Cold Betrayal

by J. A. Jance

  “You’d do that?” Athena asked.

  “Of course,” Ali said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  Athena glanced briefly at her watch, then she sprang out of her chair, came over to Ali, and bent down to give her mother-in-law a hug. “Thank you,” she whispered in Ali’s ear. “Thank you so much.”

  5

  Walking close to the buildings with her eyes modestly lowered, Enid didn’t worry about being recognized. People would know from her manner of dress—the ankle-length gingham dress and the heavy oxford shoes—and from the way she wore her hair—in long braids wrapped around the crown of her head—that she most likely belonged to one of the religious sects that had taken up residence in this far-flung corner of Mohave County.

  When voters in and around Colorado City had suggested creating a local law enforcement district and hiring their own marshal, Bishop Lowell had organized enough opposition to defeat the proposal. For one thing, the Mohave County deputy they had now, Amos Sellers, was a member in good standing of The Family. When the next vacancy occurred, he’d most likely be elevated to the status of Elder. Besides, Bishop Lowell was opposed to having any more law enforcement scrutiny than absolutely necessary.

  Even though women in The Family weren’t allowed to vote, Enid had heard all the pro and con discussions before the election. She knew that the Colorado City area fell under the jurisdiction of the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office, which was headquartered in the town of Kingman, a place she had never seen. Because the Grand Canyon—another place Enid had never seen and often wondered about—lay between The Encampment and Kingman, travel between the two places wasn’t easy. The most direct route took four hours and required crossing three separate state lines. The other, all inside Arizona, made for a seven-hour one-way trip. Lack of law enforcement oversight was one of the reasons The Family and groups like them had chosen to settle in this remote part of the state.

  Kids and women from The Family weren’t allowed to spend time in town without being supervised. Just being caught walking alone on the street would have been enough to call for a public caning from Bishop Lowell. Although Enid didn’t worry about people in town recognizing her, she was anxious that someone from The Family might see her—someone who had come to town that day to pick up a tractor part or stop by the bank. If the person who found her turned out to be one of the Elders, there would be hell to pay. As far as the townsfolk were concerned, though, the only people who knew her, other than the nurses in Dr. Johnson’s office, were the clerks and bag boys in the supermarket and maybe, just maybe, the clerk at the gas station where Enid was headed.

  On those occasions when Aunt Edith had stopped to gas up before heading home, Enid was allowed to go inside and use the restroom. She may have paused briefly to admire some of the items under the glass counters, but because she never had any spending money, she never bought anything. That made it unlikely that the clerk would know her on sight. Still, once Enid got to the station, she waited until several people entered the market at once and inserted herself in the middle of the group.

  It was three o’clock in the afternoon. From her visits to the grocery store and from watching people standing in line at the checkout counter, Enid knew this was the time of day when tourists who had spent the day wandering the Vermillion Cliffs or the North Rim of the Grand Canyon headed south to Flagstaff or Phoenix. These were folks who loved taking their hulking RVs and minivans off the beaten track. Enid understood from what they said and from the curious glances they sent in her direction that Colorado City was definitely off the beaten path. She was hoping she’d be able to convince one of those hardy-type travelers to take her along wherever they were going.

  The first group waiting for stalls in the restroom consisted of two families with several school-age children. Standing in line behind them, Enid gathered from their conversation that they were all on spring break—whatever that was—and they were heading home to Phoenix. The kids went into the stalls first. Then, after washing their hands, they ducked out into the market to buy treats. When the first mother emerged from one of the three stalls and went to the wash­basin, Enid found the courage to speak to her.

  “Is there a chance of getting a ride from here to Flagstaff?” she asked.

  The woman looked her up and down, with her gaze pausing a moment too long on Enid’s bulging tummy.

  “Certainly not,” she said firmly. “I’ve warned my children to never have anything to do with strangers, and I have no intention of setting a bad example.”

  Flushing with embarrassment, Enid fled into the nearest unoccupied stall and stayed there. Once the group left, she stripped out of her dress. Then, wearing only her shift, she sat on the toilet and used the stolen pair of scissors from her cloth bag to remove a foot or so from the bottoms of both the dress and the shift. She didn’t worry about the jagged cuts on the shift as she whacked that off just above her knee. After all, the shift wouldn’t show. The hem of the dress was the problem.

  The full gathered skirt contained plenty of material, and the scissors were small. By the time Enid had cut her way around the whole thing—trying to keep to the same line of checks as she went—her hand ached and a blister was forming on her thumb. She wadded up the discarded material and tossed it into the trash, then she took out the needle and thread. She could have done a better job of hemming if she’d had straight pins and an iron to work with, but the best she could do was turn up a tiny hem as she went, tacking it with long, efficient stitches.

  As she worked on the dress, Enid tried to reassure herself, Not all the people on the Outside will be like that.

  Several women came and went while she was sewing. One of them rattled the door on Enid’s stall and demanded, “What are you doing in there, having a baby?”

  Enid had to stifle a giggle because, in a way, that was exactly what she was doing—having an Outside baby.

  With the hemming job complete, Enid slipped the dress back on over her head. The new length seemed strange. She wasn’t used to seeing bare skin above the tops of her heavy-duty shoes. Ducking out of the stall, she examined herself in the mirror, but the one above the sink was too short for her to see the bottom of her dress.

  More women came and went. Most of them were older women with silver hair and with varicose-veined legs sticking out from under Bermuda shorts. The weather seemed cold to Enid. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would be dressed in summer clothes. They talked about places like Wisconsin and Minnesota—more places that Enid could hardly imagine. The women generally took turns using the single handicapped stall, although, as far as Enid could see, none of them looked handicapped. They met her requests for a ride with somewhat more gentleness than the first one had employed, but the answer was still the same—N-O.

  In The Family, women were not allowed to wear jewelry of any kind except a plain gold wedding band. Any other jewelry, including watches, was considered vain, ungodly, and wicked. From fifteen on, boys were allowed to wear watches, while the womenfolk were forced to tell time by following the positions of the sun. There was no window in Enid’s restroom refuge, so the sun’s timekeeping abilities were lost to her. Even so, she knew that more than an hour had passed, and she was starting to grow anxious. By now Aunt Edith, finished with her errands, was probably at home or very nearly so. Soon someone would sound the alarm that Enid had gone missing, and the search for her would be on in dead earnest.

  The restroom door opened again. The two women who entered wore boots and jeans and hiking boots. Their hair was cut short. They weren’t wearing lipstick or makeup. In fact, they looked more like men than women, although they went inside the stalls the same way the others had. Through the intervening walls, they talked easily of the hike they had taken and how soon they would arrive back at their RV park. They weren’t particularly threatening, and they seemed kind enough, nodding to Enid as they left. Still, their mannish appearances was so far outside her re
alm of experience that she let them leave without asking them for help.

  The woman who arrived immediately after they left was an older Indian lady with iron-gray hair pulled back into a complicated knot at the back of her neck. Enid knew a little about Indians. The ones who came through town occasionally were mostly Navajo. The men wore jeans, cowboy shirts, and boots along with shiny silver and turquoise bolo ties or handmade belt buckles. The women often wore brightly colored dresses and amazing turquoise necklaces, similar to the ones that were for sale in this very gas station, where handmade jewelry was arranged in a glass display case near the register.

  Boys from The Family always made fun of the “squaws wearing their squaw dresses,” but Enid often found herself envying those brightly colored, flowing dresses that bore little resemblance to the bland, home-sewn shapeless things she and the other women in The Family wore until their colors faded away to nothing.

  Some of the older boys liked to tease the younger girls, telling them that the Indians came to town looking for women and girls they could kidnap for their scalps and claiming that Indians liked blond-haired scalps more than any others.

  Based on what she’d been told, Enid should have been terrified of the new arrival, but she wasn’t. The old Indian woman had a wise, kind face that was creased with a network of sun-deepened smile lines. When she came out of the stall and went to the basin, she nodded at Enid’s reflection in the faded mirror.

  “I need to get to Flagstaff,” Enid blurted out urgently, saying the words fast enough that there was no time to change her mind. “I’m looking for a ride.”

  Drying her hands, the woman turned to Enid with her brow furrowed into a frown. “We’re not going all the way to Flag,” she said. “Twenty miles this side, but you’re welcome to ride with us that far if you want.”

  When Enid left the restroom at last, she scurried along beside the heavyset woman, hoping that the Indian woman’s ample body and voluminous skirt would shield her from the curious glances of both the clerk and the customers gathered around the cash register. Once outside, the woman led the way to a dusty pickup truck, an older-model Ford. A scrawny Indian man in a white Stetson, a black shirt, faded jeans, and equally faded boots was finishing filling the gas tank and returning the hose to the pump.

  He looked up at Enid questioningly as she and the woman approached the vehicle. “She’s going to Flagstaff and needs a ride,” the woman explained. “I told her we’ll take her as far as we’re going.”

  Under the wide brim of the Stetson, the man’s bronzed face was impassive, registering neither surprise nor objection. He simply nodded, as though picking up strangers and giving them rides was the most natural thing in the world. He waited until the pump burped out a receipt that he folded carefully before putting in his wallet.

  “Okay then,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  The woman climbed in first, taking the seat in the middle with the floor-mounted gearshift between her legs. Once seated, her body seemed to spread out in both directions, leaving just enough room for the driver and Enid to crowd into the cab on either side. It was a tight fit. Enid had a hard time closing her door. She was relieved when the old truck’s engine rumbled to life and then purred smoothly as they drove across the paved lot and onto the roadway. The truck may have been older than most of the vehicles at The Encampment, but this one seemed to run better.

  Enid sat pressed up against the door with both arms resting on her swollen belly. As they headed south in the gathering dusk, the road was familiar at first. Enid realized then that she had been inside the restroom far longer than she had thought. The sun was already setting in the west as they drove past the dirt track called Sanctuary Road that, two miles later, would arrive at the first houses built inside The Encampment.

  From that intersection on, Enid was in territory that was wholly new to her. The dark sky overhead was familiar, and so were the emerging stars, but she knew nothing of the surrounding landscape. Was the Grand Canyon just over there? she wondered, looking to the west. Was she riding past it in the dark without being able to see it?

  They rode for miles in utter silence. The woman was the first to speak. “When’s your baby due?” she asked.

  “A month and a half,” Enid answered.

  “A boy or a girl?”

  “A girl.”

  The woman nodded, her smile visible in the reflected light from the dashboard. “That’s good,” she said. “Then when you have a son, he will always have an elder sister to look up to.”

  Enid thought about that statement. It didn’t seem to jibe with the way things worked in The Family. Yes, little boys valued their older sisters when they were little and needed food to eat or to have their diapers changed, but there came a time when that was no longer true. That’s when the balance of power shifted. It didn’t take long for boys to start looking down on the very girls who had once cared for them. About that same time, though—about the time the girls were betrothed and sent to live with their future husbands’ families—the boys left their birth homes, too, going to live in the boys’ dormitories near the church where they were overseen by Bishop Lowell’s wives and trained to work in the fields. After that, the only time The Encampment’s boys and girls saw each other was during supervised events at church.

  “Does your family know you’re out here by yourself?” the woman asked.

  Enid nodded. “My mother’s in the hospital in Flagstaff,” she said, surprised at how easily the lie came to her lips. “I’m going to see her.”

  The old woman nodded, seeming to accept Enid’s statement at face value.

  As the silence deepened once more, the size of Enid’s lie seemed to grow around her, filling the cab of the truck, robbing it of air. She wished what she had said was true—that her mother was in a hospital someplace, but, of course, that wasn’t likely. In Enid’s heart of hearts, she hoped her mother was Outside somewhere—that she had somehow escaped life in The Family and that someday Enid might even be able to find her.

  • • •

  Enid had only the vaguest memories of her mother, or, at least, of the woman she thought had been her mother. She’d had blond hair, too, worn in braids wrapped around the crown of her head, just the way Enid wore hers. She remembered that a woman with blond hair, kind eyes, a sweet voice, and a wonderful smile had been part of Enid’s childhood for a while. She was there for a time, and then she was gone. After she disappeared, Enid went to live with another family. Then when she was five and betrothed to Gordon, she had come to live in his household under the strict thumb of Aunt Edith. Once, when Enid had asked Aunt Edith who her mother was and where she had gone, Aunt Edith had replied that Enid’s mother was dead. End of story.

  Except it wasn’t. Last summer, Enid had broken one of The Family’s cardinal rules and had paid an unauthorized visit to the pig sheds. The two women who tended the Tower family pigs lived in a small tin Quonset hut near a similar building that housed their charges. Never referred to by name, they were known only as the Brought Back girls—girls who had attempted to escape The Family and had lived Outside before being returned home. According to The Family’s strictures, they were considered wicked and evil and were not to be spoken to under any circumstances.

  The Brought Back girls slept on straw mattresses in a shed with no electricity. They had a kerosene lantern and a wood stove. Their Quonset hut came with no running water or indoor toilet. The two of them wore faded, cast-off, and much-mended clothing that was handed down to them only when it was no longer fit for anyone else to wear. After dinner each night, they came to the back door of the kitchen to collect that day’s slop bucket for the pigs, bringing along two tin plates for the scraps that were their own dinner. Never allowed inside the house, they stood in silence on the back step, waiting until whatever leftovers happened to be available were doled out onto their individual plates.

  Older girls were assigne
d various household tasks and child-­tending chores. Enid actually preferred doing dinner dishes to some of the other jobs—like sweeping, dusting, and shaking rugs. As a result, she was often in the kitchen when the Brought Back girls came to the house after supper to collect their evening meal—their only meal of the day.

  Enid had noticed that when Aunt Margaret was in the kitchen overseeing the cleanup, the amount of food heaped onto the Brought Back girls’ plates was far more generous than when Aunt Edith was in charge. The same thing held true for the other wives when it came their turn. They made sure that the Brought Back girls’ helpings were stingier than they needed to be.

  Curious, Enid had managed to ask enough questions to learn that one of The Family’s two in-house exiles was actually Aunt Margaret’s younger sister, someone who had once been betrothed to marry Gordon and who had run away months before the scheduled ceremony. No one ever mentioned how she had been found or returned to The Encampment, but clearly someone had gone Outside and retrieved her.

  For the first time, Enid began to wonder. She knew that on the rare occasions when girls ran away from The Family and didn’t come back, their disappearances were worse than if they had died. Their names were inked out of family Bibles and were never mentioned again. It was almost as though they had never existed.

  One afternoon, when Enid was charged with looking after some of the younger kids out in the play area, the electric fence around the pig-pen went down and some of the piglets escaped their enclosure. Enid and the children helped return some of the escapees to the pen, an act of kindness for which the Brought Back girls were effusively grateful. In the middle of all the excitement, Enid managed a quiet word with the one she had been told was Aunt Margaret’s younger sister.

  The woman’s clothing was filthy, and so was she. Her footwear consisted of a pair of taped-together men’s boots several sizes too large for her. Her hands were rough and callused. Her matted hair was spiked with twigs of straw. She was missing several teeth. Enid tried to estimate how old she was, but the hard life she lived made guessing her age impossible.