Desert Lost (9781615952229) by Betty Webb

a year. But I stopped fightin’, and she was right. He wasn’t so rough after that, and at least he was quick. After a while I learned to think of other stuff while he was…Well, it got almost bearable.”
    â€œAlmost?”
    The hard edge returned to her voice. “Prophet Shupe was a pig. Is a pig. If it hadn’t been for Celeste, I don’t know how I woulda survived. Celeste had a way of, oh, I don’t know, making me see the lighter side of things.”
    The lighter side of rape?
    â€œI helped her take care of her babies, and when KariAnn was born, she helped me, too. And the both of us, we helped with all the other kids. I never saw a woman who loved children more than Celeste did, so it wasn’t all bad. We had ourselves some laughs, me and her.”
    Just one big, happy, dysfunctional family.
    â€œProphet Shupe really liked her,” Rosella continued. “Not me, so much. It took me too long to get pregnant.”
    I remembered Celeste’s dead face. She’d been pretty enough, although not as pretty as Rosella. But physical attractiveness wasn’t the most prized quality on a polygamy compound. Fertility was what really mattered.
    Brushing a stray hair from my black wig out of my face, I said, “You said she was two years older than you. She already had several kids when you left?”
    â€œFour, includin’ a set of twins. And she was pregnant again.”
    Celeste would have been sixteen, which meant that she’d begun having children at the age of twelve or thirteen.
    â€œShe was lucky in another way, too. Most of her kids was girls.”
    Bouncing baby boys grew into adult problems on polygamy compounds. When they entered their mid-teens, the boys learned the flip side of polygamy: if one man had ten wives, nine men would go without. The few young men chosen by the prophet to receive multiple wives were among the lucky minority. The prophet ordered the others—almost always undefended by their mothers—bussed out of the compounds no later than their eighteenth birthdays, when they were no longer eligible for welfare payments and their use to the community was at its end. Undereducated and unfit for modern life, boys as young as sixteen were dumped in Salt Lake City, Flagstaff, even Phoenix. A few were lucky enough to make their way to rescue missions; the majority endured short and brutal lives on the street.
    Celeste had been pregnant with a boy when she’d been murdered, which made me wonder how many boys she’d previously produced. I started to ask, but my question was cut short when Rosella veered the Santa Fe so sharply onto a gravel road that I had to brace myself against the dashboard.
    â€œJust about two miles down here is where we’re supposed to pick the girl up,” Rosella said. “At that deserted mining camp up against the cliffs.”
    By now it had grown so dark I couldn’t see her face. “I thought you said the call came from St. George? We haven’t crossed the Utah border yet.”
    â€œWe can’t make the pickup at her house ’cause the caller’s got kids of her own and doesn’t want to endanger them. She said she’d be waitin’ with the girl at the camp. No problemo, because that’s the same place I just picked up those two runaways, Patience and True, on Tuesday night. Maybe it ain’t the greatest location, but at least it’s not one of the canyons. Those things scare the crap out of me.”
    When I’d rescued a runaway from one of the area’s steep-sided canyons, it had necessitated picking my way between boulders and rattlesnakes, so I understood her fear. Nodding my agreement, I settled back against the seat. The sky was inky, and now that Rosella was using running lights only, the gravel road barely visible.
    â€œYou sure you can see where you’re going?”
    â€œI was raised here, remember? Second Zion is three miles north. As