by Jake Hinkson
“Oh, Dub doesn’t even own the place anymore.”
“Oh.”
“Feller name of Sam owns it now. He serves a dinner. Except on Sundays.”
I smiled.
She smiled back. “I guess we got our own way of doing, Billie. I can’t claim that it always makes sense, but it has the virtue of being consistent.”
We said so long, and Eustace and I exchanged goodbye waves.
I watched them walk down Main Street. I took a pack of Pall Malls from the dresser by the door and shook out a cigarette.
Lucy Harington would be the one I’d have to deal with if something happened to Amberly.
I lit a match and I’d almost lifted it to the butt when a thought stopped my hand.
I had just blithely considered killing Amberly Henshaw.
I dropped the match on the ground and closed the door. Laying back across the bed, I felt a strange unease. It was as if I felt awkward being in the same room as the woman who’d just had that thought. In the room, alone with myself, I felt crowded and uncomfortable.
I couldn’t just kill Amberly. could I I couldn’t just kill anyone. could I, I’d never be able to live with myself.
Could I?
No.
But if it came down to it. If the choices were narrowed to killing someone or going to jail. Then that was choice I would have to make in my own favor. Who wouldn’t?
But Amberly. I couldn’t kill her. I’d kissed her, felt her breath on my face, felt her muscles move beneath her skin. I’d been alive with her for a passionate moment in the sun.
I could not kill her. Even to save myself.
But the preacher, was there any reason to let him live?
He’d beat me. He’d beat her. He was the one threatening to ruin my life.
I lit my cigarette.
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered why he’d ever let me go. Why would he have me kill the woman he loved and then turn the other cheek while I rode out of town? The more I thought about it, the more impossible that seemed.
He wanted me to kill his wife in his church. In front of the altar. While he was visiting some congregant.
I smoked my cigarette. When it was gone, I smoked another. As the smoke drifted up the ceiling, my thoughts cleared and sharpened.
He didn’t want her killed. He wanted her murdered, in an obvious way that would warrant an investigation. In a town of a few hundred people, a stranger like me would be an immediate, obvious suspect. At that point, the preacher could tell them any twisted story he wanted.
I couldn’t make a run for it. I couldn’t let the preacher ruin me. I couldn’t kill Amberly.
That left me with one option.
Chapter Eight
It rained the next morning. The warm blue skies from the previous day had been swept aside by gray sheets of cold rain that slapped the top of the motor lodge and plastered autumn leaves to the top of the station wagon.
I stood in the doorway of my room and smoked cigarettes and watched the occasional car splash by.
Obadiah expected me at the church at noon. That meant he would be somewhere else by that time. The way I figured it, he wanted to be wherever he was going by noon, so that his whereabouts would be established. He couldn’t drive. That meant one of two things. Either he was walking, or someone else was driving him.
I wanted him to walk. But as I watched the rain pound Stock’s Settlement, I worried. Would he walk in the rain? A blind man?
I hadn’t seen a phone at the church, so I didn’t know if he could call someone. He might.
I didn’t know. I didn’t know much at all. I watched the rain and worried and smoked cigarettes.
~ ~ ~
At ten o’clock, the rain still hadn’t let up. I put on a black skirt and white blouse, wrapped myself in a long coat, pulled a forest green kerchief over my hair, and dashed out to the car.
I started it up and backed out of the motor lodge. The usual old man was sitting in his office, staring at his chessboard.
Appleton Avenue curved around the edge of town, so I took it rather than driving down Main Street as I usually did. Gray rain slicked the graveled avenue, but when I got to the dirt road that led toward the church, everything turned to mud.
As I wound up the hill, the sky seemed to be trying to stop me. Wind and rain battered the car. Red sludge spat up at the wheels. I could barely keep the heap on the road.
When I reached the top of the hill, I pulled off into the woods and shut off the car. Through the trees, I could see that the stained glass windows of the Blood-Bought Tabernacle were shuttered, but yellow light shone from the windows of the parsonage in the back. Down the hill, the waters beneath the bridge were high but they had not flooded.
Was Amberly already home? Would she be coming up the hill behind me? Did she have a car? Would she be driving? Would someone else be driving her?
I took out a cigarette, but my hands shook too much from the cold. I fumbled with the matches and finally gave up.
I just sat there.
~ ~ ~
The storm beat on until eleven, when all at once it simply stopped. The front door of the church opened and the preacher walked out. It was as if he’d turned off the rain because it was time for him to leave.
He walked out of the church, swinging his fishing pole. He came down the hill rapidly, like a man wholly unafraid of a misstep. Although he wore all black, by the time he crossed the bridge his pants were red with mud up to his knees.
From where I was parked in the trees, I could see him begin to ascend the hill. The muddy climb slowed him. He used his cane more as a walking stick now, helping to dig in and get sure footing in the sludge. I watched him until he came to a bend in the road obscured by the hill. In a moment, I knew, he would mount the hill not far from where I waited.
I started the car. I floored the gas.
Mud sprayed behind me.
As I ripped around the turn in the road, he tried to jump out of the way.
I swerved to hit him.
He slammed into the front of the car and tumbled over the hood and smashed into the windshield and spun off the roof. I hit the brakes. When I did, the car skidded, the back end whipping around. I fought the wheel, but the car whirled off the road and into a ditch, crashing to a stop in the mud.
~ ~ ~
Cheap motion pictures covered everything. The canisters lay broken in the back of the car, their celluloid contents spilling out the shattered back window and filling the front seat.
I blinked mud and blood and sweat out of my eyes. Glass covered me. The hard film stock had sliced the back of my hand like a paring knife.
Holding my side, I tried to take a breath but my chest ached like someone had punched me in the lungs. I opened the door with my free hand and splashed out into the red muck.
Rivulets of water ran down the hill. Wind shook raindrops from the trees.
I found him on the other side of the road. He’d slid down into a muddy bank of leaves and twigs. A few feet away from him in the trees, the leafy ground plunged further down a rocky black crevice.
He lay broken and bleeding.
I limped down to him.
His front teeth were gone and his right leg was twisted backward below the knee.
He turned his head to me. “Wh-who, who is there?”
His eyes were open, blank and useless.
“I need … help,” he said.
The shock of the moment rattled my brain. I said, “I’ll get help.” I didn’t think about what I’d done. I didn’t think about the fact that he was still alive. For a brief moment, some natural instinct in me took over. For a moment, it was as if we had actually had a terrible accident.
I bent down. I wiped blood from his eyes. “You’ll be okay. I’ll get help.”
He grabbed my bleeding arm. “You? You did this?”
“I came … I was driving my car–r”
“You did this.”
“No … I was … d
riving. I was just – ”
He grabbed at his twisted leg with his free hand. “My leg,” he moaned. He tried to pull himself up, but when he did his Goddamn leg just fell off. It slid a little further into the mud. Obadiah let out an awful scream.
Breaking free of his grasp, I tumbled backward. As I scrambled to my feet, I glanced, just beyond the trees and the church, distant slashes of blue in the gray sky.
“Please, get help!” he screamed.
I ran up the hill toward the road, but an old fallen tree lay in my way. Sodden black at the stump, its top had long ago been scattered into pieces. I stopped, my blood dripping in thin spots against the damp bark. I turned back to where Obadiah lay fumbling with his belt. I picked up a chunk of the tree about the size of a piece of firewood. Heavy and solid, it fit my hand like a club.
Obadiah pulled his belt out of his hoops and tied it around the bleeding stub that was all that was left of his right leg.
As he did, I lifted the log above my head. He turned to me and I brought it down on his face.
The pictures always get murder wrong. In a picture, one fellow cracks another in the head with something and it’s all over. It’s like pulling the cord on a lamp.
But Obadiah didn’t die when I hit him. The log thumped against his head, one solid object striking another. He screamed and tried to crawl away, but I beat those two solid objects together again and he slowed down. I hit him again, and he stopped.
Chapter Nine
I threw the log down the rocky crevice. It clattered down and disappeared into the dark. I went back to my car, but it was sunk almost sideways into the mud. I climbed back to the road and looked through the trees to the church.
Light still shone from the windows.
Was she there already?
I walked down the hill bloodied, covered in mud and leaves, my hands and chin shaking. Wind seared my face and stung my eyes. My side ached even worse than before.
As I climbed the muddy road toward the church, mud filled my shoes. Mud splattered my muddy legs and caked my muddy dress in yet another layer of mud.
I finally reached the church and went around to the parsonage. I pushed my way in through the backdoor and called her name.
But no one came. I called it again.
She wasn’t there.
Panic seized me. I wanted her to take care of me, to tend to me. I wanted to collapse into her arms. But she wasn’t there.
What should I do?
Stay there and wait for her? But what if she wasn’t alone when she showed up? I’d never seen a car around the church. Someone might be driving her home. What if they stopped up the road when they saw my wrecked car? I wanted to be there when they found Obadiah.
I went to the washroom. As plain as the rest of the place, it nevertheless smelled like Amberly. I washed the long cut on my right hand. It extended diagonally from the knuckle, over the wrist, and few inches down my arm. I wrapped it with a pink towel.
Then, in the mirror over the wash basin, I finally saw the damage to the rest of me. Nicks to my chin, left cheek, and left eyebrow. My left eye was red. Hair disheveled. Mud and blood spotted everything. My blouse. My dress. My belt.
I ran some water to wash the bits of bark and blood and mud off my face, but I stopped myself.
I looked at my belt in the mirror again.
I hurried back to the car.
The gray sky had closed over me. A few drops pelted my face as I rushed down one hill and then trudged up the other. I was almost to the car when I saw a giant man step out of the woods.
“Eustace!” I called.
He stared at me, his dumb face as empty as a dead movie screen. I hurried toward him and I slipped. It was a real slip, but I used it for all it was worth. I started crying like Bette Davis.
Behind Eustace on the road, a car idled with its doors open.
Two women stepped out of the woods.
Lucy Harington.
Amberly.
Amberly looked pale and shaken.
Lucy just watched us both.
~ ~ ~
Hours later, she sat across from me in the examination room at the back of the house of a doctor named Westwood and watched him stitch up the gash on my arm.
The doctor had cleaned and bandaged my arm, and then I’d been allowed to shower in the guest washroom. Doctor Westwood lived with his wife in a nice two story house at the edge of the town square, a short walk from the Eureka Theater. Someone got my suitcase from the motor lodge, and I changed into the most feminine thing I owned, a lime green dress decorated with tiny white petals.
When I came out, the doctor sat me down on a wooden table and gave my arm a shot of Procaine.
Lucy Harington sat across the room in a hardback chair. She wore a white blouse with a black ankle-length skirt, now muddy at the hemline, and even muddier black boots. Her raincoat was folded over the back of another chair and dripped onto the doctor’s hardwood floor. Her hair was pinned up and her cheeks still showed red from the cold winds out on the hill.
She said nothing, just watched the doctor prepare his tools.
I asked her, “Is Amberly alright?”
“She’s resting at home. Obviously, she’s endured quite a shock.”
“I feel so awful. That poor woman.”
Lucy nodded.
The balding doctor straddled a stool and leaned down to look at my arm. His remaining hair had been swept up from just above the ear and pomaded into five greasy fingers that clawed his pale scalp in desperation. As he squeezed the sides of my cut together and readied his needle, I looked away.
I made a show of avoiding the general direction of the doctor, and thus the sheriff, and stared out the back window at a young oak tree jerking in the wind.
From the other side of the room, Lucy’s polite but firm voice asked, “Would you like to tell me more about what happened, Billie?”
Keeping my face to the window, I said, “I don’t know what I can say. I was heading to the church – ”
“How come you were going out there?”
“Just to pay my respects.”
“Awful bad weather for paying respects.”
“I know. And I didn’t particularly want to do it, but I’m leaving town today. Or, I was. No other time I could do it.”
“You were going out to see the preacher or Sister Henshaw?”
“Well, both. I’d met them both.”
Lucy said nothing to that. The doctor worked on my arm. I couldn’t feel anything, but I winced a little now and then for show.
“Claude mentioned to me the other day,” Lucy said, “that the preacher had requested you come see him.”
“That’s right.”
“Went and saw him yesterday, didn’t you?”
I wanted to ask her where she’d heard that. I wanted to ask her why she wasn’t asking me about the accident. I wanted to ask her why she seemed to have turned cold to me.
I said, “That’s right, I did.”
“Was Amberly there?”
“No.”
“Huh.”
Without meaning to, I turned to look at her.
She was staring at me.
“Did you ask after her?”
“Yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t … remember. Maybe I did. I don’t remember.”
“If you didn’t ask after her, how do you know she wasn’t there?”
“I guess I must have asked after her.”
“Did you tell Obadiah you were coming back today?”
“I guess I did. Yes.”
“Huh.”
“What?”
She said, “I wonder why he didn’t tell her you were coming by today. You went out there yesterday. She was out of town with some ladies from church. They went up to Black Tree. You told him you were coming back today. I wonder why he didn’t tell Amberly. You would have missed her two days in a row.”
I winced like the doctor had hurt me, and I looked awa
y. “I really don’t know, Lucy. Maybe it slipped his mind. I think, though – I’m a little shaken up, obviously, so it’s hard to get my head straight – but I don’t think I would have missed her. I just would have stayed and talked to him until she came back.”
I turned back to her.
She was looking out the window now, her eyes distant but not dreamy. She looked like she might be doing math in her head.
“I wonder why he was on the road, then,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
She turned back to me. “You were coming to visit. He knew that you were coming to visit. But he didn’t tell Amberly this morning, and then this afternoon he took off on foot.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t tell you what was on his mind this morning. Maybe he just plain forgot I was coming.”
“I reckon that makes sense,” she said. “He agree to let old Claude run the picture show unimpeded?”
“He did.”
“Tell me what happened this afternoon.”
I took a deep breath. To the surprise of all three of us – especially me – as I began to speak my voice broke and tears ran down my face. “I didn’t see him. I just came around the curb and he was there. I swerved to miss him but he jumped right into me.”
Lucy stood up and walked over to me and handed me a silk handkerchief embroidered with roses. “I’m sorry, Billie. I know this is hard. Are you alright? Would you like a moment?”
I dabbed at my eyes. “No, thank you.”
“He jumped to his right?”
“Yes.” I coughed. “Yes.”
She returned to her seat.
“Then what? I know it’s difficult, but just tell me exactly what happened.”
“He hit the car and tumbled over it. I swung the wheel to the … right, to my right and I went off the road. I think I blacked out. I don’t know how long. Maybe I didn’t blackout, even, but I lost control of my senses for a moment. I was simply bewildered. Gradually I regained my senses, and I got out and tried to find him.”
The doctor stopped working on my arm to listen to the story, but he didn’t lift his head. His sad brown eyes just stared up at over his glasses.
“He was down the other side of the road. He was dead.” I started crying again. Not a lot, just a few tears, but they were real. “I tried to help him. I tried to wake him up.”