by Joan Hess
By this time Brother Verber was in fine form. Spittle spewed from his mouth, and his fist hit the podium on every third word. “Well, it was a mighty high window, and when they threw the harlot down to the street, she splattered like a ripe tomato. Then the horses trampled on her and stomped on her until there was blood everyplace. If you’d been there, you’d still be scrubbing your clothes to get out the stains.” He switched to a melodramatic whisper. “And do you know what all they did next? Do you know? Why, Jehu and his men went inside just as calm as you please and they had their supper. They had their supper the very same way you have your supper in your own home, just swapping jokes and having a fine time while they ate fried chicken and mashed potatoes and corn on the cob. Did they worry about that dead whore’s crumpled body out there in the middle of the street?”
He gave his audience a minute to ponder that one, then slammed his fist down. “No!” he cried, now waving the fist in the air. “They didn’t worry one whit—because she was a whore! Jehu finally got to feeling sorry about the mess outside and told his men to go bury her, but they came back and said they was right sorry but all they could find was her skull, her feet, and the palms of her hands! That was all that was left of the whore!” Verber stopped to mop his forehead. Several members of the congregation muttered amens, but they didn’t sound as if they knew exactly why they were doing it.
Hammet rumbled under his breath. Farther down the row Bubba. made the same noise, and Sissie didn’t look all that pleased with the sermon thus far. Sukie, on the other hand, looked dumbstruck by the theatrics. Baby was asleep. I crossed my fingers and wished myself to be elsewhere, but it didn’t work. It never does.
Verber sucked in a lungful and let it rip. “Now I’m going to tell you what Jehu had to say about that whore, Jezebel. He said that the dogs ate the flesh and that the corpse was dung upon the face of the field. Those were his precise words, because he knew what ought should happen to whores.” He sucked in another lungful and gripped the sides of the pulpit as he leaned forward. “And we know it, too. Even in this very day and age, there are whores who are willing to corrupt good Christian soldiers of the Lord. They tempt them something awful. They encourage otherwise moral men to indulge in the sins of the flesh. These whores are about as carnal as you can get! And there is such a whore right here in Maggody. She’s smack-dab in the bosom of our little community.”
While he stopped once again to mop his forehead, I realized the rumbling along the pew had intensified until I might as well have been sitting beside a hornet’s nest. I don’t know if Verber heard any of it, but he shot a hooded look at our merry band before continuing. “But why do we allow it? We’re charitable Christians, yes. We’re kind and forgiving. We’re not the kind of folks to stone a sinner—at least not a penitent sinner who’s willing to change her nasty ways. But this whore won’t repent! She goes right along tempting men with her big breasts and her curvacious body and her perverted enjoyment of practices way too depraved to describe in the holy house. She encourages those practices—and takes five dollars for doing them!”
He mopped for a minute while the congregation tried to imagine what practices he was referring to, since they sounded interesting. Once he was tidied up, he sternly studied his flock. “What can we do, you ask me? Well, I’m going to tell you what we can do. We can tell this whore we don’t want her in our community any longer. We can tell her that we’re God-fearing soldiers of the Lord, and we’ll no longer tolerate her depravities. We can tell her we’re sick of her, that she is an outcast who’d best go somewhere else to engage in her whorin’ and moonshinin’ and perversions. We can tell her we don’t want her kind because we’re moral and pure. We are pillars of the Lord!”
I glanced at Hammet, who glanced at Bubba, who sucked in a breath of his own, stood up, and pointed his finger at the figure behind the pulpit. “Pappy!”
And one beat behind him, Sissle leaped up and aimed an equally accusatory finger at the very same person. “Pappy!”
That rather brought the situation to a halt. The silence was such that you could have heard two electrons collide. Maybe a whole sackful of electrons. The proverbial pin would have sounded like a nuclear explosion. Verber recoiled. His face was so frozen in panic that I decided this time we were going to be treated to the spectacle of a public heart attack. Personally, I was enchanted. It made the last three-quarters of an hour worth every tedious second. Ruby Bee and Estelle nodded at each other, leading me to further questions regarding their sanity. David Allen was biting down on his lower lip so hard it was likely to bleed.
Finally there was a noise in the back, followed by footsteps down the aisle. Mrs. Jim Bob stomped right up to Bubba Buchanon and jabbed her finger at him. “You are a filthy little liar! How dare you and this wretched sister of yours make that kind of wild, lying accusation in the house of the Lord? You ought to be whipped until you can’t sit down for a solid week. Maybe a year!”
Hammet now poked Sukie, who picked up Baby and turned around to stare at the back of the room. Every head in the congregation turned too. What we saw was Jim Bob Buchanon, Hizzoner the Moron, sneaking toward the exit. What we heard was Sukie loudly lisp, “Pappy!”
“Liar!” Mrs. Jim Bob howled.
“No, she ain’t,” Ruby Bee said, rising to the occasion. She held up the Bible so everyone could see it. “What I got in my hand is Robin Buchanon’s family Bible. She couldn’t read or write real well, but she had enough sense to record the names of her children’s fathers. It seems like Brother Verber begat a couple, as did our fine, upstanding mayor. This is proof. The begats are written in the Bible.”
And right there in the Voice of the Almighty Lord Assembly Hall, all hell broke loose. It was wonderful. It really was.
14
David Allen, Hammet, and I slipped outside. Even beside the highway we could hear the accusations flying inside the building, with Mrs. Jim Bob the most audible. By a long shot.
“Interesting timing,” I said to Hammet.
He gave me a grin of great innocence and shrugged. “We was going to wait until afterward, but he was saying all them low-down things. It jest seemed like the time.”
David Allen nodded. “I thought it was well staged, myself. But what about your father, pal? Wasn’t he in there cowering behind a pew?”
“No, he used to live over in Emmet, but I think he moved away a few years back. He weren’t all that bad. He gived me a dollar once, but of course Her found it and like to slap me silly.”
“Do you know his name?” David Allen asked.
“It’s in the goddamn Bible.” Hammet sighed, then looked up at me with his puppy-dog expression. “Iffen we can’t find him, can I live with you? You might get married sometime to a father what wants a sibling for his own little boy—iffen his little boy gets well.”
I bent down and hugged him until he squirmed. “Listen,” I said gently, “you know you can’t live with me. But we’ll find your father and let him know about you. You yourself said he wasn’t all that bad. And you can come visit me whenever you want, if you don’t complain about sleeping on the sofa or being left alone all day while I do police work.”
Which I needed to do. I was in the middle of asking David Allen if he’d keep Hammet for an hour when a pickup truck drove past us and stopped in front of the Emporium across the road. My whiskery, dope-smoking friend got out of the truck and waved a half-eaten ice-cream cone at me. I told everybody to sit tight and went across the street.
“How are Poppy and the baby?” I asked.
“They’re cool. How about you?”
A dark-haired man with the motions of a panther came out of the store, a gasoline can in one hand and a package of light bulbs in the other. Ignoring me, he glowered at Zachery. “I told you to be back an hour ago. What the hell kept you? Are you trying to fuck with me for some reason?”
“Hey,
man, don’t come down on me. Rainbow told me to wash the truck. It was so muddy she thought it might contaminate the bottled water or something screwy like that.” He grinned at me. “Have you met Nate here?”
“You’re the one who wasn’t around last night to fetch the midwife,” I said pleasantly, considering. “You’d gone off in the truck, so I ended up driving all over the county to find her.”
“Yeah, tough luck,” he muttered.
I looked at the truck, which was blue and battered—and familiar. “I saw you in the truck last night, by the way. Remember the jeep you almost ran off the road right down there by Estelle’s Hair Fantasies?”
“You didn’t nosedive into the ditch, lady. You ought to pay more attention when you drive, instead of trying to pin something on me.”
“I was talking on the radio, and I might not have been watching too carefully. However, I did have my headlights on. If yours are broken, I doubt those light bulbs will fit. Where were you going? There’s nothing down that way until Hasty, which is hardly worth a visit on a bright, clear day. It’s unthinkable on a rainy night. It’s suicidal on a rainy night without headlights.”
“The headlights were on. You’ve got a loose screw, lady.” He put his things under a tarp in the truck bed and started to walk away, but Zachery caught his arm.
“She’s a cop,” he said in what was supposed to be a whisper.
“Tough shit.” Nate shrugged off the hand, then went into the Emporium and slammed the door hard enough to set off the wind chimes that hung in front of the window. Shaking his head, Zachery took out a package of cigarette papers and a Baggie of green leaves. He then remembered who I was, wiggled his eyebrows in apology, and strolled around the corner of the store. A soft “wow” wafted in his wake.
I went back to the lawn of the church. Ruby Bee and Estelle had joined David Allen and Hammet, and the four of them were studying the front page of the Bible.
I tapped Ruby Bee on the shoulder. “Where’d you find that?”
“On the table in the cabin. It was right there in plain sight. I’m astounded you didn’t take it when you were there, forcing others of us to run your errands for you.”
“Raz Buchanon took you up there in his truck?”
“No, he didn’t,” Estelle said. “We went most of the way up there in my station wagon, if you must know. Then the engine got all hot and wouldn’t go any farther, so we had to hike the rest of the way up the mountain, and all the way down this morning. Once we got to the highway, we stuck out our thumbs and tried to hitchhike a ride for the longest time. Finally Raz happened by and was kind enough to give us a lift for fifty cents.”
“And this is how you didn’t interfere in my police investigation?” I asked, smiling sweetly.
Estelle warily returned the smile. “For reasons best left unspoken, we decided it was real urgent to learn the names of the Buchanon children’s fathers. We went to Madam Celeste, who told us she saw a list of names. Once we thought about it, we realized just where to go. We hadn’t counted on my station wagon giving out so that we’d have to spend the night in a haunted cabin.”
Hammet glanced up. “It ain’t haunted. I done lived there for eleven years and I never seen any ghosts or spooks.”
An earlier remark came back to me. I took Hammet’s shoulder and propelled him away from the others. Then I bent down so I could watch his eyes as I said, “On Friday I told you that your mother had been killed in a hunting accident. Before the church service started, you said that she’d been murdered. Why’d you say that?”
“That’s what the holyfied lady told me and my siblings. They already knew afore David Allen and me got there. She said Her’d been blown to kingdom come by some kind of booby trap.”
I had a pretty good idea how Mrs. Jim Bob had learned that tidbit. After all, she’d called LaBelle for two solid days trying to reach me. It was difficult to picture Mrs. Jim Bob growing marijuana in the National Forest, or slithering up in the dark to chop the plants while yours truly was otherwise occupied in town. I concluded (admittedly with a flicker of disappointment) that she was not my air-traffic controller.
“Did you or any of your siblings tell anyone that your mother was murdered?” I asked Hammet.
“No, we din’t say nuthin’. After we left the lady’s house, we went to your apartment and watched television ’til it got late and they started showing this picture that stayed the same. That’s when we decided to see about this foster crap and decide iffen we wanted to do that or tell about our pappies. We knowed all along; we jest wasn’t sure if it were the thing to do.”
I, too, would have had reservations about claiming a filial relationship with Verber and/or Jim Bob Buchanon. “So David Allen convinced you to confess?”
“When he got home, he said all kinds of stuff about how we might get sent to other places and not necessarily get a bicycle. It were mighty scary, so I told him we’d tell him after church.”
“But instead you prodded Bubba and the others into a public display that caused all sorts of embarrassment for the two fathers,” I said, trying not to smile.
“We was gettin’ tired of hearing how we was sinners going right to hell on an express train and everybody else was so friggin’ perfect they was going to heaven to play harps and dumb shit like that. We decided mebbe some other folks might be on the same train.”
Never underestimate the cunning of a Buchanon bush colt.
I returned him to David Allen’s custody and went back inside the church. I found Mrs. Jim Bob in the foyer, a tissue clutched in her hand. She gave me a tight frown and said, “What do you want? Did you come to make snide remarks about my husband? Did you come to snicker at me?”
Moi? I shook my head and lectured myself to avoid any temptation to snicker until I was alone, at which time I’d let loose like a gross of candy bars. “No, I came to ask you a question. I know that LaBelle told you about Robin Buchanon’s murder up on the ridge. I need to know if you told anyone else, anyone at all.”
“LaBelle did mention something about it late Friday afternoon. In that I am not a common gossip, I did not repeat one syllable of it to another living soul.”
“You told the Buchanon children.”
She turned on her beadiest look. “I had experienced some difficulty in dealing with them. I called several times for you so I could tell you to fetch them, but you didn’t have the common courtesy to return my calls. In fact, I called more than a dozen times and LaBelle swore she beeped you without fail.” She glanced down at the beeper clipped to my belt. “I guess you’re too deaf to hear that thing. Or maybe you think you’re too important to answer the mayor’s wife’s calls. Anyway, I found it necessary to tell those vile bastards about their mother’s well-deserved fate. It was the only way I could get them under control.”
I realized how much I loathed the woman. However, it was not the time to mention as much, so I settled for a grim stare. “Did you tell anyone else about the murder?”
“Do you think I’d converse with the cleaning girl? Of course I didn’t tell anyone else. I was occupied with the mess those bastards left. There are going to have to be some repairs done at my house, and I’m holding you responsible, Arly Hanks. My husband will have a little chat with you later concerning upholstery and paint and carpet cleaners.”
“No problem. Let’s do the nursery first, shall we? Baby simply adores blue. Sukie, on the other hand, favors brown.”
I went back outside, armed with the useless information that neither she nor the Buchanon children had told anyone about the murder. But someone had known that Robin’s body had been discovered by the pot patch, and that it was probable that I’d stake out the scene of the crime. Otherwise the gardeners would have wandered up the road to harvest the crop in broad daylight, not the least bit concerned about being caught. The only reason they hadn’t and had mana
ged to track my movements was because they knew I knew. Only I didn’t know what I needed to know. Such as: Who? How? Where was the dope now? Why did I feel as though I was in the land of Oz?
As I stood there waiting for a round-trip ticket for a tornado ride, a high school girl rushed up to David Allen.
“Oh, Mr. Wainright,” she gasped, “I’m so grateful to find you. The most terrible thing happened. Carol Alice Plummer went back to Madam Celeste! Now she’s all despondent and talking about suicide and killing herself and not marrying Bo Swiggins. She won’t even eat. Her pa’s madder than a wet hen, both at Carol Alice for being such a silly goose to believe that stuff, and at Madam Celeste for saying it in the first place.”
David Allen wrinkled his forehead. “When did she have this session?”
“Yesterday evening. I went over to look through magazines with her, and she was on her bed moaning about suicide. I didn’t have any idea how to talk her out of it. I tried to call you, but then Carol Alice’s pa called me and I told him everything.” Snuffles gave way to a flood of tears. “I wish I didn’t have anything to do with this!”
He glanced at me as he handed a folded handkerchief to the wailing girl. “This woman causes a lot of problems. Isn’t there some way to convince her to conduct her seances elsewhere?”
Ruby Bee bristled. “Carol Alice is too immature, that’s all. Madam Celeste has been very helpful to Estelle and me, not to mention to Gladys and Elsie and plenty of other folks. We wouldn’t have this Bible if Madam Celeste hadn’t told us she saw a list.”