Evidence of Love

by John Bloom

  All Candy wanted to do was get out of the house, because she suddenly had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. So she moved toward the utility room, dropping her purse in a chair as she walked by. She found the swimsuit on top of the washer. As she was picking it up, Betty reappeared behind her.

  “Don’t forget Alisa’s peppermints.” The tone was softer now, more reassuring, as though Betty’s anger had subsided. The two women met at the utility room door, and Betty handed the towel to Candy.

  “That’s okay, I have some peppermint at home I can give her.”

  Betty moved over to the fireplace and reached into a candy bowl. “I’ll give you a few of these anyway.”

  Betty walked back to the utility room door, where Candy was fidgeting with her purse. Candy wrapped the swimsuit in the towel and stuffed it into the handbag. Betty gave her the handful of candies, and she dropped those in as well. Then Candy rummaged around for her sunglasses. When she found them, she folded her regular lenses and put them in the purse, still holding the sunglasses in her hand.

  Candy looked up at last. Betty was looking at her intently, but the expression was no longer one of rage. It was a face full of pain. For a brief moment Candy thought of how Betty would cry after she left, and she felt a stab of conscience. They both hesitated, as though something important would be settled by the tone of the parting. Reflexively, clumsily, Candy reached out and placed her hand on Betty’s arm. When she spoke, her voice dripped with pity.

  “Oh, Betty, I’m so sorry.”

  All at once Betty’s rage erupted. She flung the hand from her arm and shoved Candy’s chest with both hands, with such force that Candy stumbled backwards into the utility room. Betty grabbed the ax resting by the doorway and rushed in after her, holding it like a weapon, diagonally across her chest. The blade still pointed at the floor.

  “You can’t have him,” Betty screamed, crowding Candy, moving closer. “You can’t have him. I’m going to have a baby and you can’t have him this time.”

  “Betty, don’t,” said Candy, reaching out to put her hands on the ax as Betty moved in. “This is stupid. I don’t want Allan.”

  For a moment neither woman moved. Both of them gripped the ax firmly by the handle; it hung between them like a curtain. Then they both tightened their grips, their eyes locked, and Betty began to jerk the ax, trying to control it.

  “Betty, don’t do this,” pleaded Candy. “Please stop.”

  “I’ve got to kill you.” Betty spoke the words slowly, with a distracted, impersonal finality.

  As they grappled for control, Betty gave the ax a violent wrench with her wrists and jerked upward. The flat side of the metal slapped against the side of Candy’s bobbing head.

  “Betty, what are you doing?” Candy stepped backward, further into the utility room, and grabbed her head with one hand. “Betty, stop.”

  Candy looked at her hand; it was streaked with red. Then she looked back at Betty, and saw her raising the ax blade over her head, almost to the eight-foot ceiling, as though to smash her with a single powerful blow. Candy screamed at the top of her lungs, a high-pitched, pleading sound, and jumped sideways into a cabinet, spilling books and knickknacks onto the floor.

  Even though Candy had no place to hide—Betty was between Candy and both exits—the ensuing swing of the ax missed her entirely and landed harmlessly on the linoleum. The blade made a dull thud, bounced once, and sliced a gash in Candy’s toe, exposed by her rubber sandals. Just as it did, Candy reached over and grabbed the weapon by the blade, wrapping her fingers around the thick heavy metal. Her pleading turned now to anger. She said no more.

  With the exaggerated blow and the drawing of blood, some primal instinct unloosed the surging rage of both women. As soon as Candy grabbed the blade, Betty started shoving and jerking the handle in an effort to get the ax back. But Candy held on tightly, and the struggle degenerated into a wrestling match to gain control of the weapon. Betty thrust and jabbed the ax at Candy’s body, kicked at her legs, kneed her in the thighs. Candy responded with wrenching motions intended to jerk the handle out of Betty’s hands. From a distance, nonsensically, came the frenzied, high-pitched sound of barking dogs. Betty moved her hands farther up the handle, trying to get leverage, and at one point bit Candy on the knuckle in an effort to make her let go. As soon as she did, her head bent, her body temporarily off balance, Candy shoved the ax against Betty’s body with all her might. Betty reeled backward and fell sideways against the door of the freezer, her feet slipping a little on the linoleum.

  Candy didn’t hesitate. As Betty struggled to regain her balance, her body temporarily facing away, Candy raised the ax with both hands and brought the blade down on the back of Betty’s head.

  The blow resounded with a hollow pop, like the cork coming out of a wine bottle, and then blood gushed across the back of Betty’s neck. Candy dropped the ax, jumped away from Betty, and felt time shift into slow motion. Betty began to slump toward the floor, blood pouring out of her skull, but she continued to struggle to regain her feet. Terrified by the blood and the certainty that she had just killed her, Candy bolted for the living-room door but, as though dreaming, felt an eternity pass as she tried to reach it. She finally put her hand on the knob, started to pull—and Betty slammed her body against the door.

  Candy looked up and saw blood spreading across the side of Betty’s face. Betty had picked up the ax again, like some nightmarish vision of a dead person who still stalks his killer. Tears spurted out of Candy’s eyes. The barking of dogs, wolfish and primitive, grew louder still.

  “Let me go, Betty, please Betty, let me go.”

  Betty’s voice came from a thousand miles away: “I can’t.”

  Candy grabbed the ax again, and for the next few eternal moments, the women did a macabre dance around the utility room, once again jabbing and pushing with the ax that hung between them, Betty’s head now dripping blood onto the floor until the linoleum was slick with crimson. They circled endlessly, one temporarily losing her grip, then gaining it again before she could be shoved away. At one point Betty bumped up against the freezer again, and as she did, Candy removed one hand from the ax and grabbed the knob of the door leading to the garage. She pulled it open a few inches, but then Betty managed to shove her away from the doorway, slam it shut, and push in the lock on the knob. Both women began to kick as they jockeyed for position. Their shoes made squeaking noises on the sticky red floor, and above the steady electrical hum of the washing machine, they both grunted and breathed heavily. Betty removed a hand from the ax and grabbed Candy’s hair. Then Candy slipped on the blood and went down hard directly in front of the freezer. As she did, Betty tried to raise the ax again, but, growing weaker from loss of blood, couldn’t get it up in time. Candy tackled her by one leg, and she sprawled forward, almost on top of Candy. By the time they were both upright again, the ax was between them, and they continued to fight over it from sitting positions.

  Candy shoved Betty hard, jumped to her feet, and lunged at the garage door again, but this time the knob wouldn’t turn. She pivoted as Betty moved back toward her.

  “Betty, don’t,” she said. “Please let me go. I don’t want him. I don’t want him.”

  Betty’s eyes flared in one final paroxysm of rage, but her reply was eerily restrained. Placing one finger to her lips, the other hand still gripping the ax, she breathed out from somewhere deep in the back of her throat.

  “Shhhhhhhhhhhh.”

  The eerie susurration echoed through the subconscious of Candy Montgomery like a psychic alarm. She grabbed the ax once more and used it aggressively, pushing the wooden end against Betty’s thighs and legs. From beyond an open window came the hysterical canine sounds, desperate now, the barking and howling of a frightened creature. Candy jerked violently and then leaned backward with all her might, wrapping both hands around the blade. The handle was becoming covered with blood, and when Betty tried to pull just as hard, as though the combatants were having a
tug of war, her grip couldn’t hold the surface. Her hands slipped off and she plunged backwards into the room. She wouldn’t stay down, though. She got up and lunged back toward Candy, but not before Candy had time to raise the ax and bring it down with all the adrenaline-fueled strength she could gather.

  Disoriented by the loss of blood, rushing forward toward her opponent, Betty ran directly into the blade, redoubling its force, as it came down directly across the top of her forehead, piercing the skull and making a sound like a coconut being cracked open with a machete. Betty threw her arms straight up in the air. Candy raised the ax again and brought it down on the forehead, again cracking the skull. Betty groaned and clutched her head. Great fistfuls of hair came loose in her clenched hands. Candy struck a third blow, missing the head and slicing into her elbow. The bone snapped, and the arm swung limp at Betty’s side. Candy swung for a fourth time, and a fifth, turning the top of Betty’s head to a ghastly red paste, carving gashes in her arms as Betty vainly tried to block the metal with her own flesh. Betty’s eyes rolled, and her head bobbed and weaved instinctively, trying to avoid the next swing, but the blows continued. Her legs began to buckle, but she still wouldn’t go down.

  Some inner fire continued to fuel Candy’s hatred. She chopped and hacked and raised the ax again. Betty’s legs flexed and became tangled; one of her shoes went sliding across the floor. She swiveled in a half circle, weaved, knelt, and finally sat, her head slumped forward, her back to Candy. But she still wouldn’t fall, as though her entire purpose in her last moments now was to frustrate Candy’s will to destroy. Candy continued to swing, even after Betty’s back was turned, landing repeated blows to the shoulders and the base of the skull. Then she cracked another time across the top of the head. Betty’s brain began seeping out of the cranial cap. She twitched and lurched backward, her bloody head thudding against the linoleum and landing between Candy’s legs.

  Candy screamed and swung again at the woman who wouldn’t die. And through some remarkable motor reaction, Betty moved one last time, drawing her legs up into a fetal position until Candy’s flailing ax hacked them back down onto the floor. Then, with Betty’s head still between her legs and a dead body lying prone across the red floor of the utility room, Candy swung the ax at least a dozen more times, this time aiming at the face, trying to obliterate that look that had once made Candy want to reach out and say, “I’m so sorry, Betty.” There was no pity or remorse or conscience now. Candy destroyed Betty’s face out of pure unadulterated hate—anger over what this woman had done to her, rage that now her life might be changed because of this stupid woman. Candy swung the ax at the immobile head until she had no strength to swing any longer. She stopped, literally, at the point of exhaustion.

  Candy dropped the ax and kicked it aside. Her hands fell to her knees, her head drooped between her shoulders, and her chest heaved as she gulped air rapidly, trying to feed oxygen back to her overtaxed heart. She stepped back a few feet, away from the body, suddenly afraid to look at it. She walked to the other end of the utility room, where she was enveloped by the electrical churning of the washing machine, and then back the other way. She closed her eyes tightly and then opened them again. When she did, she saw splatters of blood all over her blouse and blue jeans, and she became vaguely aware of a sickening antiseptic smell: the odor of fabric softener, the odor of the room, now mixed with some other smell, of violence and fear and dread. She suddenly had the sense of being covered with grime, contaminated. She wretched and gagged on the phlegm in the back of her throat. Her stomach contracted, and she could feel the bile rising into her mouth. Afraid of being sick, she turned abruptly, walked rapidly through the living room, and entered the bathroom.

  She threw back the curtain and stepped directly into the bathtub, keeping her clothes on. When the spray began spewing out of the shower head, she held up her arms and watched the water cleanse away the telling red blotches. Much of the water splashed onto her blue jeans and blouse, until, afraid of getting all her clothes wet, she turned off the water and stepped onto the bathmat. She removed a towel from the rack and dried off her arms. She stopped to look in the mirror. She straightened her hair. She was beginning to feel normal again.

  Candy left the bathroom and walked into the living room, hesitating before she got to the utility room door. She paused for a moment; something stopped her. A sound. The dogs—the dogs in the backyard were barking at something. She turned and went back into the bathroom and rummaged around in the cabinets until she found some towels. She carried them into the utility room and, being careful not to see anything, fell to her knees and started scrubbing the floor with one of the bath towels. But the blood wouldn’t go away. The more she scrubbed, the more it seemed to spread across the floor, soaking her towel but making an even greater mess. She stood up and went to work with a clean towel on the freezer, rubbing hard with circular motions, but the blood simply smeared across the smooth white surface. She tossed the towel aside, stood up, and supported herself with one hand against the freezer.

  Suddenly she heard the sound again—louder this time, and more real—and she looked up and caught her breath. At the end of the room, through a low window framed by frilly curtains pulled back to let the sun in, she saw Chito and Princess, staring directly at her, barking at the top of their lungs and jumping back and forth against the pane. The dogs had seen everything. She was shaken by the thought. She looked down at the floor, seeing where the body was but not looking directly at it, and then extended her leg as far as she could, stepping over the prone corpse of Betty Gore to get to the other end of the tiny room. She unfastened the curtains and pulled them across the window, but the dogs continued to bark. She spoke to herself. “You have to be normal,” she thought. She stepped back over the body and picked up her towels. “This is silly,” she thought. “There’s too much blood.”

  For the first time she thought of something beyond the house: Ian and Jenny, Bible School, the show at eleven o’clock, Father’s Day cards, swimming lessons, movies. All the normal things she was supposed to do that day. “One thing at a time,” she thought. “Do one thing at a time.” She looked for her purse and caught sight of it on the chair. She searched the floor until she found her glasses. She thought of her car. For a moment she couldn’t remember where it was. She stood in front of the fireplace and peered out the front window of the house, wondering whether it would be there. She saw it and sighed with relief. She walked very deliberately, like a person who’s had too much to drink and tries to disguise it by doing everything too precisely.

  She left by the front door, closing it behind her. As she crossed the threshold, she saw a streak of red on her foot and looked closer. The toe was bleeding profusely from a deep gash. Until then she hadn’t even noticed it, but now the toe began to throb with excruciating pain.

  She looked at her watch; it read 10:20. Plenty of time to go to Target and get the Father’s Day cards and then go back to the church. Then she looked at the watch again. It had stopped. It was broken. It had stopped the moment she had soaked it with the spray from the shower head. She got into her car and headed into the uncharted farm roads of rural Collin County, driving aimlessly, trying to decide what to do next. The one thing she didn’t think about was what she had left behind in the utility room. No one must know about that. No one, ever, must know. And maybe if she didn’t think about it long enough, even she would believe that it never really happened.

  25 Judgment

  The huge courtroom remained silent. Candy Montgomery’s voice barely rose above the traffic noise from the square. Bob Pomeroy studied her face. She was a halfway attractive woman, he had to admit. She sounded unreal. He could summon no anger toward her.

  “What did you do when you got back to the church?” asked Don.

  “I explained to Barbara why I was late.”

  “Did you lie to her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you consider telling anybody what had really happened?”


  “I was afraid to and I was so ashamed. I didn’t want anyone to ever know.”

  “Did you think you’d be believed?”

  “No.”

  “You were having trouble believing it all happened at the time, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “People at the church, of course, knew you and Betty had been friends, didn’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what did you do at the church?”

  “There was supposed to be a luncheon for the Bible School teachers. And I can remember getting the meals ready for the kids and seeing to it they were taken care of. And I can remember somebody handed me a plate. And I can remember sitting there, trying to eat. And thinking all the while that I had to be normal. And I would feel the blood running down along the side of my face. And I would have to get up and I’d go check on the kids or something so that I could blot it so that no one would see it.”

  Candy was lapsing into her monotone again. While describing the struggle, her cheeks had trembled and she had sobbed silently. But now she regained her composure. Don feared that her testimony seemed too rehearsed.

  “Mrs. Montgomery, I want you to be honest with this jury,” he said. “You’re not happy this situation took place.”

  “No.”

  “But you feel genuine anger to this day, don’t you?”

  “I am angry that it has happened, yes.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because it seems so pointless.”

  “Pointless?”

  “Yes. I didn’t want him. I kept trying to tell her that.”

  “You didn’t plan it, did you?”

  “No. And she put me into that position. It’s caused me to lose everything that is important to me. And it hurts.”

  “But you’d had an affair with her husband.”

  “But it was over.”