by David Hill
“What went with my car?”
“He cut off my money! They’re repossessing it!”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Don’t yell at me!”
“What the hell is going on?”
“You don’t love me.”
“Sure I do.”
As if the imperious witch had ever loved anyone.
“You’ve been using me.”
That was the truth, of course. In a lot of ways this was a godsend. Except for the car. He figured he’d earned it. That made him a kind of a whore, he guessed. But he had recently come to the conclusion that certain moral ideas were a luxury of the privileged. He’d save his remorse for better days. He wasn’t about to let go, not yet.
“Of course I love you.”
“You know that pistol we bought me?”
“Yes …”
She had gotten increasingly worried, almost paranoid about Henri. She was afraid to be alone in the country without protection. They had purchased her a .45 pistol last week in Memphis. He had tried to show her how to use it, but she freaked. Or acted like it. Lately it seemed everything she did was acting like something.
“I’m going to use it on myself.” Then she hung up. He dug around and found his truck keys. The truck was sitting on the alley where it had been since Soames Churchill had decided he could drive a Cutlass. Well then, the Lord Soames giveth and the Lord Henri taketh away, he mused. It took him half an hour to start the truck.
Soames was berserk with anguish and shrieking in terror every time the house creaked. Henri and she had battled through the night. He had ordered her off the place and then left. He had taken Averill’s car and padlocked the church. He was going to have Averill up on all sorts of charges which a well-connected hypocrite like Henri Churchill could make stick. It took Averill half a quart of Seagram’s Crown Royal to get her to sleep for an hour. He had to cut his losses and run. But where? And how? He didn’t have fifteen cents to his name.
“Angel of God!”
Soames was awake, feeling “miraculously better.” “Famished,” as she always said. No trace of the former terror. This was Soames on top of the world, Soames, the eternal optimist. Or Soames the nutcase, he wasn’t so sure anymore. “He can’t hurt us, baby,” she purred. “I’ve got stacks of evidence to use against him. He’ll send us on a honeymoon that will last the rest of our lives.” Averill knew she was seducing him. He knew it was all bravura. Was it habit, ego or lack of a better idea? He didn’t know. There they were, tugging at each other’s clothes on the parlor floor. This was going to get him killed someday. He couldn’t help it. Soames just had a way to get him all “famished” too.
29
MONDAY, APRIL 24, 2000
11:35 P.M.
When he left the courthouse, Blue paid a call on Arlen McFaye. He lived down a sharp hill of squat, shingled bungalows. Arlen’s wasn’t big enough to turn around in. He lived there with a wife and four kids and his mother. There couldn’t be more than two bedrooms. Yet there was no sign of anyone else when Arlen let Blue into the living room. The place was immaculate. Every surface glistened. Everything that could be stowed had a niche. At the side of the room, a neatly taped plastic tarp revealed the skeletal outline of a room in progress. If Arlen was a McFaye, he was the trying kind. He’d been in the army. He was only four or five years older than Blue, but he was already bald.
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing about you, Hudson.”
“Then don’t.”
“What do you want?”
“Did you autopsy Rhea Anne Brisbane?”
The question caught him off guard. He had to catch hold of it.
“No. Nobody asked for an autopsy.”
“You didn’t examine her and fill out the death certificate?”
“No one suspected foul play.”
“Did Sheriff Meeks ever discuss the possibility that it was a murder?”
“Of course not.”
The two men were silent for a moment.
“A little over a year ago. During the big January snow, you examined a stillbirth?”
“I have no recollection.”
“A stillborn infant girl born to the Reverend and Mrs. Averill Sayres.”
Something behind Arlen’s eyes had just added. It made him uneasy.
“It was born dead.”
“Why?”
“Who knows?”
“It just happens, huh?”
“All the time.”
“What kind of tests do you run?”
“None in this case.”
“Why not?”
“Am I suspected here?”
“Hell, no.”
“Then I done you enough favors for one day.”
Blue explained. He hadn’t meant to insinuate that Arlen wasn’t doing a fine job. There was a killer loose. His odds of getting that person locked up before someone else died were getting slimmer by the minute. He had a real situation on his back. There was an element of the birthing of that child that related to something else. He’d been presented some strong hints of possible foul play. Did anything on record indicate even the remotest possibility?
Now Arlen looked very uncomfortable. He crossed the room, switched on his computer and dug into his files. He pulled up the record. The official cause of death was asphyxia during the third trimester.
“What’s that mean?”
“It means we had to give it our best guess.”
“How extensive was your exam?”
“Off the record?”
Blue held his breath.
“If this bites me—”
“You have my word.”
“A man of God comes to me grief-stricken over his wife’s stillbirth. He tells me the baby came a week ago while they were snow- and icebound. His poor wife went psycho with grief. She held on to it for two days. It was starting to smell. Phone lines were down. He had to knock her unconscious. Then he went across the road in the ice and snow and dug a grave with a pickax. He can show me where. Now, I can put this tormented couple through the hell of a useless exhumation. Or fill out two forms and sign them. Which would you do?”
“You never even examined it?”
“What would you do?”
“What you did, Arlen.” Blue leaned over Arlen’s shoulder. He fingered the keys and the screen glowed yellow. He hit one more and the information vanished.
“Why the hell did you do that?”
“Now kill the backup copy.”
“Why?”
“To save both of our asses.”
30
TUESDAY, APRIL 25, 2000
12:13 A.M.
There wasn’t much moon and the ground was wet. All around him it felt like eyes peered at him from the woods. Sometimes when he let the pick fall into the soft clay, his eye held the image of the dark parsonage across the road through the iron cemetery fence. Over and over as he worked, he saw Averill sitting on the porch wearing one of his straw hats and watching his progress. Sometimes a deer cracked the brush or a screech owl let loose with a paralyzing cry and he almost expected the dead all around him to rise.
Sometimes he caught an indecipherable murmur near the path that split the woods as it climbed the hill. Then he knew Soames was on to him. He pitched one shovelful after another onto the pile that slowly rose as he sank in the slowly deepening hole. Every time his head followed his arm upward to release a load of earth, he expected Soames to be standing on top of it, taking aim with her delicate ivory pistol.
When the woods were blurred with the blue-gray mist of approaching morning, Blue felt the shovel scrape against something wooden. Redoubling his efforts, he had the top protruding a few inches out of the moist earth in about five minutes. Using his pickax, he pried it gently open. It was wrapped in infant’s blankets and bound with wire. He lifted the mummified relic over his head and let it roll slowly off his hands and onto the ground. The wire was coated with plastic and it was hell to break.
&nb
sp; It was almost full daylight by the time he could unwrap the blankets, which soon began to look almost new after he had loosened several layers. Then the last blanket was opened.
Nothing. Not a trace or remnant of any kind.
No, hell, no. Of course not. He’d known as much, and so had Leona, but it was too obvious for either one of them to see it. Leona hadn’t relied on her fragmented memory of the night the baby was born. That wasn’t what convinced her Averill had murdered the baby. It was the set pieces all around her. The grave. The empty crib. The autopsy. Other people’s accounts of what happened. Those things fit together as they had been designed to complete the picture. Averill had actively worked to create that picture. It was a very convincing composite portrait of a stillbirth.
A stillbirth. Not a murder. It was Soames who had altered their original design. Leona had told him as much—without realizing what it meant. Soames had come to Leona, and “confessed” her “past” affair with Averill. Then she had convinced Leona that Averill had murdered the baby.
Blue stood up. Behind the woods the horizon was red. He turned toward the road. The parsonage windows gave back the angry sky. It was still dark there. Glancing off his shoulder as he slipped the car into drive, Blue caught one last image of Averill peering off the porch at the gaping hole and the new mound of dirt in the cemetery.
Let them bury the bastard in it.
31
TUESDAY, APRIL 25, 2000
7:30 A.M.
She kept Blue waiting an hour in the double parlor while she bathed and dressed. She had laid this scenario out in her mind, even practiced a few French phrases to give her performance a smooth finish. She kept him waiting an hour because she had expected him all day yesterday and into last night. When the housekeeper woke her at 6:30 A.M. to say Sheriff Hudson had called, she was furious. She fumbled with her makeup. Then she drank a Bloody Mary to settle her nerves. Then she couldn’t decide which housecoat was the most becoming. Blue had waited for an hour when she finally waltzed into the parlor.
“Why, Mister Blue Hudson, sir! What are you doing on my love seat looking like Caravaggio’s ‘Cupid’ at this ungodly hour?”
She had swept through a gigantic arched doorway with marble column supports that separated the front parlor from the back one behind his head. Sneak attack, of course.
“What have you been doing for the last hour?”
She stood at the far end of the room, a wary lioness waiting for her cornered prey to make his inevitable, fatal move. The early sun flooded the gilt-and-velvet parlor with lurid yellow. The intense light revealed dry, pallid flesh under a veneer of makeup. She had rubbed a white substance into tiny dark folds of flesh under her eyes. She was an aging carnivore, embittered by years of stalking lesser warm-blooded creatures through sleepless, solitary darkness.
“Why have you hauled me out of bed at this ungodly hour?”
“I need your help.”
She despised getting out of bed before ten o’clock in the morning, but Soames had an intuition that this was going to be worth it. Was he investigating a murder or trying to cover it up? No one had really bothered to question her about the murder, despite the fact that she had been the one who called Blue’s office to report it. She had heard plenty of lurid tales about his inappropriate conduct with Leona in the last day or so.
“Leona needs my help.”
“Leona isn’t worth helping,” Blue said.
“You bastard! She was in love with you!”
“You think she’s so damned good?”
“I won’t help you send her to death row.”
“Then you’ll help Leona send you to death row.”
Blue had to admit that in spite of all the circumstances, he was beginning to enjoy his visit. Soames was always acting. Didn’t it figure then that she would fall for his performance?
“Send me to death row?”
“She says you shot Averill Sayres.”
Soames had plenty of color now. She pasted on an incredulous mask.
“I’ll let you see yourself out.”
“Look, we know she’s lying.”
She regained her aloof expression.
“Me? She turned on me like that?”
Blue wasn’t about to waste a cue like that.
“I know all about how Leona turns on those who care the most.”
That worked. He had reassured her.
“Don’t you want something to drink?”
When he was finally back at the wheel of the Jeep, he went all jittery. He had given her quite a performance, pretending that he had recently come to the reluctant conclusion that Leona had not only murdered Averill but Rhea Anne Brisbane as well.
“What?”
This time there was unmistakable triumph in her incredulity. Blue ran through the various incriminating facts surrounding that case as it related to Leona. He was hoping Soames would indicate some kind of satisfaction that he was basically saying that her setup had succeeded.
“She was not only the last person alone in that church with Rhea Anne, but the only person in the county who had any motive for killing her.”
Yet Soames seemed to weigh what he told her about the gun.
“The clinker is the gun. We know Leona used the same one to kill both Rhea Anne and Averill. But we can’t find it.”
“I’m afraid I don’t see what any of this has to do with me.”
“I was just hoping she might have said something.”
“About the murder weapon?” Soames asked with disdain. “You must think I’m an accomplice!”
This was going to be his exit line. He had to say it just right.
“Not about the weapon, Soames. About me.”
“You?”
“Yeah. Like whether or not she ever really loved me.”
Moving down the long driveway toward the road, Blue kept checking the rearview mirror, half expecting Soames to step out from behind a giant Corinthian column and fire a pistol at the back of his head. Well, if she did, he mused, the county would have all the evidence it needed to free Leona and convict Soames.
Of course the real question was, now that he had set the trap, was she going to take the bait?
32
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 26, 2000
12:01 A.M.
There had been nothing to do but wait until dark in the woods. He had pulled the truck into a dry creek bed and under a sandstone ridge. Folding his fleece-lined jacket into a wad behind his head, he stretched out across the seat. He kept fading in and out. After midnight Blue drove without headlights as close as he felt it was safe, then he crept through the woods about a mile before he came out in the cemetery across the road from the parsonage. The house was dark. The Oldsmobile and the truck sat where they had been last night. All the same, he kept his head low and moved from tree to tree, making a wide arc that took him to the porch.
Once inside the dark house, he searched in the shadows, feeling around in drawers and at the backs of shelves. The little pearl-handled pistol was wrapped in a piece of velvet and tucked into the toe of Averill’s galoshes at the bottom of the bedroom closet. He examined it for a moment, removed a bullet, and then wrapped the pistol and put it back.
Nothing to do now but wait. He sat in the silent house, crouched in a dark corner of the living room, and watched the moonlit face of an old Seth-Thomas shift from nine to midnight to three A.M. The longer he waited, the longer his list of unanswered questions grew. He had miscalculated something. Then around four A.M. he heard footsteps on the driveway. The door had been unlocked when he got there. He had locked it so she would have to jimmy a window. He wanted her to think her secret was locked tight.
Either she wasn’t much of a thief or she was drunk. It took her fifteen minutes to get a living room window open. She went straight to the bedroom. He followed her, standing in the door as she knelt at the closet. She didn’t start or even scream when he flipped on the overhead light. She just sat back on her haunches and threw her hands
in the air, one of which held the weapon she had carried for protection.
“Drop it,” he said.
“I’m sick to death of it,” she said. Then her right hand aimed the gun inside her mouth and as she fell forward, his face was splattered with blood and brains.
33
CHRISTMAS DAY 1997
9:30 A.M.
Soames had no intentions of spending any more time in this hot sheet motel. She had woken up around six-thirty and dressed, leaving Averill in Birdland while she took care of business. Now it was after eight and the worthless bastard could start earning his keep.
“Lover …”
He opened his eyes, moaned and shut them again, turning away from her.
Where the hell did the shiftless piece of Holy Roller trash get the idea he had the right to sleep until noon? She pulled back the sheet and he drew his long torso into a ball. He reminded her of a hairless lizard in bikini briefs.
“Get your bony ass up!”
He stared at her, incredulous.
“What are you looking at?”
“ ’S wrong, baby?”
“I have a little Christmas present for you.”
He sat forward, grinning like a juvenile.
“It’s not here. It’s out at the house.” She threw him his shirt and trousers. He tried to shake off the rest of his sleep and confusion. Henri had thrown her out for good. She couldn’t go back to the house. He shouldn’t be here or anyplace close to here with Soames.
“You can’t go to the house right now.”
“Baby, I can go to that house anytime I like for as long as I like.”
“Henri …”
“Henri had a little accident this morning.”
Averill felt ice water running down his back.
“What kind of accident?”
“Hunting,” she said with a bored expression, swooping his socks off of the floor.
“How is he?”
“To my way of thinking? Henri has never been better.”
“Dead?”