by David Hill
It was strange, the two women, embracing, feeling their unsuspected union of common haplessness. What would either gain by accusing the other? Then, slowly, the mundane, material, temporal, here and now, living and breathing world reclaimed them. They somehow managed to regather their wits, wash their faces and settle down in the comfortable yellow silk parlor because the afternoon sun was weak by now and it was cool outside.
“Leona, you didn’t know …”
“Helen, I don’t really suspect …”
All the same, Leona saw it all much clearer now. She had been Soames’s conduit to Averill and her unwitting means of tracking his every move. She had also provided Soames access and a credible explanation for her presence in the church; she had indeed facilitated Rhea Anne’s murder. All of these things she wasted no time sharing with Helen, along with the fact that she regretted them very much.
“Leona, I have a favor to ask of you.…”
Would Leona provide testimony to help prove that Soames murdered Rhea Anne? Of course she would. She’d tell everything she knew.
“It might get embarrassing, Leona.”
“We’ll sit together in the courtroom.”
Then Leona asked Helen why she hadn’t gone to the authorities with her suspicions.
“Soames would have countered by accusing Averill of Henri Churchill’s murder.” There was more in Helen’s eyes. She was assessing Leona, waiting to see if she knew or at least suspected the rest.
“What is it, Helen?”
“We were also afraid for you.”
“For me?”
“She had a brilliant case against you.”
“Why wasn’t I a suspect?”
“Your connection wasn’t obvious.”
All Soames had to do was point it out. However, no one had accused her of anything, so she kept it in the arsenal of damning evidence, true and false, that she maintained.
It was getting dark. Leona and Helen had drained each other. It was time to leave. Yet Leona hadn’t asked her about the baby. Had she and Averill ever discussed it? Did she know the truth? Would it serve any good to ask her about it? Or would it just hurt someone who had already been badly wounded?
“Helen, do you know anything about Averill I should know?”
Helen darkened. Leona had kept the question general on purpose. Her instincts told her there wasn’t much point in asking it.
“Yes, I do, Leona.”
“Please tell me.”
“I know how he felt.…”
“About what?”
“Every day, his existence, how it feels to struggle every waking moment …”
“With himself?”
“With the damage that only you see and no one can fix.”
“You mean his background?”
Helen let a small sigh escape. She seemed to be studying Leona, evaluating her honesty.
“I mean, Leona, that there are two kinds of people in the world: the ones who lose their innocence as young adults and the ones who are robbed of it as children.”
Helen could make all the moist-eyed pleas for sympathy she wanted. Leona would never feel sorry for Averill Sayres. She had to let it be. They were crossing the porch now.
* * *
“I read where it’s supposed to be a warm, dry summer,” Helen remarked, looking at the dark leaves tinged with the dying amber sun. They eyed each other one last time. Maybe it was because the twilight lent Helen an aura of lost beauty. Maybe it was inevitable. Before she realized it, Leona found herself asking the question.
“It was the baby—that’s why he married me?”
“Yes.”
“He knew all along what he was going to do.”
“Averill married you to help you and himself.”
“But the baby …”
“Soames wanted the baby. She blackmailed him into stealing it.”
Now the two women, each with missing pieces of the same puzzle, sat on the porch, oblivious to the dropping chill and the damp mist, and made a shared picture of their individual fragments.
They came all the way to that January night. Averill was supposed to drug Leona as soon as the infant came, and keep her sedated while Soames made off with it.
“Then why did he kill my baby?”
Helen turned ashen.
“Averill did everything in his power to protect your baby.”
“By strangling it?”
“Who told you that?”
The terrible implication of her unspoken answer was all the information Helen needed.
“Soames Churchill. You tried to murder Averill based on information you got from Soames Churchill.…”
Leona felt a freight train roaring in her chest. She had an image in her head that she couldn’t keep of Averill grabbing her baby. Then everything was blood, snow and ice.
Helen’s hands were on her shoulders. She was driving her words into Leona’s head. This was the truth as she had heard it from Averill. There was no reason to doubt it.
Averill had never planned to conspire with Soames. Helen had gone to Memphis with Averill the week before the baby was born. They had drawn Leona’s money out of an account in Union Planters Bank. If things had gone as expected, Leona and her infant would have been safely settled into a life of their own within a week of its birth. The stillbirth and the phony grave were ploys meant to fool Soames. Averill had arranged a safe, temporary situation for the newborn infant. He would take it there right after it was born. Leona would be sedated and allowed to rest and recover as necessary. As soon as she was able, he would take her to collect the infant and explain everything.
Everything went wrong.
The snow and ice made the roads impassable. He couldn’t wait. Soames was checking for signs of Leona’s imminent delivery every few hours by then. He had to get the infant to safety that night. He was trying to shrink the distance to town by cutting downhill through the woods. It was dark. He was panicked. He was worried about the baby in his arms. Something happened. He tripped and fell. He hit his head and blacked out.
“So that’s how she died?”
“That’s as much as Averill ever told me.”
“So she’s buried there in the woods?”
“He went into shock. He didn’t know.”
“Lie to me, Helen! Please, lie to me! Tell me he said he buried her.”
“I can’t imagine he would have just left her there.”
“Not even in shock?”
“Not even in shock, honey.”
37
THURSDAY, APRIL 27, 2000
9:00 P.M.
Father Timon switched out the porch light and moved through the downstairs rooms turning out lamps and sconces and overhead lights. Then he fixed himself a plate of leftovers, which he heated in the microwave and carried with relish upstairs to his bedroom, where he planned to stuff himself like a Poland China pig while he watched the evening rerun of Law & Order.
God had other plans.
Darthula showed up at the back door. She was carrying an enormous bundle of rags, which he insisted that she leave on the porch.
“Heard about the murder?”
“Of course.”
She was standing in the doorway. She had replaced her soiled garments with a purple velvet robe. Her red veil remained over her face. She looked like she was going to a costume party as his late mother. He didn’t laugh at that because he didn’t have the energy to explain.
“He was the devil hisself, Reverend Mister Averill.”
“Really?”
“Know who done it?”
“Who?”
“Miz Evil Thang.”
Father Timon didn’t follow.
“Miss Soame’ Churchill.”
“Why?”
“Crazy.”
“Has she been arrested?”
“No, nor will she ever be.”
“She fled?”
“Shot him dead and herself next.”
“Chased him all the way to h
ell, did she?”
“You pretty funny.”
“She went crazy thinking he kill the baby.”
“I didn’t know Mrs. Churchill had a baby.”
“She ain’t.”
“Whose baby did he kill?”
“Nobody baby killed.”
“I don’t understand.”
Darthula turned around and grabbed the bundle of rags. He thought she was leaving, but she turned toward him, lifting a blanket and revealing the sleeping visage and gossamer curls of the most beautiful baby he had ever seen.
“Where did you get that baby?”
“Found her in the snow.”
“When?”
“Last January.”
“Where?”
“Where the devil laid her down.”
“Why didn’t you tell somebody?”
“ ’Fraid the devil would find out and snatch her.”
“We have to talk to the sheriff.”
“You have to give me something to eat first.”
38
SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 2000
10:00 A.M.
It was the first hot, sticky day of the year. Averill’s sister Audena and her husband, Winky, led the parade from the church to the cemetery where his fervid flock laid their slain angel to rest. Leona and Blue watched from the front porch. It was all very sad, yet there was an undeniable circuslike edge to it. They had to smile at the silhouette of Leelinda Spakes’s silicone breasts as she pranced through the mud in her formfitting choir robe and spiked heels. She couldn’t have seen them from this distance, but Leelinda looked over at them and turned to step out of the line of mourners and cross the road.
“Hey there, Leelinda.”
She just stood there, beaming her disapproval at them through her false eyelashes.
“Need something, sugar?” Blue asked.
“A harlot may be hired for a loaf of bread …” she said, quoting scripture, “but an adulteress stalks a man’s very life.” Then she drew in a long breath that made her already enormous breasts seem to inflate and lift as if she were about to float away. She was all unmitigated satisfaction as she turned slowly toward the cemetery.
“Leelinda?” Blue called in a subdued tone.
“Yes?” she inquired with a haughty glare.
“If you crash in water, can those things be used for flotation?”
Blue had no sooner fired off his remark than a sudden streak of lightning and an immediate peal of thunder aborted the ceremony at the grave, and mourners raced for the parking lot beside the church while Blue and Leona dove inside the house. The air was copper. Then a sea-green wall of water fell like a tidal wave out of the sky. Suddenly Leona was exhausted. Her fragile hilarity gave way to a weary sense of gloom. She went into the bedroom and tried to sleep.
There was something he wasn’t telling her. Blue had been acting strange since last night. Father Timon, the Episcopal priest, had called him. He’d gone into the bedroom and whispered into the receiver for half an hour. After that he was downright silly.
“What was that all about?”
“Nothing.”
It was late afternoon by the time Leona woke from her nap. The rain had stopped and the sky was pewter blue above the trees outside the bedroom window. Blue was in the front yard arguing with someone. It was Audena and Winky. Their voices grew louder. She peered through the dusty screen over the bedroom window. Winky and Audena were barreling down the driveway toward the road. Blue swirled around toward the house. He was doubled over, laughing.
“What?”
“I caught Winky trying to hot-wire Averill’s Cutlass.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“I told him I was sheriff and he was under arrest for car theft.”
She showered and changed and then went out on the front porch, where Blue was watching the shadows spread over the green hills. Her nap had given her some ballast. The world didn’t seem as frayed and tattered.
“You have something on your mind.”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “There are some things better shown than told.”
“Then show me.”
“Twenty minutes.”
“Is it bad?”
“No.”
“Please tell me.”
“It’s not bad,” he countered. Then he went in and took a shower.
“Ready?”
“I’ll get my purse.”
“You don’t need it.”
He let her walk down the porch steps in front of him. She moved to get into his car.
“We’re walking.”
He took her hand. They crossed the road and stepped over the low iron fence at the front of the cemetery. He went straight to the flower-covered mound, but he didn’t stop there. Instead they moved up the path into the woods for about a hundred yards. In another three or four minutes, however, Blue turned down a side trail toward the swamp.
“There’s snakes down there.”
“I hope you understand why I did it this way,” he said, making less sense as the black surface of the swamp came into view. To this point she was on familiar ground. Now Blue was guiding her to the left, where another path she had never noticed descended the hillside. In another minute Leona had to admit that she was completely turned around. Blue had taken them down into a gorge she had never seen. In another minute, she saw the shack. So this was where Darthula lived. It wasn’t through the swamp, as she had led people to believe.
“Darthula?” Leona called, so they wouldn’t startle her.
“She’s not home.”
“What’s going on, Blue?”
“I’ll give you the details later.”
Then he sat her down on the rocky hillside and took both of her hands. There was something he was having a hard time telling her. She might just brace for a shock, a good shock, but a shock nonetheless. She took her cue from him. She waited for him to tell her whatever it was. She was sure he was doing it the best possible way.
“Leona, I have wonderful news.”
In a heartbeat, he could see her beginning to hope against hope and dread that she might be wrong at the same time.
“She’s alive. Tess is alive and she’s here.” He was trembling and crying. He was going to pieces.
She was by some inexplicable quirk of human nature as calm as the moss-covered rocks. “Where is she, Blue?”
“There in that crib on the porch.”
Leona floated through the surreal purple and gold haze. Yet it wasn’t surreal or dreamlike. She could smell the pines and hear the birds. The past two years were the dream. She had somehow fled her own being and moved off, leaving the rest of herself behind in that nightmare just past. This wasn’t to be confused with that dim place. This was where she had somehow overtaken and stepped into her own lost being once more.
Now she was moving up the porch steps. No, nothing fantastic here. An old crib. She crept toward it and peered down at the sum of it all. Tess sat cross-legged, sucking her thumb. She was a cherub, a peach, a perfect, freckled angel with swirls of curly silver-white baby hair and ice blue eyes that danced when she looked up at Leona. Yet she was no dream or angel. She was altogether tangible, here and now.
“Hey,” Leona said in a soft, hoarse voice. Then, leaning toward the curious baby, she wrapped her hand around a wooden side rail and let her fingers flutter slowly. In another minute Tess touched her knuckle and Blue saw Leona’s color deepen, but she didn’t move or make a sound.
“Hey,” Leona repeated, smiling at Tess.
“Hey,” Tess shouted, clapping both of her hands.
“Come?” Leona asked after Tess had shown her an earless stuffed cotton bunny.
“Yeah!” Tess shouted, jumping up and down.
Then she lifted the dancing baby with both arms, resisting the urge to hug, for fear of frightening her. Sitting her up under one arm, Leona swung Tess around so she could see Blue, who was trying to stem his tears with his handkerchief.
“Hush, baby,” Le
ona commanded.
When it was full dark and Tess had fallen asleep on the bed, Leona went out to the front porch, where Blue sat looking at the stars.
“Whatcha know?” he asked.
“Less by the minute,” she said.
Across the road the moon had plated the flowers on Averill’s grave silver blue. A breeze stirred the tops of the pines. It was clear, but she could smell more rain coming from the opposite side of the hill. She drank the soft scent. Far up the hill an owl hooted. They sat in the quiet splendor, leaving each other to the dreams and battles and reflections that lie within. Slowly the cloud continent appeared over the trees, and after a while they could feel the first scattered drops of rain.
“Coming in?” she asked Blue, who seemed to be asleep with his eyes open. He stirred himself fully awake and stood next to her, watching the jade green tops of trees bristle in the gathering wind.
“I love these old woods,” he said.
She was falling asleep. The shivering limbs of the trees seemed to echo the breathing in the darkness on either side of her. Husband and child, partner and promise, breathing in and out, their chests lifting and falling with the floating pines. Was it a pattern or an accident?
Did it matter if she understood that it was lovely? It was life, and she could feel her own breathing with theirs; life, and now a muted drumming on the roof. There, in the little house under the sighing trees, she pressed her shoulders into the pillow and imagined the Earth curving all the way around from the head of her bed through town and the ocean and Asia and back to the foot of the bed. For now she understood that she was at this place on that curve for this time.
Happiness was a here-and-now, breathing thing.
It was enough, all this warm breathing and creaking and holding on to the curve of the Earth. It was magnificent, the slight swell of moonlit curtains, the comfortable squeak of tired bedsprings, the far-off wail of a wild dog. She was tired. Sleep was tugging at her. Tomorrow with all its cloying improbabilities and toil was lurking in the darkness, waiting like a snare in the tall grass near the empty grave across the road. Tomorrow and dying, and bending time could wait.