Maggie studied the forsythia. She had thought death might be kinder than divorce, but maybe she was wrong. Death was so permanent. She wondered if death was as hard to forgive as betrayal.
“Canon brings me flowers all spring and summer. Those come in last Friday—well you were here on Monday, I told you that. He had asked me if we had the new Stephen King novel. He loves Stephen King.”
“Sheriff Dale is a reader?”
“My word, is he? I can’t keep him in books. He’s very fond of those Jack Ryan stories. He’s read all of those. A lot of mysteries. Oh! Westerns. That man is crazy for westerns. I believe he’s read every Louis L’Amour book ever was.”
When Maggie reached inside her purse for her keys, Dot smacked her hands together and said, “I thought of a title for your book. ‘The Murder of Tandy Wilkins.’ What do you think?” Her voice dropped again. “She never did take Zeke’s last name.”
Maggie nodded. “Has a nice ring to it.” Only problem was, Maggie didn’t believe it was murder.
“That would make a good title, wouldn’t it?” Dot went on. “‘Course, what do I know? I just line the books up; I don’t write them. I wish I could write them, because this town is full of stories. I guess every town is. Why, even this house has a story. I told you that one. I guess every town is rich with stories. And you know how folks are when they’re telling stories. They go right to the juice. We hear all the juice here in the library. But sometimes I worry we’re not writing enough of it down. So it’s a good thing, you’re doing. Let me know when the time comes. We’ll do a book signing.”
Maggie took her leave then. The pressure to finish Zeke’s story was mounting.
* * *
Before she left town Maggie went to see Paul Wilkins, the doctor who served as coroner. His was the last name on her list of people to interview. Paul was a distant relative to Tandy and Rynell. His office was in the small county hospital. Maggie was catching him between his rounds, but he didn’t rush his time with her. He remembered the events well.
“My grandmother married Jack Wilkins after Tandy’s grandmother died. There’s a lot of Wilkinses, but two sets. Jack Wilkins had fifteen children total. So we were related, but not close. Her people were a lot rougher than mine. Still, because of the family connection, I remember the details. Plus, we don’t have a lot of killings like that in Marston.
“Tandy was beat up bad. I told Canon there wasn’t any way Zeke could have done it, because his hands weren’t bruised. That other man’s were. But Zeke had gunpowder on him and that was enough to convince the jury. They brought in people from two counties over, to try to get a fair trail, but Zeke’s lawyer was young, fresh out of law school. And he didn’t know some of those Wayne County people knew Tandy’s family.”
A woman walked in with a file folder and laid it on Dr. Wilkins’ desk. She nodded at Maggie and left. Everyone at the hospital, like everyone Maggie had met so far in Marston, was friendly and relaxed…welcoming…seemingly curious about her, the writer come to town to unearth a story that happened long ago.
“Was Tandy paralyzed by her injuries?” she asked.
“Yes. Spinal cord was damaged under the neck, up under the first vertebrae.”
“But she didn’t die from the beating she’d received.”
“No. The gunshot killed her. And from all the evidence, Zeke did pull the trigger.”
“What about the other man?”
“The man from Trenton? He died from two gunshots, one to the head and one to the upper chest that entered the right aorta and punctured a lung. One to the head entered over the right ear, straight to the brain. It’s the one that killed him. He would have likely bled to death from the first one, but was leaned over from it when the second one hit him in the head.”
Paul pointed to his body to show her. He was a lean, ruddy cheeked man in his sixties. Maggie was impressed with his memory of detail. His account perfectly matched the police and trial reports.
“Could Tandy have been the one who shot him, considering her injuries?”
“It’s plausible. Zeke’s lawyer tried to argue it that way. All I know is that the same person fired both those shots, in quick succession. Could have been Zeke, could have been Tandy. But the jury didn’t believe it could have been Tandy seeing as how she was beat up and paralyzed.”
“What about you? Do you think she could have done it?”
He gave a rueful smile. “I know for a fact she was mean enough to do it. If you’re asking whether she could have physically held a gun and shot it with that damaged vertebrae, I don’t know. And that’s what I told the jury. She had gunpowder on her. I think she had use of her arms and hands until Zeke lifted her head, but I couldn’t prove it then and I can’t now. It’s just that…Zeke Thompson wasn’t the type to lie.
“I mean, if you’re ever going to lie, it would be to save yourself from going to prison. But that’s just it. Zeke pled guilty. He said he didn’t mind going to prison. Seemed resigned to it. So why would he lie about that? About lifting her head and that being what severed the damaged cord?
“Zeke testified that he shot Tandy because she lacked the strength to turn the gun around and use it on herself. That takes a different set of muscles in the hand. It would have been easier for her to point it straight than to turn it back around. Zeke said it fell out of her hand and she couldn’t get it back up and pointed right.”
Maggie thanked Paul Wilkins for his time. As she walked back out to the parking lot she mulled over what he said.
The facts seemed pretty cut and dry—all but for the question of Zeke’s true motive.
28
We fall, we get up. We lose, but we gain something in return. We love, in spite of the risk. So much of life is conquering fear to reach the gifts that lie on the other side.
Maggie cried while writing the scene.
As I came down the Mill Creek highway, I saw a red Chevy pickup with a Trenton County license plate sitting in our gravel drive. From the minute I parked the Camaro and opened the door, I could hear loud arguing coming from the house. It sounded like furniture being thrown against the wall of the back bedroom.
I ran for the side porch steps, but that door was locked, so I ran around to the front of the house. That door stood open.
As I came down the hall, two quick shots were fired. Then I was in the doorway of the bedroom. A man I didn’t recognize—a man with black hair and John Travolta sideburns—was pinned to the wall by the force of the bullets, blood pouring from his chest and a hole over his right ear. I watched his body slide to the floor, red streaks and spatters staining the cream colored paint—Navajo White—a $9.99 special from Baker Hardware.
It was like walking in on a bad movie.
Tandy lay on the bed in her panties and blue t-shirt, as blood-spattered as the man, her legs splayed at odd angles. A stainless revolver was on the mattress beside her right hand. She didn’t raise up when I entered or when the man from Trenton slid down.
I went to her, up on my knees on the bed. “Tandy.”
I tried to lift her head but she screamed—a tragic, weak-kitten scream. “Don’t!”
But it was too late. Somewhere deep down in me I knew in that moment that my lift of her head severed a cord already damaged. Paul Wilkins, Tandy’s distant cousin, would confirm that later at the trial. But I didn’t take time to think about it then.
“Tandy.” She was like a stranger to me. All we’d been through…all the years…but in that moment it seemed I’d never known the broken body of the woman twisted beneath me.
She cut her eyes up and whispered, “Finish me.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, but I knew. I knew exactly what she wanted me to do, and I knew I’d cave and do it like the coward I’d grown into, but I shook my head no.
“Finish me, Zeke,” she insisted. “I can’t move my legs. My hands now neither.”
“Are you sure?” I lifted her arms. She didn’t protest. They were limp as overcooked
pasta. “Let me call an ambulance, Tandy. Let me get you some help.”
“No!” she squeaked again. “Please. Finish me. Don’t make me live like this, like Daisy Jenkins in a wheelchair.”
Daisy Jenkins was a girl we went to school with, the niece of Dorothy Jenkins at the library. When Daisy was eight years old, she dove headfirst into a shallow pool at the Country Club. Daisy finished high school in a wheelchair. Daisy Jenkins had never been asked out. No man from Trenton had ever looked twice at her.
“I can’t do that, Tandy.”
“The hell you can’t!”
She got foul-mouthed then. Called me things I’d been called before. “What kind of man lets his wife do such awful things to him and live? Finish me!” Then she went from cussing to crying. “Please, Zeke. As a final act of mercy. I beg you.”
I looked down at her, my heart breaking. I started to leave, to get the phone.
“Don’t leave me, Zeke!” I’d never heard a more piteous cry coming from her throat, worse than that night two months into our marriage.
“Put the gun in my hand if you can’t do it. Please! Put the gun in my hand.”
I stared down at the gun on the mattress—a Smith & Wesson, what they called a .38 Special, stainless steel, evidently the man from Trenton’s because I never owned a handgun, only rifles—then lifted it and set it carefully into her hand.
It was heavy. Tandy tried to pull the trigger, but couldn’t. Tears rolled over her cheeks. She twisted her face and shook her head, sobbing in frustration. Her head seemed to be the only thing she could operate.
“Don’t make me endure this, Zeke. Don’t! Please. Don’t punish me by making me endure it.”
When I wouldn’t look at her she said it again. “Please, Zeke.” Then she added, “You were better at loving than I was. I know that. You were better at everything.”
I looked down at her and remember feeling tired…so tired.
“I did you wrong, Zeke. I know it and I’m sorry. I hate myself for the way I’ve treated you. Let me make it right. Let me go. I want it to be over.”
I wanted it to be over, too.
“Won’t you help me?” she begged.
I’d seen Tandy cry lots of times, but not like this, never like this.
The psalms David wrote say God is pleased with a contrite spirit and a broken heart. If that was true, I knew I ought to be in good standing with God, but I’d never known Tandy to be.
Not ‘til now.
A voice whispered in me this was Tandy’s best shot. If she went now, while she was begging, she might stand a chance, like that thief on the cross who knew he could never make it on his own. Maybe the Lord still made last-minute exceptions.
I took a deep breath. “Did you ever love me, Tandy?”
“I love you now, Zeke.”
That’s when I picked up the .38 Special and pulled the trigger.
* * *
Zeke’s jury decided when he came into the house and saw his wife in compromising circumstances with another man, he first shot the man, then shot his wife. And at least one juror argued that Zeke took the time to beat Tandy between shooting the man from Trenton and shooting her. This, after Paul Wilkins testified under oath that Zeke had no bruises on either hand. The man from Trenton, by contrast, had bloody knuckles and two fractures.
Heroin was found in both the bodies. Zeke was subjected to a blood test, but no trace of drugs was found in him. He was convicted of two counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to thirty years in prison. The jury could not accept the possibility that a man might kill his cheating wife in a final act of mercy.
As Maggie assembled the pieces of the puzzle and worked on Zeke’s story, she wondered often about the man in the ravine behind her cabin.
I died on a Monday—same Monday I broke out of prison. My name was Ezekiel Thompson. Everybody called me Zeke. I killed three people, but only one from hatred.
The more Maggie worked on Zeke’s story, the more convinced she became that Zeke felt responsible for his mother’s death, too—that his choices had “brought on the cancer” like Mr. Thompson feared. So the second person he killed was his mother, and the third was Rodriquez.
Zeke had told Maggie he was coming to the cabin because it shone with light. When he got close, had he seen Rodriquez lurking in the woods? Watching Maggie as she bathed?
The more she thought about it, the more convinced Maggie was that the whack she heard before Zeke knocked on her door was Zeke protecting her from danger. What did he stand to lose in killing that man if he’d already died thirty years ago? But what he stood to gain was a chance at some measure of redemption…through the telling of his story…through Maggie.
29
"Telling people you are writing a book, then letting people read it, is like standing naked on the high dive." English professor to a budding author
Saturday morning the skies were clear and, if the majesty of the sunrise was any indication, it promised to be a glorious day.
Maggie wore the teal dress.
Canon had texted the evening before. “Pick you up at ten. I’ll be designated driver in case you want to try the cherry wine.”
“There you go again,” she texted back, “making me out to be a lush.”
At 9:45 Maggie checked the mirror one more time: cute teal dress with pockets, comfortable flats, and a white shrug sweater. Easter had passed, white was allowed, even Dot Jenkins couldn’t argue with that. At 9:50 Maggie shot one quick spray of perfume with notes of vanilla and citrus in the air and let it waft down on her shoulders. At 9:55 when she heard him coming up the road, she grabbed her purse and sunglasses.
Maggie had repacked the purse three times.
One more look in the mirror. Makeup kept minimal, but she did put extra time into her hair, twisting the silk of it into a loose knot on her head and fastening it with bobby pins. If a wind blew up she’d be in trouble, but her phone and the skylights promised a calm day.
Maggie locked the door and tried not to run out to Canon’s car looking too excited. He got out and held the passenger door open for her. How romantic…his squad car. At least Canon wasn’t in uniform, and Maggie was glad. Jeans and a polo shirt again, with the sheriff’s office logo.
“I hope you didn’t eat breakfast,” he said. “You’re going to need a lot of room for all things cherry.” Canon really did have nice forearms.
When he closed her door, walked around the car and got in, she could smell his aftershave. Maggie felt sixteen again. “I didn’t eat.” How could she with all the butterflies swarming?
Before starting the car, Canon held his keys a minute. “Can I get one thing out of the way before we leave?”
Maggie’s heart dropped. He’s going to tell me it’s not really a date. That was sure to put a damper on things. Instead, he leaned over and kissed her lightly on the lips. Then he put the keys in the ignition and started the car.
Maggie smiled. “Thank God that’s out of the way.”
Canon laughed. What a magical sound! The kiss and his laughter broke through the tight web of Maggie’s nerves, releasing the butterflies.
Canon parked at the sheriff’s office. Music floated over from Main. It was 10:30 when they arrived. Everybody in the county must have turned out for the festival. They all seemed to know Canon and wanted to talk to him. Maggie met so many new people she couldn’t keep track of their names.
She recognized Dot Jenkins, of course, in cropped white pants and a polka-dot blouse—cherry—to match the theme of the day. Paul Wilkins was there, and Rynell, though the two didn’t share a distant-relation hug. Becky Renco worked the ring toss with an athletic man named Steve who turned out to be her husband.
Canon put a hand on Maggie’s elbow, leaned close to her ear and murmured helpful information. “Steve’s the local high school football coach. They’ve had a rough year.”
He kept moving her through the crowd. It sent a shiver down Maggie’s spine to have him walking beside her, men t
ipping their baseball hats to him, women eyeing Maggie like she’d won the door prize. Each time Maggie thought of his kiss in the car, she bit her bottom lip to keep from breaking into a silly grin.
They stopped and talked to June Hargrove and her husband, who wore overalls and a John Deere hat.
“Ed’s a farmer,” said Canon, as they moved along.
Canon pointed her toward Mabel Stevens’ booth first thing for that fried cherry pie, because he knew she was going to be overloaded with options. As promised, it was a slice of heaven. But Maggie liked her lunch salad even better—spinach with dried cherries, apples, pecans and feta. The balsamic dressing was perfect. Or was her favorite the cherry beignets after lunch? Who had ever even heard of cherry beignets?
Maggie bought jars of cherry preserves, cherry salsa, and cherry chutney to try later in her cooking, and a bag of sour cherries for Yvette because she knew her soon-to-be daughter-in-law loved them. And she did try that cherry wine and bought bottles for the kids and a couple for herself. By 2:30 Maggie’s feet and stomach begged for relief and Canon’s forearms bulged carrying her shopping bags.
“You about ready to go sit by the pond and fish?” he said low under his breath as he dodged running children on the sidewalk. The music and revelers were dying down. Canon had planted his yearly tree at noon, adding to a row lining the east of the courthouse.
“So ready,” said Maggie.
They made their way back to the car. Canon checked on things in the office while she settled her bags in the back, then he drove them out of town, turning off on a side road she’d never been down before.
Maggie was so tired she wanted to close her eyes, but she didn’t want to miss the countryside. This was the route to Canon’s farm. She wanted to experience it. Corn fields…hay fields…newly planted rows of soybeans passed outside her windows.
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