Butterfly Sunday (23 page)

So this had to be part of that. Leona poisoned Averill? Deliberately. Could that possibly be so?

In the car on the road up Whitsunday Hill, he kept thinking about the kids. Lucy had pulled one last dirty trick, taking off for California with Doctor Kildare and the two younger kids. Their daughter Nancy, she said, wouldn’t adjust well to the move so soon after being placed in the Home for Juvenile Incurables. Nancy she
left behind, like Blue and the rest of the trash he found all over the house after she moved out.

He was supposed to be spending this month in California. Back in the winter he and Leona had talked about using part of the trip as a honeymoon.

At the crossroads store he veered left, and the road turned to gravel as he began the long climb up the hill. It seemed like some last, impossible mountain. He couldn’t shake the godforsaken feeling that the end of everything was waiting two miles above him in the opaque April leaves. It was all so bleak and pointless now. He’d faced up to a million youthful mistakes by now. He’d learned a thousand lessons the hard way. He’d looked at himself from the rest of the world’s point of view and tried like hell to change.

Why then was he left with this goddamned nothingness? Why were the woman and the children he loved so far apart and out of his reach? What was the sense of doing your best if the wind had its own ideas? God, he prayed, God, God, God, please tell me this is all some bad joke. Let this be one more of Soames Churchill’s dramas. She was an original, he’d give her that. Blue had often thought he’d love to see whatever swamp or hollow she had crawled out of. Henri Churchill’s money would never completely erase its impact on her. Then Blue remembered how old Sheriff Meeks had gone to his grave believing Soames had murdered Henri. There was all kinds of speculation when he died in a hunting accident. Blue hadn’t been in law enforcement back then. He remembered thinking, like most people, that Henri was just one more dandified idiot who had no business toting a loaded rifle.

Blue was just below the Sayres place. A cloud of dust at the crest of a vine-covered knoll told him a car was coming. He lifted the radio to call for backup.

SUNDAY, APRIL 23, 2000

5:46 P.M.

The Lincoln roared into the driveway and came within a hair of hitting the rear bumper of Averill’s Cutlass before it jerked to a sudden stop. Soames leapt out of the car and raced to Leona.

“I’m sorry I didn’t stop, honey. I just had to think.” Tears streamed down her cheeks. She was shaking. “No one with a heart will ever blame you,” she said. Then she threw her arms around Leona and squeezed the air out of her. “Blue’s coming.”

Leona stared at her, incredulous. Blue couldn’t possibly come. Blue was on the other side of the country in California visiting his kids. He’d left on Friday night, the fourteenth of April. Wouldn’t she know? She had once thought she’d be on the plane with him. She had altered her plans with his in mind. She had deliberately
scheduled this thing so that she would be in jail awaiting trial before he knew anything about it. She didn’t want him to try to be a hero. This was a culprit he’d never apprehend. He’d get himself into a lot of trouble, apt as not lose his job, and then for his trouble he’d get to watch the state of Mississippi execute her.

“Blue’s in Big Sur, California.”

“He didn’t go.”

“Of course he did.”

“If you went to town more than once a year, you’d know Warren Meeks was dead.”

“Who?”

“County sheriff for the last sixteen years!”

“Huh?”

“They appointed Blue to finish his term. He didn’t go.”

It was as if Leona had suddenly found herself sealed inside a box made of glass six inches thick. She was screaming, ripping her vocal cords out, but the rest of the world, which was at that moment Soames Churchill, couldn’t hear her. In fact, Soames sounded miles away as she repeated her name.

“Leona! Leona!” Soames was shaking her with both hands on her shoulders.

Gradually Leona started to feel nauseous and Soames’s voice became louder.

“Stop it!”

Soames released her and Leona steadied herself against a porch post.

“Sit down, Leona. I’ll get you a sweater.” Soames practically shoved Leona into a chair on the porch and then stepped over her as she hurtled herself into the house. Through the open bedroom window Leona could hear her opening and closing bureau drawers. She tried to speak, to explain to Soames that she wasn’t shaking
with cold. It was irony or disgust or dread of seeing Blue’s car pull into the driveway.

Then she heard Soames pick up the telephone and dial a long-distance number. She overheard enough to get the salient points. Soames was talking to a criminal lawyer up at Memphis, giving him the gist of the situation and pleading with him to take the case.

“No, Frankie, she can’t afford you, but she’s my best friend and I can.…”

Strange, but Leona wasn’t as touched by Soames’s generosity as she wanted to be. It was almost as if she was thinking—wait, and see. Soames had a way of inundating you with her largesse. Then a day or a week later you’d see how it all worked out more in Soames’s favor than your own.

“Yes, I know you’re expensive. You’re the best, aren’t you?”

It was probably just her mood and the bizarre patina on everything right now, but Leona felt as if the call had somehow been staged for her benefit. Soames did all the things people do when they care, but she didn’t seem to feel anything. It was as if she thought the doing itself would make the reason for it happen.

“Frank Isom is coming to see you in the morning.”

“You mean in jail?”

“I’m afraid I do, honey.”

“The judge will appoint me a lawyer.”

Soames’s hollow laugh grated Leona’s ears.

She filled Leona in on what to expect. Frank had instructed Soames to tell the law what she’d discovered up at the church. Period. Soames was to offer no speculations as to the cause of death. Then Soames lost all her verve and gave Leona another hug. Leona could see over Soames’s shoulder and into the enormous open kid
leather bag that hung by a thin strap almost to her ankles.

It always looked like a portable salon and spa. Nestled among the sachet and Elizabeth Arden products she noticed the small, ivory-handled pistol that Soames carried everywhere. It was an antique dueling weapon. She had a pair of them, one of which she had tried countless times to give to Leona. It got to be a joke. Leona would open the refrigerator and there the damned thing would be. Or she’d recoil at the unexpected cold metal against her fingers when she reached into her purse. Soames liked to wear expensive jewelry. “Sugar, they’ll slice my ears and sell them for five grand apiece,” she would say, referring to the diamond studs she never removed. God alone knew what they’d get for her neck and wrists. She also carried heavy cash. She was forever pulling a paper Bank of Orpheus envelope out of her purse and digging through a thick stack of hundreds. She wasn’t exactly hiding her fortune under a bushel.

All well and good for her rich eccentric friend. Leona didn’t have anything to steal. She was more afraid of guns than she was of thugs and muggers.

Now Soames had that look she wore whenever she was about to get down to the heart of the matter.

“What?”

“It was that rat poison you bought in Memphis last month, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Leona had told Soames what she was thinking about doing. It had seemed a natural thing to do. It was Soames who had told Leona that Averill had broken down and confessed to her that he had killed the baby.

“I meant to keep you out of this, Soames. I should have thought.…”

“I’m going down with your ship, baby.”

“You aren’t part of this.”

“I knew what I was doing.”

“You didn’t do anything, except try to help me.”

“I murdered him, Leona. We both did, I guess.”

“Talk sense!”

Soames turned dark red. Even her eyes were cloudy and bloodshot. She looked very old. She turned slowly to touch Leona’s chin.

“Sit down.”

“It has nothing to do with you.”

“I shot him, Leona. I killed him.”

SUNDAY, APRIL 23, 2000

6:00 P.M.

When Leona heard Soames say that she had shot Averill, everything she had stored in her head tore apart like strands of cotton candy—shapes, sounds, thoughts, past and present. Nothing held any further meaning. Nothing related or connected. Coincidence ruled. Reality had turned into the ultimate fantasy.

“Leona, are you listening to me?”

“No.”

“I said you miscalculated. The poison wasn’t as fast or lethal as you thought it was.” When she went in the church, Soames went on, she had found Averill rolling on his study floor in dementia. He was kicking and clutching his throat and choking with vomit. He thought Soames was some demon who’d come to take him to hell. He was soaked with sweat and screaming with pain.

All the while Soames was talking to her, Leona couldn’t help marveling at her demeanor. In spite of her ghastly encounter, she seemed as calm as Christmas Eve.

“The bastard deserved every second of his torture.”

“He begged me to shoot him, Leona.” Her iron façade was finally cracking. Averill had pleaded with her, begged her to end his torture. “So help me God, I did,” she finished, breaking down in heaving sobs.

Unreality had triumphed. Soames had shot and killed Averill while he was dying of all the rat poison Leona had fed him. Soames was a heaving mass of hysteria and remorse.

Leona didn’t believe a single tear, but she had no concrete reason not to. What made Leona judge and jury over Soames’s motives and emotions? It was Leona who had quit feeling. Leona was dispassionate about lives, her own and other people’s. Around and around her thoughts ran like the leopard chasing its own tail around a pole in the childhood story. Except that the leopard eventually turned into butter. Personally Leona didn’t expect any such golden transformation.

Now Leona did what she had been raised to do. She studied the moment for some opportunity, no matter how small, some measurable good she might accomplish. It had been her father’s most repeated advice. Strange that she chose this moment to test it.

“You did no such thing,” she said. “I did.”

“He was so pitiful. He didn’t look or sound human. More like an animal in agony.”

“He was dead when you found him. Now that’s all.”

Why should Soames go to prison for an act of compassion? Leona was the killer. She lifted the weapon out of Soames’s purse and walked into the bedroom,
where she stuck it into the toe of one of her winter boots.

“Go wash your face, Soames.”

They had traded places. Leona was the stronger now. Leona was telling her what to do. There was nothing left to argue, nothing to determine or attempt. She felt grateful for the chance to do this bit of good in the middle of it all. Soames went into the bathroom. Things kept turning inside out; things always had one more layer to peel away. One thing invariably reversed or reverted into another. Nothing ever kept its shape or color or place or outline or meaning. No matter what a thing meant today, it would have an entirely new meaning tomorrow.

Leona almost felt sorry for Soames. She felt as if she had abandoned her. Soames was still part of the normal world. She had to go on bloodying her knees and fighting for her square foot of terra firma. Soames had to keep holding up her lonely existence. She had to fend off an eternal army of lawyers and tax men and bankers whose lives amounted to robbing people like her. Leona had done all her meager business. She was experiencing the unexpected peace reserved for those who surrender everything and seek nothing. She had forked over all her hopes and despairs in exchange for this even emptiness.