Butterfly Sunday (24 page)

She and life had used all their tricks on each other. She and life had failed each other in the end. She hadn’t been resourceful or clever enough to figure out its meaning. While life hadn’t turned any of its dark clouds inside out to show her any sterling-silver revelations.

In a few minutes Soames was back. So was her self-confidence. She had accepted Leona’s decision. It would free her to take charge of Leona’s defense.

“Honey, Frank Isom is God’s other son. The man never loses a case.”

Leona nodded. There was no sense riling Soames any more than she already was. She had no intentions of asking any such man to defend her case. Nor was she inclined to go hoarse trying to make Soames see why she had to lose in court.

“Don’t you say one word to Blue Hudson unless Frank tells you to.”

What could she say to Blue? He was the last person she wanted to involve in this. How else could she have hurt him by breaking up? She wouldn’t have gone through with it if she hadn’t felt certain that Blue was in California. She had waited until he was out of town. That way he wouldn’t be involved in the investigation or her arrest. She had intended to sign her confession and instruct her lawyer to enter a guilty plea before Blue got back and destroyed himself trying to save her.

It had taken more resolve to tell Blue that it was over than it had to poison Averill. Of course she couldn’t tell him the real reason why they couldn’t love each other. She couldn’t say that it was because she knew that Averill had murdered her baby and she was going to kill him. Blue would have locked her up in the county jail to stop her. Then he would’ve ruined his career trying to prove what Averill had done. He would have demanded they exhume the infant’s remains and conduct a second inquest. They’d already had their inquest and called it a stillbirth. What was going to make them change their minds now? As if Averill wouldn’t dissolve into the atmosphere at the first hint of suspicion.

Tess would be forgotten, or worse, remembered as the pathetic and wishful delusion of a grief-crazed
mother. It would ruin Blue and it would rob Leona of her only means to do anything for her child.

It had been an awful scene between Leona and Blue. He knew she was lying. He had gotten her within a hair of breaking down and admitting the truth. He finally left, but not before he said that this was far from over. Well, it was all over now, Baby Blue. At least he’d finally know why.

Not why she had to do it. Leona was already beginning to think no one outside of her shoes would understand the forces she had obeyed. Yet Blue would see that she had protected him and his career by breaking it off when she did. He’d comprehend the fact that what she had done wasn’t by choice. It was the only thing she could do to keep her universe from melting into chaos. If there had been two sane alternatives, she would have chosen him.

“I mean it, Leona,” Soames repeated. “Not one word to Blue.”

What a wonder Leona had created. What detailed misery and mayhem she had baked into her blue-ribbon casseroles! She had taken every possible precaution. For all she knew she’d managed to put Averill’s innocent sister and brother-in-law in hell with him. She’d arranged for her best friend to be the poor soul to find him, and now Soames was up to her neck in a hopeless drama to save her. Now Blue, who always did exactly what he said he would, when and how he said he would—Blue, who’d had his plane ticket and hotel reservations for months—was on his way.

Blue, who said she was a sorceress because she’d broken the curse on him and resurrected him, body and soul—Blue, who had shot up out of the hopeless dark
and reignited the stars—Blue was on his way to investigate, to interrogate and charge and arrest her. Blue’s evidence and testimony would convict and condemn her to death.

She couldn’t sit still with all that floating around her. She had to leap out the door and into the yard. She had to swirl around and around and careen with dizziness and terrible laughter. She skinned her knees when she finally fell over. They bled a lot. It was very painful. That made her guffaw even more. Soames was crying and stiff and trying to stay calm and in charge, trying to think, which was a little grandiose with the earth splitting and Averill floating past.

Then something sent Leona into a reeling purple silence. At first it sounded like a baby’s cry, but in a moment she realized for the millionth time that was only that damned catbird in the sweet gum tree by the cemetery.

SUNDAY, APRIL 23, 2000

6:20 P.M.

It was almost dark. There was all kinds of activity up and down the road now. Two county sheriff’s cars and an ambulance had flown past and turned into the churchyard. Leona and Soames could hear all kinds of voices and ruckus. Fifteen minutes later Blue’s Jeep stopped in front of the house. The ambulance came back. They could see the body wrapped in blankets and lying on a stretcher in back. The ambulance was all lit up inside like a macabre window display. Blue got out of his car and talked to the driver. The ambulance moved on. They could still hear plenty of activity up at the church. Word was getting around. Several church members rode past during the next ten minutes.

A highway patrolman came up on the porch and
knocked at the screen. He asked Soames to come with him, which she did. Leona figured they didn’t want Soames to get hurt if they had to use force during her arrest. Things got quiet. Then Blue’s familiar light, steady boot heels clipped up the porch steps. He knocked. He tugged the screen door open. Then he came inside.

Each felt the other must be made of steel at that moment. Neither one of them moved or spoke. They just looked at each other, two metal masks of resolute opposition. Hiding deep inside each of them was the unmitigated will to sacrifice everything to save the other.

“Why aren’t you in California?”

“Tell me everything you’ve done since you got out of church this morning.”

“You can’t investigate this.”

It was dusky, ethereal. Everything was blurred as if seen through gauze; though iridescent too, like frost-covered leaves on a clear night or the glistening fruit she coated with sugar and arranged with waxy leaves and camellias in silver bowls for wedding receptions and rehearsal dinners. Lovely, it was life’s unexpected last crumb of chocolate truffle. They sat in total silence.

With nothing to be done about anything, Leona told herself it was better to breathe in this moment, to savor his lime scent, and the unexpected pleasure of Blue’s nearness. For all her folly and youth, Leona would take some memories with her out of this world.

She had surrendered certain rights with her decision to visit justice on Averill. One of them was regret for things that might have been. She realized now that she had developed the ability to control certain feelings and to direct them toward whatever made the most appropriate sense. Blue’s visit reminded her that she had an
enormous potential for loving him. Yet there was no possibility of realizing it. So she experienced the butterfly he stirred in her breast for all the present-tense happiness it gave her.

She became aware that it was cool in the room. She went to shut the door. As she peered out across the porch, she realized that the scene on the road had faded away. Now it felt like any other night.

“Where’d everybody go?”

“I told them to clear the area,” he said. “I’m the sheriff. Remember?”

“That must have the whole town awake.”

“Let’s talk turkey, Leona.”

He’d been a highway patrolman before he became sheriff. He had experienced the creeping unreality of highway wrecks, held hands with the dying, pulled mothers away from the dismembered remnants of their children and watched helpless as an explosion engulfed a trapped victim in his screaming hell. He had followed the circuitous and clever trails of killers and child molesters and bank robbers to innocent-looking American dream houses with manicured lawns. He had arrested men in their Sunday suits as they stepped out of church into the sunshine.

There were times when he lay sleepless with knots in his stomach waiting for the hard experiences of the previous day’s work to let go of him. Yet he always came back around to the feeling he’d done some piece of good. He’d given a dying kid comfort or locked away some malevolent threat to innocent people. He understood law enforcement. He knew what it meant to protect and to serve.

Until tonight. Now he didn’t know the meaning of
anything. It was ignorant to divide the world into good and bad people, not at least based on their records of arrest and convictions. So-called law-abiding people perpetrated all types of violence and robberies against each other and never felt the threat of arrest and prosecution. Instead they died in their sleep at age a hundred and three. There were a thousand kinds of justice. In the end it was the time they did on earth that brought most people to the limits of their immoralities. It was breathing in and out, not prison, that rehabilitated most dishonest souls.

“Tell me everything, Leona.”

“I thought you were in California, I …”

“Well, I’m not.”

“Call someone else to handle this!”

“Tell me everything, Leona.”

“Averill murdered my baby, so I killed him.”

The particulars, as Leona imparted them, were of little interest to Blue. He was struggling with another irrefutable fact. He should have fought harder to be with her. He should have been more vigilant. Didn’t he know she was living in a precarious situation? What was he thinking when he agreed with Leona that they had plenty of time?

He told himself that he was pulling the pieces of his life together after his divorce. His appointment to the office of county sheriff had seemed the most obvious course to follow. He put his focus on getting himself elected the following summer. It was a bitter race. The other two candidates made a mockery of his divorce. He wouldn’t risk gossip about him and a married preacher’s wife. He took it slow. He got sidetracked with criminology courses at night down at the university.

“It’s as much my fault as yours, Leona.”

She didn’t acknowledge his remark. Though everything about her demeanor told him this was why she had insisted that they were finished. She was keeping him out of it.

“At least I know that you still love me,” he said, interrupting her account.

“Do you know why I couldn’t let that matter?”

Being with her, hearing her soothing voice, watching the lamplight play off her hair when she moved her head, and knowing her heart hadn’t changed cast an uncanny patina of romance over things.

Leona told Blue everything while he dutifully scribbled his notes. The truth was, however, that they had stolen themselves one last night.

A flock of starlings nesting in the thicket across the road made a sudden fluttering storm. She had seen bobcats across the road all winter. One had just seized himself a fowl for dinner. Blue pulled back the shades and stared out into the dark. He did that for a long time while he listened to her breathing.

When he looked into her eyes after he kissed her, his lips were silver-white from the sun and soft like conditioned leather. When they lay down in the velvet shadows, his lips caressed warm circles of flesh where his tongue had moistened her breasts. When they swayed fast and slow, rolling up and down on the bed, she wept with joy. She was seizing gifts of happiness and storing them for the cold, dark season ahead.

When their passion was spent, Blue cradled her in his arms and they giggled and whispered and cried until the sky hung white behind the new green woods.

TUESDAY, JULY 13, 1999

10:00 A.M.

Leona had seen Soames at church. She was an arresting sight, at least six feet tall, a patrician-looking woman with high ivory cheekbones and sparkling grayish green eyes. She had an eternally haughty expression dramatized by a magnificent mane of very curly carrot hair.