Butterfly Sunday (26 page)

“You won’t live long enough to spend twenty-two cents.” Averill walked out the front door and down the porch steps. Something had been aroused in him. It gave him purpose or maybe focus he had never before displayed. It was hard to pinpoint. There had always been an almost pathetic or slightly unhinged air about Averill. It was as if a hundred strings had been drawn tight and secured near the small of his back.

He had spoken in riddles, but his message for her was straight and clear. She had been advised for her own considerable good to be wary of Soames and feed her no information, even inadvertently. The Blazer had some
symbolic meaning for Averill. Was Soames sending him a message? Did they know each other that well? What did she care? If she could believe Averill, and his uncharacteristically straightforward manner almost demanded that she believe him in this instance, she could walk away in three months. Or drive away, thanks to Soames, with enough money to settle into a place and pay for a no-contest divorce.

As for Averill’s dramatic warning that she was in peril if she opened her mouth, she had to smirk at that. Averill never could resist a grand exit line.

MONDAY, AUGUST 2, 1999

7:18 P.M.

Leona was in a wretched mood. She was on her way home in the Blazer. She’d been around the hill trying to help an ignorant cow plan her daughter’s wedding. She didn’t like to brand people, especially poor ones. Poor people weren’t always ignorant or trashy. Rich ones could turn out to be both. She tried to give a person the benefit of every doubt. All the same, this woman was an ignorant redneck trash cow and her stinky husband would pass for one of the McFayes’ bloated Jerseys. The bride was thirteen and swollen to full mast. The groom was twenty and half-reptile. The fact was, three girls from this part of the county had been raped in the last year. The groom had been questioned twice and was still considered a suspect.

Yet the woman went on half a day about a proper
English wedding, which she had pronounced “Englith,” because she was missing several upper front teeth. Meanwhile the groom kept touching the bulge in his trousers and grinning at Leona when the others couldn’t see him. Well, she could ignore that. This was business, or some febrile precursor of it. She was definitely starting small. Leona had put out the word she was for hire to advise, design and direct weddings. This was her first paying customer—if, that was, she agreed to accept half her payment in the form of poultry and produce and the rest on the E-Z time-payment plan.

She hit a straight stretch where the road crossed a marshy bottomland. It was a low place and the trees were thick overhead. It was almost night here. There was a figure up ahead, a round-looking woman wearing a veil. She was carrying something in her arms. It was a baby. She stepped down into the shallow edge of the swamp as Leona drove past. Leona kept looking for her in the rearview mirror, but she was gone.

She drove on but she couldn’t erase the image. It had looked so real and yet it was like a nightmare phantom, some low nursemaid of hell charged with living-dead infants. When she got home, for a change, Averill was sitting there in front of the television. She sat with him and watched two or three mindless series segue into the ten o’clock news. He fixed her a bowl of ice cream along with one for himself. They were almost conversant.

Averill sat up and watched an old movie. Leona crawled into bed. She ran in and out of murky dreams all night long, chasing but never catching that phantom that held her baby in its arms.

MONDAY, APRIL 24, 2000

10:34 A.M.

Blue had been in the bedroom making telephone calls for the last forty minutes. The morning was moving on. They had to go. She couldn’t imagine how much hell he was going to catch for last night. This was bound to cost him his badge. Every minute he delayed was going to make things harder on him.

She loved the damp smell of the garden on sunny mornings. The sky was deep blue. The wind tossed a scattering of curling white fleece over the new green trees. It was the sort of day she liked to spend with her hands in the dirt. Suddenly she longed to be out there with the warm earth under her knees and the returning sun softening her neck and shoulder muscles.

“Blue!” she hollered back through the house, “let’s do this.”

If he had any sense, he’d drive off and let someone else bring her into custody. His delay was beginning to have an effect on her resolve, her acceptance of the inevitable and necessary. She kept knocking down thoughts of some possible future with Blue, a way to go on living. That was dangerous. That had to be tossed aside. How could she call herself a mother and entertain the possibility that her pleasure was worth more than her child?

Time was wasting. Time had all been wasted. It was time to go. She went out on the front porch and gazed with strange new affection at the surrounding woods she had regarded her prison for almost two miserable years.

She was caving in. She was losing the transcending peace of telling her story, the immutable conviction that she had taken the only available path that God’s hand was in—all that self-obsessed madness was fading away. What had given her the right to take another human life?

What an arrogant delusion it had all been. Now she saw with tragic clarity she had followed the lowest route, the straightest, surest and quickest descending road to hell. She had built silver towers of blind rage, purchased shining palaces of righteous indignation for the exorbitant price of her happiness and Blue’s.

There it was, real happiness. Happiness she could hear in the rise and fall of his indecipherable voice on the phone. Happiness she now observed as she eyed his creased leather billfold and the hologram of his key ring with its splayed circle of dull steel and brass. Happiness she could draw in through her nostrils as she found his scent on the back of her hand. Happiness as deep and tender as the lingering, tender echoes he left inside her.

Now she understood as she looked back across a battleground of years from the last precipice of her defeat. The triumph over life for which she had struggled was not to be achieved by the vanity of a holy death. Maybe the thing was too simple, too abundant and available to notice. It had always been everywhere in her life, though never as easy to perceive as it was now framed and illumined by the brilliant corona of her regret. She was overwhelmed with contrition and sadness for the years of loving that would never be. She was flooded with a useless, happy yearning to go on loving Blue. She was riveted to her conviction that the faith and affection she might have showered on him would nurture a lot of good for him. Though her awareness of what she had destroyed radiated beyond that.

She knew the whole truth about life in all its facets. She longed to go on loving Blue, but her heart mourned for life and people in general and the wasted power of all the stored goodwill it contained. She wanted to be in this world, to adore it, to mend and repair and replenish and protect it with all her means. She wanted its troubles and worries and aches and aggravations. She wanted to inhabit the years, to grow weary from beating her fists against their indomitable mystery. Now the irksome burdens she had borne with unceasing lament had shifted and arranged themselves like ballast to steady her for the waving mountains and valleys of life. Now, as she descended the hopeless stone stair of her self-made twilight, she shuddered with unfathomable new ability to beg God for a miracle.

Because her mistake had been no more or less than the summation of all human folly. She had attempted to ascend the throne of God and assert her will above all others.

“Where’s the gun?” he asked.

She handed Soames’s pistol to him. He looked as if he’d seen a ghost.

“What?”

“Where did you get this?”

“From Soames.”

“Cock it and shoot it for me.”

They went out into the front yard. It was a fiasco. The gun’s chamber was empty. The bullets were an odd size and required special ordering. Besides, Leona had never fired a slingshot, much less a pistol. Not to mention that this one had a special safety latch. Leave it to Soames to be different. Blue looked at her like she was Ma Barker.

“Explain it to me in the car.”

As he backed out Leona surveyed the house. The yellow irises beside the front steps had set bud. She’d neglected to put a dry ear of corn in the squirrel feeder. Her bedroom window shades were pulled down to different heights. The flowered cushions on the glider swing were all but faded to solid gray. It grabbed her hard, the sudden notion that she couldn’t say whether she loved or hated what she saw.

“Why are you protecting Soames Churchill?”

“Soames Churchill was protecting me,” she countered.

When she had explained what happened, Blue seemed to draw himself off somewhere. He didn’t say anything. He seemed to be churning it over in his mind, trying to punch a hole in it.

“It’s the truth, Blue. Every word.”

“I believe you.” There was something or someone he didn’t believe. Or didn’t want to believe.

It was at the very least ludicrous, but Leona couldn’t
help the soaring feeling she took just sitting beside him with the clouds skimming the pale green trees overhead. Then she drew air back into her nostrils and giggled out loud. He’d showered in her bathroom that morning and he was wearing Averill’s hundred-dollar cologne. Wasn’t he a paragon of law and order?

“Mr. Tall Sheriff?”

“Yeah …”

“You make one hell of an arrest.”

His somber expression reminded her that they were getting close to town, and why. This time the party was really over. So why the hell didn’t the sky turn steel gray and a steady rain begin to fall? Why this china blue and white fleece? Why was the sun a splendid yellow sphere this morning, almost like the radiant suns in children’s crayon drawings?

What macabre force of nature had surrounded their bleak last act with so much bursting primary color and awakening? As she made out the courthouse clock through the trees and the familiar lead weight pressed her spirit, the April countryside almost seemed a tasteless, insensitive joke.

“Blue, tell me, please, that you’re putting someone else in charge.”

He was still chewing on Soames and her involvement. Did it buy them anything to hold her accountable for her part in it? It seemed to him that it should. Wasn’t she the actual murderer? He meant according to the law, of course, he meant in the technical sense. From a moral perspective Leona was right. It had been an act of compassion. Averill had already been close to death. It was inevitable. Had it not been, then Soames would be guilty of murder.

He knew the answer already, but he made a note
between his ears to ask Arlen about it. Arlen McFaye was the county coroner. Was it a certainty based on his tests that Averill Sayres had swallowed a lethal amount of poison? There was always the chance Arlen would list a bullet and not poison as the cause of death.

His train of thought was making him nauseous. Blue felt like an amoral despot. He didn’t like Soames Churchill. He’d never been one-hundred-and-ten percent convinced that her husband’s death had been an accident. He had nothing to go on there but a lot of rumor and innuendo about her adulteries and Henri Churchill’s intent to divorce her. Blue had actually checked the county clerk’s records, but there was nothing on file. Though he had to concede that his negative feelings for Soames were based to a large extent on the fact that she had made him uncomfortable on several occasions by throwing herself at him. It had never seemed real to him. It didn’t come across as genuine attraction. He sensed some other agenda there. Maybe he was a thousand miles off. He had never even been tempted to follow her home and find out.

Yet there was nothing in any of that to warrant twisting an act of decency into a crime. Leona was about to run flat into a brick wall. As hard as it was to take, he’d serve no good by destroying another woman, whether or not he liked her. In fact, the only way he could see to help Leona now was to disappear with her.