Butterfly Sunday (29 page)

Why weren’t children taught to look life in the eye? Why did people wrap their most consequential things in shame and try to hide them from each other? How could Sarah have slept knowing that Henri Churchill’s murderer was not only free, but also living like an empress on his estate? If she had known so much about Soames, didn’t Sarah at least suspect that Henri had been in danger? Yet she had in effect let him walk into Soames’s trap and die. Would she have sacrificed a man’s life in order to protect his reputation, a man she loved like a son?

No. Henri’s reputation was only the top layer. If thinking and looking and seeing into people and situations were Blue’s game, then she had a lesson for the master.

“Look underneath what you’re saying, Blue.”

“There’s nothing underneath what I’m saying.”

The subject at hand was Leona’s forte.

“You say Sarah loved Henri like a son?”

“She would have died for him.”

“There’s not a mother on Earth who would voluntarily suppress the identity of her child’s murderer.”

“Then Sarah was afraid of Soames.”

Blue looked away and back and away again. He was thinking. He was trying something on for size. A person might just as well be a rock when Blue was like that.

“Leona?”

He looked at her as if there were smoke coming out both of her ears.

“What are you gawking at?”

Blue answered her with a strange smirk.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You said no mother would hide the identity of her child’s murderer.”

“Who’d know better than me?”

“But you kept your child’s murder a secret.”

“For obvious reasons.”

“The minute Soames told you what Averill had done, did you decide to kill him?”

“Not that very second, no …”

Could he possibly mean what she was thinking? Had Soames used the old trick of persuading her to do it with bad arguments against it? The idea made Leona blush with shame. Was she really so willing to live at any price, even pointing fingers at innocent people? Yet Blue seemed to think there was some merit in it.

“Leona, how exactly did you deduce that Averill murdered your baby?”

“Soames.”

“Soames deduced it?”

“No, he told Soames.”

“Why?”

That stopped her. She hadn’t really questioned it at the time. Blue looked as if he was about to go into a trance. His features were frozen, his eyes glued to her. She had to think. She had to remember it in detail.
Blue could worry the horns off a billy goat picking at it. Though something was slithering down in her subconscious. Something that made her afraid she was about to find out she’d been a fool one more time.

It was a Wednesday night in late March. She knew it was a Wednesday because Averill had gone to make an appearance at choir practice. Soames had turned up at the door acting glum. She had something on her conscience, she said. Something was going to drive her insane if she didn’t tell Leona the truth. Of course Soames made a one-act play out of spitting it out. She had to dramatize her mixed emotions, her fears for what it might do to Leona, to their friendship, what Leona might do—all of that.

Then she told her. She said Averill had turned up at her door one night the week before, weaving drunk. He was a mess, she said, puking on the kitchen floor and—

“ ‘Kitchen floor’?” Blue interrupted.

“Yeah,’s what she said, ‘kitchen floor.’ ”

“Go on.”

“I’m trying to.…”

Then Soames finally said it. Averill was drunk and bawling and guilt-ridden and upset because he had gone completely insane the night the baby was born and strangled it. He couldn’t live with it anymore, but he didn’t have the guts to blow his brains out or turn himself in.

“Soames!” Blue hissed, “Soames’s word is all you had to go on!”

“I have reason to think she was making it up!”

“Finish your story, Leona.”

What else was there? Soames had gotten her message out. A minute or two later she left.

“A minute or two later?”

“She had to be somewhere.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

Like she had cared where Soames had to be that night. It was strange, though. When Soames told her that Averill had confessed to murdering Tess, Leona had felt a surge of some kind, as if she were being lifted to a different plane. Everything since then had taken place here on that surreal level.

She hadn’t screamed or lost her temper or tried not to believe it. She had somehow in that moment separated all the unimportant things, like Blue, like the rest of her life, like the fact that killing was always wrong, from the thing that she knew in a moment she was going to do.

“It’s called shock, Leona.”

“I’m beginning to see that, Blue.”

Though she couldn’t see it much since she was still experiencing it. She had no capacity there and then for considering the possibility that Averill might not have done it. In order to even consider that, she would have to figure a way out of her own body first. Or go permanently berserk. Instead there had been this lead calm that she shook off for a few minutes, but never longer than that.

What was it? Something was happening. She was falling. She was sitting still. It was as if someone had turned up the lights and the volume of the world around her. Emotions as well. She was feeling everything and too much of it at once. It was roaring, excruciating, and then everything was fury as she leapt at Blue and punched and kicked and pounded and somehow his voice was saying as if through a roaring waterfall that she was all right. She was feeling. She was coming out of it.

Though it was another five minutes before she understood that he was Blue and not Soames telling her what Averill had done. She was frowning at them both in this spewing rage.

Then it was quiet and she was opening her eyes. His shirt was torn, his nose was bloody. His face was scratched.

“You fainted, thank God.” He grinned.

Did he understand that she had broken some wall inside of herself that had protected her from what she had just felt?

“Blue,” she said, throwing her arms around him, “Blue, I’m so afraid. Blue, help me.”

He held her for a few minutes. Then he kissed her.

“Welcome home, Leona.”

It was like that, almost as if she had been in space. She was back on planet Earth. What was the point, though, if all she had done was come home to die?

Leona was letting Blue know that she understood him a little. If he was going to do her any good, then he had to connect her situation to something wider, some chain of events and people he had been investigating for a long time.

If it was a useless effort, then at least it was more rational than she had first thought it was. Her ideas had led her into the bottom rung of hell. What did she have to lose by following his? Beyond that she was simply awed by Blue’s unbridled willingness to risk any consequence if it kept a shred of hope alive. It was as inconceivable as it was undeniable. Even if it failed to help her fend off the outside world, it gave her an immense feeling of worth deep inside. It was as if she had somehow developed the power to experience two congruent realities. There was this terrible tumult of dark facts and
pain. Then next to it was a vein of astounding happiness. Blue had proven his deep and unselfish affection for her. If it was only another route to her execution, well, so what? It flooded her diminishing existence with unexpected meaning.

He was tapping the number pad on his telephone. She watched him roll his desk chair to the wall behind him and then lay one foot over the other on his blotter. Colored with all that she felt for him, he looked magnificent to her.

“Blue?”

She could hear the telephone on the other end of the line ringing.

“Yeah?”

His mind was off where an exhausted male voice had just said hello. “Thank you.” His hand was up, telling her not to disturb him. “Arlen?” The county coroner apparently had anticipated Blue’s questions because Leona could hear a steady, if indecipherable, stream of words. Blue’s face went blank. It lost all its former tension. Yet it didn’t change as much as it seemed to pale and diminish.

It was bad. They had been whistling to each other in the dark all day. Arlen was bringing Blue back to earth and it was obvious to Leona that it was a hard landing. Why else would he sit there with the receiver still in his hand, not moving, not saying anything? All of Leona’s golden transcendence from moments before had evaporated like rubbing alcohol in the searing August sun.

“What?” She hadn’t meant to sound so whiny, so desperate and unable to swallow her inevitable, just deserts. Blue cleared his throat. Then he pressed the Redial button on his handset.

“Arlen? One quick question.” Blue took a long, slow
sip of close, damp air. “Is this a joke?” Blue hit a button on the desk unit and the coroner’s easy listening radio station sent “The Tennessee Waltz” through the speaker. He had regained his color.

“Okay, one more time. What killed Averill Sayres?”

“A bullet.”

“What about poison?”

“What about it?”

“Who did the toxicology testing?”

“Memphis.”

“How much did you tell me they found?”

“Zip.”

“None?”

“Zero.”

“Did they find anything unusual in his stomach?”

“They say he’d ate about a pound of baking soda.”

“Then why is everybody hollering for Leona Sayres’s neck?”

“ ’Cause she’s too damned pretty to be a preacher’s wife.”

“Arlen?”

“Ap.”

“Turn up the music there, will ya?” Blue said as he hung up the phone.

The look on Leona’s face was almost worth the whole stinking ordeal.

“Baking soda?”

“Somebody pulled a switch.”

“Soames?”

“Why would Soames put you up to it and then switch the poison to baking soda?”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“Averill figured you out.”

“But Soames …”

“She was expecting to find a corpse.”

“Why’d she shoot him?”

“You know what they say about a woman scorned.”

“Especially by a man who can finger her for murder.”

She was shaking. Her head was throbbing. Something terrible had passed behind her back. This was forbidden territory. Or she was insane. Whatever it meant, she was sure the punishment would be eternal and unbearable.

“You bribed him, didn’t you?”

“With what? I’m six bucks overdrawn.”

“But …”

“My guess is the Reverend Mister Sleaze had the last laugh.”

Averill figured it out? Averill switched baking soda for poison and let her think she was doing him in.

“How’d he know I had it?”

“Where’d you get it?”

Leona felt a rippling in her veins from head to toe. It was either God or a stroke.

“And the angel of the Lord found her by a spring in the wilderness.”
The line was from a story about an unmarried, pregnant woman who had fled in shame. Leona had many times over the last year and a half thought of herself that way. She was Hagar in the wilderness. Now here he was, her delivering angel, two days past due for a shave, unreal, yet real. Everything around her seemed to shine, and a giant burning circle in her chest began to shrink. There was an orchestra playing “The Tennessee Waltz” in her head, and Blue was floating toward her. She seemed weightless as he took her in his arms and they waltzed like a pair of helium-filled refugees from hell around and around his office.

MONDAY, APRIL 24, 2000

9:15 P.M.

An hour later Blue had his third conversation of the day with Arlen McFaye.

“Who else knows about this, Arlen?”

“Zilch.”

“You and me and the gatepost?”

“Ap.”

“Can we keep it that way?”

“All my reports are public record.”

“Twenty-four hours?”

“No can do, sir.”

“Not even for a case of Jack Black?”

“I’ll need a chaser.”

“You need ice too?”

“Ice, I got, this is the morgue, remember?”

Blue had no sooner hung up the telephone than he
jerked open the door into the hall and a din of confused voices fell off like a choir obeying the director’s cue.

“I need Jenkins, Smith and Lefferts in my office. Now.”

The three deputies appeared and the rest of Blue’s staff squeezed into the hall to witness whatever was about to happen.

“Lock her up.”

“Do we interrogate her?”

“Or should we go ahead and book her?”

“Hell, no,” Blue growled. “She’s been interrogated and we’re not booking her as a suspect. I want you to charge her with murder.” An agreeable buzz in the corridor and the sudden calm on the faces of the three deputies signaled general relief and a return to normalcy.