Butterfly Sunday (30 page)

Leona observed all this as they cuffed her wrists behind her back. People had an inveterate need to cling to what they saw as the status quo. All the violations of his duty, all the threats to his position, the rumblings about possible charges of obstructing justice, every bit of it had vanished. The crack in their universe had been repaired. The invading extraterrestrials had rocketed home to their galaxy. The tried and true had conquered all. They had no intentions of learning any more than that. The strange events of the day had been one of those ephemeral aberrations of life. They had their good ol’ boy Blue back on the job. They had a comprehensible murder, the madness of one more evil woman scorned. She would never have believed it if she hadn’t experienced it. Their hostile attitude toward her had vanished. She hadn’t twisted Blue Hudson’s mind after all. No, he’d only put a big toe over the line by taking some advantage of her last night. Well, he was, after all,
a healthy young man and a lonely one. She had her own lascivious needs in light of her husband’s neglect. Blue was a finely cut young fellow. How much could she have minded? Now it was already a mile downstream and about to disappear over the cataracts. They were grateful to Leona for turning out to be no more inexplicable than any normal young Jezebel who took it all too far.

They were afraid, terrified to know anything they didn’t already know or at least believe to be true. Yet so little of what the average person did or said was true. The way to get on with people was to figure which lies they wanted you to tell them. The way to succeed was to figure out how much of what you saw or felt was acceptable. With so much self-deception and willful ignorance, it was no wonder nothing ever turned out to be what it had seemed at first. It wasn’t death they feared. It was life, meaning themselves and each other. No wonder so much evil went unnoticed until it created enough pain to spark some riot or war.

Yet she knew she had only seen this fearful herding instinct because she had been removed from their society just then, cast down and branded something other than they. It was a perspective that clarified a great deal.

She and Blue had decided that her arrest and incarceration would accomplish several important things. She would be safer in a jail cell than anywhere else. If Soames Churchill was looking, then she would continue to assume that Leona was willing to plead guilty. It also took a great deal of pressure off of Blue, allowing him to maneuver about and retain his power as sheriff. Soames had shot and killed Averill for reasons
all her own. Yet she had insisted it was no less than a compassionate, last-resort act of mercy. She had invented a ghastly scenario and let Leona think the poison had worked unbearable torment on him. Of course, there hadn’t been any poison. Yet, as Blue observed, the least possible aspect of Soames’s account was her claim of empathy toward another human being. No. Soames wanted Averill dead and she hadn’t trusted Leona to accomplish the job.

Soames had wanted Averill dead. She had given Leona several strong motives for killing him. Then she showed up one afternoon with a two-pound sack of tasteless, odorless and super-powerful rat poison. Not because she was concerned about Leona’s suspected vermin under the house.

Leona and Blue were trying to figure out Leona’s value to Averill and Soames. What was it Averill had wanted from her in the first place? Why had he gone to such lengths to help her out? He had come back to Fredonia shortly after Henri Churchill’s murder. To that time he and Soames had carried on their affair. Odds were high that Averill had participated in Henri’s killing. Why? Had he and Soames planned to be together?

It was easy enough to imagine Averill smitten by Soames. Her vampish airs would have titillated him. Her potential millions would have also aroused great passion. Wouldn’t it have been easier to lay low for a while? Did he think arriving with a wife and a baby on the way would lessen suspicion? Blue countered that Averill wasn’t so worried that he didn’t come back here to live. Was that Soames’s doing?

“Maybe.”

“I know what she wanted.”

“No, before Averill brought you here.”

“What did I have that either one of them wanted?”

“A baby.”

Blue winced and shrugged. It was tender territory, to say the least. She’d had a thousand years’ worth of hell in one day. Yet there wasn’t time to sidestep and soft-paw his way to it. Soames Churchill was taking on evil in his mind. She was becoming a sorceress, an accomplished dissembler and the first one-hundred-percent carved-granite criminal mind he had encountered in his law enforcement career. She had murdered at least two men so far.

“Then why was she so nice to me after all that?”

“Manipulation.”

“Like the wedding business?”

“She got you into that?”

“She hounded me into it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have a clue.”

“Did she steer any business your way?”

“Rhea Anne Brisbane’s wedding.”

Blue leaned forward with rapt attention. He was listening, but he was also praying Leona would tell him what he was desperate to hear. “Take your time,” he said, knowing how little either of them had.

Leona had helped Soames plan a huge party in her garden. It was in honor of a young couple who had become engaged. The event was life and death to Soames. It shocked Leona to see that Soames didn’t know how to achieve the effects she wanted. She was lost. Using more common sense than experience, Leona went to town and had a great time spending Soames’s money to create an arresting Arabian Nights theme in a billowing
tent of parachute material. It had an exotic, royal and romantic ambiance that captivated all the guests. Several had asked Soames for Leona’s number.

Leona was hired to decorate churches for several weddings that summer. By fall she was becoming an enterprise. Leona didn’t think twice when a young bride-to-be from Orpheus named Rhea Anne Brisbane knocked on her door. Rhea Anne told her that Soames Churchill had insisted she hire Leona to decorate for her wedding.

“That hateful snit,” Soames later whined, “that lying, hateful snit.”

“What do you mean?” Leona asked.

“I never sent her to see you. I wouldn’t get you involved with that pack of trash.”

Leona didn’t see the big deal. They might be trash, but they had ready money. She was thrilled to have the income. Soames was burdened with the constant need to be upset with someone. This was going to be a giant production and real cash cow for Leona. It would also spread Leona’s reputation. It might even put her on enough solid financial ground to leave Averill.

Besides, in the high-handed, old-fashioned sense of the word, the Brisbanes were nothing like trash. Far from it. This was tall cotton all the way. Rhea Anne’s marriage was dubbed “the merger,” as two of the old guard families were involved. How many times had Soames told Leona to showcase her talents for the crimped-cucumber-sandwich crowd. Suddenly the Brisbanes were “nouveau trash” and Soames denied that she had ever sent Rhea Anne to see her.

All the same, Soames volunteered to help Leona get the wedding greenery to town in her truck. She had
promised to be there by seven-thirty that Saturday morning. She finally showed up around ten o’clock. She looked half-awake and she acted totally hungover. Leona had given up on her and called one of the Spakes when Soames finally pulled into her driveway.

“It’s a wedding, not emergency surgery,” Soames said when she saw the irritation on Leona’s face. Leona was organized. She had used the time to finish the ivy ropes. She had other garlands coiled in tubs of cold water. The wild roses were soaking in the creek in potato sacks. Nearby there were giant ferns growing in clay pots in the shade at the edge of the water. The honeysuckle and the privet and the lacework gypsophila and the white silver-throated lilies were standing in buckets on the back of the truck. All she had to do was clip the peonies along the cemetery. They had to be cut last or they’d open too soon.

Leona had a gift for classical embellishments, an inexplicable comprehension of looping swags of fruits and floating silks and wreaths of ordinary leaves that took on Greco-Roman majesty. She could take an armload of the most despicable common briar and dry brush and Johnson grass and turn an old slop pot into a fountain of ancient splendor.

The Episcopal sanctuary was too dreary, too dark with its mahogany ceiling and trim blackened by decades of oil heat. The stucco walls were pink, the carpet and most of the stained windows were deep crimson. Back in the twenties some diehard Victorian had been determined to elevate the modest church with abundant splashes of imperial Anglican blue blood of the Lamb. Rhea Anne had some taste. She asked that it be airy and NeoClassical.

“Then I’m afraid you better call an architect,” Leona
had advised her when she took a look at the place. Leona had expected some argument. For all its Gothic darkness and smothering red, the old building had lightness, a delicacy that had obviously been ignored for the last seventy years. However, Rhea Anne looked overwhelmed. She wasn’t much more than twenty, but she had the resignation of a much older woman in her eyes.

“What do you think, Mrs. Sayres?”

Leona thought Rhea Anne was a very weary-looking young bride. Something about this event had been omitted from the articles on the society pages about pre-wedding parties. Whatever it was, Leona had the feeling she was supposed to make it disappear with magic swags and loops of greenery and cascading summer flowers. That she could do. Rhea Anne listened to Leona’s suggestions with an air of general relief and a vague attention to details.

“That’s fine,” she said.

“It’s not the most economical way to go,” Leona said, by way of bringing up the eternally unpleasant subject of money. She quoted an outrageously high price. She was testing Rhea Anne. If she agreed to it, then she was talking out of turn. There had to be parents waiting in the wings, people whose money she was spending.

“That’s fine,” she said. Then she lifted her checkbook out of her bag and used the flat surface of the altar rail to steady her hand as she gave Leona the specified amount.

“You think we can make it respectable for that amount?”

“Don’t you want to discuss this with Mama and Daddy first?”

Rhea Anne replaced the gold cap of her fountain pen and dropped it into her shoulder bag.

“I’m sorry if I insulted you,” Leona said.

“I’m not insulted. It’s just that I don’t have the week it would take to answer your question.”

“I see.” Leona smiled, though she didn’t have a clue.

“Soames Churchill told me I could count on you.”

“Soames Churchill told you the truth.”

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1999

4:46 P.M.

Timon Baird, the sixty-two-year-old Episcopal rector, had just stepped out of the Bank of Orpheus into the muggy September afternoon. It was Friday. Rhea Anne Brisbane’s wedding was scheduled for the next evening. It was a social do. All kinds of people would be dropping into the rectory all day. They’d expect hors d’oeuvres and wine and liquor. He needed help. As if in answer to his silent prayer, he spotted Darthula.

“Good afternoon, Mother Darthula.”

“Evening, Father Baird.”

“You’re veiled in blue today.”

“Dark, dark blue, Father.”

“What’s it mean?”

“What do my white veil mean, Father?”

“White means the angels are watching.”

“It do. And when I got my red veil on?”

“Red warns us the devil is here about.”

“Ain’t I told you it do?”

“Indeed. So, what’s blue?”

“This here veil on my head is dark blue, Rev.… You look like you standin’ up straighter, Holy Paws.”

“Once more before I’m stooped,” the priest replied. She reminded him of a dark blue veil on a tree stump. There were as many stories around town about Darthula as there were people to tell them.

“I was sorry to hear your mama passed, Father.”

Darthula had prepared many fine meals for the old bat’s dinner parties. Queenie had ruled over her table like God ruled the world.

Timon asked her to polish the church pews for the wedding.

“I think you glad Old Squirrelzrina gone to the worms, Father.”

“You look tired, Darthula. Can I give you a ride home?”

“Not that you ain’t sorry about your blessed mama.”

“She’s in a better world, Darthula.”

Father Timon backed the Buick out of its parking space in front of the bank. He already knew the general meanings of the veils. “What does your dark blue give us to understand?”