Sharyn McCrumb - If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him…

“But you haven’t heard anything yet, Bill! This poor woman went through two years of hell. Imagine being married to a razor-sharp, reptilian attorney who equates legal cases with chess games.”

“Yes, yes, I am imagining it,” said Bill, grinning. “And a lovely bride you’d make, too, Amy dear.”

She made a face at him. “No, seriously. You devote twenty years of your life to being the perfect little wife, a small grace note to his magnificence, and then one day he replaces you with a newer model. And instead of pensioning you off as decency and fairness-if not sentiment-require, he decides to turn the divorce into a legal Super Bowl.”

“And she has to be the Buffalo Bills, I suppose?”

“No. She’s the guy whose ticket was stolen and who didn’t even get to see the game. Nobody in town would take her divorce case. Two different guys from other counties signed on, and then mysteriously quit. She couldn’t get a change of venue to some other town, because everyone who had a say in the matter was a friend of Good Old Jeb. He used every trick in the book to hide his assets. He had all their furniture and household goods moved out of their house and put into storage, pending the settlement.”

“Furniture? What for?”

“Because she didn’t have any money to replace it! He just went out and bought all new stuff. Poor Eleanor couldn’t afford to do that. He even took the Waterford crystal and the silverware that had been left to Eleanor by her grandmother, and when she tried to go to the storage place to get it back, Jeb Royden had her arrested for trespassing.”

Bill shook his head. “It doesn’t ring true,” he said. “Mother and Dad weren’t like that. Why would Royden be so vindictive toward his own wife?”

“I asked her that!” said Powell Hill triumphantly. “She said that Jeb was so used to getting his own way that he couldn’t believe she was putting up a fuss about the divorce. He thought she should just submit meekly to whatever decision he made-and take whatever he chose to give her. When she made a fuss about it, he turned nasty. Then he decided to use all his legal skills to punish her. I have to document all the details of this for the defense. It’s a very depressing case.”

“I don’t know,” said Bill. “It makes me feel better.”

“Why?”

“It gives me a new perspective on my parents’ situation. Now I realize how much worse things could have been.”

“Don’t relax yet,” said Powell Hill. “The Roydens’ divorce went through more than a year ago, but she only shot him yesterday. Your mother may still be simmering.”

The small white frame church sat back from the road like a humpbacked Brahma bull, glowering at the world through eyes of crimson glass. The building was old, and it had once been a fine, but simple country church. Through the years jackleg carpenters had remodeled it to add plumbing and electricity, and to cover the weathered exterior with aluminum siding and the cracking plaster walls with cheap paneling, and the result was a serviceable structure without a scrap of grace. The old cemetery that formed a semicircle around the structure had a certain somber beauty, but otherwise the building and its surroundings, hemmed in by scrub pines and weedy locust trees fringing a gravel parking lot, completed the picture of an edifice that only God could love.

Bill MacPherson edged his shabby blue Tempo between a couple of battered pickup trucks. A single streetlight glowed above the parking lot, illuminating the dents in the aging vehicles and silhouetting the gun racks in the truck cabs. “I don’t think we look too out of place,” he said, looking approvingly at the faded Fords and Chevys lined up in front of them.

“No,” said Edith, slamming her door. “This clunker of yours can match rust spots with the best of them.”

“I drive this car as a safety precaution,” said Bill. “It deters thieves.”

“You couldn’t pay one to steal it, if that’s what you mean,” Edith replied. “But it is useful for undercover work. If anyone suspected that this car belonged to an attorney, applications to law schools would plummet.” She eyed him critically. “I’m not so sure about your clothes, though.”

“What’s wrong with them?” asked Bill, straightening his burgundy silk tie. “This is what I always wear to church. Navy blazer, khaki pants, blue oxford-cloth shirt. A suit would be more formal, I know, but it’s only a Tuesday-night service. Don’t I look all right?”

“Call it a hunch.” Edith, who was in a shapeless polyester dress, shrugged. “But I think you’re going to look like a peacock in a birdbath.”

“Maybe I should have brought my raincoat,” said Bill, loosening his tie and glancing nervously at the closed church door illuminated by a single yellow bug light. “We’ll sit in the back row and try to stay inconspicuous.”

“Just watch me,” said Edith, heading for the door. “I grew up in a little church like this one. Don’t genuflect. Don’t kneel. Don’t put your MasterCard in the collection plate. And if somebody starts passing around a little wooden box with a metal latch, don’t take it.”

“Why not?” asked Bill. “What would they have in a little wooden box?”

Edith opened the door and slipped inside. “Rattlesnakes,” she whispered. She slid into a wooden pew to the right of the door, pulling Bill’s sleeve to rouse him from the stupor that seemed to have struck him as he contemplated her last remark. “Come on, Bill. I was kidding about the snakes,” she said in his ear. “Probably.”

As Bill edged toward the pew he stepped on a black cylindrical shape coiled at his feet, and his mouth opened to let out a scream that would have rattled the stained glass, but before he could get his diaphragm to work, his brain realized that he was in fact standing on the cord to the ministerial microphone, which was attached to the sound system in the back corner. The mike itself, a cigar-shaped handheld instrument, was perched on a plastic stand atop a homemade pine lectern at the front of the sanctuary.

The small sanctuary was so jammed with bodies that it was difficult to make out the look of the room, but when Bill’s eyes adjusted to the dim light, he saw that a wagonwheel chandelier illumined the altar area, casting a sickly yellow glow on the lectern, but shedding very little brightness elsewhere. The walls were lined with a dark pressed-wood paneling (sold at building-supply stores for about five dollars a square mile) that seemed to absorb light, and the ceiling was low, adding to the catacomb effect of the room.

“Where’s Mrs. Morgan?” whispered Edith, elbowing Bill in the ribs.

“Which one?” he hissed back.

“Well, exactly !” said Edith. “I’ll bet most of this congregation is here for the begats instead of the amens.”

There was a shuffling of feet and a murmur of voices, and then a slender, middle-aged woman in a crimson robe made her way up the aisle and sat down at the upright piano to the right of the lectern. She pounded out a few bars of “Come to the Church in the Wildwood” to announce the start of the service, and the congregation struggled to its feet.

“All rise,” muttered Edith. “The honorable rooster is about to crow.”

“Behave!” Bill whispered back. “This crowd might believe in stoning unbelievers.”

No one was paying any attention to them, though, because the Reverend Chevry Morgan had chosen that moment to make his grand entrance. A side door at the front of the room opened, and Chevry Morgan sauntered in, wearing an unmistakable smirk of satisfaction. Trailing behind him were two women. The dowdy, middle-aged one stared at the floor, and the ferret-faced teenager tossed her head and smiled at the crowd like a beauty-pageant contestant.