Билл Пронзини - Blue Lonesome

“Verbena. The first one I planted for her died.” Maria sat down on the low mound of dirt, placed her hands together like a supplicant. “Everything dies,” she said. “Sooner or later.”

“White dress, white verbena. White for purity.”

“Yes.”

“And that’s why you put her body in the well.”

“Yes. Pure water to cleanse away the evil, to prepare her for her entry into the Kingdom. She suffered, but not for long. Then she was at peace in the arms of the Lord.”

“But you’re not at peace, Maria.”

“I will be soon.”

“You suffered too, didn’t you? The same way Tess did, and for a much longer time. That’s the real reason you’re not at peace.”

“Yes.”

“That’s why you did what you did at the ranch.” Has to be. It’s the only way it all makes sense. “And why you didn’t tell anyone afterward. You couldn’t talk about such things, not even to save Anna. Your father made you swear never to talk about such things, didn’t he?”

“People wouldn’t understand, he said. It wasn’t wicked, what we did together, because we loved each other. I love you more than life itself, Maria, you’re the closest to an angel God ever made. I need to show you how much I love you. I can’t stop myself, Lord help me, I can’t. That’s what he said.”

Dacy made an angry sound in her throat. Messenger said, “It wasn’t love, Maria. You know that now.”

“Yes. I know that now.”

Reverend Walter Hoxie. He was responsible for everything that Maria had done, not she. He drove her to look for his kind of love with the Roebucks and Draper and Teal and God knew how many others. He gave her a warped view of religion and sowed the seeds of murder. And at some level she’d known all along what he was and what he’d done to her. It wasn’t Dave Roebuck she’d killed in March, it was her adoptive father. It wasn’t John T. she’d shot last night, it was the man who’d begun molesting her when she was no older than Tess.

“Where is he?” Messenger said thickly. “Where’s the good reverend Hoxie?”

“In the church.”

“Stay here with her,” he said to Dacy. “I’m going to see Hoxie.”

“Jim, don’t do anything foolish—”

“I won’t. I just want to confront him with it.”

He hurried back around to the front of the church. The hinges squeaked when he pushed open one of the double doors. Electric light was all that burned inside; the votive candles on the altar were unlit. He noticed that first, before anything else registered. Then—

Light and shadow: one elongated shadow, half bulky and half finger-thin, stretched out over several of the empty pews. The Virgin Mary on one stained glass window, the twelve apostles on another, thorn-crowned Christ on the bronze cross behind the altar... all of them seemed to be staring, as he was staring, at the abomination in their midst.

Reverend Walter Hoxie hung stiff and straight from a length of rope looped around one of the rafter beams. The crude noose he’d fashioned hadn’t fit tightly enough and his neck hadn’t broken when he stepped off the top of one of the pews. He had died of strangulation: mottled red face, distended tongue a charred-looking black. Like a burnt offering, Messenger thought.

It was the second dead man he’d seen in less than twenty-four hours, but this time he felt nothing. His footfalls echoed hollowly as he walked closer. There was a piece of paper pinned to the front of Hoxie’s coat; by stretching upward on his toes he could just make out the words printed on it in a shaky hand.

May God forgive me for what I have done. Just that, nothing else.

The door hinges squeaked again behind him. He turned to see Maria come inside, then Dacy a few paces behind; heard the audible intake of Dacy’s breath as she saw Hoxie. In the diffused light Maria’s face was clear to him for the first time: without animation or color, eyes flat and empty like the eyes of someone close to death. Like Anna Roebuck’s eyes in San Francisco. Until this moment he’d been certain that no one could possibly be sadder, lonelier than the woman he’d seen that first night in the Harmony Café. But he had been wrong.

The true essence of blue lonesome was the girl who stood facing him now.

“I confessed to him this morning,” she said. “Everything, all my sins and all that God told me to do. He cried the way Dave Roebuck cried and told me how sorry he was. Then he came out here. I knew what he was going to do but I didn’t try to stop him. I didn’t want to stop him. I dug his grave first, on the other side of the cemetery from mine.”

She advanced to Messenger’s side, her empty gaze on what was left of Walter Hoxie. A vagrant air current stirred the body, made the rope creak faintly. In his ears the sound was like a whimper — a child’s whimper in the night.

“‘I am the rose of Sharon,’” she whispered, “‘and the lily of the valleys. As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love. Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.’”

And she sank to her knees and bowed her head, and in a clear, steady voice she began to pray.

“I keep thinking about her,” Dacy said.

“I know. So do I.”

“The things she said to us, the way she looked... I can’t get it out of my mind.”

“She’s in good hands now,” Messenger said. “Just keep telling yourself that.”

“Doesn’t do any good. I’ll never forget that night. If I live to ninety it’ll still be haunting my sleep.”

“You think so now, but it’s only been three days.”

“Time heals, Jim?”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Some things. Others... all you get is a scab that you can pick off without even half trying. Time won’t heal Maria, no matter how many head doctors she has working on her. And it won’t heal Beulah either. Towns are like people. Tear the guts out of one and even if it survives it’ll never be the same again.”

“Everybody blames me. You too, a little?”

“No,” she said. “I blame the Roebucks. And Walter Hoxie. You did what you had to do. What nobody else would do. You gave Anna back her good name and took the hate and bitterness out of Lonnie and me. I’ll always be grateful to you, Jim.”

“I get the feeling there’s a ‘but’ in there somewhere.”

“Not where you’re concerned. The only ‘but’ is that I may not be able to keep on living here. I always figured I’d stick on this ranch until the day I die, but now... I’m not thinking that way anymore.”

“Would it be so bad to go somewhere else, make a fresh start?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. Tonopah, Beatty, up around Winnemucca — I wouldn’t mind any of those. Main problem is, I couldn’t get much for this place and decent cattle land’s expensive.”

“You could use some or all of the money Anna left. You and Lonnie really do deserve to have it.”

“Maybe. I don’t know about that yet, either.”

“Have you said anything to him about moving?”

“No. He’s got enough to deal with right now.”

“He’ll be all right, no matter what you decide to do. He’s a strong kid. No, a strong man. He’d make a fine veterinarian.”

“I know it. You reckon he’d put all this behind him quicker and easier somewhere else?”

“Yes. And I think you would, too.”

She didn’t reply. Instead she sat listening for a moment to the jazz tape playing softly inside; then she leaned forward to study — or pretend to study — the arrangement of the chess pieces. The westering sun slanted in under the porch overhang, put shimmery gold highlights in her hair. He restrained an impulse to touch the unruly topknot and shifted his gaze to the desert. For the first time in three days the valley road lay empty of official and unofficial cars and media vehicles; it and the sagebrush plain were bathed in a soft, buff-colored radiance. Peaceful, he thought. Finally, for all of us, a little peace.