Butterfly Sunday Read online

  “Things had to go this way, Blue.”

  “I love you so much.”

  “It makes all the difference.”

  “It could have.”

  “I had to do it. I’ve known it for a long time.”

  “I’ve known how much I love you for a long time.”

  “A million times I thought about running to you.”

  “Oh, God, why didn’t you?”

  “I knew I was eventually going to have to kill him.”

  “He wasn’t worth killing.”

  “I didn’t do it for me.”

  God, life was a farce. All that reaching and growing, the changes, the losses, the regrets and starting over—where did it get anybody? What for? Where was this climbing path to peace and wisdom all those stupid books talked about? How could she sit there beside him looking so peaceful as he downshifted for soft places in the sand clay road?

  Justice, the supreme ruler, man’s purported attempt to administer the Will of God, wanted its eye for an eye. Leona, who had never killed before and would never kill again; Leona, who rid society of a worthless man; Leona would stand trial. Judge and jury would purse their Christian lips and shrug and regret that they were morally, legally bound to convict and kill Leona with about as much sensitivity and remorse as the pound displayed when it killed a rabid stray.

  All he had to do was hang a right at the next intersection. Yet he kept straight for the courthouse at the stop sign. The road to hell, he knew now, wasn’t paved with anything as lofty as good intentions. Its construct was far more intricate than that. It was made of millions of connecting willful ignorances and blind self-indulgences.

  “Leona, please, listen to me.…”

  “I have to do this, Blue.”

  “Justice is whatever suits those with the most power.”

  “I agree.”

  “Then why hand yourself to them?”

  She was empty. She had no more words to offer. There was nothing to pull out of her hat that would make him see her purpose. This wasn’t something she would debate with anyone. Others might well have better ideas than hers. She was past all that. She had reached the inevitable part, the point of no return. It didn’t matter whether this was her insanity, self-indulgence, self-destruction, cruelty or folly. This was her own private cross, her bloody trek up Golgotha. She was seeing it through.

  “Answer me, damn it! Why hand yourself to them?”

  She wouldn’t indulge herself the feelings now. She was too tired, too weak, too vulnerable. Her heart was begging him to overpower her decision, to turn at the intersection up ahead, to take responsibility for her fate. Yet some inscrutable power of intuition had dictated otherwise. Blue was wild with despair. She had to appear calm and resolute. She had to at least convey the steel conviction that he would understand one day. But how? What words could she borrow? Then it came to her with no little irony. She could steal them from Averill.

  “Why?” Blue repeated, looking pale and helpless.

  “Why did Jesus go to Jerusalem?”

  He let the car roll past the stop sign at a snail’s pace while he glanced up and down the deserted crossroad. He coasted across the highway, his right foot pressed the clutch and his right hand guided the gearshift into first. Now second, passing the city limits sign, then third. The road widened into a residential avenue lined with two-story houses that sat deep behind ancient wrought iron fences. They stopped at a red light. He looked at her.

  “Would the answer make life without you bearable?”

  21

  MONDAY, APRIL 24, 2000

  4:00 P.M.

  By four o’clock that Monday afternoon Leona was about to tear her hair out. Blue still hadn’t let anyone else talk to her. He wasn’t willing to face facts. He was violating his own procedures, wielding authority he didn’t have and listening to no one but himself. Instead of putting her in a cell that morning, he had locked her in his office while his staff watched with their jaws agape. He had been running in and out all day. He was all over the place. Half listening, interrupting himself, now on one phone line, forgetting the other was holding. When there was a knock, he opened the door only as far as the chain lock would allow.

  “Blue, they’ll be in here with tear gas and machine guns if you don’t take hold of yourself!”

  This was nothing like what he had told her to expect. He was supposed to deliver her into the custody of a deputy. Then he was supposed to walk upstairs to see a judge. He needed some kind of papers in order to remove himself from her case. Meanwhile she’d go into the interrogation room. When Soames’s fancy lawyer showed up, the deputies would question her with him running interference. Though Leona had her doubts. Soames was probably grandstanding to keep Leona from losing control. Surely some big-time Memphis lawyer would know how to force his way in to see his client.

  Instead, Blue was holding her here like personal property.

  She’d been here in his office since their arrival at eleven this morning. God, she’d never forget that moment. The minute Blue parked in the sheriff’s space at the curb, a pack of lawmen and reporters swarmed. Word was already out. The deputies pulled Leona out of the vehicle, handcuffed her and brought her into the building. There must have been twenty cameras. Half the crowd was outraged and demanding Blue’s resignation. The other half was catcalling and making it all a dirty joke.

  Why the hell hadn’t Blue just gone to California last week as planned?

  Blue’s men were organized. They had the entrances to the courthouse secured. The media had to wait outside. Blue lingered behind them to answer questions and deny that he’d spent last night with his suspect. As they had driven down Whitsunday Hill that morning, Leona saw that highway patrol cars were stationed by the crossroads store. At Blue’s directive, they’d been turning curiosity seekers away through the night.

  The county board of supervisors was already demanding to see Blue when he arrived. He, of course, ignored them. Instead he took her into his office, locked the door and removed her handcuffs. The only other lawman Leona had seen all day was the confused-looking young deputy who Blue sent across the square for coffee and sandwiches. Around noon she had overheard two deputies in the hall outside of Blue’s office during one of his sudden disappearances. Leona and Blue were now “Sheriff Romeo and Juliet” on Memphis talk radio.

  “You must think you’re God,” Leona said after Blue had sent his secretary to inform the board of supervisors he was too busy to fool with them today.

  “No, but I think you’re innocent in God’s eyes.”

  “Blue, don’t prolong this.”

  There was a knock. Blue opened the door and took a cardboard file box from a young woman who taught Sunday school out at the church.

  “Hey, Lu Anne.”

  “Hey, yourself,” she answered in a begrudging tone.

  “Aw, now don’t be that way,” Blue cut in. “Things are rarely what they seem.”

  “Well, evil can sure look cute and cuddly, if that’s what you mean.”

  “God bless you, darlin’,” Blue snapped, closing the door in her face.

  “Blue, if that’s an indication of what people are saying, then—”

  “Sanctimonious slut.”

  Leona had to admit that she had reached a similar conclusion long before any of this mess. He was taking manila files out of the box and reading them.

  “Blue, I’m a confessed murderer. People expect you to uphold the law in this county.…”

  “Here it is,” he muttered, not paying Leona the slightest heed.

  They sat there in silence while Blue read a stack of typewritten documents. Leona had no idea what they were or why he was reading them. He was absorbed. The phone rang every two or three minutes. Sometimes it went on for fifteen or twenty rings. It didn’t seem to faze him in the least. Then it rang thirty-two times. Leona couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “County sheriff’s office,” she said.

  “Sheriff Hudson, please.” />
  “The sheriff is unavailable. May I tell him who’s calling?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Leona Sayres.”

  The man laughed so loud it hurt her ear.

  “Oh, that’s rich. That’s a good one.”

  22

  MONDAY, APRIL 24, 2000

  5:55 P.M.

  Blue’s right hand took the receiver away from Leona. Then he unplugged the phone.

  “You’ve lost your mind.”

  He handed her the typed page he’d been reading. It was from a file that the late sheriff Meeks had made of his investigation into Henri Churchill’s death, an interview with one of Henri Churchill’s employees.

  “What’s the point?”

  “There was a lot of speculation that it wasn’t an accident.”

  Leona lost it. If Blue didn’t wake up, the county was going to fire and then prosecute him for obstruction of justice.

  “For God’s sake! What difference does it make if Soames hung him on the courthouse lawn in front of a thousand witnesses? I measured out that nasty powder and dumped it into Averill’s food and watched him eat it for three days in a row.” Then, mostly to make Blue calm down a little, she read the damned interview.

  Sarah Robbins, now deceased, had been a childless young wife of twenty-seven when she became Henri Churchill’s nurse and caregiver. She had come back to work for Henri Churchill as a cook shortly after his first wife died and he began spending more time at the farm. She was seventy-six when the sheriff interviewed her. This was a week after Henri’s death. She had already quit her job.

  “You don’t care for Miss Soames?”

  “She has her ways; I have mine.”

  “Is she nice to you?”

  “Real nice.”

  “You don’t think she needs your help right now?”

  “I’m old, Sheriff. I’m the one who needs some help.”

  “Do you think Mister Henri’s death was an accident?”

  “I never called that boy ‘mister’ nothing.”

  “Was it an accident?”

  “I didn’t see it happen.”

  “Do you suspect that it wasn’t an accident?”

  “God help me, I do.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the Churchills been hunting around here since Noah landed.”

  “Henri knew gun safety.”

  “Any nut would know what she claimed.”

  “She?”

  “Loaded rifle, safety off, barrel pointed to blow a hole in his head?”

  “Who is ‘she’?”

  “It’s not but one lady living here, Sheriff.”

  According to Sarah, Henri was away on business more than half the time. Soames got bored and lonely. He had taken her all over the world during the early years of their marriage. Now he was drawing in the reins. Her spending had gotten out of control. He clipped her credit cards and to some extent her wings. He sold his big old house in Memphis and rented the apartments in New York and Paris.

  “He really put her down on the farm,” Sarah had told Sheriff Meeks. Like a lot of rich men’s wives, Soames falsely presumed the confidence of her domestic helpers. Aside from Sarah, there was a younger married couple living on the place. The man worked full-time as a groundskeeper. His wife washed and ironed linens and took care of the dozen or so upstairs rooms. Soames made a big deal to Sarah that, in spite of the fact that they were white people, she held the dark woman in higher esteem. (Meeks had that circled in purple. That meant it corroborated something else, probably something about Soames’s background.)

  Henri had told Sarah that Soames had invented her genteel background in order to seem a good match for him. Sarah was sketchy about the truth, but Henri’s investigators had disproved many of her claims. She hadn’t attended Smith College. Her grandmother wasn’t a Whitney. Her mother had never been an heiress; nor had she lost millions in a fraudulent art deal. Sarah ran on at some length.

  Soames, according to Sarah, was dying to have a baby. She wasn’t naïve enough to think that would cure Henri’s wanderlust. She whined that she had accepted the fact that she had been chosen for a wife by medieval standards. Her bloodlines were more important to her husband than she was. She was his proper public counterpart. Otherwise he was a man like all the rest. He couldn’t manage intimacy with a peer. He wanted to do his wallowing with some cloven platinum swine. No, she wanted a baby because she needed love. She deserved love. If Henri was going to imprison her there in his fortress, leaving her behind with the drawbridge raised, then why couldn’t he at least avail himself when she was ovulating? Soames wondered if it was deliberate.

  Sarah knew it was deliberate. Soames had been very naïve to share secrets with the woman who had raised her husband. They were like mother and son. Henri often called Sarah’s house at night when he was away. She knew that he was seeing a woman from Atlanta. He had long since told her that Soames had cuckolded him while he was still blind with grief over his first wife. Soames was a gold-digging sociopath and a piranha in heat, according to Henri.

  Sarah also knew how to reach Henri night or day. She was soaking up information from Soames like a deep-sea sponge. Sarah tipped off Henri that Soames had her sources and wiles. She said she had a cache of photographs and receipts. If Henri divorced her, she was prepared to convince the court that he was a philandering wife beater. She’d walk out of the courthouse with millions.

  Henri was determined not to let that happen. He told Sarah he’d hire a hit man before he’d spend a dime on a divorce lawyer. Unless, of course, he caught his beloved spouse cheating on him. In that case, he’d get rid of her and she’d be lucky if she got a dime.

  “Did she cheat on him?”

  “Like a bird dog bitch in heat.”

  “Who with?”

  “With that cheese hot-dog shoutin’ preacher up Whitsunday Hill.”

  “Did Henri catch them?”

  “Is water wet?”

  “Where were they?”

  “Right here in this house on the Savonniere rug in the parlor, two naked potato bug heatherns on Christmas Eve underneath the tree!”

  Henri had set a trap. Soames hadn’t expected him until the following morning. He had a hidden camera taping them. He waited until they were through. Then, according to what he told Sarah later that night, he strolled into the room and ordered Soames out. She got dressed without a word. She said she would give her address to Sarah, so that she could send her clothes. Henri nodded his assent. Soames wished him a Merry Christmas. Then she drove off with the preacher.

  The name (Averill Sayres) was printed in tremulous black ballpoint on the margin.

  Leona took a moment to absorb it. Or at least some of it. Soames and Averill had had an affair. So why all her trips to the cemetery to put fresh flower arrangements on Henri’s grave once or twice a week? If Henri Churchill hadn’t died … Then she remembered something. No, it was too obvious. She was mistaken.

  “How long after all this was it before Henri Churchill died?”

  Blue grinned at her just as if any of it was going to make a difference.

  “About twelve hours.”

  Leona didn’t want to get bogged down in what it had all meant in the past. She kept sifting it for some relevance to her current situation. Blue was acting like there was.

  “What’s it give us, Blue?”

  “Us? Nothing.”

  Her heart went to her shoes. This was infuriating. Blue was spinning nonsense and she was buying into it. She had to knock him back to his senses. She hated him so much in that moment that she could hardly stand to look at him. He kept up his annoying grin. The longer he held on to his toothy Pepsodent smile, the more Leona was convinced of the recent and direct link between humans and apes.

  “Blue, what the holy hell has you grinning like an idiot?”

  “It gives us nothing, Leona; but it gives Soames a motive.”

  “For what?”

  “For shooting Averill Sayres at
close range through the skull.”

  “What motive?”

  “He was both her accomplice and witness.”

  Blue handed her another page from Sheriff Meeks’s interview with Sarah.

  Sarah claimed that she had come to the house early on Christmas morning and given Henri his breakfast. He was dressed for hunting. He said he was going out to shoot quail. Sarah washed up. The house was immaculate. Henri was planning to catch an early afternoon plane from Memphis to Atlanta. He would be at his fiancée’s house in Atlanta in plenty of time for a six-thirty dinner. He had a four-and-a-half-carat diamond solitaire engagement ring in his pocket, and he showed it to Sarah that morning. Sarah left before eight o’clock and drove fifty miles to spend the day and night with her sister’s family in Tupelo.

  Soames had called for an ambulance at 11:10 A.M. It arrived at 11:35. A county highway patrol unit delivered two deputies to the scene five minutes later. The two men later reported that they had walked in on a typical Christmas morning scene. There were open presents to and from Soames and Henri under the tree. She had a ham in the oven. Two plates and the remains of a giant holiday breakfast sat on the kitchen table. The dining room table was laid with all the best things in the house. They were expecting a dozen dinner guests.

  Leona handed the page back to Blue.

  “Soames didn’t have time to kill him, rig up a suicide and do all that stuff inside the house to make it look like she and Henri were celebrating Christmas together.”

  “Averill helped her.”

  “I’d put money on it.”

  “Why wasn’t this thing investigated?”

  Blue showed her a two-foot stack of documents. The thing was investigated. The coroner’s report indicated doubt that the bullet hole was caused by a .22 gauge rifle. It seemed a bit too small. He also indicated some doubt as to whether the weapon had been fired at the close range Soames’s story indicated. The damaged area seemed a little too clean. Yet the coroner’s conclusion was that Henri Churchill’s death was an accidental, self-inflicted bullet wound.