Butterfly Sunday Read online

  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-wedd
ing 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.”

  24

  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 tells me the most interesting things about your sanctified church, Tallulah.”

  “It’s Darthula, Mother.…”

  “I think we have wonderful race relations here in Orpheus, don’t you, Tallulah?”

  “Yessie, Shining Star of Love, and you the mother wonderfulest of all relations.”

  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?”

  What the hell had happened to Buicks? Darthula wondered as the car lurched forward. She’d had her ass kicked less setting in back of Lonnie John Spakes’s pickup truck.

  “Say what?”

  “Dark blue, dark …”

  “Dark mean the area is still clean of Mephistopheles, but a tall indication he’s coming and he ain’t far.”

  Father Timon hadn’t been “called” to the priesthood. The truth was more that his mother, who was now gone to her reward, had driven him into his robes. He was deeply ashamed to admit it, but he equated faith with ignorance. Darthula’s comforted him for some reason. It was real. He drove past Whitsunday Pentecost Church and circled with the road as it turned around in a clearing. Then he stopped the car and Darthula got out.

  “Darthula, can you work for us tomorrow?”

  “You and no other, Father.”

  “I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty.”

  She nodded. Then she disappeared into the thick bramble. As she did, a handful of white butterflies rose behind her.

  25

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1999

  10:30 A.M.

  Soames waited by the back of the truck while Leona maneuvered the soft bank of the creek. “Overdoing it a little, aren’t we?” Soames said when Leona had crammed the last two sword ferns into the truck bed.

  Leona shrugged. “Better to have too much.” She had a long day ahead of her in that church. She was determined to give Rhea Anne her money’s worth. She knew exactly where she’d use every garland and loop of flowers and leaves. Soames was getting on her nerves. Why had she volunteered to help Leona if she was going to be so critical and oddly resentful?

  “Don’t delude yourself into thinking the Brisbanes are going to appreciate your efforts,” Soames moaned as she dumped her purse on the seat beside Leona and put the truck in reverse. Leona didn’t say anything. She had already deposited the Brisbanes’ appreciation in the Bank of Orpheus.

  Soames chattered like a starling with a toothache as they headed down the hill under the sparkling trees. Leona half listened, counting dogwoods, drawing pictures of raw countryside still wet from last night’s rain. The wind in the trees always reminded her of some outerspace cathedral choir. They roiled around the big curve out of the woods, and farmland dropped down a mile on her right, then rose into a long wooded hill. She could see the familiar courthouse clock tower just above the trees.

  It always made her glad to see that clock poking its rounded slate roof and white face just above the high horizon. She always felt grateful for the sight. To her it meant she had survived the darkness of the wooded hills behind her and that another world, one better lit and familiar and sensible, hadn’t disappeared with all the things she had lost. It was still there and waiting for her. This wedding was her biggest step toward it to date.

  “That odious bitch!” Soames had stopped at the light at the southwest corner of Court Square. It was just after eleven. There weren’t any other cars in either lane. She didn’t see anyone on the sidewalk.

  “Who are you talking about, Soames?”

  She hissed with irritation as if Leona were the dumbest person alive for not knowing. Soames could be like that. If it was on her mind, it was the most important thing in the world.

  “Excuse me for breathing your air, ma’am.”

  “Whoever taught you it was good sense to play dumb all the time?”

  “I’m not playing dumb, Soames. I am dumb!”

  They went on in silence, bristling, the pair of them. Soames pulled into the alley behind the church and got out to help Leona unload the truck bed.

  “Don’t bother,” Leona hissed.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Leona,” Soames moaned, picking up a fern. “You can’t haul all this by yourself.”

  “Please put that down!”

  “Fine,” she minced, letting the giant green plant drop to the asphalt. She got back into her truck. After Leona had finished unloading the bed, Soames scratched off up the alley.

  Weird, the very idea of a wedding upset some women.

  Two hours later Soames walked into the sanctuary wearing a good as new smile and carrying a boxed lunch. She had one of her housekeepers with her. That was her
way of rolling up her sleeves and digging in.

  “I’m sorry for this morning.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “Sweetie …” Soames began in a mournful tone. Then she stood and motioned for Leona to follow her through a door beside the altar that eventually led them up a set of stairs and into the church parlor.

  “I thought you knew, Leona.”

  Soames was having a little drama. Leona never knew where the facts began and the fantasy would lead. She was baiting Leona to ask a lot of questions. Leona had hours of work ahead of her.

  “Soames, I have work to do.”

  “Of course you don’t know.”

  “What?” Leona stood up and laid a hand on the doorknob. Soames could drag one of her scenes out for a week. She didn’t have the time. Time seemed to be all Soames had.

  “Averill is having an affair with Helen Brisbane.”

  Funny how the reality of a situation hit you first. When Soames told Leona that Averill was sleeping with the bride’s mother, Leona’s first thought was that now she was really dying to meet her. Clearly Soames was hoping that Leona would at least explode as if a torpedo had just hit her.

  “I’m sorry,” Soames whispered. “I thought you had a right to know.” Soames knew the lay of the land between Leona and Averill. She knew Leona was getting her enterprise off the ground. Leona couldn’t have cared less if Averill was sleeping with the bride or her mother. Why did Soames? Soames followed Leona back downstairs into the sanctuary. She kept cramming the thing into Leona’s ears. She thought it was the height of deception. That guttersnipe Rhea Anne had known about it all along. This was all designed to humiliate Leona. Soames stayed to help her decorate the church, taking every opportunity to object on Leona’s behalf.