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  Did she not see that Helen and Averill would soon be making a move? She had no doubt Averill would make his move sooner rather than later. However, Leona was preoccupied with her own moves at the moment. So she tried to ignore Soames until, mercifully, she left to have her hair done for the wedding around four o’clock. Soames had succeeded. Leona was riled. Leona was angry. Though not with Averill—with Soames for trying to push her buttons.

  Rhea Anne and Helen showed up around five-thirty. Like most legendary seductresses, Helen was a little disappointing in the flesh. She was a small, quiet woman with dyed black hair. She wore a little too much rouge. She was charming, though. She seemed genuinely moved by the decorations. She was very complimentary. In fact, both she and Rhea Anne hugged Leona with tears in their eyes.

  Not that Leona was inclined to let anything tarnish the little glow of goodwill she felt toward the Brisbanes when she stopped to consider the fact that their check had immediately cleared upon deposit.

  The last person Leona saw in the church was Ransom Brisbane. He crept into the sanctuary and stood at the back while she was gathering her things. Despite his considerable height and broad shoulders, there was a balloonlike quality to Ransom. He seemed always to be straining his neck or poking his heavy frame glasses back up the bridge of his nose with his index finger. That and a host of rumors about him and the Episcopal rector was all Leona could claim she knew about him.

  “Mother fuck,” he moaned, dropping his jaw with exaggeration, “Mother of God …” He moved slowly toward her, taking in the canopy of ferns and wildflowers over the aisle. He had a fancy crystal and gold glass in his right hand, part of a large set she had seen on Father Timon’s dining room buffet.

  “Exquisite,” he spat. Leona smelled vodka. “Helen and I will always be in your debt.” He spoke with casual intimacy, as if this were the continuation of a previous conversation. People did that a lot in Orpheus. She supposed it was because they knew so much about each other, it didn’t seem relevant whether or not they had actually ever met. In Ransom’s case the familiarity seemed closer than that, almost a violation. He was drunk.

  Leona was tired. She wanted to take some pictures for her customer book and get out of the church before the guests began to arrive. Ransom was talking ninety to nothing about weddings and fashion designers and swirling his arms like snakes as he conjured up all kinds of images that he found a great deal more exciting than Leona did at the moment.

  Did the self-important shit not see she was busy and exhausted and not the least bit interested? Did he think she had some obligation to put up with him? Was she supposed to believe he didn’t know about her husband and his wife? Or did it make the moron feel high-class to stand here talking on with her and making a show of not knowing a thing?

  “Where did you study design, Leona?”

  “I’m afraid I never did,” she replied, turning to pick up a metal basket filled with leaves and flower petals.

  “Idiot savant?” he asked with a goofy grin that identified the true idiot to Leona’s satisfaction. Then he lunged with one arm toward the metal basket in her hands, grabbing it in what was meant as a chivalrous gesture, but which landed him facedown on the floor while the glass in his hand flew across the sanctuary, smashing into a thousand pieces against the baptismal font. There were twigs and leaves and pine needles everywhere.

  “Mary Mother of God!” he shouted as he got back to his feet. “Timon’s goddamned Medici cocktail glass! Look here!” He pointed to a rise in the edge of the oriental runner at least five feet away from where he’d stumbled. “Haven’t you ever heard of tacking down a carpet runner?”

  Leona dared not open her mouth. The smallest amount of oxygen would ignite the coals of rage and God alone knew where things would end. She just stood there shaking with gritted teeth while Ransom fled down the aisle.

  Because of Ransom’s drunken melee, it was five minutes before seven o’clock when Leona walked out of the sanctuary. She was exhausted. She took the route along the side of the church that was away from the parish house lawn. She was avoiding the first wave of wedding folks. She had called one of the Spakes for a ride home. The boy was waiting in his shabby pickup truck in the alley where she and Soames had unloaded the plants that morning. Across the alley were parking places behind the stores along the east end of the square. Most were abandoned at this hour on a Saturday. Just before they reached the street, she spotted Soames’s Lincoln in a narrow bay behind a shoe store. Soames had parked there to avoid the wedding traffic along the street.

  It was eight-fifteen when Soames pulled into her driveway and got out of her car. She had just come from the church. She was shaking and crying. Rhea Anne had finished dressing for the ceremony upstairs in the church parlor. The church was packed to overflowing. A madrigal was playing. At seven twenty-five the wedding party lined up on the church steps. Ransom Brisbane stumbled upstairs to collect his daughter and lead her down the aisle. He found her asleep on the parlor sofa. He called to her, but she didn’t hear him.

  Moving closer, he saw the pistol on the floor and the tiny trickle of blood from the hole at the middle of her forehead.

  26

  MONDAY, APRIL 24, 2000

  10:45 P.M.

  Leona had been so deep into her account that it took her a minute to reacclimate to her surroundings. She had been a long way off. Now Blue looked over his desk at Leona as if he had just seen the Rapture. Then he opened his desk drawer and took out a small ivory pistol. It was identical to the one Leona had seen in Soames’s purse yesterday afternoon.

  “Where did that come from?”

  “It’s Rhea Anne Brisbane’s suicide weapon.”

  It was a pair of antique dueling pistols. Soames had tried to give her one of them at least a dozen times—for self-protection! She had even put it in Leona’s purse. Did Leona remember the last time? Now she did. It was on the afternoon before that doomed wedding. She had gone into her bag for her scissors and there it sat. She hadn’t even bothered to protest. Instead she had just slipped it quietly back into Soames’s purse.

  “You messed her up big time,” Blue grinned.

  Leona shuddered. Soames had tried to frame her. Thanks to Leona’s aversion to firearms and her stupidity, she had failed.

  “You ready to get yourself arrested?” Blue asked.

  “Yeah, but I’m too dumb to pull off a murder,” Leona answered. It was chilly in her cell. The odor was revolting. All around her voices echoed. The cot felt like concrete. None of it made any difference to Leona. She put her head down and slept like the dead.

  27

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1999

  7:15 P.M.

  From the dining room window Timon could see the old ladies starting to swarm. They had experience with overflow wedding crowds. If they waited until seven-thirty, parking would be a consideration. They could well wind up walking several blocks, not a daunting prospect while it was still daylight, but maneuvering the uneven sidewalks in the dark after the ceremony could be disastrous. They could all name hapless contemporaries who had fallen and broken their hips on an unseen tree root or listing section of concrete. Some recovered, many after long hospital stays and improper healings that required surgical intervention and painful months on canes and walkers. Others had taken arthritis into the breaks and died bedridden from pneumonia within a few months.

  Seven-fifteen was too early if getting a seat was the only motivation. There would still be plenty of seats inside the sanctuary at seven-thirty, but this seasoned crowd had known the pitfalls of every church in Orpheus for decades. They knew the most accessible seating, the places with the best views and the ones from which you had the best chance to be viewed, the clunkers in the Presbyterian church that dipped when you leaned forward to take your hymnal off the rack, the Episcopal creakers that squawked during a prayer, the unfortunate pew in the Methodist church above a furnace vent that would scorch your ankles.

  Besides, they moved more slowly and
they didn’t like to be huddled up along a stair rail with a young deputation on their heels. They liked to climb straight-backed, to enjoy the floating sensation as they headed into the sanctuary. They enjoyed being situated and ready to watch the next generation lumber in around seven thirty-five. Though it never failed to startle them how the years had begun to show on the next generation.

  Watching them cluster at the church steps, Timon acknowledged that he had accomplished one thing in his life. He had become an expert on old ladies. He would very soon be one himself. Five minutes later the curtain was rising on the spectacle. Darthula was covering platters of leftover hors d’oeuvres with clear plastic. He couldn’t count the people who had stopped in all day. They had their ostensible reasons. People never said, “Hi, we’re here for the free food and drink.”

  It was seven-forty. The bridesmaids and groomsmen were sitting in two gray vans across the street from the church steps, where they would line up behind the bride at two minutes until eight. The groom was standing in the alley behind the house, smoking and talking with his uncles. From their laughter he assumed there was a bottle of liquor moving around their narrow circle. Timon wouldn’t be part of the wedding procession since he was going to lead the closing benediction from the back of the church. It took a bishop to perform a Brisbane marriage ceremony. He was planning to hold down the church foyer during the ceremony, directing latecomers to the parish house and keeping general watch.

  It was almost dark by seven-fifty. The candles flickered behind the stained glass windows in the sanctuary. A trickle of late-arriving guests was being routed into the parish house, where a pair of remote stereo speakers would allow them to hear the ceremony. It was an odd egocentricity of the town. People paid good money for black tie and formal wear and then sat on aluminum chairs at the same folding tables where they sometimes sold rummage, other times played bingo and on Shrove Tuesdays ate pancakes and sausages. It seemed atrocious enough to Timon that airlines oversold flights. Sending engraved invitations marked “black tie only” under the same auspices was extraordinary bad taste. Not here in Orpheus. No one ever complained about it. In fact, there was a regular handful who seemed to prefer it. For obvious reasons the parish house was labeled “the smoker.” It always made Timon think of some blitz-era MP’s dinner guests waiting out an air raid between courses in a London shelter.

  Ransom Brisbane thumped his cigarette into the grass and trotted toward the parish house. He’d take the back stairs up to the second floor and bring Rhea Anne down and across the lawn to enter the church. As he went in, he stopped to hold the door for Soames Churchill. She was wearing a crimson feathered hat. She had a gangly air about her, as if she needed ballast. Maybe she was drunk. Soames moved toward the front of the church, displacing half the wedding party on her way up the steps. Ransom disappeared into the parish house.

  Timon had to get over there and take his prominent position at the rear. Darthula came back into the room. She had switched her white veil for the red one.

  “Close, is he?”

  “Close as you,” she replied.

  Moving toward the front door of the rectory, Timon passed a gallery of framed photographs that told his unremarkable pictorial history. How he longed for the millionth time for the courage to take what remained of his life and live it. It was one thing to lose your faith in God. There were thousands of theologians and religious scholars whose religious experiences were intellectual rather than spiritual. Timon would settle for faith in life.

  How he wished he believed in something as much as Darthula did. How he would give anything to wake up just one day and possess the immutable sense of purpose she did. All he wanted to do before he died was feel himself become God’s mortal instrument for good or change or truth, but something. At the door he remembered the little book of prayers he always gave to the bride and groom. He went back to get it.

  The rectory was air-conditioned. The dining room windows were closed and the drapes were drawn when Timon took the prayer book off the marble sideboard. It was only the rare sound from outside that penetrated the cool stillness. So it jabbed him between his shoulder blades, the piercing tenor wail from the second-floor window of the parish house.

  Meanwhile, fifteen feet away where she was cleaning the kitchen, Darthula’s hand reached into a canvas bag and took out a wrinkled red veil.

  28

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 24, 1997

  11:00 P.M.

  Averill had rented a small guest house in Orpheus. The parsonage needed more work than his time and budget would accommodate—at least in the beginning. Once Averill had built up a congregation, it was hoped that the funds would materialize. Of course, Averill grew less and less interested in the future of the little church and its ministerial manse as time went by. He was more comfortable in town. There were two or three decent restaurants close by. He could walk up the block to the dry cleaners or the bank or post office. There were people on the street and in the cafés he came to know as speaking acquaintances.

  Who was there to see out on Whitsunday Hill except Soames Churchill? Things had gone from a little wild to insane between Averill and Soames. As the situation between Soames and Henri deteriorated, Soames visited her affections on Averill with increasing frequency. She said that it was just her need for physical release. Averill could match her in intensity and appetite. It was all just harmless fun. At first he didn’t really connect the little “gifts” she always had waiting—a portable CD player, a dozen hand-sewn broadcloth shirts with Averill’s monogram on the cuffs. And cash—she sometimes tucked a pair of hundred-dollar bills in his palm before he left.

  When the mechanic told him it was going to cost him a thousand dollars to get his truck in decent shape, he actually caught himself calculating how many times he’d have to bed Soames to raise the cash. Though even better, or much worse, than that—he couldn’t honestly decide which—Soames paid the garage and told them that “Mr. Henri” had instructed her to keep his minister in dependable transportation.

  As if those weren’t enough incentives for a lusty young profligate, Soames always had lavish meals or Averill could sit in Henri’s sauna and then let Henri’s automatic shiatsu massage chair pound and knead him into a waterlogged noodle. Every time Averill got ready to explain to Soames that he had to stop the affair, she silenced his carefully rehearsed parting speech with a suit or a new pair of Church’s English shoes.

  It was ironic. Soames’s gifts actually decreased Averill’s sense of obligation to her. They were more like payments than presents. She knew she could buy his attentions and she lost no pride in doing so. That spared Averill the need to explain the shallow nature of his passion. It alleviated any guilt he might otherwise carry because of his growing attachment to a woman in town.

  Averill had drifted into a quiet affair with his landlady, Helen Brisbane. She and her husband, Ransom, lived in a sprawling white Victorian mansion across the street, which the locals called “The Wedding Cake.” They had, by any standards, a very civilized marriage. She was a sweet, sweet, pretty woman with a quiet, impeccable air.

  She was the soul of discretion, appearing like a surprise bundle of softness between his lightly starched sheets, dissolving into the darkness like a dream before deeper sleep. She was wild and tender, all silk and fire, and what she drew out of him was something finer than he had ever believed himself to be.

  He didn’t know when he had started to love her, or where it would lead. He only knew that she made him want to be healed. Like Soames, she had a husband. Unlike Soames and Henri, Helen and Ransom Brisbane had understood the purposes and parameters of their marriage. For reasons Averill didn’t quite grasp, or need to, Helen and Ransom would remain for all public appearances husband and wife until their daughter Rhea Anne was married.

  Averill assumed that the issue was respectability. However, he would later discover that respectability was a by-product of a far more pragmatic agenda.

  All this had evolved in se
cret during his first year in town. However, it wasn’t until he found himself listening to Soames’s hollow arias about their future in a glass house overlooking the Pacific Ocean that Averill began to realize how strong his attachment to Helen had become. Soames was too strident, too capricious and self-absorbed. There was a disingenuous quality about every grand thing she said and did. It was all the worst or the best with her; it was all deafening roar or stone silence, all frenzied, excessive ecstasy or “excruciation,” her favorite word. Or maybe it was just that no matter how hard he worked to please her, she was eternally dissatisfied, somehow ungenerous in spite of her lavish gifts and, in the end, perpetually unwilling to surrender control in any situation.

  It had to end. He had to find a graceful exit, and not just from Soames, but the church as well. He had a vague and gathering sense of a real life with a real woman who he was beginning to hope would be Helen Brisbane. When the day came that she was free, he wanted to be wholly available to pursue her.

  By now he had also begun to perceive the undercurrent of panic that fueled Soames’s excesses. She was in more trouble than she had ever revealed to him, though he almost thought it was something inside of her. Whatever it was, and whatever raveling messes her languishing marriage would create, Averill was determined to avoid them.

  All of which was heavy on his mind the morning of Christmas Eve when he walked out the front door in time to see a wrecker towing his Cutlass away.

  “Averill, Henri’s lost his mind!” Soames was on the telephone, sounding a little insane herself. “He’s dumping me for his little screw-around bitch!” she sobbed, as if he and she hadn’t made love almost every day for the last year.