The PMS Outlaws: An Elizabeth MacPherson Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Beside her Emma O. was putting the finishing touches on a fantasy watercolor depicting a dark-haired man with pointed ears gazing out a porthole at the rings of Saturn. Elizabeth was careful not to show any interest in this particular work, because Emma O. met any display of curiosity with an earnest and complete synopsis of whatever Star Trek episode had inspired her current drawing.

  The other members of the art therapy class drew abstract patterns or stick figures with varying degrees of skill and perseverance. Beulah McNeil made clumsy renderings of crosses entwined with flowers, often adorned with a carefully lettered Bible verse. Clifford Allen drew detailed maps and house plans in a tiny, secretive scrawl. Nobody bothered to ask him why.

  Elizabeth was pleased with herself for deciding to change her drawing habit. Perhaps, if art therapy meant anything at all, this departure was a step toward wellness. She pulled an envelope out of her pocket. “I got a letter from my brother, Bill, this morning,” she announced. “And I’ve decided to paint something different today.”

  The other members of the class gathered around her easel, their green artist smocks reflecting a rainbow of smeared paint. Elizabeth opened the envelope and handed a photograph around to her fellow artists, who made noises of polite interest as the photo passed from hand to hand.

  Clifford Allen was the first to comment on the snapshot. “Mount Vernon,” he said with that little sneer that never quite left his voice.

  “Mount Vernon is not made of brick!” said Elizabeth. “But you did get the state right. This house is also in Virginia. It was just purchased by my brother, Bill, who’s an attorney.”

  Clifford looked at the photo with more interest this time. “Some house! Looks like it would have a lot of valuable stuff in it.”

  Elizabeth hesitated between family pride and caution at arousing too much interest in her brother’s property. In group therapy sessions Clifford had disclosed the fact that he was a burglar. His outlaw trademark had been to defecate on the floor of each place he burgled, as a hostile memento for his victims. (“A housebreaker who isn’t housebroken!” Rose Hanelon had quipped. “I wish I could have written the headline for that story!”) Opinion among his fellow patients was divided over whether Clifford was really mentally disturbed, or whether he had got himself committed in an effort to avoid a lengthy jail term, but Lisa Lynn seemed to speak for the majority when she announced that anyone who relieved themselves on strangers’ living room rugs was not what she would call sane.

  “It is a lovely house, isn’t it?” Elizabeth smiled politely as she took the photograph back from Clifford. “But I’m afraid that the house cost so much that they probably can’t afford anything worth stealing,” she told Clifford. “My brother lives here, but it’s also his law office. I thought I’d do a painting of it and give it to him for a present.”

  Rose Hanelon looked at the photograph. “Impressive,” she grunted. “Looks like quite a find. You don’t want to show that photo to old Mrs. Nicholson, though.”

  “Why not?”

  Rose shrugged. “She cries when she sees large, expensive houses. You know the magazines that have decorating articles or photo spreads on gardens? We have to hide them from her. Architectural Digest makes her sob.”

  “Oh, me, too!” said Elizabeth. “Some of the contemporary designs in there are simply dreadful. Especially the ones in the Southwestern style, where they have huge stucco buildings with pastel trim, set in landscapes of rock gardens and cacti. To me they look like Ramada Inns set down in boxes of cat litter.”

  “Southern woman,” said Rose. “You think anything that doesn’t have Corinthian columns is a waste of money. But I think that Mrs. Nicholson cries over the houses she likes. Beats me why, though.”

  “Well,” said Elizabeth, “she seems to be in her own world. At breakfast this morning she was reading the hallmarks on her fork. When I asked what she was doing, she explained them to me in a very pleasant, lucid tone: Lion passant for sterling, capital letter signifying the year, thistle for Scotland.…”

  Rose Hanelon frowned. “The flatware here is institutional stainless steel.”

  “I know.”

  They sighed, wondering what the rest of Cherry Hill looked like in Mrs. Nicholson’s version of reality.

  Matt Pennington was the last to arrive for class. He wandered in, looking a little dazed, as he always did on the days when he had electro-convulsive therapy. He took out his pens and drawing pad, staring at it thoughtfully. Then he looked up and saw Elizabeth watching him. “Hello!” he said. “You must be new here! My name is Matt Pennington.”

  “Yes, Matt, I know,” said Elizabeth. “We’ve met.” In point of fact they had been sitting next to each other in group for more than a week. By now she knew a good deal about Matt’s childhood, his education, his career goals, and his inner fantasy life. She knew that in art class he drew designs for ships and skyscrapers with the practiced skill of a trained architect. What she did not know was why he did not seem to recognize her now.

  “We’ve met?” Matt smiled in polite disbelief. “I think I’d remember if we had. Attractive young lady like you. What did you say your name was?”

  “Elizabeth …” she said on a rising inflection, expecting him to supply the rest, but he simply smiled at her and nodded.

  “Pleased to meet you, Elizabeth,” he said. “I guess I’ll see you around.”

  Elizabeth turned to Clifford Allen who was watching her with his usual sneer. “What was that all about?” she said softly. “He’s been sitting next to me in group for days now!”

  Clifford gave her a cold smile. “Guess you’re not memorable.”

  Between her family connections and her own career, A. P. Hill thought she must know every attorney in Richmond. That was impossible, of course. When the state legislature was in session, the lawyers in Richmond must outnumber the pigeons, but it still seemed that she was acquainted with a great many of their number. Occasionally, this was a pleasant circumstance. After a long, tedious day in court, she had a fair chance of finding someone to have dinner with, and if her companions ended up talking shop, that was all right, too. Powell Hill’s stock of nonlegal small talk was generally exhausted after three remarks about the weather.

  She had just finished an excellent dinner in fashionable Shockoe Slip, in a restaurant called The Frog and the Redneck, a trendy establishment whose cuisine was more politically correct than its name. Her dinner companions had explained that they loved to entertain guests there, because the name of the restaurant fit them so well. The “frog” was Katy DeBruhl, who as an undergraduate had been a French major. After law school, Katy had worked as a staff member for A. P. Hill’s Cousin Stinky, as the family privately called Virginia’s attorney general. Now she worked as a prosecutor for the Commonwealth Attorney’s office in Richmond. Her “redneck” companion was Lewis Paine, a tall, sandy-haired police lieutenant from Martinsville, who preferred stock-car racing to opera.

  “You seem awfully far away tonight, Powell,” said Katy DeBruhl. “Are you worried about your case?”

  “No.” A. P. Hill took a sip of her wine. The case had been straightforward enough. She worked Microsoft hours to prepare for every contingency, and then she went into court with the attitude of a pit bull, and everything worked out to the client’s satisfaction. Her legal business in Richmond did not trouble her. The news did.

  “I was thinking about a story I heard on the radio,” she told her dinner companions, trying to sound casual. “A woman lawyer somewhere down south broke her client out of prison, and apparently the two fugitives have committed some robberies along the way. The suspects are still at large. Two women our age. One of them’s a lawyer.” She told DeBruhl and Paine about the PMS Outlaws, carefully omitting the fact that she was personally acquainted with one of them. “I suppose it fascinates me because I have never heard of anybody so completely trashing a charmed life. I’m referring to Patricia Purdue. The lawyer. She’s our age, Katy. She had a promising l
egal career, a bright future. She was attractive and smart. And now she’s thrown it all away forever.”

  Katy DeBruhl nodded. “Forever is right. Aiding in the escape of a prisoner is a felony. If she is convicted, she’ll never practice law again. That is a waste. Does it make any sense to you, Lewis?”

  Police Lieutenant Paine shrugged. “I don’t find it rational, if that’s what you mean, but in my job, I see so much stupidity that nothing surprises me any more. Except for one thing, this fugitive story isn’t particularly unusual.”

  “What, lawyers breaking clients out of jail?” Powell Hill’s expression suggested that he had uttered blasphemy. “Not unusual?”

  “Not specifically that,” said Paine. “I meant women becoming emotionally involved with prisoners. Female guards will get crushes on the prisoners. They become pen pals with them, slip the guys nude photos of themselves. The jailers find them all the time when they do shakedowns of the cells. A jailer once told me that it isn’t unusual for women to drive into the parking lot of the jail and … um …” Remembering that his dinner companions were female, Paine edited his remarks. “… they expose themselves to the prisoners looking out through their barred windows. I don’t mean wives and girlfriends of the prisoners. I mean college girls and suburban matrons in expensive cars. I guess it’s a dangerous thrill: taunting the human animals in the zoo.”

  Powell shuddered. “Is that true?”

  “Happens all the time.”

  “Well, it’s insane,” she said. “Killers. Sociopaths. Aside from the degrading aspect of it, which goes without saying, I cannot think of any stupider way to ask for trouble.”

  “It’s the Little Red Riding Hood syndrome,” said Katy DeBruhl. “Some women like to walk with wolves for the emotional high you get from the danger. I’m not saying I approve of it, but I can see how it might happen. Some women like to live close to the edge. The tiger is behind bars so it’s safe to flaunt yourself at him.”

  A. P. Hill nodded. “You have a point, Paine, about the emotional attraction of prisoners. I remember reading about a woman in Florida who married Ted Bundy while he was on trial for murdering more than two dozen women. Go figure.”

  Lewis Paine was staring at the flickering light in the glass candleholder in the center of the table. “Little Red Riding Hood,” he mused. “I knew a nun once who belonged to an order that visits prisoners as part of their charity work. This was years ago—I forget the name of the order. They wore those hats like the Flying Nun, though. Anyhow, Sister What’s-Her-Name fell in love with one of the prisoners. An armed robber. He swore he was innocent, of course, and she believed him. I mean, who’d lie to a nun?”

  “Every man in that prison,” muttered A. P. Hill.

  “Right. Of course. She didn’t know that, though. She was a sweet, trusting woman. She thought the guy had been framed. Anyhow, she wrote to the governor, held press conferences on the robber’s behalf, swore he was innocent, and said that she would personally shepherd him back into society.”

  “What did the Church think of that?”

  “I imagine that someone tried to talk her out of it, but they didn’t get very far. She resigned from the order, or whatever it is they do to get out of being a nun. She was plain, plump, and forty-something, and she’d been in the convent since she was eighteen. She knew nothing about living in the present decade. Chronologically she was forty, but really, she’d turned eighteen about twenty-two times. Still a naive kid at heart. So she left the only home she’d known for twenty-some years to stand by her man.” He sighed. “We joked about it at the time. Said that both of them got paroled the same week.”

  A. P. Hill looked up. “The nun got the prisoner released? She actually got him out?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Paine. “He was only a robber. Hadn’t killed anybody. No big deal. Prisons are overcrowded anyhow. They were probably glad for an excuse to turn him loose.”

  “Heaven help her,” muttered Katy.

  “One look into those dead shark eyes of his should have told her that he was past praying for,” Paine went on. “Classic sociopath. Knows what you want to hear, and gives it to you, pitch-perfect. You must have defended guys like that.”

  They nodded.

  “But, yes, she got him out. He’d told her they were going to get married as soon as he was released. She picked him up at the prison on Friday. They had a weekend honeymoon without benefit of clergy—and Monday morning she woke up in the motel to find that the Robber Bridegroom was gone, taking every cent she had along with him.”

  The two lawyers looked at each other. Their reactions were a study in contrasts. A. P. Hill narrowed her eyes and set her jaw, as if she were imagining herself in that situation, and picturing in Technicolor the retribution that would follow. Katy DeBruhl brushed away a tear with the back of her hand, and said, “The poor Sister! Did she return to the convent?”

  “No. I don’t know whether she tried to or not. She certainly wasn’t equipped to manage on her own, though. I guess she knew that. We found her in the motel room with an empty bottle of pills on the nightstand. No note. I mean, what was there to say? The robber’s still out there somewhere. Technically, of course, it wasn’t murder, so we couldn’t take him back into custody. I’m sure he returned to business as usual.”

  Katy’s eyes flashed. “I’d have been tempted to stash a bag of heroin in his hip pocket and bust him for drugs just to get him off the street.”

  “Nah,” said Paine. “He’d already ruined one life. Why make it two?”

  A. P. Hill was still thinking about the PMS Outlaws. “So you think Purdue, the lawyer in the news, became emotionally involved with the woman prisoner, and that’s why she helped her escape?”

  “All I know about the story is what you’ve told me,” Paine reminded her. “That doesn’t qualify me to make a judgment, but if I had to make a guess based on those facts, I’d say it was an elopement.”

  “But they’re picking up guys!”

  The lieutenant shrugged. “That’s just business. Just a way to make a fast buck. Nothing personal about it.”

  A. P. Hill digested this information. After a few moments’ thought she said, “How would you go about catching them?”

  “Are they headed this way?”

  “Not that I know of. It’s a theoretical question. I know how to defend suspects. I don’t know much about the process of capturing them. Say you’re FBI, Lewis. What do you do to apprehend the suspects?”

  Paine laughed. “It would give me a good excuse to hang out in bars, wouldn’t it? I could sit around hoping to get picked up by two women.” He looked hopefully at his dinner companions.

  “Don’t even think about it,” said Katy DeBruhl.

  “Seriously,” said A. P. Hill.

  “Okay.” Paine’s smile vanished, as he shifted into the thought patterns of pursuit. “What would I do? I’d get a list of all the close friends and relatives of both women, and I’d ask local law enforcement people to keep an eye on their houses, just in case the two ladies stop by for an unannounced visit, and I might tap their phone lines, too. If the renegade lawyer has a telephone calling card, I’d get the phone company to give me a list of the numbers she’s calling. I’d check the purchase on her credit cards, if she’s dumb enough to keep using them.”

  “I think she’s using other people’s credit cards,” said Katy.

  “That works, too, as long as we know their names, and I presume we do, if the victims reported the robberies to the police. Every time one of the women uses a stolen credit card, you can put a pin in the map, and after a while you ought to be able to tell where they’re headed.”

  “And what happens when you find them?”

  Lewis Paine was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Well, you hope they are unarmed and that they’re willing to listen to reason.”

  “And if not?”

  He shrugged. “If not … Well, there was a poem written in the Thirties by another lady outlaw.…

/>   “Someday they’ll go down together.

  They’ll bury them side by side;

  To some it will be grief; to the law a relief,

  But it’s Death for Bonnie and Clyde.”

  “Is this your photograph, young lady?”

  Elizabeth looked up from her sketch to see the stern leathery face of Hillman Randolph looming over her. The old man was brandishing the snapshot of Bill’s new house, which had been making the rounds of the art therapy class. “Yes,” said Elizabeth with careful politeness. Hillman Randolph’s expression was always one of unremitting severity, and his scarred face did not help matters. It was impossible to tell if he was angry by looking at him. Elizabeth decided to risk no further comment until she could gauge his mood.

  “I know this house,” Mr. Randolph said, tapping the photo. “It’s in Virginia.”

  Elizabeth sighed. “It is not Mount Vernon.”

  He scowled. “Any fool can see that! Never said it was. This house is in Danville, Virginia, or near it, anyhow.”

  She stared up at the old man in astonishment. “Yes, it is, but how did you know that?”

  The old man beamed triumphantly. “I knew it! My job used to take me all over the Southeast. Never will forget that house!”

  Elizabeth tried to picture Mr. Randolph as a young traveling salesman, but unless the old curmudgeon had been more genial in his youth, she didn’t think he could have been much good at it. “What did you do for a living?” she asked.

  “Well, I guess it’s all right to tell you now. After all, it was a long time ago, and I’m retired,” he drawled. “I was one of the government men. Federal law enforcement.”