“Yeah, well, I gotta get some rest sometime, sugar. Had to do my hair. It’s not like we’re busy . . .”
“You’d better not be cattin’ around, Shel.”
“At this hour of the morning?” Her eyes widened, and she pushed a strand of stringy hair out of her eyes. “And me a married lady.”
“Some excuse for a wife you are,” he muttered. “Worse at that than you are at being a waitress. Cattin’ around with half the county. I don’t know what I was thinking, divorcing Cora for the likes of you. I should have listened to your ex-husband.”
“Which one?” She was still looking around, and the conversation sounded so pat that it must have been one the two of them had often, because nothing in her face or voice indicated that she was anything but bored, that is, until she recognized me.
I recognized her too. Her cheeks and her lipstick were redder than when I had seen her last, and now there wasn’t a drizzle to make her bleached blond hair frizz up, or a cloth coat to smooth her shape, but I knew where I had seen her last: in the mist on that grassy hillside after Albert’s funeral.
Her smile wavered for a moment, but then she gave me a cheerful nod. “Well, hello there, Missus Sheriff. Haven’t seen you around here as I recall. What’s going on here? Anything to worry about?”
Before I could answer her, her irate husband slapped his hand down on the table again. “Well, Sheriff? I haven’t got all day. Are you going to arrest this little punk or not?”
I stood up to go. “I’m taking him with me anyhow. Come on, Davis Howell. We’ll get you sorted out somewhere else.”
The waitress seemed to lose interest in all of us then. She pouted for a moment, as if waiting to see if anybody else was going to speak up, and then with a shrug, she turned and walked behind the counter and through a swinging door that led to the kitchen.
I took Davis Howell by the elbow and walked him to the door of the diner. “Come on, let’s see if we can find an alternative to robbing trash bins. You can’t take care of a little child all by yourself.”
“I wasn’t expecting that man—the cook—to be out there at the trash bins. I was hoping it would be her again.”
“Which her?”
“Shelley. The blonde you was just talkin’ to. She was out back there the other morning with some man, and she gimme a hunk of bread and cheese to clear out and not say nothing about it. I was hoping she’d give me some chores to do so’s I could earn some money.”
“You’re too young to be having to worry about that. Come on.”
“Are you taking me to jail?”
“I would if we had the makings of a decent meal there, but since we don’t I’m going to turn you over to the minister of my church. He’s bound to know somebody in the congregation who can look after you and your sister, maybe even give you a home.” If that failed, the government people would come and put them in an orphanage, but I thought they’d be better off staying around here.
When I got back to the office Falcon was still at the desk. “Everything go all right at the diner, ma’am? Ike must have been on the warpath again, but I figured he wouldn’t hit you. He’s not above hitting women, but not you.”
“Hitting women?”
He nodded. “Every so often Ike and that wife of his go for each other’s throats, and then Mildred—the other waitress—calls us to come over and break it up. Who got the worst of it this time?”
“He caught a kid pilfering the trash bins. That’s why he called. But he and his wife had words while I was there. Looks like they deserve each other.”
“Glad to hear he wasn’t walloping her. That Shelley is a handful. ’Course he should have known that when he married her, because fooling around with him broke up her marriage in the first place, but, believe it or not, he is crazed with jealousy.”
“Maybe that’s why.”
“I guess. He says he’ll cut her throat if he catches her with another man, which I don’t understand, because he must have known what she was like. If he wanted a good woman he should have married one. At least he hasn’t caught her—yet. I just hope he doesn’t kill her. Then we’d have to arrest him, and I’d sure miss the diner.”
If there was a murder case that everybody was talking about that spring, it was the one that was about to end in execution in New Jersey. It had been four years since the Lindbergh baby had been kidnapped and found buried in a shallow grave not far from his parents’ mansion. It had taken the investigators more than two years to find the kidnapper. Then came the trial, which was a three-ring circus of reporters and newsreel photographers covering every minute of the proceedings, because everybody in the world seemed to want to know all the details about the famous aviator’s family tragedy. Finally, though, Bruno Hauptmann had been convicted of the baby’s murder and sentenced to death. He went to the electric chair in early April, and some people claimed he was innocent, but, after all, somebody had to pay for that poor child’s death, so nobody objected to the execution too much that I ever heard. Anyhow, that’s what people were talking about that spring.
All of us talked about the Lindbergh case every now and then, when the paper reported something more important than what the condemned man had for breakfast, but Roy Phillips was the only one of us who really got interested in the story. It wasn’t the ghoulish details or the question of Bruno Hauptmann’s guilt that mattered to him—it was the technology involved in the execution.
“An electric chair.” He set the newspaper down next to his coffee mug. “Don’t that beat all? I sure would like to see that thing in action, boys.”
Tyree glanced at the newspaper’s drawing of the chair and shrugged. “Killing a man with electricity. I wonder if it hurts.”
Roy grinned. “Not for long.”
“Well, you’d have to sit there and wait while they strapped you in and fiddled with the controls, wouldn’t you? I reckon all told a rope is quicker.”
“Depends on if the executioner knows what he’s doing. They say that if the hangman puts the knot in the wrong place when he slips the noose around the prisoner’s neck, it can take a good quarter of an hour for the man to die. Strangulation. Twisting in the wind. Mighty slow. And not many hangmen would know what they were doing, would they? Most lawmen don’t hang more than one or two prisoners in their whole career. The electric chair wouldn’t be so difficult to—” he grinned, “to get the hang of.”
Tyree was never in favor of changing things that weren’t broke. “Yeah, but I’ve heard that the first jolt of electricity doesn’t always kill the condemned man either. That could take awhile too. Stop. Listen for the heartbeat. Start over.”
“Seems cleaner, though,” said Roy. “More modern, I guess. Just a bunch of white-coated technicians in a little room with a switch on the wall—that’s how I picture it, anyhow. I wonder why we don’t use an electric chair in Tennessee?”
“Maybe they don’t think we have electricity down here.”
“Electrocution would be easier, though, don’t you reckon? Just flip a switch instead of having to build a platform and fit up a trapdoor, and put the rope around the poor fellow’s neck? And then there’s all the calculations to contend with.”
“What calculations?” I think they’d forgotten I was there, because they both looked startled when I chimed in, but I thought I’d better ask, because anything within law enforcement was my business nowadays.
Roy glanced over at me and reddened a bit, looking like he wished he hadn’t brought it all up, but before he could change the subject I asked him again, and after he hemmed and hawed he finally said, “Oh, the calculations . . . Well, Sheriff Tyler always said there was a formula you had to follow before you strung somebody up.”
“Did he ever have to hang a prisoner?”
“If he did, it was before my time. Maybe a long time back when he was a deputy. I don’t know. But he knew right much about
it, seems like. Maybe he heard people talking about it.”
“What did he say about calculations, Roy?”
“According to him, it had to do with ratios. He said you had to match the weight of the condemned man to the length of the rope, because if you got the ratio wrong—well, never you mind. It’s not something you’ll ever have to worry about. But from what I’ve heard, an electric chair would be easier on everybody involved.”
“It’s not up to us, though, is it? The state legislature gets to decide that.”
Roy nodded. “They’d probably be more interested in costs than in making things easy on anybody.”
“Just throwing a switch,” said Tyree. “Can’t get much easier than that for the executioner. I don’t see any point in making it easy on the prisoner, though. That fellow they had on death row in New Jersey killed a helpless little baby. I reckon I’d turn on the juice on him myself and not lose a minute’s sleep over it.”
I thought about it. Maybe I had never seen an execution, but I had watched Albert die, and that was bad enough. I couldn’t imagine having been the cause of it. “I don’t think it would be easy to kill a man no matter how you went about it.”
Tyree may have known what was in my mind. “Well, Sheriff, you’d just have to bear in mind that anybody an executioner is called on to—well, I won’t say kill, because a legal execution isn’t murder. It’s not personal. Anyhow, the murderer has it coming. The way I see it, nothing you could do to the condemned man is a patch on what he put his victim through when he committed his crime.”
“And at least he knows it’s coming,” said Roy. “Your convicted killer has got months to say his good-byes to his family, wrap up his earthly business, and make his peace with God, if he’s a mind to. The victims had none of that, did they? There they were, looking forward to many more years of living, same as anybody, and then, out of the blue, the poor unsuspecting souls are put down like so many stockyard calves, with no choice in the matter, no time to settle anything, and no lawyers to try to get them a second chance. I’d feel sorry for the victims if I were you.”
I reckon most lawmen feel that way. They wouldn’t be lawmen if they didn’t. I could see the sense of it, too. Maybe Albert hadn’t had a chance to say good-bye when he was dying, stricken with pneumonia like he was, but at least I had most of a week to come to terms with his passing. It would have been a deal worse if I had just opened the door one day to find a stranger on the doorstep telling me my husband was gone. But still . . .
“I don’t say that a convicted killer doesn’t have it coming, Roy. I’m just saying that I’d find it hard to be the one to make it happen. I know the law wouldn’t count it as murder. It’s called protecting society when a peace officer does it on the orders of the court, and I agree with that. Even the church sanctions punishing the guilty. But—I don’t know. I guess I’d wonder if taking that life was any of my business. Judging somebody, I mean. Without knowing all the facts.”
“What if you did know all the facts?”
“Well, if I thought that I could stop them from hurting other people, then maybe I could. If I knew the facts for myself.”
“But you don’t have to know! That’s why the state’s executioner can do it, ma’am.” Roy would worry a subject worse than a dog with a bone. “Because he’s just carrying out orders from the decisions made by somebody else. The way I see it, if you were to go trying to decide for yourself who deserves it and who doesn’t, why, vengeance would be likely to creep into the mixture. And then justice is bound to get tainted. I wouldn’t want to have any say-so at all in the matter of who gets executed. No choice, no blame.”
Tyree nodded. “That’s right. If we wanted to take responsibility for the law’s decisions, we’d have the judge’s job—or yours.”
They both laughed then, and we talked of other things while we finished our coffee. It was just an idle conversation to pass the time, that’s all. Shooting the breeze about a case in New Jersey that had nothing at all to do with us.
Except, as it turns out, it did.
The commissioners generally left us alone, too, at first, for which I was uncommonly grateful. I guess they were waiting to see if I could handle the job or not, or whether the deputies could manage to work for a woman. When neither of those things proved to be a problem, they still held off, giving me time to decide whether or not I wanted to quit on account of having young children to raise. But if anything, I was growing more sure of myself as acting sheriff, better at making decisions and faster with the assignments and the paperwork. I got accustomed to talking to strangers and making them believe that they could trust us to take care of their troubles. In fact, as the days passed I was beginning to think that the job wouldn’t give me much trouble at all.
If only Lonnie Varden hadn’t killed his wife.
THE KILLING
She wasn’t looking at him, or even at the uneven path beneath her feet. He had warned her once to watch where she was going, but she was too busy looking at the trees, her new camera dangling from a strap on her wrist.
“Look at that redbud over there under the poplars. With the sun hitting it, it looks like stained glass. The trees are mostly bare, but the forest is aflame. See the new leaves? The ones that are the shade of yellow green that only lasts a week or so.”
“Yes. You said that last year, too, Ceil.”
“But don’t you think it’s glorious here in the spring? I’ve lived here all my life, but every April the beauty of it still takes me unawares.”
“I guess I stopped noticing.”
“But you’re an artist! You should notice it more than anybody.”
“Used to be.” He had worked at the sawmill for more than a year, and the feeling of being connected to some universal ideal of art was long gone. The only painting he was expected to do anymore was to hand-letter the signs for the office and the prices on cards for each lot of lumber. He had wanted to settle down with Celia, but when they did marry, life changed for both of them more than either had quite expected. By the time he had finished painting the mural of the frontier fort on the post office wall they had settled into being a couple, recognized as such by the community. By then, avoiding marriage—even if he had wanted to—would have been like swimming upstream against a strong current. Celia Pasten was intelligent and easy to talk to, and she thought he was a wonderful artist—all qualities that had been lacking in the girls he had previously known. With her he was no longer lonely, and that counted most.
At their wedding reception in the church hall, when one of the Greers went through the receiving line, she leaned in close and whispered in the bride’s ear, “You see, Celia? Dropping that old knife at the Dumb Supper didn’t do you a bit of harm. Here you are, married after all!”
With a frozen smile, Celia went on shaking hands, but she remembered very little of the reception after that. She would tell her new husband about that silly courting tradition. Someday.
Remembering the Dumb Supper made her wonder if her new husband really had been a gift from fate, conjured up by the ancient ritual. He wasn’t very tall, but he was as handsome as she could have wished for. He wasn’t rich or trained for a grand profession, like medicine or law, but he was an artist, which was more than a profession, really. To her that meant he had been touched with some sort of divine gift for creation; the less she understood his vocation, the more she was in awe of it. Aside from that, her new husband seemed gentle and serious, and perhaps most wonderful of all, Celia thought he looked rather like a prince out of a fairy tale. Because she had never thought of herself as anything but timid and plain, Lonnie’s air of quiet confidence and his calmness around people seemed as great an accomplishment—and as difficult—as wing walking or sword swallowing: fascinating to watch, but not something you’d ever attempt yourself.
She had known she would have to resign from teaching when she married, but she hadn’t q
uite realized how much her job defined who she was. Before she became a bride she had been the community’s schoolmarm, respected for her knowledge and her independence, as exalted and different from the other women as a pagan priestess, but now she had surrendered all that to become just another wife, no better than the women who had not gone to college, perhaps even outranked by them, because they had children and she did not. It chafed a bit to be dependent on someone else, no matter how beloved, when you had been accustomed to earning your own money and spending it as you pleased, without having to take anyone else’s preferences into account.
For his part, marriage meant settling down. People thought that artists could draw anywhere, anytime, and maybe some of them could, but for him the unfettered, itinerant life of a freelance painter had turned out to be the part of the vocation he had valued most. When he lost that, the desire to create art seemed to go with it. He didn’t miss it at first. He was happy with Celia, and he would not say that he regretted choosing a life with her over the one he had before, but sometimes he wished he didn’t see his future as a straight line leading directly through the decades to the grave—no turns, no shadows, no surprises, except, perhaps, unpleasant ones. Maybe that was why he had done what he had—just to put a curve in that monotonous straight line.
And now he couldn’t think of anything else. There must be some way to tell her, but he had been unable to find one. The burden of all this worry had driven all thoughts of nature and beauty out of his mind.
“Spring doesn’t inspire you?”
He shrugged. “Not particularly. Anyhow, it doesn’t last long.”
“No. Two weeks at most, but I wish I could make it last forever.”
He looked down at the little Brownie camera his wife was holding. “Well, I guess that’s what cameras are for. So you’ll remember. But a blurry little snapshot in black-and-white? I don’t think that’s gonna do it, honey.”
“Well, the pictures won’t mean anything to anybody else, but at least they will help me remember how it was until next year. I wish you’d draw a picture of spring for me.” She pushed a bare branch out of her way, and stepped off the path, aiming the camera at the pink-flowered tree lit by a shaft of sunlight. She took a few more steps, peered through the viewfinder, went closer and backed away again, turning the camera this way and that. After a few more tries, she looked back at him, frowning. “I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Without color, it might just look like ordinary leaves. I’m trying to think in black and white.”
Prayers the Devil Answers Page 20
