Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 07 (16 page)

Humming happily, Brother Verber went into the bathroom of the rectory and studied his reflection in the mirror, trying to see himself for the first time just like Miss Katie Hawk would do shortly. He’d read her interview in Country Cavalcade, where she’d talked about her childhood, and he’d been mopping his eyes and blowing his nose before he finished it. Her pa’d been a coal miner before his health failed, but then he’d taken to preaching at a little white clapboard church up in the mountains. Katie had told the interviewer how this had given her the strength to battle the wickedness that lurked on every corner of Nashville.

Wouldn’t it be something if Miss Katie Hawk would deliver that same message from the pulpit of the Voice of the Almighty Lord Assembly Hall? Why, they could even charge a small admission fee to those who’d pack the pews to hear her preach. He pictured her in a white robe, her black hair straight and unadorned, her face scrubbed of makeup, her eyes boring into the souls of the sinners.

He went into the bedroom and sat down to figure out how much they could make if they charged five dollars a head. He finally resorted to a pencil and a scrap of paper, his forehead crinkled as he struggled with the multiplication (twenty-eight pews times twelve sinners … ) and his lips moving silently (two times eight is sixteen, carry the one … ) as his mind grew green with wondrous possibilities (plus eleven in the choir times five), which is why he failed to see the figure hurry past the rectory and cut through the pasture that paralleled County 102.

“Thanks for supper,” Dahlia said as she crammed her cowboy hat on her head and yanked the cord so tightly it cut into her chins. “It was mighty good, but I guess my appetite ain’t what it used to be.”

Eilene hugged as much of her as she could. “It’s gonna be all right, honey. Soon as we get the wagon and loudspeakers paid off, you can keep all the money and Kevin won’t have to work so late every night. Have you told him how much you’re making these days?”

“He ain’t asked.” Dahlia sighed clear down to the soles of her white cowboy boots, picked up her fringed shoulder bag, and trudged out the door without so much as a belch of farewell to her in-laws. There wasn’t any call to hurry home to an empty love nest, she thought, as she turned the key and waited until the engine quit coughing and settled into a drone. She deftly maneuvered the wagon around and headed up Finger Lane to the highway.

Most of the time driving the Matt-Mobile made her feel important, especially when she was pulling a wagonload of tourists who were jabbery as blue jays. Now that it was cold and dark and the wagon was empty, she figured she looked pretty dam stupid. And it was all Kevin’s fault for refusing to take the job just so he could spend his evenings with his Farberville floozy.

She negotiated the turn and drove past the souvenir shoppe, gazing sadly at the Matt Montana mannequin in the front window. Music was blaring inside the pool hall, but she didn’t so much as turn her head as she drove on. The crafts boutique was closed, as was the antique store. She saw Perkins in the launderette, but he didn’t return her desultory wave and she drove on. There was a night-light shining behind the yellow-and-white gingham curtains of the PD. She didn’t even slow down. The SuperSaver was open, but the parking lot was dotted with only a few cars, one of which appeared to have two flat tires. She drove on.

Things were a sight livelier at Matt Montana’s Hometown Bar & Grill—not that she or anybody else had laid eyes on Matt hisself. What was the good of having a celebrity in town if he turned out to be a recluse like Louisa Ferncliff Buchanon, who lived so far up in the hills that she had to walk backward to get to town and had been spotted only four times in the last twenty-three years?

Dahlia downshifted, turned, and drove up the hill past Raz Buchanon’s shack. One of these nights she’d stop and buy ajar of hooch, tease her hair, and put on her red dress. She had plenty of old boyfriends in town. Wouldn’t Kevin be sorry when he searched high and low until he found her down at the bar, seeing double and feeling single!

She nearly sideswiped a car parked halfway in the ditch as she imagined herself with Matt Montana, who walked into her daydream and held out his hand to her like she’d driven up to the castle in a pumpkin. Everybody else stepped back. A quarter tinkled in the jukebox, and slowly the strains of “You’re a Detour on the Highway to Heaven” filled the room, but this time, Matt began to croon to her as if they were all alone. “I got lost in the glare of your headlights,” he sang with such tenderness she had to bite her lip to keep from bawling, “and went joyridin’ just for the view.”

Operating on automatic pilot, she parked the Matt-Mobile in the side yard, put the tractor key in her shoulder bag and dug out the house key, and drifted onto the porch, her privates tingling as his voice caressed her like a bathtub filled with scented water. And realized the front door was not only unlocked, but slightly ajar.

Someone was in there.

Down the road, one of Raz’s hounds bayed soulfully, and up on the ridge an owl screeched. Out back a critter rooted in crackly leaves. Barely audible were voices and car doors slamming in the parking lot of the bar and grill way down at the bottom of the hill. And from inside the house, someone let out a grunt of frustration.

She eased off the porch and took a step toward the gate, thinking she could hurry down to Raz’s and persuade him to grab his shotgun and come back with her. She stopped. The idea of miserable ol’ Raz Buchanon coming to her rescue was hard to swallow—especially when her lawfully wedded husband should be there to defend her.

Her imagination, well primed after the scene with Matt, shifted smoothly into overdrive. Inside the house was someone who knew that she went to bed alone every night, her arms empty, her feet as icy as a widow woman’s. He was a sex fiend, a hunchbacked pervert with one rheumy red eye, slobbery lips, warts like a toad, and gnarly hands that would bruise her tender flesh while he had his wicked way with her.

But she wasn’t some simpery princess in need of a fairy godmother to drag her out of the cinders and clean her up. No, ma’am, she was a respectable married woman, a dutiful granddaughter and daughter-in-law, and a Christian soldier since she was baptized in the muddy water of Boone Creek on her thirteenth birthday. That she’d lost her virginity that same night (and less than a mile upstream) had done nothing to deter her from enlisting in the rank and file of the Lord’s Army. Dahlia squared her shoulders, thrust out her jaw, tightened her fists, and tiptoed into the living room of her love nest.

Somewhere in the back the floor squeaked. The pervert was in the bedroom, naturally, his hairy hands pawing through her underwear, his drool spilling onto her pillow, his prick rigid and ready to attack her. Her lip curled in disgust, she went into the kitchen, took a skillet off the stove, and made her way cautiously across the living room. Her breathing was ragged, but all she could do was hope that he couldn’t hear it—or if he did, that he was so blinded by lechery that he’d misinterpret it.

The skillet poised above her head, she opened the bedroom door. Her white-clad body filled the space; the fringe on her vest twittered and twirled, and countless swirls of sequins shimmered in the weak light from the utility pole out back. The pervert spun around from the dresser, his hands thrown high, his face distorted with surprise as he confronted the ghost of Nashville past or present present. For him, there was no future. “Aaarugulaaaa,” he gurgled as he lunged forward.

She beaned him neatly and he crumpled to the floor.

Dropping the skillet beside him, Dahlia went into the living room and switched on the light, then continued into the kitchen, took a beer from the refrigerator, and downed it in one celebratory gulp. After a burp of pride that might have originated from the distant past when an ancestor had brought down a woolly mammoth with a swing of a club, she took another beer and sat down on the sofa to wait until her breathing eased and her heart stopped racing. Wouldn’t Kevin Fitzgerald Buchanon’s expression be priceless when he came home and found the one-eyed, hunchbacked pervert sprawled in the bedroom!

This might not happen for a long while, she realized as she squinted at the clock her second cousin Velda had brought all the way back from Memphis as a wedding present. According to Elvis’s outstretched arms, it was not yet nine o’clock. Kevin hadn’t made it home before midnight in more than a week. In the meantime, what was she supposed to do if the pervert woke up and made another attempt to ravish her? She set the beer on the end table and went into the bedroom to truss him up like a rodeo calf and set him out on the porch so Kevin would trip over him.

She stepped over an outstretched arm and took a belt and handful of scarves from her closet, stepped back over it to fetch adhesive tape from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and scissors from a drawer in the kitchen, and returned to the bedroom. Only then did she turn on the overhead light to take a look at her trophy.

The scarves, belt, tape, and scissors fell out of her limp hands. He had not one eye but two, and they were plain brown. His hair was silver and combed back in a pompadour like a televangelist’s, and his gray jacket matched his trousers—and his socks. A blue silk handkerchief had fallen out of his pocket. If there’d been a hump, it’d deflated like a punctured balloon. His complexion was clear and smooth, but decidedly more bluish than when she’d seen him go into the Vacu-Pro office.

She dropped to her knees and grasped his shoulders. “I’m real sorry I thought you were a sex fiend, Mr. Dentha. If I’d known it was you, you can bet the farm I wouldn’t have hit you with the skillet.” She shook him so roughly that his head flopped against the floor. The sound was disturbingly hollow. “Wouldn’t you like to rest in the recliner until you feel up to snuff, Mr. Dentha? How about an ice bag for that lump on your head?”

The brown eyes remained blank and her offers of hospitality went unheeded.

Dahlia scooted away from him and leaned against the dresser, praying for one little blink, one twitch of a finger, one wheeze of breath. If anything, his face was as round and bland as a blueberry. And she, Dahlia (nee O’Neill) Buchanon had murdered him in her own home. The weapon lay beside him. It had come right out of her kitchen. Hers were the only fingerprints on it.

Why had Mr. Dentha come to the house? There wasn’t much use asking him, she thought as she let her head fall back against a drawer and squeezed her eyes closed so she wouldn’t have to look at his face. The answer was obvious. He’d come to beg Kevin to take back his job. Why’d he done that? Because she’d taken it upon herself to call the office and request a demonstration by their best vacuum cleaner salesman. She’d made it clear none of the others was half as good as Kevin, and Mr. Dentha had realized it.

She sniffled as she imagined Arly standing in the doorway, scowling down at the scene and barking out questions. Had he threatened her? Had he attempted to tie her to the bedposts with his fancy silk handkerchief? Had he laid so much as his pinkie on her? Or had she beaned him without giving him a chance to explain who he was and why he was there? Beaned him hard enough to kill him?

Her sparse knowledge of women’s prisons came from black-and-white movies, but she figured even in this Technicolor day and age they weren’t any less brutal than sleepover church camps. But what else could she expect after killing Mr. Dentha in cold blood? Her throat seized up and she shuddered in horror at the idea of chain gangs and blazing cotton fields and being chased through the swamps by bloodhounds and sadistic guards with whips.

“Mr. Dentha,” she wailed, “I sure am sorry I murdered you. Now I’m even sorrier about what I got no choice but to do.”

“Cock-a-doodle-doo!” crowed the rooster on the fence post behind Raz’s shack. Onomatopoeically speaking, the sound was more like that of a balky outboard motor than the traditional storybook simplification of easily pronounceable phonemes, but it had been one helluva night in Maggody and nobody was in the mood to be picky. As familiar as the sound was (the sun came up on a daily basis in Maggody), it went over real poorly that morning.

Grumbling, Raz burrowed under the limp gray pillow like a wood pussy going after a grub. He and Marjorie had been busy most of the night. A dadburned queer business it had proved to be, mebbe as queer as the time his uncle Melki Buchanon had shanghaied a wagonful of folks from a traveling freak show and locked ‘em in his barn. Raz still got choked up ever’ time he remembered the bearded lady.

Now the scrawny excuse for a rooster was carryin’ on like he’d discovered the sun. On a pallet in the comer, Marjorie snuffled uneasily and her legs twitched as she dreamed of shady, sylvan trails that led to caches of tasty acorns. To Raz’s relief, she quieted down; she was in a real ornery mood these days and needed her rest.

Dahlia yanked the blankets over her head and tried to go back to sleep. She’d been tormented by gawdawful nightmares ever since she got home and fell into bed just as Elvis pointed both arms at the twelve. She sat up partway and looked groggily through the doorway. Kevvie was sleeping like a baby on the recliner, but why shouldn’t he? He hadn’t murdered anybody in cold blood.

Ruby Bee wiggled around until the plastic curler stopped cutting into her ear. She’d been so tired she couldn’t see straight after she shooed out the last customers, and she’d wasted no time getting ready for bed. Once her face was covered with moisturizer and her blistered hands dotted with medicine and tucked into cotton gloves, she’d fluffed her pillow, folded the bedspread at the foot of the bed, and checked to make sure the alarm clock was set. This was the exact moment when the boys in the units across the lot started up a raucous jam session that lasted long past the time when the moon dropped behind the ridge. If she owned a shotgun, they’d have been able to piss in sixteen different directions at the same time.

Brother Verber opened one eye and peered at the clock, then scooted toward the foot of the bed until only the top of his head was visible. One of the perks of his job was that hardly ever did a sinner come a-knockin’ at his door before noon. This was only fitting since he toiled on Sundays and all your major holidays. Didn’t he lead a prayer service every Fourth of July, with the choir holding sparklers as they sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and the entire congregation sharing a spiritual climax when he shot off roman candles from the pulpit?