I have made my peace with God, and firmly believe in an hour I will be in a far better place. If you can bring yourself to do it after what you have learned, please look in on Wynona and Trey occasionally. They deserve far more than they have received. I am no advertisement for Christianity, but they truly are. Chet.
It is only with these last few sentences that Wynona’s voice breaks. She wipes her eyes with her wrist. Too dumbfounded to move, I watch as she shreds the letter, forces it down the drain, and turns on the faucet and the garbage disposal. Pearl Norman! If Jill had asked the right questions, would she have broken down and confessed? No wonder she was almost hysterical. As Wynona turns off the switch on the disposal, she says, “I’m sorry, Gideon. I hope you can live with this.”
Like a stroke victim who has lost the power of speech, I find I can only nod at her. I leave, but not before promising Trey I will return in a couple of weeks to take him to an Arkansas Travelers baseball game. A Cardinal farm team, the Travs haven’t been very good lately, but, who knows, maybe we will discover another Brooks Robinson.
On the winding road back east into town, my mind is a blur of images. I think back to the day Chet showed up in my office and told me that he thought Leigh was probably guilty. I was being set up from day one! I feel my face burn as I remember that I never got around to checking out Pearl’s alibi. Why did I do such a poor job of thinking about this case? The reason is obvious: I wanted to discredit Shane. He was stealing Sarah and Rainey. How pathetic of me! Chet had me eating out of his hand, and so did Leigh. I fell for every lie they fed me. Why didn’t Chet simply ram down my throat that we were going after Shane? I would have bought it. Obviously, because there was a conflict. I was supposed to figure it out gradually and insist on Shane’s culpability after they all rubbed my nose in it. I bought everything, even the taped conversation between Leigh and Shane.
They set me up every time. Leigh must almost have cracked, though, at one point. When she ran off and got drunk, she must have scared Shane and Pearl to death.
And yet, even with Chet’s suicide and Hector’s unexpected testimony, Shane never missed a line or cue. He went right on as if he had a script in front of him. How could I forget to what lengths families will go to protect each other? Driving too fast, I have to brake hard on a curve, reminding myself that accidents can happen.
Maybe Pearl didn’t intend to kill Art, just threaten him with a dramatic gesture. Poor Pearl. Those phone calls.
She wanted to confess to me, I think, but I wouldn’t listen.
Her daughter and her husband wouldn’t let her take responsibility for her life. The American Way. Why?
Easier to make excuses and keep her out of sight. Perhaps I should go to Jill with what I know, but, without a shred of proof, I’m pretty sure I will wait. Chet’s letter to me is part of the Blackwell County sewer system, and doubtless, precautions have been taken to firm up Pearl’s alibi. If she is dying, what would be the point?
As traffic halts at the entrance to the freeway that will take me home, I realize that the case, as it stands now, has generated a lot of favorable publicity. There have been a couple of nice articles that mentioned my name.
No one has yet claimed that I am Chet’s heir apparent, but it is nice all the same. I speed on the freeway, practically begging to be arrested, but there isn’t a cop in sight. Ah, the practice of law.
“Hold still!” I command my dog, who is shaking as if he is about to be electrocuted instead of being given a bath in the backyard.
“You can turn on the water!” I holler at Sarah, who is wiping beads of sweat from her forehead as she stands over the spigot with a pair of pliers. She turns the handle, and water runs from the hose onto Woogie’s back, as he begins to shiver all over again. It is sweltering, and it isn’t even June.
Sarah walks over to us and bends down to take hold of Woogie’s collar.
“What a terrible year for Pastor Norman,” she says.
“First his daughter is charged with murder and then his wife dies.”
I nod in agreement.
“I can’t imagine having to live through both events in the same year.” Unbeknownst to Sarah, I feel Pearl Norman’s death last night has lifted a weight from my back.
“Though I’m sad for him, I don’t quite feel the same way about Christian Life,” Sarah admits, holding Woogie as I soap his back.
“Since the trial, there’s been so much dissension that it doesn’t seem the same place.
There’s talk of a big group of people leaving to form a new church.”
I rub the bar of soap against Woogie’s belly. He looks at me as if I were holding a gun to his head. I grunt, “I noticed you haven’t been going much lately.” Though Sarah was angry at me again after the trial, the main casualty has been Rainey. I have seen her only a couple of times the last two months. My daughter is more forgiving. After all, I am her flesh and blood.
“Do you still believe the Bible word for word?” I ask, trying to sound casual. I rinse Woogie off and pretend to admire his fur in the glistening water and bright sunshine.
“I don’t know,” Sarah says irritably, perhaps betraying that it is a battle she can’t win.
“That’s really important to you, isn’t it?”
I reach down on the grass for the ragged yellow towel I keep beneath the sink for this occasion and begin to rub Woogie briskly.
“I guess while some people have a need to believe,” I respond, “I have a need not to, un less I can understand it.”
Sarah’s mouth puckers as if she were tasting some thing that does not agree with her. She has already forgiven me for going after Shane but wants to have the last word.
“You miss a lot that way,” she says, petting Woogie’s head to calm him.
“It’s almost over, boy.”
“Probably so,” I concede as I dry Woogie’s legs. You miss a lot of nonsense. But I do not say this. I’ve got my daughter back. Now is the time to be relatively magnanimous.
“I could never be a lawyer,” Sarah says and stands up.
She is saying this to hurt me because she knows someday I’d like to see “Page amp; Page” in the Yellow Pages.
“I know.” She has plenty of time to change her mind. Woogie, freed from the towel, squirms around on the grass on his back. He’ll show me, by God.
“Everything is always the ends justifying the means,” Sarah says unnecessarily.
“I don’t see how you can live like that.”
Our dog runs in circles and then plops down on the grass again. “There are really a lot more rules than it looks like,” I call after Sarah as she goes over to the spigot to turn it off.
She doesn’t say anything, and after turning off the water, she marches inside. I sit down on the grass and watch Woogie take a tour of the backyard. There is a lot more I could say, but I won’t. For starters, I could tell her that my ego nearly did me in, but I escaped. Not with everything. Rainey is gone. I suppose she could come back, but the last time I talked to her she said that she wanted to see if I was the only kind of man she was attracted to.
“What kind of man is that?” I asked. She didn’t smile when she said, “The kind who always does what he wants to and expects the woman to be there to fix everything.”
It is hot out here. I call Woogie, who is happily sniffing the fence that separates my property from my neighbor’s, “Let’s go inside!” He follows.