She does not respond but places her hands over her mouth as if she is becoming nauseated.
“Art wasn’t a lot different from your father, was he?” I say, and tell her my belief that they must have hated each other.
“It must have seemed like Art was fighting for your body and Shane was fighting for your soul.”
Parting her hands, Leigh gives me a fierce look.
“My father didn’t kill my husband, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
The bench is hard. There is no getting comfortable on it. I follow up quickly.
“But you’re worried that he might have, aren’t you?”
When she doesn’t say anything, I plunge ahead.
“He was furious that morning at Art because you hadn’t come to church. He knew you were home, and when you went up there to pretend to check in, he went to the house and killed Art.”
Her beautiful face is flushed.
“That’s ridiculous!” she shouts at me.
“My father is incapable of killing anyone.”
She is breathing too hard for me to believe she is convinced of that.
“You know how jealous he was of Art,” I say.
“He thought he was the very personification of evil, and that’s what you now think, too. What was it you stayed home to do with Art that morning? Was it sex? Is that what you’re ashamed to tell?”
She begins to cry. Somehow she has to open up to me. I tell her, “My own daughter and I have become incredibly close since her mother died. I feel so helpless right now, because it seems like I’m about to lose her-ironically, to your father’s church. Could I kill somebody?
I think I could, but if I couldn’t, I suspect the reason is that I don’t know anybody at the moment who I can say is evil. If somebody abused her, hurt her, I doubt it would take me long to work up some uncontrollable anger. Did your father know about Art’s porno skimming plan? Is that what tipped him over the edge?”
Leigh reaches into her purse for a tissue. Her hands are shaking. Most women look terrible when they cry.
Instead, her eyes have become more enormous and beautiful.
“I don’t see how he could,” she gets out.
With the trial next week, it is now or never. I fear that someone will drive up, but it is quiet and peaceful, beyond words. In the distance I can see a park ranger’s truck stop down by the entrance. I say, “I know how attached your father is to you. He lost your sisters, and he was about to lose you. He probably loves you more than he loves your mother, Leigh. And Art stood for everything he hated. Your dad knew how the world seduces people, and he spent his life building a fortress so you could be safe from it. He didn’t want you to marry Art, did he?”
Leigh’s breasts rise and fall under the silk. She shakes her head.
“He wanted me to delay the wedding, but he couldn’t find anything specifically wrong with Art. He did say that if Art really loved me, he wouldn’t mind waiting until we got to know each other better.”
Men in their forties don’t have much patience. We see too many heart attacks in our age bracket. I stand up, unwilling to inflict the bench on my butt any longer.
“Shane hired an investigator to try to turn something up, didn’t he?” This is pure speculation, but not out of the realm of possibility. Shane, like Chet, doesn’t seem the type to leave much to chance if he can avoid it.
Leigh brushes her hair away from her neck. Though it is gloriously mild, doubtless she has begun to feel warmer since this conversation began.
“Art told me after we married that he thought Daddy had done something,” she confesses.
“He said somebody was looking into his business. Naturally, he assumed it was Daddy, but he was never able to confirm it.”
I glance up at the mountain, fearful that someone is suddenly going to come walking out of it. Turning back to Leigh I say, “A pretty logical assumption, don’t you think? After your sisters left the church and the state, I imagine he was paranoid about his favorite daughter.
And after you married Art, his worst suspicions were confirmed.” She looks down at the ground. There is something she hasn’t told me, but it may be too difficult. All her life she has been dominated by middleaged men. She may have had her fill of us.
“What about Art?” I ask.
“Was he worried about your father?”
Leigh wipes her eyes.
“Not physically,” she said.
“Three months after we were married, he told me I had been brainwashed by Daddy. He said Christian Life was fine for people afraid to live in the real world. He said our family groups were essentially spies, part of the thought police that Daddy used to control our behavior.”
I watch the park ranger’s truck drive slowly toward us. If he sees Leigh crying, he may stop.
“He never took Christian Life seriously, did he?” I ask.
“He said he did,” Leigh says, her voice bitter, “but I didn’t believe him.” She turns to watch as the ranger creeps slowly past us. He waves. I wave back. It is too lovely a day to go looking for trouble. I don’t know what the pay is, but I wouldn’t mind the job, cruising around the parks in perfect weather, hoping to catch couples making it in the backseat.
Leigh, I see, has some of her father in her. There is an unrevealed vein of anger at Art I haven’t tapped into yet.
“You wanted to believe him,” I say, encouraging her.
“That’s pretty obvious.”
She wets her lips, and her voice becomes high with indignation.
“My husband was a con artist of the first order. He could make you think black was white before you knew it. Of course I wanted him to believe in Jesus Christ. What was wrong with that?”
Am I the one being conned? She sounds so convincing my reaction is to doubt her. Still, I ask, “Did he make you doubt your faith?”
Leigh’s voice takes on an accusing tone.
“He could ridicule something without you even realizing that’s what he was doing. Before I knew it, I had begun to question the book of Genesis.”
Her look of astonished anger seems genuine. I try to put myself in her place. Despite her exquisite beauty, she has never lived in the world like a normal woman.
My supposition until now has been that anyone who looks like this can’t be naive. I realize I have been applying the same standards to Leigh that I apply to Sarah and to Rainey, but their situation is not even remotely similar. If Sarah and Rainey did not want to take the Bible literally, there is no one on earth who could talk them into it.
“You had to realize at some point Art was calling into question everything you and your father had lived for,” I say, not quite asking a question. What better motive for murder? If her actions weren’t a crime, they would be easy to justify. A jury made up of Christian Life members would probably acquit her in five minutes or at least would keep her out of jail.
Leigh looks pained as she admits, “It wasn’t as easy to see that as you think. For the first time in my life, I guess, thanks to my husband, I began to rebel against my father. Art was subtle about it at first. It was only right before he died that he really began to criticize Christian Life.”
I watch as the ranger drives back by. He waves again.
What a tough job.
“Was Art open about it?” I ask, wondering how much of it was getting back to Shane.
“No,” Leigh explains.
“You’d have to have known Art. In public he was charming and would give a million excuses for us not being up there more. In private, he made fun of my father.”
The prosecutor’s office would have a field day with this information. It is as damaging to Leigh as it is to her father. It hits me that it is not out of the realm of possibility that Leigh and her father could have planned this murder together. They certainly had a motive. Perhaps at the last moment someone is going to step forward to support Leigh’s alibi that she was at the church the entire time.
“Where has your mother been in all of this?” I ask, struck by how little Pearl Norman figures in her account.