If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him…

5

LUCY TODHUNTER SAT at the defense table, swathed in mourning, but dry-eyed, watching the jury with a tremulous smile that widened slightly when the judge told them that they could not convict a defendant of murder unless they were able to work out how the crime was committed. In his summation for the defense Patrick Russell had said much the same.

“Mind you, gentlemen, you cannot say that the defendant somehow managed to administer arsenic to the victim-you know not how-and is therefore guilty,” Russell told the jurors. “You must be certain beyond a reasonable doubt, when and by what means the fatal dose was administered. If you are unable to decide that-and I cannot say that the prosecution has been much help to you in the matter-it is your bounden duty to acquit the defendant, Mrs. Lucy Todhunter. It does not mean that you believe her to be innocent; only that by strict legal standards you cannot prove her guilty. In a court of law, we can be concerned only with whether or not the facts presented can support the verdict. The state of Mrs. Todhunter’s soul is the province of Almighty God, not the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

“You might have shown more faith in my innocence,” Lucy Todhunter murmured as her attorney sat down.

“Never mind what I think,” Russell told her. “It is the opinions of those twelve men that count. I hope I have left them little choice in the matter.”

Apparently he had succeeded in this aim, for in less than an hour the solemn jurors, looking rumpled and sweaty in unaccustomed suits and cravats, filed back into the courtroom and resumed their places.

“Gentlemen, have you reached a verdict in the matter of the Commonwealth of Virginia v. Mrs. Lucy Todhunter?”

“Reckon we have,” said the foreman, a tobacco farmer, who later remarked that the formality of courtroom procedure made him itch. He handed a folded sheet of paper to the bailiff, who passed the verdict to the judge.

His Honor peered over his spectacles at the message-lengthier than the usual jury decision. “It is unnecessary to explain your decision, gentlemen,” he said mildly as he passed the paper back to the bailiff. The verdict read: Not Guilty. We can’t figure out how she did it.

Patrick Russell shook his client’s hand and formally congratulated her upon her victory. He sent her an exorbitant bill and never spoke to her again.

As the crowds made their way out of the courtroom, Royes Bell turned to his fellow physician Richard Humphreys and said, “Now that Mrs. Todhunter has been acquitted of her husband’s death, in the interests of science, she ought to tell us how she managed it.”

She never did, though. Lucy Todhunter went back to her late husband’s opulent home, where she remained, declining visitors, until three months after the trial-when a pair of events brought Lucy once again to the forefront of the Danville gossip mill. First, Philip Todhunter’s relatives from Maine arrived to contest Lucy’s possession of her husband’s estate; second, the young widow’s pregnancy became evident, despite the camouflage effect of the long full-skirted dresses that were currently in fashion.

The Danville grapevine estimated the widow Todhunter to be about four months along in her pregnancy, and after considerable finger counting, they grudgingly allowed that the child was probably sired by her husband. It was just as well the jury hadn’t decided to hang her, everyone conceded, but impending motherhood did not endear her to the community. The Todhunter relatives were not impressed by this last legacy from poor dear Philip. They wanted the house, but not the heir, until attorneys for both sides pointed out to them that the baby would inherit a share in its father’s fortune.

“They’ll get that house over my dead body!” Lucy Todhunter told her few remaining friends.

They did.

She was never a robust young woman, and the strain of pregnancy, perhaps complicated by the rigors of the trial, exhausted her strength. She went into labor several weeks early and died of complications in the ensuing birth. It wasn’t to be wondered at, said the matrons of Danville. Didn’t she have all those problems with her earlier confinements? She even had to go to the spa to recuperate. Her funeral was well attended, since those who forbore to speak to her after the trial resumed their friendship with her at the graveside. Her headstone gave only her name, the dates of her birth and death, and verse 15:51 from the Book of Corinthians: BEHOLD I SHEW YOU A MYSTERY. Royes Bell attended Lucy to the last and regretfully reported to his colleagues that Mrs. Todhunter’s secret, whatever it was, went with her.

The child, a boy named after his late father, lived, and was raised in his Southern home by two of Philip Todhunter’s spinster aunts. The maiden ladies had decided that they preferred child raising in Southern prosperity to the status of poor relations in the homes of their New England kin. In time they grew accustomed to the conventions and the climate of Virginia, and they never returned to the North. Philip Todhunter, Jr., was raised with Calvinist strictness, and complete silence on the subject of his mother. He managed to fritter away most of his inheritance by the turn of the century, but he left a son, in whom no trace of the stern, cold Todhunters remained, in either accent or temperament. That young man, born in 1900, became a millworker, married a local girl, and lived in comfortable poverty, enlivened with country music, stock-car racing, and that old-time religion, a stranger to the ways of both his patrician grandmother Lucy and his ambitious grandfather, the murdered Major Todhunter-if murdered he was. No satisfactory explanation for the crime had yet been found.

By the time Philip Todhunter’s great-granddaughter was born in 1940, the family was entrenched in the lower middle class, so thoroughly Southern nationalists that they would have been grieved to learn of Major Todhunter’s wartime affiliations. His murder was a dimly recalled family legend. Whether Lucy’s bloodline left a fatal legacy remains to be seen.

DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR EX-WIFE IS TONIGHT? “Some of the local women’s group had that bumper sticker made up,” A. P. Hill told her client. “They asked me to bring you one.”

Cackling with laughter, Eleanor Royden held up the sign for the guard to read. “Tell them I love it!” she said to A. P. Hill. A week’s stay in the county jail had taken its toll on her appearance, but her raucous high spirits were intact. She looked haggard now, and the lines on her face seemed deeper. The harsh prison shampoo had stripped most of the blonde from her gray hair, giving her a faded look that added a decade to her age.

A. P. Hill rummaged in her handbag. “I brought you the Rancé soap you asked for. The guard said it was all right to give it to you. Would you like some special shampoo for tinted hair?”

Eleanor Royden pulled down a lock of coarse gray hair and inspected it. “Not much point in that, is there? I think the tint is kaput. I must look like the prom queen from hell. I hope Jeb doesn’t see me like this.”

A. P. Hill studied her client carefully for signs of disorientation. “Jeb is dead, Eleanor, remember?”

“Well, sure he is. I spent three bullets making sure. Damn the expense of the extra ones, I said. He’s worth it. I just meant I wouldn’t want him to see me in case he’s haunting the courthouse or something.”

“I don’t think that’s one of your problems,” said A. P. Hill.

“Probably not. He and Mrs. Bimbo are probably haunting the Pinehurst golf course, or else they’re in Satan’s tanning parlor, getting a really bronzed look.” She chuckled.

A. P. Hill made a mental note to deny all journalists’ requests for interviews with her client. Eleanor Royden was irrepressible and highly quotable. She could easily become so notorious that a fair trial for her would not be possible anywhere in the hemisphere. At least she wasn’t hysterical and frightened. Remorse in an accused murderer was a desirable trait, but A. P. Hill wouldn’t have wanted to handle a client afflicted with the loud, wet variety.

“I brought you the bumper sticker in case you needed cheering up,” she told Eleanor Royden. “Apparently, the gesture was unnecessary.”

“I appreciate it, though, Sunshine. I may not be sorry I shot those two reptiles, but being in this place is absolutely the pits. So, yeah, I think I needed a day-brightener.” She smirked mischievously at the young attorney. “Thank you for sharing, dear.”

A. P. Hill winced, catching the sarcasm. “Don’t mention it,” she muttered. “Upon consideration, I’m not sure it’s anything to be cheerful about.”

“I heard there’s another bumper sticker, too. A guard told me. One that says: Free Eleanor Royden So She Can Shoot More Lawyers!”

“That’s definitely not good,” said Powell Hill. “If you become notorious, you might inspire a lot of jokes, and maybe some tabloid headlines, but the stereotyping is risky. If people see you as a cartoon Annie Oakley, they won’t feel any sympathy for you. If the jury decides that you are a pistol-packing vigilante, they will have no qualms about sending you to jail. Do you want to be famous or free?”

“Can I think it over?”

“Yeah, for about a nanosecond. This is the soundbite era, when broadcast news sums up an issue in a sentence, and you don’t get a second chance to project a favorable image. Nobody feels sorry for a gloating killer. What if the media’s take on this story is that Jeb and Staci were two tragic lovers, gunned down by a raging jealous witch? Or to put it in your terms, suppose the movie version stars Harrison Ford and Demi Moore as Jeb and Staci?”

“They weren’t like that,” said Eleanor Royden. “They ought to be played by the Jurassic Park dinosaurs. Raptors. They were stupid, selfish, greedy raptors, and I was their prey.”

“Your life depends on our ability to convince the jury to see them that way. If those twelve unimaginative people think you gunned down Harrison and Demi in Technicolor, they’ll put you away for a very long time.”

Eleanor Royden considered this prospect. “I still think Sally Field ought to play me,” she said at last. “That’s my idea of a defense. What strategy did you have in mind?”

“We need a plausible defense. I thought about temporary insanity, but that’s a very hard sell to a conservative jury.”

“Good,” said Eleanor. “Because frankly, Sunshine, I hate the idea. I’m not going to stand up there and say I was crazy to shoot those two pit vipers. They tormented me for a couple of years, and they had every legal and financial advantage over me. I took it for as long as I could. Finally, the only thing I could use to even the score was my trusty nine-mm. Taurus.”

“Let’s talk about the gun, then,” said A. P. Hill, abandoning philosophy. “It was registered to you. How did you happen to have it?”

“For protection,” said Eleanor, shrugging. “I worked in real estate, remember? A couple of years ago here in Roanoke, a woman realtor went to show a house. The prospective customers robbed and killed her and left her body in the vacant house. After that, we all got nervous. I went down to the local gun store, and picked up the Taurus on the clerk’s recommendation. I even went to the shooting range a few times to learn how to use it. How to load, shoot quickly, fire at targets in dim light, and so on. I must say it came in handy- especially that last bit.”

“No,” said A. P. Hill. “You must not say things like that. Haven’t you been paying attention? I want to see a woman pushed over the edge by mental cruelty, and now racked with guilt and remorse over what she’s done.”

Eleanor Royden shook her head. “I’d have to be Sally Field to pull off that performance.”

“I was afraid you’d say something like that.” Powell Hill sighed. “I want you to be examined by a psychiatrist. Will you agree to that, Eleanor? The medical evaluation might consider a defense that hasn’t occurred to me yet.”

“How about Test Control as a Public Service’?” said Eleanor with a grin.

A. P. Hill was not amused. “Will you talk to a psychiatrist?” she demanded.

“I suppose so.” Eleanor sighed. “It would be a pity to spoil the festivities by going to an unsimpatico place like prison. I promise to behave. Now, will you get me some cigarettes and an Egyptian cotton towel, Sunshine? Benson & Hedges cigarettes, and a two-hundred-and-twenty-thread-count, undyed cotton towel. I’ll definitely go crazy if I don’t get some creature comforts around here.”

“Good,” said A. P. Hill. “If you’re crazy, I can defend you.”

Bill MacPherson had offered his client some coffee. Much to his consternation, she had accepted, forcing him to admit that cocoa and Earl Grey were the only beverages available in the office. “But I could run out and get you coffee,” he told her. “No trouble at all.”

“I can’t stay that long,” said Donna Jean Morgan. She looked nervous to be in a law office, even one as shabby as Bill’s. She sat there in her shapeless brown dress looking like someone who is too polite to mention that her chair is on fire.

“Well, I’m glad you stopped by,” said Bill. “I wondered how you were getting along.”

She shrugged. “Tolerable, I guess. Things are about the same at home, but you can get used to anything after a while.”

“You don’t have to get used to it,” said Bill, fighting the urge to raise his voice. Honestly, Donna Morgan was the modern counterpart to “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck.” “Your husband cannot get away with having two wives. Trust me on this. Here, I’ve written a couple of drafts of a stern letter to Chevry, explaining the errors of his ways and the possible legal ramifications. I wanted you to take a look at it before I type up a final copy for mailing.”

Donna Morgan took the letter and read it slowly, blinking and whispering an occasional word aloud in her bewilderment at the intricacies of legal phrasing. “I’m sure it’s very nice,” she murmured politely, handing it back.

Bill slid the letter into the Morgan folder, along with local newspaper clippings about the case and a few photocopied pages from law books. He could tell by Mrs. Morgan’s expression that she had not understood the contents. “In short, what it says is that we wish to warn Reverend Chevry Morgan that he is in violation of the state law against criminal conversation-that’s being unfaithful to one’s spouse. It’s actually illegal. I wonder if people realize that.” He broke off for a moment, thinking about MacPherson pere.

“I never heard of anybody getting taken to court on account of it.”

“Neither have I,” Bill admitted.

“Mostly, they get shot,” said Donna Jean.

“Yes, well, there are other ways of handling it,” Bill assured her. “The letter informs your husband that he may have broken several other laws as well as the one covering infidelity. It further states that if he does not cease his relationship with Miss Reinhardt, we plan to threaten him with legal separation, which will cost him support money on your behalf, and we conclude by saying that we may bring the local law-enforcement people into the picture, to see if they feel like arresting him for anything.”

“That seems harsh, Mr. MacPherson. Not like a wife ought to speak to her husband.”

“Well,” said Bill, “you didn’t write the letter. I did. Lawyers are trained to be harsh. Most people who are willing to listen to reason don’t hear from us, and we have to be stern to get the attention of the rest.”

“I don’t know if that letter will help or not,” said Donna Morgan. “You see, there’s been a development.”

Bill clutched the edge of his desk. “Not another wife?”

In spite of herself, Donna Morgan smiled. “No, sir. It’s just that Tanya Faith and me had a big fight the other evening, and she set Chevry against me, so he’s decided to move out with her.”

“Your husband has left you?” Bill pictured a sensational divorce trial and wondered if he ought to invest in a new suit.

“Not exactly left me,” Donna Jean replied. “He said he’d had a new revelation from the Lord, telling him that he wasn’t meant to keep two wives under one roof. Chevry says a woman’s home is like a hen’s nest, and that every hen has to have one of her own. He wants to give Tanya Faith a place that belongs just to him and her, and he’ll move back and forth between her house and mine, every other day, or some such plan.”

Bill blinked. “He’s buying another house?”

“No, but there’s an old one that belongs to the church. They bought it for taxes years and years ago, when they purchased the adjoining land to build the new parking lot. The old place was used as the original parsonage. It was built about 1860, same as the church was, but the church has been modernized through the years, and this place hasn’t. It’s big and imposing. I expect it was pretty once, but it’s in a sorry state now. Still, Chevry is real handy with tools and drywall, and of course he can get the carpeting wholesale, so he thinks he can put it to rights. He’s been working on it in the evenings after he finishes his day job. I’ll take him over his dinner and a change of clothes for evening services, and then he’ll go back and work another hour or two before bedtime. He’s been feeling poorly lately. I tell him he oughtn’t to overwork himself, but he’s burning to get the place fixed up so that Tanya Faith can have it.”

“How do you feel about that?” Bill was fascinated by this new development.

“I don’t know,” said Donna. “At first I was relieved to get shut of Tanya Faith, prissing around my house and giving herself airs. She won’t hardly lift a finger to help in the kitchen, you know. Bone lazy. And she goes whining to Chevry if I try to make her do her part. If she had her own place, I wouldn’t have to put up with her, and maybe Chevry would see what a useless little tart she is.”

Bill MacPherson sighed. He had never wanted Phil Donahue’s job. After more than the usual number of years in law school, all he wanted was a nice steady income, helping people draft their wills, drawing up deeds for home buyers, and defending the occasional teenage vandal or careless motorist as they faced the terrors of the legal bureaucracy. Now it had come to this. He was the fundamentalist Dear Abby, advising the parties in a bigamous marriage about how to promote their domestic tranquillity. He knew he was supposed to be on Donna Morgan’s side, but he found it difficult to see life from her point of view. Every time Bill tried to put himself in Donna’s place, he imagined rage and an urge for colorful revenge. These qualities were notably lacking in Mrs. Morgan the Elder. It was most perplexing. Bill felt further than ever from understanding women.

Bill tried to reason with his client. “Whether or not Tanya Faith does housework is not really the issue, Donna Jean. I don’t think getting her out of your house is going to solve the problem. The problem is that your husband is committing adultery. Bigamy. Almost statutory rape. He’s a sexual outlaw, Mrs. Morgan, and having two zip codes is not going to fix any of that.”

Donna Jean Morgan nodded. ‘You go ahead and send Chevry that letter,’ she said. “I hope it will persuade him to send Tanya home. I just wish he’d hurry up and finish that house so that Tanya can move out.”

“How long is it likely to be?” asked Bill.

“He’s got the lights rewired, and last Saturday some of the men of the church helped him fix the pump on the old well so he’d have running water. Now what he’s doing is mostly painting and prettifying.” She gave a disapproving sniff. “He’s letting her pick the color of the carpet. He didn’t let me pick the color of anything in our house. Said the Lord meant for the man to be the decider in all things.”

“Well,” said Bill, “let’s see if we can settle this matter before Chevry gets struck by lightning.”

“Are you free for lunch?”

Bill MacPherson saw his sister, Elizabeth, in the doorway, looking tense and weary, as she usually did these days. He had been planning to invite Jerry Lawrence to lunch at Ashley’s, in hopes that the assistant district attorney would be willing to trade legal second opinions for a buffet lunch. Bill wanted to know how strongly the state felt about formalized fornication, in re the Chevry Morgan ménage. That inquiry would have to wait, though. He could see that Elizabeth was in need of company, and he felt guilty that MacPherson and Hill had been unable to provide any assignments to occupy their new investigator.

“Sure,” he said, with a perfunctory glance at his appointment book. “I’m free until-well, until Thursday, actually, but something will probably turn up. Let’s go to lunch.”

“How are things with you?” Bill asked, when they had settled into a booth at the restaurant. He hoped that his sister would say, “Fine,” as convention demands, but since those who are ill or otherwise preoccupied with themselves always take this pleasantry as a serious inquiry, Elizabeth spent several minutes answering his greeting in clinical detail.

“I wish you had something for me to do,” she finished plaintively. “I think too much-and there’s really no point in brooding over things I can’t change.”

“Powell has a murder case,” said Bill. “But her client has confessed, so I don’t suppose there’s much to investigate. She may want you to track down character witnesses, though.” He brightened at the thought. “I’ll ask her.”

“A murder case? Anything interesting?”

“Nothing you ought to mention to Mother,” said Bill. “Powell is defending Eleanor Royden, the ex-wife of a Roanoke attorney. She shot and killed her husband and wife number two.”

“Sore loser?”

“Apparently there was some provocation. I don’t know too many of the details.”

Elizabeth lost interest in the domestic murder in Roanoke. “What are you working on?”

“I have a bigamist,” said Bill. “And a bad-check case. A house closing next week. Sorry.”

Elizabeth nodded. She had not expected much drama to come out of Bill’s practice. “The bigamist sounds interesting,” she commented. “I trust you’re not defending him?”

“No. I’m trying to get him to quit,” said Bill. “His original wife is a nice dowdy woman in her fifties, who shouldn’t have to put up with his shenanigans. I hope I don’t turn all peculiar when I hit fifty. You don’t suppose it’s hereditary?”

“Maybe they’ll have a cure for it by then. By the way, have you talked to Mother lately?”

“I guess so,” said Bill, trying to remember. “She’s all right, isn’t she?”

“She’s quite cheerful,” said Elizabeth, not precisely answering the question. “She has a new roommate, and she’d like us both to come over for dinner so that we can get acquainted.”

“A new roommate?” So great was Bill’s distress that he put down his fork to pursue the subject. “It’s not a man, is it?”

“Urn. No.”

“Well, that’s a relief. So who is it?”

“An English professor named Phyllis Casey. I haven’t met her yet myself, but Mother said they get along… um… like a house afire.”

“That’s good to hear. I’m glad the old girl’s perking up again. Maybe they can take macramé classes together. Form a couple for duplicate bridge.”

“A couple. Yes.” Elizabeth seemed inordinately preoccupied with her salad. She hardly looked at him at all. “So, can you make it for dinner on Saturday? I promised I’d let her know.”

“Oh, I guess so,” said Bill. “It’ll be dull, but I’ll bet they’re both great cooks.”

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. “The evening may surprise you.”

“Well, I’m glad Mother has found a nice woman friend to spend time with, instead of some predatory man in a midlife crisis,” Bill said with a happy smile. “I should have known we could trust Mother to be sensible. But you know me: I always expect the worst.”

Elizabeth gave him a sad smile. “No, Bill. You don’t.”

Chevry Morgan set down his hammer, leaned against the old oak mantelpiece, and wished he had a cold beer. This was not a desire he would share with his parishioners, many of whom felt that Jesus had been unnecessarily frivolous when He turned the water into wine at the wedding at Cana. (“Surely grape juice would have been sufficient, and perhaps some cookies,” as Mrs. Harville of the Senior Ladies’ Circle phrased it.) Still, carpet laying was thirst-making work, and Chevry did not feel that the Lord intended for His servants to avoid the pleasures of the flesh. Who else had He made them for, after all?

A prophet lacking both honor and distilling facilities in his own country, Chevry saw that he would have to make do with well water instead of spirits. Donna Jean had given him sandwiches, but nothing to drink with his evening meal. She had mumbled a gruff apology for forgetting to bring a drink, and he’d let it go-but he suspected that the oversight was intentional. For a meek and God-fearing woman, Donna Jean certainly had been huffy lately. Every time he saw her, she looked like she was about to spit nails. There was no pleasing her. First, she had a hissy fit about chores, demanding that he get his sweet baby Tanya out of the house, and then when, after prayerful consideration, he took steps to do so, Donna Jean fumed about the time and expense of fixing up the new residence. He said he thought she was undergoing a crisis of faith about the Lord’s new revelation, and he suggested that she pray about it. This spiritual counsel was not well received.

Chevry mopped the sweat from his brow with a big cotton handkerchief. It sure was hot in the old house, being after sunset like it was. The tin roof soaked up the sun’s heat and held it for hours. He hoped that boded well for keeping the place warm in winter. He struggled to his feet, trying to ignore the aches in his legs and back. He would have to go to the kitchen and get his own drink. Wasn’t that a hell of a note? A man with two wives has to get his own dad-burned glass of water.

He stumped into the kitchen, feeling sorry for himself, remembering all the envious leers he’d gotten lately from the men in the community. He knew that they must have dirty movies running in their minds when they thought of him and his domestic situation. He was glad they didn’t know better. The truth was, he hadn’t been getting his ashes hauled at all lately. Why, there were probably men in prison who saw more carnal action than he had seen these past few weeks. That wasn’t much of a change as far as Donna Jean was concerned: sex had been boring her shitless for decades, and now that she was furious with him, she was even less inclined to perform that wifely chore. Once, long ago, he had tried to convince Donna Jean that oral sex was a marital variation of Holy Communion, but two days later she had countered with a few pertinent verses from Leviticus. Furthermore, she had threatened to bring up the matter for discussion in church if he persisted in his arguments. Billy Graham took her side in the matter, too; at least, Chevry had always suspected that the letter to Billy Graham’s column in the Roanoke Times had come from Donna Jean.

He took a jelly glass from the sparsely stocked cupboard, blew the dust off it, and turned on the tap. The water ran rusty for half a minute, and he waited for a clear stream before filling his glass. He downed it in one gulp and filled the glass again. Then he splashed cold water on his sweaty face and hands. His backache was worse now. It occurred to him that a man could work so hard on wife maintenance that he could be too tired to reap the pleasures of connubial bliss. He’d be finished renovating this house soon, though, and then his procreative powers would return. Damn, he needed a beer.

The thought of frosty bottles of beer brightened his mood. That was one advantage to having a second home: he could keep beer in it, something Donna Jean would not permit back at the house on Pumpkin Creek. She didn’t hold with imbibing liquor, not even for medicinal purposes. He’d once thought of introducing snake handling into the church services so that he would have an excuse to keep whiskey on the premises, but Donna Jean had put the quietus on that plan, faster than the Lord had deconstructed the Tower of Babel.

She knew him entirely too well, did Donna Jean. That came of their having been married since time immemorial. She had been a pretty, shy little thing in ’59, big-eyed with admiration at his white-walled red Fairlane and his Wildroot Cream Oiled hair. He had some ambitions of becoming a singer, based on a weak but pleasant baritone and a passing resemblance to Elvis Presley; but that hope had come to nothing. He lacked the drive as well as the talent to make it in country music. He was too easily distracted by revelry.

Chevry had been a wild one in those days, bad to drink and quick to throw a punch at anybody who crossed him. When you break up the furniture in a roadhouse brawl, they don’t ask you back again to sing. He’d even done a month or two in the county jail for his recklessness, but Donna Jean had stuck by him. She’d never said a hard word to him, even when he drank up his pay or gambled it away in some smokehouse card game. And finally he had outgrown all the tomfoolery of sowing wild oats. He turned thirty-five and found the Lord.

Donna Jean had been so proud when he’d announced that he had felt the call to preach. She’d looked at him with shining eyes and believed that he had been summoned to the pulpit from On High. Well, maybe he had, but he could not quite block out a stubborn memory of the young, sly Chevry Morgan, sizing up a trusting congregation and thinking: This gig is easier than show business.

Sure, it was. You didn’t have to be drop-dead handsome and you didn’t have to be able to carry a tune. Anybody could holler. The rest of it was patter and snake-oil showmanship, and he had been born with more than his share of that. He knew the Bible well enough from childhood Sunday school (thank you, Mama!), and he read up on it in the evenings, looking for new material. There was some good stuff in there, too. In his opinion, the Song of Solomon was a showstopper, and anybody who thought that its meaning was metaphysical had grits for brains. He’d got himself a black suit with the trousers one size too small, and a string tie, and he’d preached fire and brimstone with a little Presley swivel to his hips, and the women-congregations are mostly women and hostages- had moaned with righteous fervor. He was hotter than Elijah’s chariot.

Within a year, he had become the minister of his own little rural church, a respected man in the community, and a happy performer, with his own flock of pious fans. He wished that preaching paid well enough to let him give up carpet laying, but he was realistic about his prospects. Moses might have been able to get water from a rock, but he couldn’t have got a Cadillac from a minimum-wage congregation. So be it.

The years had rolled on, and he’d stayed strong and passionate, and-with the help of Grecian Formula-young; while Donna Jean had just faded more and more each day, until her face was as gray as her hair, and her waist and ankles thickened with age and indifference. She had let herself go, all the time claiming that the Apostle Paul didn’t want women to dye their hair and paint their faces. Which was fine when they died at thirty, like they mostly did in biblical times. He didn’t argue with her, because fundamentalists mostly discourage vanity and artifice, but it saddened him to think of himself saddled with an old lady. She was a good woman-yes, she was; but she hadn’t gotten his motor out of first gear in years.

Sex. That was the gulf between them. He thought young, and he lusted young. Donna Jean faded and didn’t even care.

He reckoned Donna Jean could last until Judgment Day without another roll in the hay, and never miss it, but he was getting hornier by the hour. That’s when he’d started noticing Tanya Faith at services. She was fifteen then, but she had a ripening body and a sultry look about her that could have sold apples to the seraphim guarding postserpent Eden. He’d found himself at the pulpit, preaching straight to her and gauging the success of his sermon on her reactions. The time she got up and started speaking in tongues, slumping back against him in a swoon afterward, he thought he would sweat a bucketful. How could he live out his life in tapioca nothingness with Donna when he burned for Tanya Faith?

Maybe the Lord had put the idea in his head. Chevry had got to thinking about roosters and stallions, and it suddenly occurred to him that man was not meant for monogamy. Didn’t the biblical King David have scores of wives, and didn’t his son Solomon have a gracious plenty, too? And God had liked both of them well enough. Surely, a modern prophet like himself was entitled to one over the limit.

The revelation of multiple wife taking had been a miracle, as far as Chevry was concerned, but, of course, Donna Jean was furious over it, and now Tanya Faith was being cold and stubborn, claiming she couldn’t be a real wife until he gave her a home of her own to be a wife in. If he didn’t finish these renovations soon, he’d catch pneumonia from cold showers. And now he was getting frosty letters from some lawyer in Danville, threatening him with legal action for sexual improprieties. Chevry sighed with the weariness of the unhonored prophet in an unwired kitchen. He wished the Lord had given him a little help in persuading the rest of the planet that this idea was divinely inspired, that was all.

His reverie was cut short by a howl of pain, and he bent double, clutching his abdomen and gasping for breath. His gut felt like somebody was inside him with a weed-whacker. In a wave of dizziness, he lowered himself to the kitchen floor. What the hell had Donna Jean put in those sandwiches? he thought as the decor of the room faded to black.