Prayers the Devil Answers (27 page)

I wished there was more of a straight line in her explanation, because I still wasn't following it. “Go on.”

“Besides, you're from a community up the mountain yourself, aren't you? I'd heard that.”

“That's so. Before we moved to town, my home was a little settlement up the mountain. I was born and raised there. But just what is it you hoped I'd understand?”

She sighed. “Well, it's about Lonnie Varden, that prisoner you're fixing to execute.”

“Lonnie Varden? What about him?”

“His wife, Celia, grew up in our settlement. We'd known her all our lives.”

“Did you come to visit Mr. Varden? He's not here yet, you know. I expect a couple of marshals will be bringing him in toward the end of the week. Is he also a friend of yours?”

“Oh no. I barely know him by sight, and I don't think it would do either of us any good if I were to visit him. He didn't grow up anywhere around here, as far as I know, and Celia married him just a few years ago.”

“But if you don't know him . . . Do you know anything about the
state of their marriage?” I knew that such a question had no bearing on my duty as a peace officer, and maybe I had no business asking it, but when a man murders his wife it's only natural for outsiders to wonder what problems there had been between them.
Why
is a woman's question, I guess, but we always want to know.

She shook her head. “I never really spent any time with the two of them together. All I know is that the marriage was cursed before it ever happened, and that's why he killed her. My sister says it was fate.”

I wanted to ask her more about that, but the conversation felt too much like gossiping for me to let her keep going without first setting her straight about legal procedure, as best I understood it myself. “Well, Miss Greer, I'm sure that your story is very interesting, and I suppose the prosecuting attorney might have been able to use information about the victim's past—or, more likely, the defense would have, but here in the sheriff's department the details about the crime are none of our business anymore. After the arrest the courts decide what to do with him. We just carry out their instructions. The hanging is in a couple of weeks. I'm sure you're anxious to see the killer punished for what he did to your friend.”

“But that's just it. I'm not sure that Lonnie Varden should even
be
punished. I mean I know he killed her and all, but we think he was fated to do it.”

I'll bet the defense would have thought this story was a Christmas present, except that Eunice Greer would have been the world's worst witness, and her tale of fate might have proved so fanciful that they'd have been laughed out of court.

A minute or two later she finally worked her way around to the beginning of the tale. “Back when we were young girls in the settlement, we had a Dumb Supper. You know about them, I suppose?”

“Yes. Never went to one, but I know the custom. You cook a meal for your future husband, and if you do the ritual right, he's supposed to show up, either in person or in spirit.”

“Well, we had one for a lark nine years ago, and Celia broke the rules. She told me about it a year later—how she had dropped a place knife when she was setting the table, and when she went to put it back, she turned and faced the table.”

“Facing the table is forbidden, isn't it?”

“Yes. It ruins everything. She should have stopped right then and told the rest of us, but she didn't. Why, it's a mercy the misfortune didn't taint the other girls as well. Of course, we don't know what's to come, do we? It makes me glad I never tried to wed.”

“Celia Varden dropped a knife playing at a Dumb Supper years ago, and you think that's why she was killed?”

She nodded. “We do. As soon as Celia was killed, I told my sister what had happened at the Dumb Supper, and she wrote to the others to let them know. She says Celia got what she deserved for being deceitful and trying to cheat fate out of a husband, and that she got what was coming to her for that deceit. I don't know. Maybe my sister is just bitter about staying a spinster, no matter what she says to the contrary. But it's Celia's poor husband who concerns me. I'm sure she didn't tell him anything about the Dumb Supper when she married him. So now she's gone and gotten both of them killed.”

It should have been funny except that the story was going to end with a hanging. I thought Eunice Greer was talking pure foolishness, but I could see that she was sincere in what she was saying. There's people from all over who believe things even sillier than that, but it wouldn't be right to mock them for it. Finally I said, “We're not given to know if fate makes people do things or not, so in this world we have to hold people responsible for what they do, no matter why they did it.”

She blushed. “Well, being a woman I thought you'd understand, anyhow. I'm sorry for him, but I don't know what I can do about it. Maybe he couldn't help it.”

“Maybe there's a reason why anybody in the world does anything,
but we usually don't know what those reasons are. I think we have to judge people by their actions, because they have a choice. At some point, curse or no curse, a person has to decide to do what he does. If there's more to it than that, then his lawyer ought to bring it up in court and let the jury decide if it matters.”

“It's too late to talk to him, though, isn't it?”

“The trial is over now, yes.”

“But the trial was miles away, and I couldn't possibly have got there. The lawyer was a man, though, and I doubt if he would have listened to a word I said. It's only when I got to thinking about them hanging him and knowing it was going to happen here that I felt I had to come and tell somebody.”

I thought about it. “Would it be all right with you if I told your story to Mr. Varden when he gets back? Maybe it would give him some peace to think the crime wasn't altogether his fault.”

Eunice Greer looked relieved. She stuffed the remains of the paper handkerchief back in her purse and stood up to go. “Thank you, Sheriff. Yes. I suppose I can't hope for any more than that. You tell him that. And tell him that we will be praying for him. All of us from the Dumb Supper. We'll be praying for his soul.”

In these mountains there is a kind of cricket called a cicada that hardly crosses your mind most of the time, but every seventeen years an enormous brood of them hatches out of the ground and takes flight. Then it is like living through one of the ten plagues of Egypt around here. The last time it happened was four years ago, after we had moved to town. The newly awakened cicadas swarm like black smoke, covering everything, and blundering into anyone who is working outside in a field near trees or bushes, so that it's a misery to venture out until they finish their natural cycle and go to ground again.

The newspapermen made me think of them.

A few days after it was announced that wife-killer Lonnie Varden would be publicly executed by a sheriff who happened to be female, a great swarm of journalists seemed to rise right up out of the ground and descend on this little town just like the plague of cicadas. They tied up the telephone at the office until we began to be afraid that some caller with a genuine emergency would be unable to get through. Finally Roy started taking names and threatening to arrest any reporter who called more than three times. Then they took to dropping by the office and trying to waylay us on our way in and out the door. They offered the deputies everything from a cup of coffee to a five-dollar bill for a five-minute interview with the prisoner. We told them all to get lost, but we might as well have been swatting at cicadas.

I ate lunch in the office every day, so generally the only time I had to worry about them was going to work and leaving at the end of the day, but it didn't take them long to figure that out, and at five o'clock one afternoon I opened the door and an explosion of flashbulbs sent me stumbling back into the office with blue dots blinding me for the better part of a minute. Even with the door shut behind me I could hear them yelling my name—my
first
name, mind you, as if these total strangers were my old-time buddies—and bawling out questions, some of which struck me as so peculiar that I wondered if they had taken leave of their senses.

“
What are you going to wear to the hanging, Ellie?”
“What's your favorite color, Ellie?” “
Are you going to kiss him good-bye before you string him up?”

I stumbled to a chair next to the reception desk. “I don't know what to do! We can't run them out of town, can we?”

Falcon shook his head. “As far as I can tell, being annoying isn't illegal. Besides, a lot of folks in town think these fellows are a godsend. They've filled up the depot hotel, and on account of them, all the local eateries have been doing a landslide business all week.”

“Wait until they read the stories those reporters churn out. I'll bet they could go over those articles with a divining rod and not find a scrap of truth about this town or anybody those newspapermen talked to.”

“They're making a lot more work for us, I'll give you that,” said Falcon. “They are almost as hard to keep out as ants, and they don't take no for an answer.”

“We ought to try to say as little as possible to them. Seems like no matter what we say they'll twist it around to whatever they want. The more we can steer clear of them, the better.”

Easier said than done.

I was walking home that afternoon a little before six, thinking about home, as I always did. Most days, as soon as I got away from the office and got to the wooded path along the creek that led to the house, I went from thinking like a law officer to being an ordinary woman again, with a house to run and children to look after. I was thinking about fixing beans and cornbread and sliced tomatoes for supper—wondering if we had enough tomatoes in the garden and whether the milk would last us through breakfast if I used some of it in the cornbread—when someone fell in step beside me. I hadn't noticed anyone around, but suddenly there he was: a stocky man wearing a shiny brown suit, a necktie, and a battered fedora that had seen better days. The town banker, the railroad directors, and the undertaker dress that way on workdays, but somehow I knew this fellow was not any of them, because when they did dress up, their clothes were not as shabby as this fellow's.

“Good evening, madam. You'd be the sheriff, wouldn't you?”

There's no law against talking to an elected official on public land, and even if there had been, I had been raised to be civil to everybody in the world, as long as they didn't give me a reason to behave otherwise.

“That's right, sir. I'm off duty now, though. Just heading off
home.” I quickened my step a little, but he took it in stride, even managing to dodge the mud puddle in the path.

“I reckon you got more of a job than you bargained for when they appointed you sheriff, madam.”

“The hanging, you mean? I'll manage. It's my job to do it—but not to talk about it.”

“I see that you have divined that I am a journalist, Sheriff. You know, there are people all across the country who are interested in your story. How you feel about doing a man's job. How you take care of your family while trying to do your work. You'd make quite a story. And as pretty as you are, you'd make the cover of
Life
magazine, if you'd give us some time to make a proper feature story of it. Let a photographer do a series of pictures of you at work and at home, say.”

“Not interested.”

He paused for a moment, sizing me up probably. “My editor has authorized me to pay you a tidy sum for exclusive rights to your story, madam. Surely, a newly widowed lady such as yourself could find a use for some ready money.”

I kept walking just as fast as ever, wishing I wasn't tempted by his offer. It would feel like selling my soul to the devil, but I had two boys to feed and clothe, and no idea what the future would hold once I finished my late husband's term in office. A bankable sum of money would be an answer to prayer, really. And where was the harm in it? No one said it was against the rules. Finally I turned to look at the man in the shiny brown suit, half expecting him to have sprouted horns and a cloven hoof, but he looked just the same: weary and a little out of breath, but quite alert to my every expression.

“Give me your business card and tell me where you're staying. I'll have to think about it.”