“You shut up. Get over there with them two.”
“Vera, listen to me.”
“No. No! You listen to me for once, you sorry sack of shit, and you get your ass over there with them two.” Kitchings sagged, then shuffled over beside me. “I been chokin’ down poison for thirty years on account of you, Thomas Kitchings, and I done had my fill of it. No more; no more. This ends right here, right now. I ain’t gonna take no more, and I ain’t gonna lie no more. This mess done ruint our lives. It’s done kilt Orbin, and it’s about kilt Tom, and I don’t aim to let that happen. Enough is a damn ’nough.”
Art cleared his throat. “Mrs. Kitchings, if you’d please put that shotgun down, I know we can talk about this calmly.”
“I don’t want to talk about this calmly,” she said. “I been calm way too long now. I been calm my whole life, and look what it’s got me.” She looked around, as if surveying the wreckage of her life; then she shook her head fiercely, her eyes blazing.
“Mrs. Kitchings, I know things look bad right now, but it’s not hopeless,” Art persisted. “With a good lawyer — Dr. Brockton here knows some fine ones — your husband could plea-bargain. If he made a deal for manslaughter, he might be out in two or three years.”
She stared at Art as if he were a madman. “Plea-bargain? Manslaughter? What the hell are you talking about?”
“The girl. Your niece. She was killed. Strangled.”
“Thomas never strangled that girl.”
I finally found my voice. “Mrs. Kitchings, we found out a lot when we examined her body. Like your son said, your niece was pregnant.”
“Hell, I knowed she was pregnant thirty year ago. You think I’m stupid?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t think you’re stupid,” I said. “I just…I’m just not sure how many of the facts you know. Long about the time the pregnancy would’ve started to show, your niece was strangled.”
“I know that, too.”
“But you just said your husband…”
“I know what I said, and I know what I didn’t say. I didn’t say she weren’t strangled. I said he never did do it.”
A staggering thought was forming in the back of my mind. I pushed it away, but it came right back again. “Mrs. Kitchings, how can you be sure he didn’t do it?”
She glared at me. “Because I did it.”
“No!” cried the old man.
“Yes,” she hissed at him. “Yes! I killed her.”
“But it was a fever,” he said. “I come home from that hunting trip, and she was dead. You said something went wrong with the baby, and she caught a fever and died.”
“And you said you never laid a hand on that girl, and I knew that was a goddamn lie. So I lied right back to you, and we been lyin’ ever since, the both of us. And look what it’s done brought down on us.”
Art took a small step toward her. “Can I ask you something, Mrs. Kitchings?” He didn’t wait for an answer. His tone was mild, curious. “Leena was a pretty big girl. Had to be pretty strong. How could a small woman like you overpower a strapping young gal like her?”
She shook her head impatiently. “I told you, I ain’t stupid. She was sick — she did have a fever — so I give her some tea with some honey and lemon in it. Put some whiskey in it, too. A right good bit of whiskey. And she got kindly tipsy, and that’s when she started cryin’ and telling me all about…” She seemed to lose her way, or her resolve, but then she clenched her jaw and drew herself up again. “She told me about what he done to her. I didn’t want to know — I’d been afraid of something like that ever since she moved in with us. So I hadn’t asked her nothin’ about nothin’, but then she went and told it herself.”
Her eyes were staring off into the distance, or back into the past. “I drank me a little whiskey, too, and then I mixed her up some more, and some more, and while she was cryin’ and drinkin’, I was cryin’ and thinkin’. Thinkin’ about how my husband had never loved me, not really, and how it took my sister’s girl movin’ in under my own roof to make me face up to the truth. And I thought, ‘Damn you, Thomas Kitchings, and damn you, pretty girl, and damn your little bastard baby, too.’ And so when she passed out, that’s when I done it.”
Now it was my turn to be puzzled. “But how did you get her all the way back into the cave?”
A heartsick voice beside me said, “I did that. God help me, I put her there.”
Mrs. Kitchings laughed a bitter laugh. “I told him he better bury her, or some doctor would look at her, and it was bound to cause a whole lot of shame and trouble and he’d lose his church for sure. Hell, I didn’t know he was gonna put her on some altar in some underground chapel and go look at her all the damn time. Thomas, I wish I had dragged her out for the dogs to eat.” His eyes widened with horror. “You self-righteous hypocrite. Up there in that pulpit ever Sunday, preaching about bein’ washed in the blood and following the path of righteousness, and the whole time, your dead niece and your bastard child lyin’ not two hunnerd yards away.”
She shook her head and spat, then took her hand off the trigger momentarily, fishing another shotgun shell from a pocket of her apron without taking her eyes off us. She broke the breach open to reload the barrel she’d fired at my windshield. I glanced at Art — the reloading didn’t strike me as a good sign — and noticed a slight tensing of his muscles. She fumbled with the shell, glancing down at the barrel. She took her eyes off us for only an instant, but that gave Art an opening. Springing forward, he grabbed the end of the barrel and wrested it from her grasp. She flung herself at Art, but her husband stepped between them and wrapped his arms around her in a bear hug. She fought for a moment, then sagged in his arms. I stood motionless, my hands still high in the air, too stunned to lower them.
“That’s real touching,” came a voice from the far corner of the porch. “Y’all gonna kiss and make up now?” Leon Williams stepped into view, a lever-action hunting rifle cradled in the crook of his right arm, the barrel angling across his chest. “Howdy, Doc. Art.”
I dropped my aching arms. “We sure coulda used you here about five minutes sooner,” I said, stepping toward him. Art reached out and laid a hand on my arm. Williams raised the rifle and thumbed the hammer back. “Put ’em back up, Doc. Art, you wanna just lay that shotgun down real careful and slide it over this way with your foot?”
Art shook his head in disgust, the shotgun hanging open and useless in his left hand. He bent down and set it on the boards, kicking it to Williams, who set one foot on the stock. Art’s voice surprised me with its steadiness. “This is kinda snowballing on you, isn’t it, Deputy? How many more people you plan to kill?” I stared at Art; he stared at Williams’s rifle. “Not too bright to bring the same rifle you shot Orbin with, Leon. That’s a Marlin 336, isn’t it? Shoots Winchester thirty-thirty ammunition, if I’m not mistaken. Be easy for ballistics to check it against the bullet Bill dug out of Orbin’s brain last night.” There was no bullet in Orbin’s brain, only a melted blob of lead in the floor of the chopper — Art was adlibbing again — but Williams suddenly looked nervous.
“By the way,” Art said, “what kind of bullet was it that killed the previous sheriff, fellow who died in that drug bust shootout a few years back? Was that a thirty-thirty, too, Leon? You been gunning for the sheriff’s job for a while now?” The deputy’s jaw muscles were working furiously. “Don’t you think you better cut your losses and make a deal while you’ve still got a chance?”