“Thanks,” Joel said, taking the envelope and watching the freshman walk away. Inside, a handwritten note on official Vanderbilt stationery instructed Joel to please come without delay to the dean’s office in Kirkland Hall, the administration building.
Joel had a literature class in fifteen minutes and the professor frowned on absences. If he sprinted, he could run by the dean’s office, tend to whatever matter was at hand, then arrive late for class and hope the professor was in a good mood. He hustled across the quad to Kirkland Hall and bounded up the stairs to the third floor, where the dean’s secretary explained that he was to wait until precisely 11:00 a.m., when his aunt Florry would call from home. The secretary claimed to know nothing. She had spoken to Florry Banning, who was calling on her rural party line and thus without privacy. Florry planned to drive into Clanton and use the private line at a friend’s home.
As he waited, he assumed someone had died and he could not help but think of those relatives and friends he preferred to lose before the others. The Banning family was smalclass="underline" just his parents, Pete and Liza, his sister, Stella, and his aunt Florry. The grandparents were dead. Florry had no children; thus, he and Stella had no first cousins on the Banning side. His mother’s people were from Memphis but had scattered after the war.
He paced around the office, ignoring the looks from the secretary, and decided it was probably his mother. She had been sent away months earlier and the family was reeling. He and Stella had not seen her and their letters went unanswered. Their father refused to discuss his wife’s treatment, and, well, there were a lot of unknowns. Would her condition improve? Would she come home? Would the family ever be a real family again? Joel and Stella had questions, but their father preferred to talk about other matters when he chose to talk at all. Likewise, Aunt Florry was of little help.
She called at 11:00 a.m. on the dot. The secretary handed Joel the phone and stepped around a corner, though probably within earshot, he figured. Joel said hello, then listened for what seemed an eternity. Florry began by explaining that she was in town at the home of Miss Mildred Highlander, a woman Joel had known his entire life, and she, Florry, was there because the call needed to be private and there was no privacy on their rural party line, as he well knew. And, really, nothing was private in town right now because his father had driven to the Methodist church just hours earlier and shot and killed the Reverend Dexter Bell, and was now in jail, and, well, as anyone could understand, the entire town was buzzing and everything had come to a complete stop. Don’t ask why and don’t say anything that might get overheard, wherever you are, Joel, but it’s just awful and God help us.
Joel leaned on the secretary’s desk for support as he felt faint. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and listened. Florry said she had just talked to Stella at Hollins and she did not take it well. They had her in the president’s office with a nurse. She explained that Pete had given her specific instructions, in writing no less, that they — Joel and Stella — were to stay at school and away from home and Clanton until further notice. They should make plans to spend Thanksgiving holidays with friends as far away from Ford County as possible. And, if they were contacted by reporters, investigators, police, or anybody else, they were to say absolutely nothing. Not a word to anyone about their father or the family. Not a word, period. She wrapped things up by saying that she loved him dearly, would write a long letter immediately, and that she wished she could be there with him at this horrible moment.
Joel put the phone down without a word and left the building. He drifted across the campus until he saw an empty bench partially hidden by shrubbery. He sat there and fought back tears, determined to find the stoicism taught by his father. Poor Stella, he thought. She was as fiery and emotional as their mother, and he knew she was a mess at the moment.
Frightened, bewildered, and confused, Joel watched the leaves fall and scatter in the breeze. He felt the urge to go home, immediately, to catch a train and be in Clanton before dark, and once there he would get to the bottom of things. The thought passed, though, and he wondered if he would ever go back. Reverend Bell was a gifted and popular minister, and at the moment there was probably great hostility toward the Bannings. Besides, his father had given him and Stella strict instructions to stay away. Joel, at the age of twenty, could not remember a single instance when he had disobeyed his father. With age, he had learned to respectfully disagree with him, but he would never disobey him. His father was a proud soldier, a strict disciplinarian who said little and valued authority.
There was simply no way his father could commit murder.
Chapter 4
The courthouse, and the shops and offices lining the neat square around it, closed at five each weekday. Usually by that time all doors were locked, all lights were off, the sidewalks were empty, and everyone was gone. However, on this day the townsfolk lingered a bit later in case more facts and/or gossip emerged about the killing. They had talked of nothing else since nine that morning. They had shocked each other with the first reports, then spread along later developments. They had stood in solemn respect as old man Magargel paraded his hearse around the square to provide a glimpse of the corpse outlined under a black cape. Some had ventured to the Methodist church and held vigil while offering prayers, then returned to their places around the square with near-breathless descriptions of what was happening on the front line. Baptists, Presbyterians, and Pentecostals were at a disadvantage since they could claim no real connection to either the victim or his killer. The Methodists, though, were in the spotlight, with each one eager to describe relationships that seemed to grow stronger as the day progressed. On this unforgettable day, the Clanton Methodist Church had never known so many congregants.
For most people in Clanton, among the white folks anyway, there was a sense of betrayal. Dexter Bell was popular and highly regarded. Pete Banning was a near-mythical figure. To have one kill the other was such a senseless loss it touched almost everyone. Motive was so incomprehensible that no solid rumor emerged to address it.
Not that there was a shortage of rumors; there certainly was not. Banning would be in court tomorrow. He was refusing to say anything. He would plead insanity. John Wilbanks had never lost a trial and was not about to lose this one. Judge Oswalt was a close friend of Banning’s, or maybe he was a close friend of Dexter Bell’s. The trial would be moved to Tupelo. He had not been right since the war. Jackie Bell was heavily sedated. Her kids were a mess. Pete would put up his land as security for bail and go home tomorrow.
To avoid seeing anyone, Florry parked on a side street and hurried to the law office. John Wilbanks was working late and waiting for her in the reception room on the first floor.
In 1946, there were a dozen lawyers in Ford County and half of them worked for the firm of Wilbanks & Wilbanks. All six were related. For over a hundred years, the Wilbanks family had been prominent in law, politics, banking, real estate, and farming. John and his brother Russell studied law up north and ran the firm, which seemed to run most other commercial matters in the county. Another brother was the chairman of the largest bank in the county, along with owning several businesses. A cousin farmed two thousand acres. Another cousin handled real estate and was also a state representative with ambitions. It was rumored that the family met in secret the first week of January of each year to tally up the various profits and divide the money. There seemed to be plenty to go around.
Florry had known John Wilbanks since high school, though she was three years older. His firm had always taken care of the Bannings’ legal matters, none of which had ever seemed that complicated until now. There had been the sticky problem of shipping Liza off to the asylum, but John had discreetly pulled the right strings and away she went. Florry’s ancient divorce had likewise been swept under the rug by John and his brother, with hardly a record of it in the county books.