“He’s accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.”
“Does that mean he was with you?”
“Yes. I told the other policeman.”
Gurney smiled sympathetically. “Sometimes it helps us to go over these things more than once.”
She nodded as if in deep agreement and repeated, “He’s accepted Jesus Christ.”
“Did your husband accept Jesus Christ?”
“I believe he did.”
“You’re not sure?”
She closed her eyes tightly as if searching the insides of her eyelids for the answer. She said, “Satan is powerful, and devious are his ways.”
“Devious indeed, Mrs. Rudden,” said Gurney. He pulled the coffee table with the pink flowers on it back a little from the couch, walked around, and sat on the edge of it, facing her. He’d learned that the best way to talk to someone who talked like that was to talk the same way, even if he had no idea where the conversation was going.
“Devious and terrible,” he said, watching her closely.
“‘The Lord is my shepherd,’” she said. “‘I shall not want.’”
“Amen.”
Clamm cleared his throat and shifted his feet.
“Tell me,” said Gurney, “in what devious way did Satan reach out to Albert?”
“It is the upright man that Satan pursueth!” she cried with sudden insistence. “For the evil man he hath already in his power.”
“And Albert was an upright man?”
“Jonah!” she cried even louder, rising from the couch and moving with surprising speed through the archway on the left to one of the doors beyond it, which she began slapping with the palm of her hand. “Open the door! Now! Open the door!”
“What the fuck…?” said Clamm.
“I said now, Jonah!”
A lock clicked, and the door opened halfway, revealing an obese boy almost as large as the mother he resembled to a disturbing degree-right up to the odd sense of detachment in the eyes, making Gurney wonder whether the cause was genetics or medication or both. His crew cut was bleached pure white.
“I told you not to lock that door when I’m home. Turn down the sound. It sounds like someone being murdered in there.” If either of them had any feeling about the awkwardness of this comment under the circumstances, neither showed it. The boy looked at Gurney and Clamm without interest. No doubt, mused Gurney, this was one of those families so accustomed to social-services interventions that official-looking strangers in the living room didn’t merit a second thought. The boy looked back at his mother.
“Can I have my Popsicle now?”
“You know you can’t have it now. Keep the sound down or you won’t have it at all.”
“I’ll have it,” he said flatly, and shut the door in her face.
She came back into the living room and sat back down on the couch. “He was devastated by Albert’s death.”
“Mrs. Rudden,” said Clamm in his let’s-move-right-along way, “Detective Gurney here needs to ask you some questions.”
“Isn’t that a funny coincidence? I have an Aunt Bernie. I was just thinking about her this morning.”
“Gurney, not Bernie,” said Clamm.
“It’s close, though, isn’t it?” Her eyes seemed to gleam with the significance of the similarity.
“Mrs. Rudden,” said Gurney, “during the past month, did your husband tell you anything he was worried about?”
“Albert never worried.”
“Did he seem in any way different to you?”
“Albert was always the same.”
Gurney suspected that these perceptions could as likely be due to the cushioning and fogging effect of her medication as to any consistency on Albert’s part.
“Did he ever receive any mail with a handwritten address or with any writing in red ink?”
“The mail is all bills and ads. I never look at it.”
“Albert took care of the mail?”
“It was all bills and ads.”
“Do you know if Albert paid any special bills lately or wrote any unusual checks?”
She shook her head emphatically, making her immature face appear shockingly childish.
“One last question. After you found your husband’s body, did you change or move anything in the room before the police arrived?”
Again she shook her head. It might have been his imagination, but he thought he caught a glimpse of something new in her expression. Had there been a ripple of alarm in that blank stare? He decided to take a chance.
“Does the Lord speak to you?” he asked.
There was something else in her expression now, not so much alarm as vindication.
“Yes, He does.”
Vindication and pride, thought Gurney.
“Did the Lord speak to you when you found Albert?”
“‘The Lord is my shepherd,’” she began-and went on to recite the entire Twenty-third Psalm. The impatient tics and blinks that peppered Clamm’s face were visible even in Gurney’s peripheral vision.
“Did the Lord give you specific instructions?”
“I don’t hear voices,” she said. Again that flicker of alarm.
“No, not voices. But the Lord did speak to you, to help you?”
“We are here on earth to do what He would have us do.”
Gurney leaned toward her from his perch on the edge of the coffee table. “And you did as the Lord directed?”
“I did as the Lord directed.”
“When you found Albert, was there something that needed to be changed, something not the way it should be, something the Lord wanted you to do?”
The big woman’s eyes filled with tears, and they ran down her round, girlish cheeks. “I had to save it.”
“Save it?”
“The policemen would have taken it away.”
“Taken what away?”
“They took everything else-the clothes he was wearing, his watch, his wallet, the newspaper he was reading, the chair he was sitting in, the rug, his eyeglasses, the glass he was drinking… I mean, they took everything.”
“Not quite everything-right, Mrs. Rudden? They didn’t take what you saved.”
“I couldn’t let them. It was a gift. It was Albert’s last gift to me.”
“May I see the gift?”
“You already saw it. There-behind you.”
Gurney swiveled around and followed her gaze to the vase of pink flowers in the middle of the table-or what, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a vase with one pink plastic flower whose bloom was so large and showy it gave the initial impression of a bouquet.
“Albert gave you that flower?”
“That was his intention,” she said after a hesitation.
“He didn’t actually give it to you?”
“He couldn’t, could he?”
“Do you mean because he was killed?”
“I know he got it for me.”
“This could be very important, Mrs. Rudden,” said Gurney softly. “Please tell me exactly what you found and what you did.”
“When Jonah and I came home from Revelation Hall, we heard the television, and I didn’t want to disturb Albert. Albert loved television. He didn’t like it if someone walked in front of him. So Jonah and I walked around to the back door that goes into the kitchen, rather than come in the front and have to walk in front of him. We sat in the kitchen, and Jonah had his bedtime Popsicle.”
“How long did you sit in the kitchen?”
“I couldn’t tell you that. We got to talking. Jonah is very deep.”
“Talking about what?”
“Jonah’s favorite subject-the tribulation of the End Times. It says in the Scriptures that in the End Times there will be tribulation. Jonah always asks if I believe that, and how much tribulation I believe there will be, and what kind of tribulation. We talk a lot about that.”
“So you talked about tribulation, and Jonah ate his Popsicle?”
“Like always.”
“Then what?”
“Then it was time for him to go to bed.”
“And?”
“And he went through the kitchen door into the living room to get to his bedroom, but it wasn’t five seconds before he was back in the kitchen, backing up like, and pointing at the living room. I tried to get him to say something, but all he would do was point. So I went in there myself. I mean, I came in here,” she said, looking around the room.