Here Lies a Wicked Man – Snippet 28
CHAPTER 29
SILVER RAINDROPS TAP-DANCED ON TAUT UMBRELLAS as neighbors hurried to the church dressed in the somber colors expected at a funeral. Wind came in gusts, rain in spurts, a sprinkle followed by a downpour. Water collected underfoot in streams before it could run off. Lightning zipped through plum-bellied clouds, infusing the air with the smell of ozone. The thunderstorm had settled in for a long visit.
Booker opened the door for an elderly couple he vaguely recognized, then he and Bradley stamped in, wiping their feet on the muddied door mat. An organ dirge filled the room with appropriate melancholy. Mourners chattered in tight groups.
When Booker saw the number of funeral wreathes crowded into the room, later to be hauled to a stormy grave site, he felt better about forgetting to order flowers. The church already reeked of carnations and lilies.
Charles Bailyn Fowler lay in a burnished umber casket, not extravagant but decently expensive. Closed, of course. Considering what a bass-enriched lake had done to the corpse,
Booker was grateful.
Spying Roxanna in the second row, he scarcely hesitated before taking a seat beside her. Bradley slouched toward a back row to watch for Jeremy. After the photo shoot, everyone had gone home to change clothes for the funeral, and Bradley, having ridden from Bryan in Jeremy’s Chevy, had asked Booker to drive him back to the theater later, where his motorcycle was locked in the prop room. Maybe he’d work a while, he said. Booker hoped his son would change his mind and decide to stay overnight.
Roxanna, auburn hair sleeked into a complicated twist at the back of her head, looked classy and sophisticated in a dark green suit. She might own a multimillion-dollar hotel chain instead of a struggling bed and brunch.
“Who’s minding the inn?” Booker asked.
“I closed early. Everybody who stopped was in a hurry, most of them coming here.”
“Don’t your overnight guests check in today?”
“After four o’clock.” Her smile, properly low wattage for the occasion, gave him that familiar jolt. “I was too keyed up to hang around the inn all afternoon. Everything’s ready, and my fidgeting wouldn’t have made it better. I suppose I’m silly, getting butterflies as if it was a grand opening or something.”
“Going shopping might’ve been more calming than a funeral.” Booker eyed her careful attire, uncertain whether he was suspicious or jealous. “Guess I didn’t realize you and Chuck were friendly enough…well, he did double cross you.”
“A man’s sins die with him, Booker. And shopping takes money.”
Booker had turned sideways in the pew to talk to her. From this vantage he watched people enter the church. Sheriff and Mrs. Ringhoffer sat in the middle row, Cora Lee striking in a black dress with her yellow hair and plump little figure, the sheriff in his uniform. Perhaps he considered himself on duty.
Booker checked his watch. Services were due to start, yet the family hadn’t arrived. As the organist repeated her hymn medley, Booker recognized “Rock of Ages,” “I’ll Fly Away” and perhaps a slowed down rendition of “Your Cheating Heart,” though he wouldn’t swear to it.
Finally, Sarabelle entered, shaking raindrops from her black hat and looking properly mournful in a limp black dress, her face naturally pale and free of makeup. Aaron and Jeremy followed her, handsome in black suits.
In fact, the entire congregation looked grand. Booker, wearing a gray suit, the pants as much in need of a gusset as those he’d worn last night, wondered if he should’ve brought his camera. He wasn’t current on funeral etiquette, but people seemed determined to fill their online albums with pictures of every occasion. The corpse had already been well documented. Perhaps the living should receive the same attention.
He considered making a dash for the car and, at the same time, finding the men’s room. No way a preacher could pass up an opportunity for long-winded oratory in front of his largest congregation since Easter Sunday, but just as Booker spotted a door that undoubtedly led to the rest rooms, and decided against dashing for his camera, the preacher stepped to the lectern.
At that same instant, Melinda entered the church. A muscular fellow with collar-length salt-and-pepper hair skinned back in a stiff fringe at his nape escorted her. He wore a black western-cut jacket, black shirt, black string tie. He needed only a guitar and a prison tattoo to be the spitting image of an iconic country singer, also deceased but still popular.
Melinda herself looked like a movie star. Her black-veiled hat would make three of Sarabelle’s, as wide as a small umbrella and tilted dramatically over her eyes. Her dress fit as snug as a coat of black shoe polish, showing three inches of spectacular cleavage and six inches of shapely thigh.
A whispered urgency circled the room as Melinda and her escort, who could only be the infamous Ramsey Crawford, sat down in a back corner. Sarabelle glanced around to see what had caused the stir, and apparently didn’t spot the couple. Booker let out a breath of gratitude.
The organist played a mournful drum-roll to hush the crowd and launch the preacher’s commemoration. He did a fine job, too, hitting all the usual bases—good husband and father, good friend, good citizen, undeserving of such an early death yet destined for a better world—then went on to describe how the congregation might be equally deserving.
Follow the Ten Commandments. Avoid the Seven Deadly Sins. Most of all, attend church every Sabbath and tithe. When the tribute started winding down, Booker thought he might finally have a chance at the men’s room.
That’s when Pete Littlehawk stood and asked to say a few words about the deceased. His Choctaw vest, worn over black pants and a gray shirt, battled the funeral flowers for dramatic color, while his expression remained properly somber. No sign of his earsplitting grin.
“My friend Chuck was a great warrior. We competed many times, on water, on land, and in business. Sure-sure, we often disagreed. Chuck was a brutal, uncompromising opponent. I will miss him.”
He sat down. The flock went silent for a moment. Booker squirmed. In his experience, one such testimonial always prompted another.
Sarabelle stood, paused long enough to infuse the moment with gravity, then squared her shoulders and mounted the dais. Today her scrawny frame looked valiantly frail, her ashen face saintly, her granite eyes stalwart. She, even more than her husband, was the celebrity of the hour.
“Charles believed in himself, and he instilled in all of his family that same belief. ‘When a thing feels right, do it,’ he often said. ‘Never question intuition. It’s our inner confidence that gives us power.’
“The night Charles asked me to marry him, I knew it was right. It felt right and proved to be the driving force of my life until the day of my husband’s death, when I had to search again for that inner confidence. My husband gave me thirty-six exceptional years plus two glorious sons. Fortunately, he also gave me the strength to carry on in his absence.”
She remained collected throughout the speech, but her lips quivered and her voice cracked near the end. In the rows behind him, Booker heard sniffles.
Aaron was on his feet before his mother quit the lectern. He escorted her to her seat then stepped up to deliver his own message.
“Pop taught me everything I know, okay? Everything I consider important. When I was three years old, he bought me a pair of boxing gloves. ‘You don’t get what you want in life with an open palm,’ he said. ‘You fight for it.’ All the time I was growing up, I watched Pop fight for what he wanted. No trophy was unattainable, no opponent too strong. Pop was the best. He taught me to walk in his shoes, and I intend to be worthy of them.”
Aaron sat down. Another brief silence followed, punctuated by sniffles, but the ball was rolling now and wouldn’t stop until Fowler’s family and closest friends had said their piece.
Booker eyed the door to the rest rooms. With a resigned sigh, he reached under his jacket and loosened his belt.
In contrast to his brother, Jeremy moved haltingly to the front of the room, as if ushered by audience expectation but uncertain how to proceed. His young face, so animated the night before, now appeared lifeless, years older, and more distant than at the photo shoot. Tears glistened in his eyes. He coughed, started to speak, then cleared his throat and began again.
“My father never gave up on us. Never. Unlike Aaron, I didn’t fit the family mold. I wanted to. Especially, when I was younger. I wanted to do everything Pop and Aaron did. I wanted Pop to be proud of me. For some reason, I couldn’t learn to swim. Pop tried to teach me, but nothing worked. He held me up while I dog-paddled, showed me how to kick like a frog. He strapped weights on my ankles to build up my leg muscles.”
Tears streamed down Jeremy’s face, as if from an open faucet, but he seemed not to notice. Except for an occasional glance toward his mother, he stared forward, over the heads of his audience.
“When I was six, we went out in the boat. ‘Going fishing,’ Pop said. I hated water, was terrified of it, but I liked the boat. Out in the middle of the lake, Pop said we were changing plans. He was going to fish while I learned to swim. He tethered me to the stern with a twenty-foot rope, short enough to pull me in, I guess, if I really started drowning. Then he drove around the lake all day.
“I didn’t learn to swim, but Pop wouldn’t give up. We went out the next week and the next. Eventually, I learned. That day, when he reached out his big rough hand to pull me into the boat, the pride on his face was worth all the suffering. What I know about my father is when he said something was going to happen, it happened. You could write a contract on it. I know how to swim now.”
The boy blinked a few times, wiped a hand across his wet face, and sat down as haltingly as he had stood. This time the crowd remained quiet for a full minute, Booker noticed, and hoped they were deciding enough had been said. Then Emaline rose, which began a parade of eulogies. A few people managed to keep their seats, cutting the agony shorter than it might have been. Booker mentally searched out those few souls and thanked them.
“Let us not be shy,” the preacher said when the parade lulled. Booker wanted to muzzle him. “This is the time for sharing our feelings. Don’t be the one who regrets passing the opportunity to speak out.”
He shouldn’t have said it like that, Booker thought later. He could have put it any other way and maybe averted a disaster.
Hearing the tap of high heels from way in the rear of the room, Booker knew what was coming. He wished he’d been smart enough to take a seat near the door, like Bradley, so he could sneak out. The whispers started before she was halfway to the dais and grew like a wave behind her. Booker couldn’t differentiate the mutterings, but he knew the gist.
“What is she up to?”
“Just wait till Sarabelle sees her.”
“The nerve of the woman.”
“What will she say?”
“I can’t believe she’s even here. Somebody stop her.”
“What is she going to do?”
Sarabelle must have known, too, but she didn’t turn to look. A composed, poised, tolerant widow had replaced the embittered harridan. When the astonished preacher refused to relinquish his lectern, Melinda nodded and stood beside it, smiling shamelessly.
“Lying in church ought to send you straight to hell, shouldn’t it? Yet someone stood up here in front of you and lied through her teeth. Chuck was my friend and lover, my future husband. Now he’s dead, and the person who killed him is in this room. His murderer shouldn’t go unpunished, should she?”
Every head in the church, except the Fowler boys’, turned toward Sarabelle. She sat rigid and cool.
Melinda stepped down primly from the podium, strode back down the aisle and out the door, which Ramsey Crawford had opened for her. This time there were no whispers. But
Booker had a hunch the congregation would pass this story around the county for years to come.
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