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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Bloom
Read between
March 21 - March 23, 2019
If the truth were known, she often avoided talking to Betty at all. She found Betty cold and distant, and one reason she wanted Alisa to go with them to the movie is that, otherwise, Alisa might not get to see it at all.
As Candy left the kitchen to find Ian and Alisa, Betty Huffhines happened to notice something odd. Candy Montgomery, who always wore rubber sandals in the summer, was wearing a pair of blue tennis shoes.
Johnny, bigger and faster than Candy, was off right away and won easily, but as soon as Candy caught up she grabbed the jar from him and smashed it against the pump in rage.
“My mother told me you wanted to be a doctor.” Pat nodded. “Well, you must really like to work with your hands.” Pat explained that he wanted a Ph.D., not an M.D., and then he tried to explain what electromagnetics is.
It was only their fourth weekend together, and a scant two months after they had first met, but they quickly agreed that the earliest possible wedding date was the only acceptable one.
Despite her popularity, Betty was never wholly convinced that she wasn’t plain, so she tended to cling hard to anything as handsome as Jimmy Sheetz.
A few feet from Betty’s head, half-concealed under the freezer, was a heavy, wooden-handled, three-foot-long ax.
There, spread out next to the remnants of the breakfast dishes, was the Dallas Morning News, opened to the entertainment section and folded so as to emphasize a single article, a movie review. The movie was “The Shining.” It was the story of a psychopathic ax murderer.
Then he went to the bathroom, which leads from the front hallway, and considered the most terrifying evidence yet: there were blood stains on the bathmat, the soap dish, the wall tiles, and the tub. The killer had had enough composure to take a shower before leaving. Now Abbott, like everyone else, was really thinking about psychos.
From the drain in the tub he retrieved a fairly large clump of hair, which he placed in a bag for later lab analysis.
“It was not premeditated,” he told Abbott. “The weapon is too strange, there are signs of a terrible struggle everywhere. It was a crime of circumstance. Second, those footprints in the utility room don’t belong to a man; they’re too small. I think a woman did this. A woman or a kid.”
It must have been a sexual crime. Otherwise, why so much overkill, so much mutilation?
They were so deep, and had been struck with such force, that they had penetrated the skull and gone all the way into the cranial vault, causing a good portion of Betty Gore’s brain to seep out onto the floor.
Candy sat in a chair by the kitchen table, phone cradled between her chin and shoulder, a pair of garden shears in her hands. As she spoke, she began to work the shears back and forth, pressing with all her might as the metal blades cut through the soles of a pair of rubber sandals. She continued her work for several minutes, long enough for the shears to destroy all semblance of pattern on the sole and to render the shoes into a messy little heap of rubber. Hanging up the phone, she gathered up the scraps she had made and carried them to an outside garbage can.
As Candy threw her nightgown over her head, Pat noticed something on her legs. Her thighs were covered with unsightly purple bruises. “Where did you get those?” he asked. “Oh, just housework.
But the cynic and the idealist are more closely related than either believes.
Candy Montgomery was a back-door friend. Betty Gore was a front-door friend. When Betty came by the parsonage for one reason or another, the other women would remember to hold their tongues for fear of offending her.
They had never asked her why the fingernail on the little finger of her left hand was cut to the quick.
“Chief Abbott, this is Allan Gore. I’m calling to tell you that there’s one thing I wasn’t truthful about last night.” “What’s that, Allan?” “I did have an affair.” “Oh?” “With Candy Montgomery.”
Candy felt very well pleased. Despite Allan’s apparent inexperience, she hadn’t really had to fake her responses very much at all. And he did show great promise as a lover. He wasn’t very interesting in bed, and he was certainly quick about it, but he had an advantage most men didn’t: the most perfectly shaped penis Candy had ever seen.
How could this little woman be accused of an ax murder, of all things?
That macabre, bloody print found in the utility room belonged to the Montgomery woman.
“Candy,” he said over dinner, “whatever happened to those thongs you used to wear?” “I gave them to the police.” “No, not those, the other pair.” “Oh, I threw ’em away.” “When?” “I don’t remember. A while ago.” Pat dropped the subject.
“On Friday, June the thirteenth, 1980, Candace Montgomery killed Betty Gore. She did so with an ax. She did so in self-defense.”
“how does a person commit some crime like that and then say it was self-defense four months later? You don’t say, ‘I had to do it,’ four months later. That’s something you say right after you kill somebody.”
There were, in all, forty-one chop wounds. Forty of them occurred while Betty Gore’s heart was still beating.
What about her subsequent lies to her friends and to the police? Was that “dissociative reaction”?
She was sane enough to argue self-defense, but not sane enough to be responsible for the forty-one blows. It was like having a self-defense and a temporary insanity plea at the same time, and reaping the benefits of both.
And finally Don tried to deal with the most troublesome aspect of his whole case: the overkill, the forty-one blows.
“You’re not going to swing an ax twenty-eight times or forty-one, or however many times it was in this case, and not know what you’re doing.”
Marriage and love, once united in a supreme white goddess, had become warring forces within the soul of every woman.
Perhaps never before had there been such widespread disagreement with a jury verdict, and such a universal feeling that something important about right and justice had been sacrificed when Candy Montgomery was allowed to walk free.