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Art kept climbing, step upon step, slowly turning the picture and holding it out toward Kitchings. The old man shrank back, like a vampire confronted by a crucifix. “Must have been real hard for you when the girl moved into your house,” said Art. “So young, so pretty. So much like the woman you were still in love with, even after you married the homely sister.” Kitchings was shaking his head slowly from side to side, but his eyes were locked on the picture. “I bet you dreamed about her at night, didn’t you, Reverend? Prayed about her in the daytime, dreamed about her at night.” Art was almost to the top step. “Then she took up with that O’Conner boy. Is that what pushed you over the edge, Reverend? Knowing you were about to lose her, too? Knowing another man — a man from a family you hated — was about to pluck that young woman you’d been watching ripen on the vine all that time?”
Art stepped onto the porch, brandishing the picture at arm’s length like a weapon. I flashed back to the image of him holding the photo in the KPD forensics lab, the flaming photo of the suspect in his abduction case, and I marveled at the power he was able to invest pictures with. Maybe the Native Americans are right: maybe the camera does capture a bit of the soul.
“You forced that girl, didn’t you, Reverend, when you realized she was gonna marry Jim O’Conner? She was a virgin, but you knew that, didn’t you? That was part of the temptation, wasn’t it?” Kitchings was backed up against the front wall of the house now, his head thrashing from side to side as if the words were backhanded blows to the face. I thought back to Art’s reenactment of Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway — she was my niece; she was my lover; she was my niece and my lover. “Did she cry, Reverend? Did she beg you not to, or was she too proud to plead? How’d you do it? Did you hit her? Hold a knife to her throat and a hand on her mouth?” As Art advanced relentlessly, the old man began to slide down the wall, his knees giving way beneath him. “And when you spilled your seed inside her, Reverend — inside your own niece, Reverend — did you ask her to forgive you? Or did you just pray to God you wouldn’t get caught?” Kitchings was crumpled at Art’s feet now, his breath coming in ragged sobs. “And four months later, Reverend — when her pregnancy started to show — what did God say when you put your hands around her throat and started to squeeze?”
“No,” he whispered. “Oh, Lord God, no.”
I was holding my breath, and the two men on the porch were motionless. Even the wind seemed breathless, for there was an eerie, electric silence, as if the very cosmos were hanging in suspense, waiting for what would come next. And in that sudden silence I heard the unmistakable click of a shotgun being breached open, then snapped shut.
“All right, Mister, you just step back right now,” twanged a flat female voice I recognized from my interview with Mrs. Kitchings. The screen door screeched open against its rusty spring, then slapped shut as she stepped out of the house and onto the porch. “Get your hands up,” she told Art, motioning with the shotgun. “You, too,” she said, waving the shotgun’s gaping twin barrels at me.
I stood frozen, too dumbfounded to move. She raised the gun to her shoulder. Her mouth pursed into a prunelike grimace. Fire blasted from one of the barrels, and I felt a searing wind roar past my right ear. Behind me, I heard my truck’s windshield shatter. “I said put your hands up. Next shot takes your head off. One. Two.”
I raised my arms.
“Now botha you get over there to the end of the porch. Go on, now.”
I mounted the steps, as if toward a gallows, and moved to the far end of the porch. Art came and stood beside me.
The old man struggled to his feet and limped to his wife. He reached out his hand for the gun, saying, “Vera—” The barrel caught him squarely on his right cheekbone. The front sight raked across the flesh, tearing a ragged gash that began to ooze blood. He staggered back against the porch rail, one hand pressed to the cheek. “Vera…”
“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.”
