misconduct. I guess I’d better do some homework on the subject.”
Edith smirked. “Would you like me to call and set up an appointment with Secretariat?”
“Not yet,” said Bill. “Would you like to take a look at this guy?”
“Are you selling tickets?”
“No. I thought I might go to church tonight.”
It was fortunate that Bill MacPherson’s budget for office decor did not run to hand-hooked oriental rugs. At the rate A. P. Hill was pacing his floor, she would have worn them out in a matter of hours. “It’s weird, I tell you!” she said, for perhaps the fifth time, punctuating the statement with a two-handed gesture of despair: palms up, fingers outstretched. “They have denied my client bail. Can you believe it? In a domestic case!”
Her law partner watched her with interest, feet up on his desk and a can of root beer poised ready to drink, except that he had to keep nodding in agreement to all her rhetorical questions. “Well,” he ventured at last, “she did kill two people, you know. A conservative would call that mass murder.”
“Domestic!” said A.P., waving away the issue.
“Uh-so was Bluebeard,” Bill pointed out. “And What’s-his-name in England, the one who kept drowning his wives in the bathtub.”
“George Joseph Smith,” said A. P. Hill, whose grade-point average in law school had owed much to her memory. “But he preyed on women for their fortunes. Eleanor Royden committed a crime of passion.”
“I don’t know how passionate one can be at six o’clock in the morning when the other party is peacefully asleep,” mused Bill. “To my mind the real reason the court is taking such a dim view of Mrs. Royden is the fact that she blew away a lawyer. Not a precedent they want to encourage.”
“Ha! Yes!” said A. R Hill, smacking her fist into her palm. “Craven attorneys. And I’ll bet a few of those old stoats have ex-wives somewhere in the background, too! They figure they’ll be next. After all, it wouldn’t do to give the ladies any ideas, would it?”
Bill considered the matter. “Well, since this is the state that hosted the Lorena Bobbitt trial, the Roanoke courts may feel that women have far too many thoughts on the subject of vengeance as it is.”
“Don’t get me started on Lorena Bobbitt,” said his partner. Indeed, that famous Manassas trial had been so thoroughly scrutinized and vicariously debated in the offices of MacPherson and Hill, that Edith, their legal secretary, had imposed a twenty-five-cent fine on anyone using the word
Quarters were duly deposited in the spare coffee mug, and the discussion continued.
“You should have seen their faces when I went in and said that I was defending her. You’d have thought that I had asked them for kitten recipes the way they stared at me in horrified fascination.
And then they started telling me what a swell guy good old Jeb had been.”
“He probably was, if you didn’t happen to be married to him,” said Bill.
A. P. Hill stopped pacing and glared in his direction. “That’s right. Stick up for him. Typical male trait: close the ranks. Crimes against women do not count.”
“Not at all,” Bill replied. “I did not know the man. All I’m saying is, if his only crime was to get a divorce and remarry, then it looks like Eleanor is a poor sport, to say the least, and there aren’t many courts who consider her justified in executing the happy couple.”
“But you haven’t heard anything yet, Bill! This poor woman went through two years of hell. Imagine being married to a razor-sharp, reptilian attorney who equates legal cases with chess games.”
“Yes, yes, I am imagining it,” said Bill, grinning. “And a lovely bride you’d make, too, Amy dear.”
She made a face at him. “No, seriously. You devote twenty years of your life to being the perfect little wife, a small grace note to his magnificence, and then one day he replaces you with a newer model. And instead of pensioning you off as decency and fairness-if not sentiment-require, he decides to turn the divorce into a legal Super Bowl.”
“And she has to be the Buffalo Bills, I suppose?”
“No. She’s the guy whose ticket was stolen and who didn’t even get to see the game. Nobody in town would take her divorce case. Two different guys from other counties signed on, and then mysteriously quit. She couldn’t get a change of venue to some other town, because everyone who had a say in the matter was a friend of Good Old Jeb. He used every trick in the book to hide his assets. He had all their furniture and household goods moved out of their house and put into storage, pending the settlement.”
“Furniture? What for?”
“Because she didn’t have any money to replace it! He just went out and bought all new stuff. Poor Eleanor couldn’t afford to do that. He even took the Waterford crystal and the silverware that had been left to Eleanor by her grandmother, and when she tried to go to the storage place to get it back, Jeb Royden had her arrested for trespassing.”
Bill shook his head. “It doesn’t ring true,” he said. “Mother and Dad weren’t like that. Why would Royden be so vindictive toward his own wife?”
“I asked her that!” said Powell Hill triumphantly. “She said that Jeb was so used to getting his own way that he couldn’t believe she was putting up a fuss about the divorce. He thought she should just submit meekly to whatever decision he made-and take whatever he chose to give her. When she made a fuss about it, he turned nasty. Then he decided to use all his legal skills to punish her. I have to document all the details of this for the defense. It’s a very depressing case.”
“I don’t know,” said Bill. “It makes
“Why?”
“It gives me a new perspective on my parents’ situation. Now I realize how much worse things could have been.”
“Don’t relax yet,” said Powell Hill. “The Roydens’ divorce went through more than a year ago, but she only shot him yesterday. Your mother may still be simmering.”
The small white frame church sat back from the road like a humpbacked Brahma bull, glowering at the world through eyes of crimson glass. The building was old, and it had once been a fine, but simple country church. Through the years jackleg carpenters had remodeled it to add plumbing and electricity, and to cover the weathered exterior with aluminum siding and the cracking plaster walls with cheap paneling, and the result was a serviceable structure without a scrap of grace. The old cemetery that formed a semicircle around the structure had a certain somber beauty, but otherwise the building and its surroundings, hemmed in by scrub pines and weedy locust trees fringing a gravel parking lot, completed the picture of an edifice that only God could love.
Bill MacPherson edged his shabby blue Tempo between a couple of battered pickup trucks. A single streetlight glowed above the parking lot, illuminating the dents in the aging vehicles and silhouetting the gun racks in the truck cabs. “I don’t think we look too out of place,” he said, looking approvingly at the faded Fords and Chevys lined up in front of them.
“No,” said Edith, slamming her door. “This clunker of yours can match rust spots with the best of them.”
“I drive this car as a safety precaution,” said Bill. “It deters thieves.”
“You couldn’t pay one to steal it, if that’s what you mean,” Edith replied. “But it is useful for undercover work. If anyone suspected that this car belonged to an attorney, applications to law schools would plummet.” She eyed him critically. “I’m not so sure about your clothes, though.”
“What’s wrong with them?” asked Bill, straightening his burgundy silk tie. “This is what I always wear to church. Navy blazer, khaki pants, blue oxford-cloth shirt. A suit would be more formal, I know, but it’s only a Tuesday-night service. Don’t I look all right?”
“Call it a hunch.” Edith, who was in a shapeless polyester dress, shrugged. “But I think you’re going to look like a peacock in a birdbath.”
“Maybe I should have brought my raincoat,” said Bill, loosening his tie and glancing nervously at the closed church door illuminated by a single yellow bug light. “We’ll sit in the back row and try to stay inconspicuous.”
“Just watch me,” said Edith, heading for the door. “I grew up in a little church like this one. Don’t genuflect. Don’t kneel. Don’t put your MasterCard in the collection plate. And if somebody starts passing around a little wooden box with a metal latch, don’t take it.”
“Why not?” asked Bill. “What would they have in a little wooden box?”
Edith opened the door and slipped inside. “Rattlesnakes,” she whispered. She slid into a wooden pew to the
