Ring of Truth (9 page)

“I don't think that will happen, Anne,” I say, cautiously.

She frowns. “You don't know the rest of it yet.”

“What?”

“Let Jenny show you.”

As Anne and I return to the living room with a tray of drinks, I wonder if my visitors realize that everything they are looking at is either man-made or put there by humans. That doesn't make it ugly; it is, in fact, beautiful. But while it looks like “nature,” in fact every inch of it was plotted by architects and city planners, by botanists and that well-known landscape artist, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. I place a cool glass in Jenny's free hand, then pass the second glass to her mother. “You've heard of the Pleistocene, Jenny?”

She looks up at me and nods.

“During the Pleistocene era,” I tell her, “Florida was mostly veldt, like they have in Africa. There were camels out there, and bison and tortoises as big as trucks, and llamas, and the ancestors of elephants. Isn't that amazing?”

“Elephants?” her mother asks.

“Mastodons,” I tell her, lingering over the syllables with pleasure. Imagine that, mastodons in Florida. The proof, claim some naturalists, is visible whenever a new road goes through and ancient ivory is unearthed. I wonder if true crime writers will be dinosaurs one day, when satellites and video cameras record every inch of earth, and science can solve all crimes, so that nobody commits them anymore. Is it just me, the greedy writer, who recoils at that idea? “What's up, Jenny?” I finally ask, to get this over with. I like this child, and I like her mother, and I could talk about my state's natural history with them all day long, but right now I need a bath, not visitors. “What have you got to show me?”

They both turn around, and Anne gives her daughter a nudge. They set the canvas bag on my carpet, and the child bends over and digs something out of it. “I found this.” She has something gripped in her right fist. “Here.” She holds the fist out to me,
and I raise my right hand and open my palm to her. She drops something small and light into it. When her own small hand moves away, I give a little gasp. She has given me a small, shiny gold ring. Like an archeologist holding a coprolite, I'm looking down at the treasure she has uncovered: a gold band with four diamonds. The diamonds are not so large that you could buy a home with the insurance proceeds from losing this, but they're definitely impressive enough to insure. The band has odd jogs in it, like a puzzle intended to fit another ring.

“The missing wedding ring!” I exclaim.

When I give Jenny an amazed stare, she says, “I found it in the haunted house where the dead lady was.” Her blue eyes fill with tears, and she brings a fist up to rub the moisture away. Jenny suddenly looks very young and small and sorry. In a stiff voice, sounding as if she has been schooled, she says to me, “I apologize that I didn't tell you before, Ms. Lightfoot.”

“Stole it!” corrects her mother, in a grim tone. “And didn't tell anybody, and probably never would have, except that I found it when I was cleaning out her closet. She says she was afraid she'd get arrested and go to jail for taking it.” I don't smile at that, although I'm tempted. This is such a childish prank. And yet, there is something else at the back of Anne's eyes, a hint of an anxiety to match her daughter's. When I look at Jenny again, I see that tears are rolling down her cheeks, and I feel surprised and stricken for her. “Oh, Jenny!” I bend over, touch her hair.

“I'm sorry,” she whispers, with an urgent look into my eyes.

They seem so disproportionately upset over this that I feel a need to calm Jenny down, set her mother at ease, put a little perspective on things. It doesn't seem to me like anything to get excited about. I can see why Jenny felt anxious, as any kid would whose mother had caught her stealing something, but I don't see why her mother needs to make such a federal case out of it. This is a childish misdemeanor if there ever was one. A little girl found a shiny bauble and wanted to keep it, that's all.

The ring sparkles in the sunlight as I hold it.

Anne Carmichael gives me a meaningful look and says, in a low voice that makes her daughter's eyes widen in fear, “What if it's
hers?
What if
she
wants it back?” And then she says, in a tense, angry voice, “Show Marie what else you found in the old house, Jenny.”

Anything to Be Together

By Marie Lightfoot

CHAPTER 5

“Nobody equates religion with passion anymore,” the Reverend Bob Wing was known to thunder from his pulpit now and then. “Not since the civil rights movement of the sixties. Nobody lays down their life anymore, nobody throws themselves with all of their heart onto the picket line of justice. But here at Sands Gospel, we still feel it.” At that point, his fist would strike his black robe over his heart with a thud his microphone picked up. “Where there is racism, where there is injustice, where there is death that shouldn't be, we'll be there. We have a passion, all right, a passion for justice, for peace, for human rights.”

The faces in the pews demonstrated his words, for they were young and old, black, brown, golden, and white and every shade in between. It billed itself as a liberal church— like the Unitarians—with no creed but with a wide-open welcome mat for Christians and Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans, atheists, agnostics, and anybody with a searching, doubting, crusading nature. It wasn't traditional or conventional, but then neither was he.

The tall, young preacher was mesmerizing and handsome.
Forty-five years old, black-haired, with riveting blue eyes that held entire sanctuaries of people in their compass. There was about him the glamorous look of a western lawman—tall, straight-backed, and straightforward in his manner, he looked as if he'd be right at home in a long black coat with pistols at his side. His voice, that glorious baritone that reverberated in the hearts of his listeners, was part of his extraordinary appeal. Women adored him; men trusted him. Even his political enemies admitted he was as good as his word. Normally soft-spoken, he was known to be implacable as a bounty hunter when he got on the path of righteousness. He was scholarly too, with a doctorate in theology from Princeton and enough legal expertise to match most attorneys. If Bob Wing joined your cause, you cheered right up; if he opposed you, you girded your loins for battle.

His pet cause, the one that galvanized him, was capital punishment.

“Kill the death penalty,” he liked to say, “and save this country's soul.”

Argue with him and he leveled that blue stare at you and let loose with a devastating rebuttal to which few could respond. “Let me put this in terms even you can understand,” he once famously sneered at a conservative opponent. “The way our criminal system is structured, if you favor the death penalty, you favor the occasional execution of wrongfully convicted defendants. It's as plain as that. The U.S. Supreme Court stated as much in
Herrera v. Collins,
where Justice Rehnquist wrote that, effectively, if the state has provided you with all of the due process you are entitled to under the Constitution and the laws of the jurisdiction in which you were convicted, and granted access to both substantive and habeas corpus appeals, and you nevertheless fail to overturn your sentence of death, the fact that you are innocent makes no difference. Got
that? It makes no damned difference. The law doesn't care and you're a fool if you think it does. The system only guarantees the chance to prove your innocence, the court has written, because it is a subjective system with no absolute guarantees that every innocent person will be exonerated. The death penalty is absolute. Life in prison allows release. So, if you have the stomach for knowing that you, as a citizen of one of the states that are perpetually at risk of executing innocent or wrongfully convicted people, will be partially responsible for killing those people as a price for executing others, then fine.”

Few stood up to that passionate onslaught.

“But some people deserve to die,” his opponent objected.

“Like I said,” snapped the preacher, “that's your choice, and you purchase your vengeance at a damned high price.”

In the western suburbs of Bahia Beach, Sands Gospel members were awake and worrying in the hours before dawn. Their minister's wife had been missing for almost twentyfour hours now and they rushed to his side the way he rallied to the aid of so many other victims. Bob and Susanna lived in a suburb where clusters of homes dotted boulevards that are divided by grassy medians where waterfowl roost. Their development was called Bayfield, though there are no bays, and it's a good ten miles from the ocean. But each walled development has its own little lake, swimming pool, private gate, and homes association.

Church members arrived carrying comforting food they'd kindly brought to nourish their minister in his time of trouble. It was adults only, as this was deemed too upsetting for the children. This was the stuff of nightmares. Younger kids were left in the care of older brothers and sisters; baby-sitters and grandmothers hurried to help out, too.

At times, everybody seemed to talk at once in nervous bursts.

“Bob, I don't know what to say . . .”

“She's all right, Bob, I know it.”

When they thought he couldn't overhear them, they whispered to each other, “Where do you think she could be?” And, “It isn't fair! Not after what happened to—”

“Shh,” soft whispers warned.

By 8:00
A.M.,
the kitchen counters staggered under casseroles, canned goods, pies and cakes, coffee cakes and a meatloaf, loaves of bread, muffins, bagels, biscuits, several varieties of cream cheese, bags of potato chips, extra cans of coffee, and packs of sodas.

“Poor man, oh, that poor man. It's not fair. First he loses one wife he loved, and now—”

“Don't say it. Don't even think it!”

Their minister had been married once before, to a lovely woman named Donna who had died only two years ago. When Bob had fallen in love with a new member, Susanna Davis, and then married her, his congregation rejoiced. It was heartwarming to see him rise out of sorrow and loneliness. But now . . . this.

“We'll find her,” the president of the board said, forcefully. Stuart McGregor was a tall, lean man in his late thirties, with blond hair and an unlined face that could almost have passed for college-age. Though he hadn't been a member of the church very long, he'd taken to responsibility like a fish to water. He and the minister were good friends, as were their wives. His pretty blond wife, Artemis, nodded in agreement with her husband's sentiments as she walked around the living room carrying a coffee pot and providing refills for all the cups held out to her. “I don't care what it takes,” Stuart assured people, “we'll find her.”

“Of course we will,” echoed one of the older women. She accepted a refill without looking directly at the comely
woman who poured it for her. “And we'll take care of Bob till Susanna comes home.”

Artemis McGregor—known as Artie—quietly continued her coffee duties, her big brown eyes filling up when the missing woman's name was mentioned. Petite, blond, and buxom as a high school cheerleader, Artie was normally the bubbly life of any party; but on this difficult morning she was uncharacteristically silent as she made her coffee rounds. She, too, was tired, and her hands trembled so much that a little hot liquid spilled on more than one recipient of her efforts.

Another member spoke up: “That's what this church is about, taking care of one another.”

“But what if we
don't
find her?” somebody whispered, urgently.

“That's not possible,” Tammi Golding said, firmly. “ Between us and the police, we'll find her.” She didn't look like a tough legal contender at the moment; she looked like a tired, worried friend of the family, dressed in white shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals, and wearing a frown that made her look older than her thirty-nine years. Like the church members in the house, Tammi hadn't slept since getting the emergency phone call from her client and friend.

“Tammi,” someone asked her, “is the death-penalty committee still going to meet today?”

“No,” she said quietly, with a glance toward the living room, where Bob Wing sat in his armchair. “Not with this going on.”

“We haven't got much time. Every day—”

“Counts, I know. You don't have to tell
me.”
The other church members looked wilted; their shoulders sagged.

“We never had a chance,” one of them murmured resentfully.

“Yes we did!” Tammi whispered back furiously, causing several other people to turn and look at them. “We still do! Don't anybody give up, you hear me? We won't give up. They'd just love for us to give up and let Stevie die. But I won't give them the pleasure. If we have to, we'll fight them until the second before they turn the current on him.”

“Okay,Tammi,” somebody agreed, wearily. “Okay.”

When Artie McGregor moved past with the coffee a couple of the other women exchanged discreet glances— and then drew back from her as if to avoid getting burned.

“Do you think Bob wants coffee?” Artie suddenly blurted.

There was a moment of frozen silence when nobody responded to her question. Her husband, appearing oblivious to the silence of the others, smiled kindly at his pretty wife and said, “Why don't you ask him, honey?”

But Tammi Golding reached out for the coffee pot, took it out of Artie's hands, and said, firmly, “I'll do it.” Left with empty hands and a look of surprise on her face, Artemis appeared close to bursting into tears. Seeing how emotional she felt, Stuart lovingly wrapped an arm around her. He gently led his wife out of the circle of church members, saying, “Come on, Artie, let's find something else to do. It'll be okay, honey, we'll find her and she'll be fine, I promise.”

“I don't think so,” Artie whispered, and somebody gasped to hear it.

“Sure she will!” Stuart reassured her.

“No,” his wife said, tearfully, stubbornly, “she isn't.”