Carved in Bone - Jefferson Bass [122]
“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