Ring of Truth

  “Yes,” Anne says, in a shaky voice. She grabs Jenny by the shoulders and pulls the girl back against her. “If the jury had known about this stuff . . .”

  I finish the sentence for her: “They might have convicted her, too. Where were these, Jenny?”

  “In the tower,” she says in a small voice.

  For a moment, I don’t even remember that the mansion has one, and then I see it in my mind’s eye, the “third story” on the right as you face the front porch. “Where in the tower, honey?”

  “There’s a cabinet,” her mother says. “Set into the wall, as far as I can tell from the way Jenny describes it.”

  “I just wanted the bag,” she says, defensively.

  As I gaze at these banal objects lying on my living room floor, a personal memory pops unbidden into my head: once, I was interviewing the parents of a serial killer in southwest Florida, in the vicinity of the Big Cypress National Preserve. The three of us were sitting in their backyard looking out over their swamp, where an alligator lived. We were gazing into the thicket beyond when, suddenly, in the lazy heat, in the middle of one of my desultory questions—or one of their slow answers—we saw a flash of fauna between the flora. There. Not there. In and out. Gone. Now, the Florida panther is not extinct, but it’s endangered and rare, only thirty to fifty of them remaining in the state. Claiming you’ve actually seen one is nearly akin to reporting a Big Foot sighting, so I’m not saying this was a panther, beyond all shadow of a doubt. But I’ll say this much—perfectly aware that eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable: it had a flat face like a cat, and a tail too long to be a bobcat’s and too sinuous to be a dog’s. I can’t swear the tail was crooked on the end, the way a panther’s ought to be, but I do know the creature was far too big to be a domestic cat, and there was nothing on the local news about anybody’s pet mountain lion being on the loose. And it was the right color: not black, but tan. The parents of the serial killer saw it, too, for whatever that’s worth as corroborating testimony, and they didn’t make any claims about ever having seen anything like it before in their woods. It gave all three of us a shock, a shiver, seeing that creature flicker in and out of our view, and it left us staring at each other, and saying, “Was that what I think it was?”

  I’ve got that panther feeling again, as though something improbable and dangerous has slipped in and out of my awareness.

  “Does Nikki know about this?”

  Jenny gives me a look, as if to say, “Well, duh,” though her actual words are more polite than that. “Oh, yeah, Nikki helped me carry it to our bikes.”

  I had interviewed both of those little stinkers, and neither of them said one single word about—

  “Why didn’t you tell anybody?”

  “Nobody asked us.”

  Her mother and I shake our heads at each other.

  “She wanted to keep the ring,” her mother says tartly.

  “Mom! I was going to—”

  “But you didn’t. What should we do with these things, Ms. Lightfoot?”

  “Marie, please.”

  What should they do with them? Now there’s a question with an obvious answer, if I ever heard one. Take them to the police, that’s what they should have done as soon as Anne found the bag at the back of Jenny’s closet a week ago. They’ve waited a week, just to show me?

  “Take it to the police, Anne.”

  “I tried,” she says, looking aggrieved. “They didn’t want it, and I didn’t know who else to show, until I thought of you—”

  “They didn’t want it? Who told you that, Anne?”

  “Detective Chamblin. He said it was too late to do any good.”

  “Did you offer it to the prosecutor?”

  “Mr. Delano said the same thing. I even tried the defense attorneys. I just wanted somebody to take it away from us. But they didn’t want it, either.”

  “Who didn’t?”

  “Ms. Golding.”

  I notice that Jenny is observing us closely, as if we are deciding her fate. No wonder she looks scared; the child’s very bright; she understands that she may have hidden evidence. If this stuff could have been linked to Bob Wing and Artie McGregor, it might have put two of them on death row instead of just one. And if it couldn’t have been linked to them, it might have provided fodder for the defense to suggest the presence in that house of somebody else who might have killed Susanna.

  “They may not want it,” Anne says, “but somebody sure does.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Again she turns toward her daughter, but this time Anne doesn’t sound angry at her little girl; she sounds gentle and anxious. “Tell Marie about the phone call, Jenny.”

  With wide eyes, the child says, “Somebody called our house and asked for me. And they told me I had to put the bag out on the front porch at night. They said I couldn’t tell anybody about it. They said if I did my mom and dad would go to jail for . . .” She looks to her mom for help with the words.

  “Withholding evidence,” her mother says, and sets her mouth in a grim line.

  “What?” I exclaim. “Was this before or after you talked to Carl and Tony?”

  “After I saw them.”

  “This doesn’t make sense.”

  “I know, but there’s more. Jenny was so scared she didn’t tell her father or me. She did what the person on the phone told her to do and put the bag on the porch one night. My husband heard a noise that night and woke up and went to look. When he turned on the porch light, somebody ran off our porch. They didn’t get the bag, but it scared us all half to death. That’s when Jenny finally told us the truth.”

  “Was it a man or a woman?” I ask them both.

  But they shrug and shake their heads.

  “I couldn’t tell from their voice,” Jenny says.

  “My husband couldn’t see who it was, either.” Anne Carmichael is literally wringing her hands. “I am really upset about this.”

  “I don’t blame you. Who knew you had this bag at your house?”

  “Just the people I told you.”

  “And who’d they tell?” I wonder out loud.

  “I don’t know, but I have a really big favor to ask you.”

  “You want me to keep the bag.”

  “Yes, how’d you know that?”

  “You need to get it away from your family, but you also don’t want to destroy it. But, Anne, the person who tried to take it is not going to know that it isn’t there anymore.”

  “Oh, yes they are,” she says with a grim smile. “There’s a big sign on our front porch that says, ’Your Bag’s Not Here. We Threw It Away.’ ”

  I have to laugh at her wildly creative solution. “That’s brilliant. When somebody comes in the dark, hit them back by daylight.”

  “Exactly. They’re not going to hurt my children.”

  “No.” I drop to my haunches to look that child directly in her eyes. “Is there anything else you have to tell us, Jenny?”

  She shakes her head at me, but there’s a look in her eyes that suggests she is surprised by my question and not very happy with it. Again, I get that spooky feeling of something elusive, something lurking in the shadows, like a panther. They’re silent creatures, except during mating season, and then their screams can rip the sheaths right off your nerves.

  I rise to my feet. “I’ll keep the bag. Don’t worry about it anymore.”

  When they leave, I have in my possession a gold and diamond wedding ring and the detritus, possibly, of an illicit affair. It’s not much to add to my book, but at least the condoms and the sheet suggest that somebody had sex. What the ring means, I still don’t know.

  Anything to Be Together

  By Marie Lightfoot

  CHAPTER 6

  Sands Gospel, the popular little nondenominational church, seemed to have everything going for it, except for one thing: money. It had an enviable location near the ocean and a vibrant congregation and a dynamic minister and the usual tax breaks. But it also
had a lot of good works to support. The capital-punishment campaign alone ate money like waves licking at sand. The members were mostly middle and lower class economically, and they were folks who already gave a lot to charity before they even got around to writing a check to their church. Tourists didn’t leave much in the collection plate, and the beach bums left less. But everybody left wear and tear, the wind and salt air most of all. The stucco on the outside was wearing out and the rugs on the inside were wearing thin.

  A few members started praying for a benefactor.

  They might better have heeded the wry old adage, “Be careful what you pray for, because you just might get it.”

  * * *

  “I’ll never forget the first time I saw Artemis,” the church secretary avows. “Of course, she wasn’t Artie McGregor yet, she was still Artemis Hornung. I’ll swear, when she walked in, she was like a breath of fresh air, like a sea breeze. She was so nice, so friendly and polite, and she had the face of an angel. Just lovely. She introduced herself—and I thought, what a beautiful and unusual name, Artemis—and she said she was looking for a new church home. She said she hadn’t actually set foot in a church for, gosh, twenty years.”

  What Mrs. Artemis Hornung didn’t confide was that she was newly divorced from a man who was almost the exact opposite of her. Taylor Hornung was a “meat and potatoes” kind of guy who had married a woman who could whip up soufflés at the drop of a slotted spoon. Taylor’s idea of a good time was a few beers and a football game; his wife liked museums, parties, and “good works.”

  It seemed almost inevitable when Artie and Taylor divorced.

  “We were just too different,” she told people.

  “I couldn’t keep up!” was his humorous version.

  That was all right for a long time, though, because they were both busy with the operation of Hornung Dock & Pier, Inc. You know those wooden posts that pelicans sit on all over Florida? They’re slatted and grooved and ringed with metal? Ever wonder who makes them, or where they come from? Hornung Dock & Pier, most of them. “There’s a lot of water in Florida,” Taylor Hornung liked to say, stating the obvious in his humorous way. “And one hell of a lot of seagulls. They all need perches, right? Wouldn’t be right to keep them from landing somewhere. Even seagulls got to rest now and then, you know. Millions of seagulls and pelicans, thousands of boats, and lots and lots of piers and posts.”

  And, over the years, lots and lots of money.

  After their marriage of twenty years they split their property without so much as a squabble because, “We started with nothing and earned it all together,” as Taylor told his lawyer. “People say I’m generous to her, but they never stop to think that she’s had to be equally generous to me. I mean, it’s her company, too.”

  “He’s a sweet man,” Artie was known to say.

  “Too nice,” said some of his friends who didn’t view her contributions in quite the generous light that he did. “Like ten million dollars too nice.”

  Their business sold for twenty million dollars, with half for each of them, after taxes. Their union had not produced heirs. Taylor moved happily onto a sailboat and took off for the South Pacific, where he was reachable only by E-mail. Artemis moved into a smaller house and began to look for something besides business to fill her life and something beyond her wardrobe on which to lavish her money.

  Later she would say, “I prayed for guidance.”

  Her penetrating glance fell upon Sands Gospel Church.

  * * *

  “She said she had heard good things about our pastor,” Pat Danner, the church secretary, remembers about that first meeting with Artie.

  A lot of people were hearing good things about Bob Wing.

  SANDS GOSPEL PREACHER FILLS PEWS one headline proclaimed on the religion page of the local Bahia Beach newspaper. And of course there was increasing publicity about his campaigns against the Florida death penalty. The word had gone out to tourists and residents alike that the sermons were lively at Sands Gospel, that the minister was young and charismatic, and that anybody could find a welcome there.

  “Young” is a relative term, of course.

  The Reverend Dr. Robert F. Wing was forty-three at the time of that article, forty-four at the moment when fate walked into his church in the guise of a “breath of fresh air” with the beautiful name of Artemis and the face of an angel. She was just turned forty herself. His first wife, Donna, had died of uterine cancer less than a year earlier; Artie, too, was just emerging from her divorce from Taylor Hornung. In fact, the church was full of suddenly singles. A “grief group” that Dr. Bob led twice a week was, sadly, packed with widows, widowers and divorced persons of all ages. Of all the places in which to look for happiness, surely a “grief group” was one of the least promising. And yet there seemed to be something magical about the “Recovering From Loss” group—its official name—that Bob Wing started after Donna died. It seemed as if couples paired up left and right, as if he was as much matchmaker as minister.

  He, himself, had recently married a woman in the group. But his new wife was off on real estate calls the day that Artemis Hornung walked in, and so Susanna Wing wasn’t there to greet their potential new member.

  Only the church secretary and the minister met Artie that day.

  She confessed to them that she felt a spiritual void in her life; he was a minister, trained to fill that emptiness with words of the spirit. Soon, the three of them were laughing and chatting away like old friends, as if Artie had found her natural church home, just as easily as that. When they found out that she was newly divorced, the church secretary kindly said, “You ought to attend Dr. Bob’s group for people who’ve lost their spouses through death or divorce.”

  “I will,” Artie told them, “and you ought to come to my next party.”

  And so it was set in motion by a good intention.

  It all seemed so mutually congenial, such a fortuitous meeting of hearts and minds. Bob Wing found it easy to say yes for his wife and himself, and Pat Danner accepted with pleasure on behalf of herself and her husband. It appeared that Artemis Hornung had found her church home and Sands Gospel—though they didn’t know it yet—had found its benefactor, for Artie was not only newly divorced but richly so, with money to burn and a burning ambition to spend it.

  The charming woman with the face of an angel said goodbye after a tour of the church. The secretary noticed that her handsome minister seemed to be staring at the front door after it closed behind their visitor.

  “Nice woman,” she said approvingly.

  He turned, and she saw how he blushed. “Oh. Yes, she is.”

  Men, thought the secretary with fond amusement. Even ministers. Not a one of them could resist a pretty woman, especially one who admired their life’s work. Well, who could resist that? And Mrs. Hornung had even managed to find something nice to say about the view of the parking lot! It was harmless, though. If ever there was a man you could trust to be true to his wife it was Bob Wing. He preached faithfulness, he lived it, and he even had the grace to blush just for looking at a pretty woman.

  “Did you see the size of the diamond she had on?” Pat asked him.

  He shook his head, no.

  “Size of your head,” the secretary marveled.

  Dr. Wing grinned at her. “The size of my head before I preach, or afterwards?”

  “Oh, before,” his secretary teased him right back. “The way your head swells with all that praise, no diamond could be that big.”

  “That’s what I thought you meant,” he said with a deadpan expression.

  “Maybe she’ll repair our stucco,” the secretary said, thoughtfully.

  “Pat!” he remonstrated with her. “Lets don’t spend the poor woman’s money before she’s even a member!”

  “If she’s got money, then she’s not a poor woman,” was her retort to that.

  Knowing when he was beat, the reverend retreated to his office.

  The church secretary
never gave another thought to the way he’d stared after their visitor, except for one guilty, fleeting moment when the thought did cross her mind to wish this woman had arrived before Bob Wing had married Susanna. The secretary had seen the way Mrs. Hornung blushed when he spoke to her, and how she had noticed his wedding ring. Those two would have made a charismatic couple. The secretary quickly banished that wicked notion from her brain. There was nothing wrong with Susanna Wing that a little polish couldn’t cure, and anyway, nobody was perfect. Dr. Bob had loved her enough to marry her, and the church secretary thought that should be enough recommendation for anybody.

  * * *

  One of the saddest things about Susanna Wing was that people seemed to want to like her better than they really did. She was a “looker,” as men used to say, with a compelling face and a terrific figure, and when she smiled, they say it made you feel special. But she was also, as Pat Danner hinted, a little rough around the edges compared, say, to an easy, fresh-faced charmer like Artemis Hornung. If you had lined the two women up and said, “Pick the minister’s wife,” you’d probably never have pointed to Susanna. There were good reasons for that, though, and they were tragic ones. Susanna was an orphan, for one thing. Both of her parents were dead long before she was grown. She was raised in a series of foster and group homes where nobody kept her around for more than a few months at a time. With no other relatives who cared enough to keep track of her, when she died it was as if she had existed only in Bahia Beach, and only for the short time she’d been married to Bob Wing.

  The church was packed at her funeral, but it was all church members and other friends of her minister-husband. Nobody came from out of town to mourn her, nobody at all. If there were people who would have wanted to come, if they had known, no one knew how to locate them. In keeping with the hard-luck story of her life, Susanna had grown up in Lancaster, California, where, when she was eighteen years old, a river had risen for the only time in recorded history and flooded the courthouse square, ruining every record stored in the basement of the courthouse, including the files of every juvenile for whom the court was acting as guardian. That meant the memory of the names of the people she lived with as a child died with her.