“What was that girl’s name?” Art persisted, “Gina? No, Leena, that was it, wasn’t it? She was a mighty good-looking girl, wasn’t she, Reverend? Tall. Blonde. Spirited girl, folks say, with a real spring in her step.” Art started up the steps. “I’ve got a picture of her right here.” Art reached into his shirt pocket and fished out the photo, studying it closely. “Yes sir, she was a beauty. She favored her mama a lot, didn’t she, Reverend? Sophie? The sister you really wanted to marry.”
The old man raised his other hand, held both hands out before him now, no longer pointing, but shielding himself, palms facing outward, as if to fend off some looming collision or dreadful specter. “Don’t you come any closer. You keep that away from me.”
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.”