Chapter Nine
NINE
THELMA WORLEY LIVES IN a little brick ranch house set back from the street and, as it turns out, she’s expecting me.
She emerges from the side door into the carport and waves at me as I pull the Bronco in behind her old Toyota Corolla.
A round little woman, probably in her early seventies, with short white hair and silver glasses perched on top of her head, she watches—hawkeyed—as I park.
She wears a red-and-white-striped apron and smart blue skirt set over white compression leggings.
Her tiny feet are nestled in those extra-bouncy, well-padded sneakers that give me vertigo just to look at.
“You’re the lady private investigator, right?” Without waiting for an answer, she says, “I need you to give me a hand in here.”
“Sure,” I say, though I have no idea what she wants a hand with, and I follow her inside.
Thelma’s kitchen is sparkling clean and decked out in summertime decor, including a red ceramic pitcher full of white lilies on the kitchen table.
When she sees me looking, she says, “I snagged those from Brother Ezra’s funeral, bless his heart.
I didn’t think he’d mind, though. Now, come over here, honey, and get these hand pies out of the oven for me. ”
She gives me a dish towel and an oven glove and I prepare myself before the blast of heat smacks me in the face. She talks the whole time, fanning herself with another dish towel.
“I made three trays and, as I was pulling out the second one, I felt my back start to go. Lord, I was dreading getting that third pan out but then I saw you pull up and I thought, the Lord does work in mysterious ways.”
I wrangle the pan out of the oven and rest it on the stovetop. Thelma chuckles to herself as I click on the vent hood, and then she leans closer to the pan and says, “They look like they turned out good.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say.
“I was scolding myself earlier,” she says.
“Thinking I should’ve made no-bake bars.
Cheesecake maybe. These are for the picnic in town, of course.
The church is having a bake sale. Always needing to raise money.
But you know, I thought, won’t everybody be making no-bake desserts today?
Might as well do something folks won’t get otherwise.
I should’ve made them last night, but Lord, my grandbabies were here and I couldn’t get a moment’s peace. ”
“I think they’ll be worth the effort,” I tell her.
She beams at me and then we both look down at the pan of perfectly formed pockets of golden-brown pie crust crimped around hot lemon curd.
The citrusy scent wafts up and I’m reminded instantly of church basement food.
I remember filling my plate twice, then wrapping hand pies just like these in napkins, slipping them into my jacket pocket to take home.
“Now, honey, you want some tea?” she asks. “We can go out on the porch. I think it’s cooler out there than it is in here.”
“Sure,” I say, and a few moments later we’re sitting where a breeze can find us, tall cups of sweet tea sweating on the glass-topped picnic table in front of us.
I look around at her well-manicured yard, a vegetable patch in the back, all of it surrounded by the brightest blue hydrangeas I’ve ever seen.
“It’s the sulfur,” she says with a chuckle.
“What?”
“The sulfur in the soil around here,” Thelma says. “That’s what makes the hydrangeas so blue. But, now, you’re not here to talk about flowers, are you?”
“No, ma’am. I hate to have to ask, but I’m told that you were the one who found Ezra King’s body?”
“That’s right,” she says. “I go over every Saturday morning around eight o’clock to prepare the church program, get the hymns put up on the board, do whatever little paperwork needs doing.
Brother Ezra always put the list of hymns and whatever else I might need on the desk in the church office but every now and then, he’d forget.
I’d have to go bang on the door of the parsonage and wake him up and ask him for it. ”
“So that’s what you did on Saturday morning?”
“Yes, honey. I knocked and hollered for him. I was about to give up and leave, but then I saw the curtain was open so, well, you know, I just took a peep through the window.”
“And you saw him?”
“Yes. Right there in the recliner.”
“Does the recliner seem like a weird place for him to have been?” I ask.
She looks off across the manicured lawn and toward the bushes bursting with blue flowers, and says, “No, honey. It’s just what he did before.”
“What do you mean?”
“A bad bite. It was a copperhead, I think. He put that snake right back in its box and then just rode it out in that recliner, praying to the Lord to save him.”
“And he got better?”
“That’s right,” she says. “He said the Lord’s power healed him. But this time, I called the police station as soon as I saw—well, it was abundantly clear that the man was dead. I actually smelled his body through the door. You ever been around a decaying corpse, you never forget that smell.”
I nod, a few select experiences coming to mind.
Thelma continues, “Then I called Will and he got there about the same time as the police. But, honestly, it didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened.
I saw the black wounds on his neck and up high on his cheek.
My cousin Jimmy got bit by a snake when we were kids and that bite was just the same.
Went black and shiny and swelled up. Snakebites are nasty-bad.
Poor Jimmy lost his arm but Brother Ezra …
Well, I can’t deny I never liked the snakes. ”
“So, why did you go to a snake-handling church?”
Thelma exhales sharply, her hands flying up beside her head like this is the most exasperating possible question I could’ve asked.
“First of all, Brother Ezra might’ve handled some snakes, but I wouldn’t call it a snake-handling church.
He mostly did that in his tent revivals out of town.
But, either way, I was a member of the church long before Ezra King ever showed his face.
Then, some years ago, Ezra came to Mount Zion and he married that pretty Darcy girl—what was her name? ”
“Maggie,” I say.
“That’s right, Magdalene Darcy. She’d grown up in First Christian, but after she and Ezra got together, they started coming over to Redeemer.
Ezra had a bad gambling problem back then and it was through God that he saw his way to live right.
I can’t deny his testimony was powerful.
So, when Brother George—that was the preacher then—he was getting older and needed a hand, Ezra started teaching Sunday school and, boy, he was real popular.
Especially with the younger folks. He was a looker; I can tell you that.
And that voice. Anyway, not long after that, Brother George up and died.
Fatal stroke. We all agreed to start a search for a new preacher, one we all liked.
But, in the meantime, Ezra stepped in and everyone loved him. He was a big hit.”
“So Brother George never—”
“Handled snakes?” She shakes her head solemnly.
“No, honey, he sure didn’t. And Ezra didn’t at first either.
But, by and by, he got more confident. He never was one to holler—that’s what people always seem to expect when they think of traditional preachers—but I think he never had to shout.
People always just listened to him. I remember when he first brought those snakes out.
A pair of copperheads. He wouldn’t let anyone else touch them.
It was almost like … almost more like they were props and we were all watching a performer rather than a preacher. But it was a big hit with some people.”
“Not his wife, apparently,” I say.
“No, honey. Though—again, if I’m being completely honest—” She pauses to take a long drink of her tea, then smacks her lips and says, “I think the snakes were only the last straw for Magdalene Darcy, if you know what I mean.”
She gives me a knowing look, suggestive of something tawdry.
“He was cheating?” I ask.
“Well, now, he was always popular,” she says with a little smirk, clearly reveling in the gossip. “Especially with the younger folks, like I said. Especially with the younger women.”
She bats at a fly and says, “But he was handsome. He was charismatic. And that voice. It was really something else. He could’ve charmed the whiskers off a cat with pipes like that.”
“So, why the snakes?”
“I’ve always wondered,” she says quietly. “I really have. But I think they sort of proved his point.”
“His point?”
“That he really was as powerful as he seemed. That his faith really did protect him from evil. Though, of course, I guess it didn’t save him in the end.
And it’s a damn shame. He’d started talking about retirement, said he was just a couple years off from hanging it all up.
I hate to see it happen like that. A woman I used to work with retired and made all these plans and then two weeks later had an aneurysm, can you believe it?
Anyway, Ezra made a big ol’ fuss about wanting to retire in quiet contemplation, but, if you ask me, I think he just wanted to stop getting up early on Sundays. ”
“Do you feel like Ezra wasn’t as devout as everyone believed?” I ask her.
“Well, I couldn’t say. Only God knows what’s in a man’s heart. And I know we’ll all mourn his passing, but, you know, I do think maybe it’s time for a change. I only hope poor Will is up to the challenge, bless his heart.”
“I saw him this morning. He was in Ezra’s house, milking the snakes.”
She shakes her head, frowning disgustedly.
“You don’t like the snake milking either, I take it.”
“I think it’s a good service they provide and it does bring a little extra money in to the church but …
I always said if Ezra wanted to handle those snakes, well, that’s his own business, but Will’s had enough trouble in his life without him sitting in that house trying to pull venom out of a snake’s mouth. ”
“He told me that Ezra healed him,” I say. “When he was younger.”