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True Believers(25)

By:Jane Haddam


“Tibor?”

“In the kitchen.”

Bennis went through to the kitchen. It wasn’t quite as much of a mess as it usually was. Lida and Hannah must have been in recently to clean. Still, the oversize kitchen table was covered with books, to the point where it was impossible to find a space to put down a coffee cup. Tibor had managed it only by moving books out of the way and putting them in stacks on other books. Bennis took a copy of Norman Cantor’s Civilization of the Middle Ages and a paperback of John Grisham’s The Rainmaker off a chair and chucked them onto the table with everything else.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

“I can see that. I was out. With the Relief committee. It was depressing.”

“I’ve been thinking crazy things,” Bennis said. “Like the fact that I don’t know what form of execution they have in the state of Pennsylvania. I don’t think it could still be the electric chair, do you? Does anybody still have the electric chair?”

“Florida.”

“Oh,” Bennis said. She got out of her chair and began to walk around. She remembered the stories about Florida’s electric chair. They weren’t pleasant. “Gregor says there won’t be a stay this time. That it will really happen. And I was wondering, you know, if I should force the issue. If I should make her see me.”

“Can you do that?”

“I don’t know,” Bennis admitted. “But I haven’t seen her since it happened, and it’s been ten years. And Gregor is really no help, because he gets all rational and philosophical about it, and I’m not feeling rational and philosophical. I’m feeling crazy. It doesn’t seem right, to me, capital punishment. It never did, really.”

“Mmm,” Tibor said.

Bennis checked out the coffee. It didn’t look safe. “And the thing is, I know, on the day it happens, if it happens, there are going to be people out there waiting for it. You know what I mean. There are going to be people out there with signs wishing she would die in horrible pain and other people with signs protesting the death penalty, and it just doesn’t make any sense. Why would people come a hundred miles just to stand in the road in front of the state penitentiary and wish for somebody to die a horrible death?”

“Sit down,” Tibor said. “I have a teakettle. You can have some tea.”

“I’ve had enough caffeine in the last few hours to last a millennium. No, seriously. Why do they do that? And then this afternoon, I have to go to a funeral. Scott Boardman’s funeral—”

“At St. Stephen’s,” Tibor put in helpfully.

“—and the thing is, the reason I have to go is because a friend of mine is worried there are going to be pickets. I mean people picketing the funeral. There’s this guy—”

“Roy Phipps,” Tibor said.

“Right. Roy Phipps. I suppose everybody on earth has heard of him. God only knows, he’s on the news enough. He sends out press releases just so the media can show up and call him names. So, okay, say he’s a nut. There are nuts in this world. But what about all the people who follow him, the people who hold the picket signs and go to his church. Are they all nuts? Has this guy put together all the nuts in Philadelphia in one place? I mean, why do people do these things?”

“I wish you would sit down,” Tibor said. “You’re making me dizzy. And I have only one answer to your question and you do not want to hear it.”

“Yes, I do. What is it?”

“Original sin.”

Bennis sat down. “You know what Chickie said? That’s my friend who asked me to come to the funeral. He said that last week, one of the people from the Phipps organization tried to kill them. The priest or the minister or whatever he is went to the altar and there was this little cake of white powdered stuff right there next to the wine, and it turned out to be rat poison. Arsenic, isn’t that what rat poison is? And somebody had just put this cake of rat poison right next to the Communion   wine.”

“Did they put it in the Communion   wine?”

“I don’t know. Chickie didn’t say. He didn’t even tell me what they did about it, you know, after they found it. I guess they didn’t turn in the Reverend Phipps, or it would have been on the news. But still. Who else could it have possibly been? And now with the funeral coming up, they have to be especially careful. They’re holding a vigil so that the altar is in sight of at least two people all night. It’s worse than crazy. And don’t tell me it’s original sin. I don’t believe in original sin.”