Butterfly Sunday by David Hill

penniless eighteen-year-old girl who was not only pregnant but desperately in love with her baby’s father?

    Love? Did a man love his bride one week and then abandon her the next? Why had he rescued her and lured her here to this lonely place with false assurances and phony admiration? What had he hoped to gain? Was it really as simple as a cloak of respectability behind which he could hide his secret life? Yet if that was true, why had he murdered Tess? Was it the way Soames had said? Was it really possible that Averill truly, deeply, obsessively loved her to the point that her faded passion for Tyler, her baby’s father, had fermented in his mind? Were his sudden indifference and silent contempt his means of communicating his misplaced jealousy? Did the sight of her carrying Tyler’s child day after day have the cumulative effect that Soames had theorized?

    Had Averill been seized by uncontrollable revulsion when he saw the newborn infant for the first time?

    How could that be true if Leona had never even suspected such a thing? Even now, looking back from that perspective, she didn’t remember much to support the idea. Yet questions only lead to questions. What had compelled Averill to confess these things to Soames? Surely he knew that Soames, a woman whose proclivity for gossip had raised his ire many times, would never keep his terrible secret. Yet he had turned up at her door in the middle of the night and tearfully confessed to his crime as if she were some mother superior sworn and entitled to keep his secret.

    Of course, Soames had come to her with everything.They were best friends. The poor woman was traumatized. He had frightened her. His guilt had driven him insane. He wanted to be caught. He didn’t have the guts to kill himself, but he wanted to die. Why else would he provide her with information that could destroy him? What would he do next? Did Leona feel safe alone in the house with him? What would Averill do if he found out Soames had told her everything? Did Leona have a clue why he had come to Soames? Soames had long had the feeling Averill neither liked nor trusted her. Was he setting a trap? Was he simply out of his mind?

    More questions leading to more questions. Yet Leona’s whole being was now focused on only one. How would she do it? How would she avenge her child?

    Over and over Soames begged her to let the law bring him to justice. And how would that be, Leona demanded of her trembling friend. With all those extenuating circumstances that watered down the charges? With his devoted congregation swearing under oath that each had seen a one-armed man, or some such, running through the woods that night? And how much proof would they furnish? Questions leading to more disturbing questions and then at last Leona had the answer to all of them: Averill Sayres had to die.

    For the next week or so Soames was an almost constant companion, begging her to be careful, to move slowly, and not to do anything crazy. Yet her good friend’s counsel only seemed to convince Leona a little more each time that there was no alternative. Finally, even Soames seemed to reach an uneasy truce with the inevitability of it. Right down to the first dose of arsenic, Soames tried to talk her out if it. By then, however, both women knew the thing was happening; by then it seemed to have a life all its own. Nothing was going tostop it—unless she caved in to her sorrow over its effect on Blue.

    It seemed to her that Blue rose out of the mist that gray March afternoon. Looking for Averill, he said, and he kept his distance at first, talking up the porch steps at her from the yard the way Darthula did.

    Blue and his wife, Lucy, had been Sunday regulars until about six months earlier. According to Soames, Lucy had dumped Blue for a surgeon out of Memphis. Blue had come in from a three-day duck-hunting trip last October and found their house stripped bare to the woodwork. Lucy and their two little ones had disappeared