Ring of Truth (11 page)

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. “Let's 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 BobWing.

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.

Susanna had once been married to money. She'd wed a computer start-up whiz, a Californian who had made and lost several fortunes before dying in a rock-climbing accident at the age of fifty.

“She didn't talk about Donnie at all,” people at the church said. “It was too painful.”

The obituary of Donald Scale in the
Sacramento Bee
portrayed a successful businessman who, like Susanna, had no other names of survivors to list in his death notice. Neighbors in the upscale neighborhood where the Scales lived in their Tudor-style home said the couple kept very much to themselves. Since the yards were large and surrounded by hedges, it was hard to get to know people unless you made a special effort or went to the annual block party. Donnie and Susanna weren't the sort to frequent such gatherings and nobody made the trek to their home to borrow a cup of sugar and start an acquaintance. By the time of Donnie's tragic death, all of his former companies had been liquidated—he
had taken the cash, planning for an early retirement with Susanna—and the employees were scattered far and wide.

“She never talked about her past,” people at the church said.

In many ways, Susanna was much better suited to her first husband, or so it seems now to those who learn the little bits about him that one can learn. He had no children, his parents were also deceased, he'd been an only child with no real talent for friendship, apparently, only for entrepreneurship. Nobody really knew why his widow moved to Bahia Beach, but they said that when she showed up for a meeting of the “grief group” at Sands Gospel, she seemed to be looking for love. They welcomed her, her new minister most warmly of all.

“Susanna was in his office a lot at first,” Pat Danner says. “I heard crying in there.” She admits that for a little while she feared that Susanna Scale was one of those women— there were a lot of them—who coveted the handsome preacher. “But Bob told me a little about Susanna's history and I realized she had a right to all the tears and attention she ever needed. After a while, I heard laughter more often than crying, and I felt glad for her, for both of them.”

Maybe it was only natural that it turned into courtship.

“I'd say Susanna courted him!” Pat Danner laughs. “For a quiet lady, she could be quite determined, let me tell you. I mean, she
was
a realtor, so there had to be some backbone there, and some ambition, too. We saw that when she volunteered for the pledge drive. She didn't give up until she got what she wanted. I've seen Susanna turn on the tears for some skinflint member and string out a sob story about the church that you wouldn't believe, until she had him practically begging her to take his money. She was good, when she set her mind to it.”

Coincidentally, a tall, good-looking man named Stuart
McGregor also came into the “grief group” at about the same time that Susanna did. After her murder, Stuart spoke of how he had watched the melancholy widow turn into a merry wife. “I watched her and Bob meet, I saw them fall in love, I was there for the whole thing, and we all went to their wedding.” And of course, shortly thereafter, the newlywed Wings would return the favor at Stuart's marriage to Artemis.

And no one guessed anything was awry with the Wings, until almost a year later, when Violet Lester, Annie Hamilton, and Margo Eby overheard something they were never meant to know.

The day the three women from the church overheard SusannaWing in a telephone argument with their minister, they were early to a pledge-drive committee meeting at the Wings' home. There'd been a confusion of times—the ladies thought the meeting was for 9:00
A.M.
Susanna, as it turned out, had written it down for 9:30.

When Susanna didn't answer Violet's light knock, the three friends felt perfectly comfortable opening the door and walking on into the little foyer.

What they heard next paralyzed them with dismay:

“You've already got a wife, and I'm it, or did you forget that minor little detail?”

It was Susanna's voice, coming from the kitchen, ringing with anger.

“You leave me and I'll get up in the pulpit on Sunday and confess all of your sins!We'll see how she likes you then!You won't be leaving me when that happens, she'll be leaving you! Don't think you can leave me and stay with her, just because you love her . . .”

The word “love” was scathing, scalding to her.
“You love me, remember?”

Again, they heard “love” drawn up in a furious mockery.

“You couldn't live without me, you'd do anything for me, you'd love me forever—remember? And now you just switch all that to her? As if I never existed, as if we aren't even married?

“No! Don't say her name to me! Artemis! Artemis! Stupid name! Stupid woman. Stupid you! How could you let this happen? Love! You don't love her, you love her money. I believed in you, I trusted you, I loved you! How
could
you?”

The three visitors, mortified to have overheard Susanna screaming at Bob, and to have heard the awful content of those screams, tiptoed back out to the front stoop. White-faced and trembling, they just stared at one another. With unspoken accord, they waited quite a while before Violet dared to press her finger to the doorbell. When Susanna came to let them in, she greeted them with a brittle smile that looked just as ghastly as they felt.

The morning of the search for Susanna, the same three women friends from the church took charge of the gifts of food and drink. As they busied themselves in the kitchen, they cocked their ears to what was being said in the other rooms . . . and to what was not being said. Every now and then they looked up at one another, and then immediately dropped their eyes back to their work. Their minister was slumped in an armchair in the living room, waiting for the phone to ring, and none of the three women had been in to see him, to talk to him, or to try to comfort him.

“We could pray,” one of them suggested to the others.

“To the same God that allowed this to happen?” retorted the second woman. “No thank you!”

“God didn't do this to Susanna,” whispered the third.

There was a charged silence and their hands got still.

Finally, one of them made a mundane suggestion that broke the unbearable tension. “You'd better put that potato salad in the refrigerator until closer to lunch time, Annie.”

Annie Hamilton quietly followed Violet Lester's suggestion.

“And the ham salad, Margo, over there—”

Margo Eby passed the ham salad to Annie Hamilton.

All three women looked tanned and Florida-healthy in their sandals, shorts, and T-shirts; but otherwise they could hardly have looked more different from one another. Annie Hamilton, the one closest to the refrigerator, was only thirty-eight, but her cropped, prematurely white hair gave her an older, sophisticated appearance that amused her friends, who knew how shy she was.

She carefully tucked cellophane wrap over the bowl of potato salad before closing the refrigerator door. Then she glanced at Violet Lester, who glanced at Margo Eby, who looked back at Annie Hamilton, completing the circle.

Violet, known affectionately among them as “the bossy one,” heaved a sigh, and then started emptying yet another grocery sack of foodstuffs brought over by a church member. She was thirty-two, the mother of three, as plump as Annie was thin, with curly black hair and orange lipstick, and she was usually as cheerful as an elf. At this moment, however, she was trying not to burst into tears. She knew if she looked at her friends again she'd lose her composure.