Free Husband and Wives by Susan Rogers Cooper Page A

right next to it. Church is one of them metal buildings you see, but it’s got a big ol’ cross on top of it.’
    ‘I’ll be there in about twenty,’ I told him, and hung up.
    It takes about thirty minutes to get to the county seat of Tejas County where Bill Williams’ office is, but I drive fast. Me and Bill chewed the fat for a while then he headed out to a four-wheel-drive vehicle.
    ‘Seriously?’ I said.
    ‘Hey, wouldn’t you go where no one could see you, if you were breaking the law?’ Bill asked.
    ‘Never thought about it much, but I guess you’re right. Of course, I rarely, if ever, contemplate things criminal,’ I said.
    Bill hooted with laughter. ‘Yeah, just things immoral, anti-social, and bad for the complexion.’
    ‘Drive,’ I suggested.
    Now we don’t have a lot of piny woods in Oklahoma, but there’s a little hidden dab of ’em on the east side of Tejas County – Tejas County is just to the west of us, so this was close. The trees reached the sky, all skinny and tall, not the Christmas tree kind at all. And they had big ol’ pine cones falling off of ’em. Just getting out of the car I spied half a dozen pristine cones, the middle of ’em bigger than my two hands cupped together. I picked up a bunch and threw them in the back of Bill’s car.
    ‘What?’ he whined on seeing me do it.
    ‘My wife’ll do something creative with these come Christmas. Just wait and see.’
    ‘I’d rather not,’ he said.
    I could spy the church through the trees, and it was exactly what Bill had said it was: a manufactured metal building with a cross on top. There was another building to the right of it, I think for Sunday school, or whatever it is these Mormon offshoots liked to call their indoctrination of children. We Baptists call it Sunday school. To the left of the church building was a double-wide trailer, what we Baptists would call a parsonage. Getting closer, I could see a single-wide one scrunched up to the back of it.
    Pointing, I asked Bill, ‘What’s that?’
    He shrugged. ‘Dunno.’
    He walked up the aluminum steps of the double-wide and rapped sharply on the door. In less than a minute a woman opened it. Even from where I was standing at the bottom of the steps, I could tell she was short, maybe five feet even, with graying brown hair pulled back and clipped at the nape of her neck. She was wearing a long skirt that touched the tops of her sensible-looking shoes and a blouse that started at her throat with sleeves that went to her wrists. This whole ensemble was covered with a handmade apron displaying Noah and his animals.
    The woman’s smile barely lifted her lips and never reached her eyes. ‘Hello, Sheriff,’ she said to Bill. ‘How may we help you?’
    ‘Earl around?’ Bill asked.
    ‘He’s in the church house.’
    ‘Be OK if I go over there?’ he asked.
    She stared at him for a long moment, then said, ‘If you don’t mind interrupting a man at prayer.’ With that said, she shut the door. She didn’t slam it. Just shut it firmly.
    Bill looked down at me. ‘OK, so one wife’s not exactly happy,’ he said as he came down the steps.
    ‘I’d say she’s pretty surly, but that’s just me.’
    It was about a hundred feet from the door of the double-wide to the door of the metal church building. Bill rapped on the church double doors then opened one. ‘Hey, Brother Earl, mind if we come in?’ he called into the room.
    We both stepped in and I saw a vast room, devoid of anything – pews, chairs, whatever. There was a podium at the back and a man was standing there. He was a short, thin man with wiry gray hair shooting out every which way, a beak of a nose, and small, squinty eyes, color hard to tell.
    ‘Hey there, Sheriff!’ the man called back, coming down from the raised dais to meet us. He shook hands with Bill and then got introduced to me.
    ‘I take it you’re here about Sister Mary Hudson?’ he asked.
    I nodded and he shook his head.
    ‘The Lord works