It was hot as it’d ever been that summer, temperatures pushing a hundred every day and the dogs looking at you like, can’t you do something. Everything died on the vine that summer. Roses, tomatoes. All the honeysuckle withered and dried. But everyone stayed inside anyway to watch Mary Loveless, to hear what she might have to say for herself.
Mary Loveless grew up in the Sons of Cain church, a little known sect that was part Church of Christ and part snake handlers. Religions spring up in this neck of the woods like the spider flowers did in our old backyard. Stephen, Mary’s husband, was a Sons of Cain pastor. They had two little girls born two years apart. Hope and Faith both look like Mary, and Mary looks like those “Big Eyes” paintings.
A slip of a thing, in court she was dwarfed by Sam and Saul Rubinstein, who are big-boned and swarthy and well-known in these parts. If you did it, they say, go see Sammy and Saul, and little Mary…