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suspect that her charmed chuckles at his worn-out anecdotes concealed a murderer’s heart? For she was already a murderer, and the perspiring young man of God who was beginning to work his indefatigable spell on them was already her victim.

    People survived by keeping themselves a secret from each other—who they really were, what they really felt, what they had really done or intended to do. Leona had come to think that the things they were created to hide shaped a person’s most defining outlines. She would loveto know what secrets Audena had stowed behind her virtuous drab brown dress with its ludicrous white collar. And didn’t Winky complete the picture in his olive khaki Sunday suit? She could see from the choir loft twenty feet away that his fingernails were black with filth at the tips.

    “Honest” country people, the politicians were always deifying people like them. Didn’t they seem the benchmark of harmless, faded church supper types? Leona had learned a lot about church supper types over the last few years. Sad to say, ninety-nine percent of it had made her more wary than wise.

    She found Audena’s weekly letter in her mailbox every Tuesday morning. Audena scribbled pages on pages about hard biscuits and puppy teeth and Winky’s bunions. Averill said Audena was just dull but well-meaning. Leona could see into that. Those relentless, bleak letters, pencil on ruled paper, carried messages from sister to brother between the lines. In the year and a half of marriage, Leona hadn’t begun to figure them out. Now she was glad to say she would never have the opportunity. A year and a half? It felt like two hundred years in this wilderness.

    “ ‘… Yeah, boss, I want to go to heaven.’ ” Averill hung his head to the side and threw out his arms trying to look like a half-wit. “ ‘But I thought y’all was getting up a busload to go tonight,’ ” he said, finishing his tasteless little skit. She wondered as she smiled brightly and winked in conspiratorial glee at the choir director, how many of the other chortling Christians really thought he was funny.

    At least two hundred, more like two thousand years.

    The thought had an altogether galvanizing effect onLeona. Audena, Winky and the rest of creation notwithstanding, this was going to be the last day of her interminable sojourn in this wilderness of insanity. Unless she’d misread the large-print directions on the big red bag of Rat Zap. The print on the back had touted it as the ultimate weapon in man’s endless war against rodents. All the same, it wasn’t a thing but arsenic.

    By 11:09 A.M., which was what her watch had said when Audena made the church door cry like a banshee as she opened it, the poison was deep into his system. He’d swallowed a collective tablespoon of poison over the last seventy-two hours. She’d dissolved it into Jell-O and added it to his iced tea. She’d rubbed it with olive oil into his round steak and added it with the salt to his dinner rolls. Three-quarters of a tablespoon was supposed to be adequate. So Averill’s big amen was going to be sooner rather than later.

    She’d followed the man’s instructions with meticulous care. The man was some kid the manufacturer had hired to answer questions for those who called the 800 number on the sack.

    “How much of this stuff do I use?”

    “Depends on what you’re killing.”

    “My husband—”

    “You got any idea how many times a day I hear that dumb joke?”

    “This is no joke.”

    “Then you might better shoot him because this stuff will take you several days.”

    “Why?”

    “You’d have to administer it in eighths of a teaspoon, at least four hours apart for three or four days.”

    “Why not all at once?”

    “He’d throw it up.”

    “Thanks.”

    “What’d you really need to know, ma’am? I got another call here.”

    “Don’t worry. No one will know you’re an accomplice.”

    What he told her confirmed what she had already