Double Homicide by John Coston

Author:John Coston
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504047081
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-06-07T04:00:00+00:00

PART II

Chapter 3

The Minister’s Wife

The origin of the name Missoula has always been in dispute. One popular legend ties it to the Indian word Issoul, meaning horrible, an undoubted reference to the canyon east of town through which the Flatheads had to travel on their way to big buffalo hunts on the plains. The Flatheads were peaceful, but the murderous Blackfeet would lay ready to ambush all comers at the narrow opening of the canyon. What is more certain is that the name of the canyon, Hellgate, is handed down from early French-Canadian trappers, who called it Port de l’Enfer for the same reason.

It doubtless did not cross Donna Pounds’s mind as she rode eastward through Hellgate Canyon on a snowy day in April that an ambush lay ahead. It was Maundy Thursday, the day before Good Friday. She had been along for the ride with a friend, an Avon lady, who was making drop-offs to customers. Now they were headed back to West Riverside, a small settlement, not even a town, about six miles east of the city. Her husband, Harvey, was still at work downtown, most likely eating a late lunch at the store. Harvey was an itinerant preacher of fundamentalist bent who yearned for his own flock. He supported the family by selling men’s clothes in one of the better shops in town, Yandt’s Men’s Store. His specialty was shoes, and he was known to be a fine shoe salesman when he didn’t have his mind on church affairs.

Both Harvey and Donna were equally devout Christians. Together they had attended the Prairie Bible Institute in Calgary, Alberta. A mother and a housewife, Donna also worked part time in the Christian Book Store downtown and was a volunteer at St. Patrick’s Hospital. But it was Harvey who had really taken to the cloth. So much so that his own brothers often tired of his moralizing, which could be triggered by the mere sighting of a beer in the refrigerator. It rubbed them the wrong way, too, when they learned that Harvey had bought another set of encyclopedias to help him with his ministry work. He already had four sets. Or to see him add another harmonica to his collection. He had nearly fifty already. Or when he acquired another swell piece of fishing gear, because Harvey and Donna, who unlike her husband was as unselfish and giving as they come, didn’t have the kind of money to lavish on selfish hobbies, especially when it was plain to see that the children could use some better clothes.

Harvey was forty-four. He had grown up stone poor, a child of the Depression, and maybe that explained his need to have some of the things he didn’t have as a boy. Then, too, there was the overhanging threat that his life could be snatched from him at any moment. Harvey suffered a congenital heart condition that already had claimed two of his four brothers. One brother, Mike, died at age twenty-three. Sam, another, died before reaching age thirty.

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