Grime and Punishment by Churchill Jill

Author:Churchill, Jill [Churchill, Jill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

Shelley dropped off the birdseed and Jane and · went off to do the rest of her errands. Jane, shaken badly by the result of her own chain of reasoning, sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

She really ought to be doing something worthwhile. Ironing, laundry, or something, but she felt oddly drained. Thinking she could take her mind off murder, she flipped on the little black-and-white TV on the kitchen counter.

A group of extremely aggressive-looking women were presenting their theory that the society of the United States was rotten to the core. Their proof was that as members of a Communist-lesbian support group, they’d been denied the right to adopt children. Phil Donahue was weaving in and around the audience, attempting to make those who expressed even the mildest disagreement look like right-wing fanatics who might have been out burning crosses that very week.

Jane flipped the TV off, brooding. It was amazing what some people were eager to tell about themselves, eager to the point of wanting to share it with a national audience. She rather suspected that if she herself were a lesbian, a Communist, or someone who’d been passed over as unfit to be an adoptive parent, she’d probably want to keep the whole thing as quiet as possible. To be all three and want to tell the world about it amazed her.

Which brought her right back to the subject she was trying to avoid—Ramona Thurgood’s murder. If she and Shelley were right in their reasoning, then someone they knew had a deep, dark secret. Not a secret to share with the public, but something so awful that she was willing to actually kill another human being to keep it quiet.

That one mental statement was crammed with considerations with which Jane was hardly prepared to cope. The fact that a woman could commit murder, for starters. Even though the news was filled with reports of women who killed, Jane could never quite bring herself to believe it. Murder was, to her, a strictly male activity. Being a mother, she was convinced that any mother could and would do anything to protect her children, but not necessarily herself. Very rarely herself. Stretching her imagination, she could just barely conceive of a few women she’d known commissioning a murder. Wanting it done so badly they’d have it done secondhand. That, of course, raised the question of how one found somebody to commit murder for you, but that didn’t seem to be the point here.

Besides, what secret could be so dark and dangerous and compelling? After all, these were people she knew. Of course, everybody had something they didn’t want others to know about—well, everybody except the people who wanted to be on Phil Donahue’s show. Even though Jane’s life abroad had prepared her for many things, she wasn’t at all prepared to picture her neighbors, who belonged to the PTA, as people capable of having done something so awful that they might turn to murder.

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