to say.”
“That’s not a defense, Pete.”
“Maybe I don’t have a defense, not one that folks would understand.”
“Well, the folks on the jury need to understand something. My first thought, indeed my only one at this moment, is a plea of insanity.”
Pete shook his head and said, “Hell no. I’m as sane as you are.”
“But I’m not facing the electric chair, Pete.”
Pete blew a cloud of smoke and said, “I’m not doing that.”
“Great, then give me a motive, a reason. Give me something, Pete.”
“I have nothing to say.”
* * *
—
Joel Banning was walking down the steps outside Benson Hall when someone called his name. Another student, a freshman he knew of but had not met, handed him an envelope and said, “Dean Mulrooney needs to see you at once, in his office. It’s urgent.”
“Thanks,” Joel said, taking the envelope and watching the freshman walk away. Inside, a handwritten note on official Vanderbilt stationery instructed Joel to please come without delay to the dean’s office in Kirkland Hall, the administration building.
Joel had a literature class in fifteen minutes and the professor frowned on absences. If he sprinted, he could run by the dean’s office, tend to whatever matter was at hand, then arrive late for class and hope the professor was in a good mood. He hustled across the quad to Kirkland Hall and bounded up the stairs to the third floor, where the dean’s secretary explained that he was to wait until precisely 11:00 a.m., when his aunt Florry would call from home. The secretary claimed to know nothing. She had spoken to Florry Banning, who was calling on her rural party line and thus without privacy. Florry planned to drive into Clanton and use the private line at a friend’s home.
As he waited, he assumed someone had died and he could not help but think of those relatives and friends he preferred to lose before the others. The Banning family was small: just his parents, Pete and Liza, his sister, Stella, and his aunt Florry. The grandparents were dead. Florry had no children; thus, he and Stella had no first cousins on the Banning side. His mother’s people were from Memphis but had scattered after the war.
He paced around the office, ignoring the looks from the secretary, and decided it was probably his mother. She had been sent away months earlier and the family was reeling. He and Stella had not seen her and their letters went unanswered. Their father refused to discuss his wife’s treatment, and, well, there were a lot of unknowns. Would her condition improve? Would she come home? Would the family ever be a real family again? Joel and Stella had questions, but their father preferred to talk about other matters when he chose to talk at all. Likewise, Aunt Florry was of little help.
She called at 11:00 a.m. on the dot. The secretary handed Joel the phone and stepped around a corner, though probably within earshot, he figured. Joel said hello, then listened for what seemed an eternity. Florry began by explaining that she was in town at the home of Miss Mildred Highlander, a woman Joel had known his entire life, and she, Florry, was there because the call needed to be private and there was no privacy on their rural party line, as he well knew. And, really, nothing was private in town right now because his father had driven to the Methodist church just hours earlier and shot and killed the Reverend Dexter Bell, and was now in jail, and, well, as anyone could understand, the entire town was buzzing and everything had come to a complete stop. Don’t ask why and don’t say anything that might get overheard, wherever you are, Joel, but it’s just awful and God help us.
Joel leaned on the secretary’s desk for support as he felt faint. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and listened. Florry said she had just talked to Stella at Hollins and she did not take it well. They had her in the president’s office with a nurse. She explained that Pete had given her specific instructions, in writing no less, that they—Joel and Stella—were to stay at school and away from home and Clanton until further notice. They should make plans to spend Thanksgiving holidays with friends as far away from Ford County as possible. And, if they were contacted by reporters, investigators, police, or anybody else, they were to say absolutely nothing. Not a word to anyone about