Love, Honor, Betray

Book 3: Lexington, Alabama Novel

by Mary Monroe

Genres: African American Women's Fiction; Historical Fiction; Southern

Synopsis

Award-winning New York Times bestselling author Mary Monroe delivers the latest thrillingly scandal-filled novel in her Depression-era saga of a church-going lady and her oh-so-upstanding husband racing to cover up their many sins—and gambling on one scheme too many …
With mysterious serial murders putting peaceful Lexington, Alabama, on edge, Jessie and Hubert Wiggins’ steadfast calm and devotion to each other reassures everyone that faith will see them through. But Jessie and Hubert have paid a terrible hidden cost to maintain their devout facade and respectable standing.
Nothing can allay the guilt they feel—or stop the growing distrust between them …
Hubert thought he and his secret lover, Leroy, could continue seeing each other on the down-low in peace. But when Leroy’s ex-wife moves back in with him, a heartbroken Hubert is driven to distraction trying to keep Jessie in the dark—and quell his mounting jealousy. And his need for satisfaction is driving Hubert
to reckless extremes—and desperate risks …
Jessie believes the struggles between her and Hubert will all be worth it if she can connive him to finally consummate their marriage—no matter what she has to do. But his erratic behavior and her frustration soon has her trying yet another new lover, who is as charming as he is unreliable—and unexpectedly dangerous …
Now with their secrets out of control—and the police perilously near—Jessie and Hubert discover who might be behind the deaths plaguing their town. But can they risk a pursuit that could expose their own web of lies? When their only choice pits them and their suspicions against each other, their next move will either
bury their deceptions deep for good—or reveal the one truth they can’t escape …

Release date: March 28, 2023

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

“HUBERT, DO YOU REALLY THINK WE’RE GOING TO GET AWAY WITH murder?” Jessie asked in a meek tone. We had just started eating breakfast. I knew something was bothering her as soon as I got in the kitchen and seen the distant look in her eyes.

I looked up from my plate and gazed at her with a mess of grits, bacon, and scrambled eggs still in my mouth. She had only ate a smidgen of her grits and half a slice of bacon. I swallowed hard and replied, “We done already got away with it. It’s been over a month. And it wasn’t really murder. It was a accident while I was trying to defend myself.” I stared at the dark circles around Jessie’s eyes. “You don’t look too good. It’s going to be a long day, so you should finish your food and take a pill. You’ll feel better.”

“I done lost my appetite and a pill ain’t what I want,” she insisted in a much stronger tone.

“Then what do you want?”

“I want to talk about what happened.”

“I declare, talking about it ain’t going to help. It’ll just make the situation seem worse and that much harder for you to get over it. It’s been a couple of weeks since we talked about this, so I thought we had laid this subject to rest. Why are you bringing it up again now?”

Jessie’s shoulders drooped and she let out a loud sigh. “Because I dreamed about Blondeen again last night. She had a gun and was chasing me around in the graveyard,” she mumbled with her voice trembling and a terrified look on her face. I hated seeing Jessie in distress because it distressed me. “Before last night, I hadn’t dreamed about her since the night of her funeral.”

My stomach knotted up. I rubbed the back of my head and groaned. “Looka here, I still dream about her too. When I wake up, I find other things to occupy my mind with, so I won’t have to think about her too much.”

“It’s hard to keep her off my mind, even when I have a lot of other things to think about. I have to walk past the house she used to live in to go catch my bus to work every day. Then I have to pass it again on my way home. I done seen the curtains at the front window move a few times—and that house is still empty. Everybody knew how she would sit in her living-room window, crack open the curtains, and gawk at folks walking by.”

I rolled my eyes. “Jessie, what are you getting at?”

“I think . . . I think Blondeen’s spirit is in that house.”

“Pffftt! If it was, she’d have shown herself to me or you by now. It ain’t nothing but the wind making them curtains move,” I insisted.

“There wasn’t no breeze nary one of the times I seen them curtains move.”

I rolled my eyes again and tried not to sound unsympathetic. “If that house spooks you so much, start walking a different route to and from the bus stop.”

“I tried that a few times. Going three blocks out of my way takes me ten minutes longer to get to work, and to get home. And it seems like almost every time I go out in public, I bump into some of Blondeen’s kinfolks. Last week, I ran into her mama at the market. Lord, was she a sight! Her hair was a frizzy mess, and she didn’t have on no makeup. The last three times I ran into her, she had on the same dress. Jesus would weep if He was to see her these days. I ran into her again yesterday at the fabric store. When she hugged my neck and started to talk about how well you handled Blondeen’s final arrangements, I ended up crying along with her.” Jessie sniffled and went on. “It’s a shame Blondeen had to die so young. I’m glad she didn’t have no kids. I would be feeling even worse.”

“Jessie, if I hadn’t killed her, she would have killed us. Don’t you ever forget that.”

“I just wish we could have talked some sense into her.”

I looked at Jessie like she was crazy. “Nobody can talk sense into a maniac. You was married to one, so you should know that.” I snorted, rubbed my nose, and silently prayed that this conversation would end soon. “I’m sure we’ll be fine when enough time done passed, sugar.”

Jessie sucked on her teeth and gave me a weary look. “I don’t know about that. Year before last, I read a newspaper story about a pig farm worker in Georgia who chopped his wife up and fed her to the hogs. He was able to convince their kids and everybody else that she had run off with another man. It took eight long years for his guilt to get so bad, he couldn’t deal with it no more and he turned hisself in. They put him in the electric chair.”

“I remember that case. What we done ain’t half as bad as what that fool done. So there ain’t no reason for you to believe we’ll end up feeling guilty enough to turn ourselves in. Not even in eight years or longer. All we have to do is keep our mouths shut. And so long as we continue to read our Bible and pray regularly, we’ll be just fine. Now get a grip and let’s finish breakfast so we can get to church on time for a change. Daddy wants me to sing a solo before his sermon.”

While Jessie was getting dressed, I stayed at the table and reflected on what I had become since Maggie and Claude died: a rapist, a bigger liar, and now a killer. I wouldn’t allow myself to spend too much time wondering what folks would think about me if they knew my secrets.

Me and Maggie had been best friends since childhood. She was the only one I trusted enough to tell that I was attracted to men. I was the only person she trusted enough to tell that she had been sexually abused by one of her daddy’s friends when she was a little girl. That experience had been so traumatic, Maggie was terrified of sex and decided in her teens that she didn’t want nothing else to do with it. She also decided that she would only marry a man who wouldn’t expect any. And I wanted a wife I wouldn’t have to have sex with. No normal man or woman would marry us on our terms. Therefore, we was perfect for each other. I married Maggie when I was twenty and she was seventeen.

I had never seen Maggie as happy as she was when she became a member of the Wiggins family. Her parents had led unsavory lives before they died, and she’d been looked down on by most of the folks we knew. Marrying me had put her as high up on the food chain as she could go. Daddy was the most respected and adored colored preacher in the small country town of Lexington, Alabama. Mama was a hairdresser with a lot of customers and friends, so everybody looked up to the Wiggins family—especially me.

I had a good job supervising the colored workers at the turpentine mill. And when my uncle died shortly after me and Maggie got married, he left his house to me, which he had paid off in full. I had assisted him in his undertaking business, and I’d inherited that too. His two loyal employees, cousins Tyrone and Floyd McElroy, had come with the business. They’d assisted my uncle for years and years and knew a lot about undertaking, so I wasn’t about to reorganize and replace them. I was glad they had decided to stay on and work for me, because at the end of the day, I didn’t know what I’d do without them. There was only one other colored funeral home in town. It was run by the Fuller Brothers, Ned and Percy. They was a little older than me and more experienced, but I treated people better, so I got most of the business.

Before Maggie died, she had been a great prop to help me keep my relationships with men a secret. She gave me her blessing to have as many boyfriends as I wanted, so long as I didn’t get caught and scandalize her.

Despite me and Maggie’s sexless marriage, we desperately wanted a child. But we could never create one together. That wasn’t no problem, though. We searched around until we found a stranger with features similar to mine and set him up to get Maggie pregnant. Our son, Claude, was born the year after our wedding.

Once Maggie and Claude was gone, I didn’t like living by myself. And I didn’t want to move in with Mama and Daddy. That was when I decided to focus on developing a relationship with Jessie that would benefit us both. I never expected to find another wife as accommodating as Maggie had been, but Jessie was close enough. She was a upstanding, well-respected Christian woman who lived a biblical life. Just like me. We followed almost every rule in the Bible as much as we could. I had some flaws, but the only one I could see in Jessie was that she liked to gossip. So there was no way in the world I could tell her my deep, dark secrets.

To reel her in, I had gave her a good reason as to why I couldn’t have sex with her. What I told her was so believable, I had a hard time believing it was a lie myself. I claimed that the deaths of Maggie and Claude had traumatized me so much, I had lost my urge to have sex and couldn’t even get aroused. Jessie had bought it hook, line, and sinker. But that was only because she believed my manhood would be restored one day. I couldn’t tell her that day would never come . . .

Things was going just fine until my birthday rolled around last year. Me and Jessie had drunk more alcohol than we should have during the celebration at my house that February night, and I’d blacked out. I woke up the next morning in bed with her in my arms. We was both naked. She told me that I had raped her while she was too drunk to fend me off. But since I’d been under the influence of alcohol and the Devil, she didn’t get upset or want to end our relationship.

I had never had sex with a woman and never thought I’d have the desire to do so. I didn’t remember nothing about the incident, so I had no idea if I’d enjoyed having sex with Jessie or not.

About a month later, she told me she was pregnant and that I was the daddy! I immediately offered to marry her, if she could live with a man who had lost his manhood. She still believed that my condition was temporary and insisted that she was a very patient and understanding woman. So she was more than happy to become my wife. My daddy married us a few days later. Unfortunately, Jessie had a miscarriage in May.

I knew that me and Jessie would be very happy for many years to come, so long as I kept my secrets hid, not to mention the one me and her shared about how Blondeen died. The only other thing I was concerned about was holding her off in the bedroom, permanently.

WHEN I GOT BACK TO THE KITCHEN, HUBERT WAS STILL AT THE table with his coffee cup in his hand. He was sitting so still, it looked like he was in some kind of trance. Even with half of his hair gray, a few noticeable wrinkles on his honey-colored face, and a slightly overweight body, Hubert was still a handsome man. I loved looking at him, even when he was in a trance. He didn’t realize I was standing beside him until I cleared my throat and nudged his shoulder. “Oh! I didn’t hear you come back in here.”

“Why are you still sitting here? You better hurry up and get ready for church,” I told him in a stern tone. “What was you so deep in thought about?”

“Huh? Oh! Nothing serious.” Hubert set his coffee cup down and stood up.

“You sure looked mighty serious to me. You didn’t even know I’d come back into the room until I let you know.”

“I was just thinking about work at the mill, that’s all.” He chuckled and rolled his eyes. “Some of the men I supervise done got so lazy, I’m surprised they even come to work at all.”

“Well, you’d better remind them that even though they say the Depression done ended, it’s still hard for a lot of folks to find work.” I looked Hubert up and down and stomped my foot. “Shake a leg, lickety-split, so we can get going. I done already laid out your blue suit and a shirt and tie.”

“Good! It won’t take long for me to get ready. I done already shaved and took my bath.”

“Hubert, I’m sorry about bringing up what happened to Blondeen again this morning.”

He heaved out a heavy sigh, took my hands in his, and gave me one of his warmest smiles. “And I’m sorry I scolded you for doing it.”

By the time we left our house fifteen minutes later, I was in a better mood, and the short ride to church helped. I knew and liked everybody in our neighborhood, from the doctor who lived in the biggest, nicest house on the same street we lived on, to the field hand who lived in a shack two streets behind us on a dirt road. Except for work, almost everything else was within walking distance. We could go north from our house and walk to church, the few restaurants that served colored folks, my in-laws’ house, and the market. Carson Lake, where folks fished and had picnics, was at the south end of town, which was also within walking distance.

The sun was bright for it to be January. It was still a little chilly outside, though. I wore a thick tapestry shawl over my short-sleeved blue silk dress. Hubert’s dark blue suit was thick enough, he didn’t need nothing else to keep him warm. He was so dapper, I liked to gaze at him when he wasn’t looking. There was times when I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t living in a dream.

Even though our church was within walking distance, we usually drove there every Sunday in case one of the elders needed a ride home or we wanted to go someplace else after the service ended. As we moseyed down the street in Hubert’s well-kept Ford, I looked out the window at the tall magnolia trees standing in front of some of the houses. The trees would be even more beautiful in the spring when they bloomed and perfumed the air with a wonderful fragrance. The only thing I didn’t like about our house was that we didn’t have no magnolias in our yard. But the pecan tree, which we had, made up for that. Every year we collected so many pecans, I made enough pies to feed a lot of our friends.

“How come you being so quiet now?” Hubert asked.

I whirled around to look at him. “Huh? Did you say something?”

He glanced at me for a few seconds with a mild frown on his face. “You was on me about sitting at the kitchen table deep in thought. Now here you are doing the same thing. I complimented you on that new fragrance you got on. I tell everybody you got a knack when it comes to picking out the best smell-goods.”

“Yeah. Um, I was just thinking about a few new ones I wanted to check out.” I coughed and cleared my throat. “It’s a shame we live in such a beautiful, serene little town, but . . .”

“But it would be even more beautiful and serene if it wasn’t for them five colored women getting killed?”

“Six,” I corrected.

Hubert slapped the steering wheel. “All right, then. Six dead colored women. How many more times will I have to tell you to forget about Blondeen?”

“I’ll drop the subject, but I’ll never forget about Blondeen. And I know you won’t neither.” I had scrubbed the spot where she’d bled out and covered it with a rug, but every time I moved the rug to sweep, I cringed and got sick to my stomach. There was no way I could forget completely about what happened to Blondeen.

“It ain’t helping none if you keep bringing her up.”

“Hubert, when they catch the man who killed them other women and they blame him for Blondeen, what we did won’t bother me no more.”

Hubert sighed and sucked on his teeth. “I guess that’s when it won’t bother me no more neither,” he admitted.

We didn’t say nothing more the rest of the way.

We got to church ten minutes before the morning service started. Being Reverend Wiggins’s immediate family, me and Hubert was expected to sit on the first pew.

Before Maggie died, I used to sit on the first pew because I was her best friend. But I hadn’t enjoyed church since she passed, so I only went once or twice a month. I was glad Hubert felt the same way.

While the choir was getting situated, folks was roaming around, hugging and greeting other members of the congregation. I was glad nobody had come up to me yet. It was probably because of the tight look on my face. I couldn’t help myself. Blondeen was back on my mind.

I didn’t like to speak or think ill of the dead, but I was glad she was out of my life for good. I was sorry she had to die for that to happen, though.

Ten minutes after Hubert had sung his solo, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” he slumped back into his seat and dozed off. Nobody would have noticed he had fell asleep if he hadn’t been snoring so loud. I got embarrassed every time I looked around and seen folks gawking at him, snickering and shaking their heads. I was glad Hubert wasn’t the only man snoozing. I noticed at least half-a-dozen others. While the choir was singing the last of eight songs, I jabbed him in the side with my elbow and woke him up. “I don’t want to stay for the afternoon service,” I whispered. “I need to get home and do my ironing.”

He snorted and muttered, “I ain’t staying neither.”

When Pa Wiggins finally ended the last prayer, me and Hubert bolted, but a elderly birdlike woman named Sister Quigley intercepted us as soon as we made it outside. She stood in front of us adjusting her wide-brimmed hat, looking from Hubert to me and back. With a side-eyed glance, she said, “Jessie, I noticed how worried you looked all through the service. A woman in your shoes shouldn’t have nothing to worry about, especially during a church service.” Then she looked at Hubert and added in a sarcastic tone, “Ain’t that right, Hubert?”

“You’re right as usual, Sister Quigley. Um . . . you’ll have to excuse us. Jessie ain’t feeling too good, so I need to get her home.”

“You sick? What’s wrong with you, gal? You ain’t got nothing catchy, I hope.” Sister Quigley moved a few steps back and looked at me with her eyes popped out as far as they could pop without rolling out the sockets.

“No, it ain’t nothing like that. It’s my job at the nursing home,” I answered. “We lost three patients on Friday. They was all real nice to me, so their passing really got to me.”

Sister Quigley shook her head and gave me a pitying look. “As long as you been working at that place, you ought to be used to that by now. We all know that a nursing home is the last stop on a person’s journey before they reach the graveyard. By the way, I didn’t get a chance to talk with you at Blondeen’s funeral last month, but I wanted to mention how surprised I was to see you there. Everybody knew she didn’t like you . . .”

It was going to be harder for me and Hubert to put Blondeen out of our minds if other people was going to be bringing her up too. “Me and Blondeen had our differences, but I was just as upset as everybody else when she got killed,” I replied in a stiff tone.

“Jessie attends most of the funerals I handle. With Blondeen dying in such a wretched way, even folks she didn’t like felt duty-bound to be at her home-going,” Hubert tossed in. A few moments of silence passed. I didn’t know what else to say and I didn’t want to hear nothing else Sister Quigley had to say. I was glad Hubert continued. “You’ll have to excuse us. You have a blessed rest of the day.”

We didn’t give Sister Quigley a chance to say nothing else. We got into our car and took off.

There was times when I still couldn’t believe I was married to a handsome, prosperous man like Hubert. I didn’t waste too much time after Maggie’s death before I started scheming to get him. My first husband, Orville, had been so mean and violent, I was relieved when he died the year before last because of a lifelong heart condition.

Anyway, I had schemed like mad to become the new Mrs. Wiggins. Since I had been close friends with Maggie and Hubert for years, naturally I’d helped him get through his grief when she died. He was so distressed; he was having a hard time functioning. I offered to cook and clean for him on a regular basis. He not only went for it, he also paid me every week. But I knew that so long as he was still single, there was a chance that one of the other women who had wanted to be more than friends with him might woo him away from me. The only way I could have him all to myself was to become his wife. That wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. He took me out and we spent a lot of time alone, but that was all.

I was dumbfounded when he told me that losing Maggie had traumatized him so much, he had lost interest in sex and wasn’t sure he’d ever want to do it again. Well, I had my own ideas about that. I told him that I believed his manhood would eventually be restored. It didn’t take long for me to realize he was going to need some assistance from me. On the night of his birthday celebration at his house last year, I drugged him with a double dose of some tranquilizers that I took from the nursing home. When he became conscious the next morning, I didn’t have no trouble at all convincing him that he’d raped me while he was drunk. He was so remorseful. We agreed to forget about what had happened and remain friends.

A month later, I told him I was pregnant as a result of the “rape.” He didn’t waste no time asking me to be his wife. We got married right away.

To this day, he ain’t never attempted to make love to me. That was the reason I had got involved with the handyman at the nursing home last year. I didn’t find out until later that the same man was also Blondeen’s live-in boyfriend.

Since I was never pregnant by Hubert, I had to fake a miscarriage. He was heartbroken about losing a child he’d wanted so desperately. I desperately wanted to have his baby and prayed that he’d be able to make love to me before I got too old to conceive. With a baby in the mix, I could have a hold on him for life.

My boy, Earl, was the only child me and my first husband had been blessed with. He was twenty-one now, but he had the mind of a child around seven or eight years of age. Maggie used to babysit him for me while I was at work, and never charged me a dime. I didn’t make much money working at the nursing home, so I would not have been able to pay a babysitter. Once Maggie was no longer around to watch Earl for free, my oldest sister, Minnie, took him to live with her in Toxey, a nearby town that was even smaller and more country than Lexington. She had several grandchildren and Earl enjoyed their company so much he rarely wanted to visit me and Hubert. When he was happy, I was happy.

Matter of fact, even if me and Hubert never consummated our marriage, I’d still be happy. The thought made me smile.

“Jessie, I’m talking to you,” Hubert said in a loud voice.

I whirled around to face him so fast, I almost lost my breath. “Huh? Did you say something?”

Hubert pulled into our driveway and turned off the motor. “While you sitting here, smiling like a new bride, I was saying that if you want to go back to church for the evening service, you’ll be going by yourself. I’ll drive you back over there, though.”

Just the thought of sitting through some more of Reverend Wiggins’s rambling speeches in the same day made my head throb. “I’d rather spend the rest of the day at home.”

I followed Hubert into the house, and we went straight to the living room and flopped down on the couch, him at one end and me at the other. After the “rape,” he never got too close to me again. It was bad enough that he never made love to me, but he rarely showed me any other affection at all. He didn’t give me passionate kisses, like every other man I had known. He usually just hugged my neck or kissed me on my jaw. “I enjoy us being alone. We have fun together, don’t we, Hubert?”

“Sure enough. I’ll go get the checkers and we can play for a while before you have to get busy cooking supper. After we eat, we can play checkers some more, or dominoes, until it’s time to go to bed. That suit you?”

“That suits me.” As soon as he looked away, I rolled my eyes. I couldn’t think of nothing I hated more than checkers and dominoes. But I would do anything I had to do to keep Hubert happy.

MAGGIE’S AND CLAUDE’S BIRTHDAYS HAD BEEN A FEW DAYS apart earlier in January. I’d had a hard time getting through them days. By February, I was feeling much better. I made up my mind to focus more on the future and less on the past. With me and Jessie’s history, only God knew how things was going to play out.

I didn’t realize today was Valentine’s Day until Jessie brought it up at the breakfast table this morning. It was a holiday that never meant too much to me. But Maggie and most of my used-to-be boyfriends would get all giddy when it rolled around every year. They would buy frivolous gifts for me that I would have never bought for myself. One year, Maggie had the nerve to buy me some see-through socks that she had bought from a mail-order outfit in New Orleans. That was not a practical gift for a man with bunions on each foot almost as big as walnuts. To keep her and my boyfriends happy, I’d go with the flow and buy them something just as silly.

“Let’s do something special together today. We can go shopping after we get off work, and you can help me pick out some new curtains for the living room. If you feel like it, we can eat out this evening too,” Jessie suggested as she dipped a spoon into ajar of the blackberry jelly she made last year. She dumped a second helping onto my plate and a third onto hers. I had almost finished the grits, bacon, and eggs.

“I don’t want to go shopping, and you know how busy the restaurants will be with folks celebrating Valentine’s Day this evening. And why can’t you make some new curtains on that Singer sewing machine you made me buy for you?”

“We don’t have to eat out then, and I made curtains for our bedroom. I want to buy some new ones for the living room. Besides, I get tired of sitting at that sewing machine making quilts, pillowcases, and whatnot. I just thought that since today is a special day, to some folks, you might want to do something special.”

“Um . . . I don’t really want to do nothing today. We’l. . .