“Lionel Batson,” I said, and for the first time since the funeral I felt my heart slow down. I sat in the passenger seat of the car of Tyler with the phone in my hand and the mugshot of a man I had been polite to for six months staring up at me from the screen. Lionel Batson, sixty four years old, not seventy eight, with the same gold chain and the same eyes. “Four wives,” I whispered. “Four, Tyler.” He nodded and kept driving. “And Grandma would have been five. I am going to make sure she is the last.”
By nine that night, the kitchen of my mother was full of people. Tyler had called the one person he trusted at the sheriff department, a detective named Alicia Barnes, a broad, soft spoken woman with a notebook, who sat at the table of Mama and ate a slice of the funeral cake as she read the receipt from the Golden Bell Chapel. “She wrote this in the middle of the ceremony, or just after,” Barnes said. “In her own hand. That is evidence of lack of consent that no lawyer can argue with. Mrs. Pickard, was your mother taking any medication that was not prescribed by her doctor?”
I stared at her. “She took her blood pressure pill every morning,” I said. “Leon put them in the little box for her. The days of the week. He said it was no trouble.” The detective and the deputy exchanged a look. “Do you have the box?” she asked. I did. I had carried it home from the hospital in my coat pocket, because I could not bear to leave anything of Mama behind. Barnes put on a pair of gloves and shook one pill into an evidence bag. “We will have it tested tomorrow,” she said. “And I will ask the hospital to keep her blood from the night she died.”
A mother who sews a secret into her purse has already won the argument with the man who thinks she cannot hear.
The results came on Friday. The pills in the box were not blood pressure pills. Three of the seven were something else, a white tablet of a sedative made for large animals, the kind that veterinarians give to horses, which Lionel Batson could have bought for a few dollars from a feed store in Clarksdale. The blood from the hospital told the same story. “It would not have killed her at once,” the toxicologist told me, in a gentle voice. “But in a woman of eighty six with a weak heart, it raised the odds of a stroke beyond anything I would call chance.”
I put my head down on the kitchen table. When I raised it, Detective Barnes was holding out a glass of water. “Mrs. Pickard,” she said, “we are going to arrest him this afternoon. He is still in the house of your mother, I believe, in the guest room, going through her papers. We would like you to come with us, if you can bear it. Not to do anything. Just to be there, when he sees your face.” I stood up. I took my mail carrier jacket off the hook by the door out of habit, and I put it on, and I said, “Let us go.”
He was sitting at the dining room table of Mama, with the roll top desk open and a stack of envelopes in front of him, in his shirtsleeves, wearing the gold chain. He looked up when the door opened, and his smile came on like a light, and went out like one. “Sheila, darling, what is all this?” Detective Barnes read him his rights in a flat, even voice. “Lionel Batson, you are under arrest for fraud, forgery, abuse of an elderly person, and the murder of Hazel Pickard.” He said, “Lionel? Who is Lionel?” And I said, “The man in the picture.”
They took him to the county jail in handcuffs, and the next week, on a quiet tip from Detective Barnes, the families of the other four came to Jackson, Tennessee, from three states. I met them in a church basement. A tall man from Clarksdale whose mother had died in 2019. A pair of sisters from Greenville. A woman from Natchez who had brought the ring of her mother in a handkerchief, because Lionel had never found it. We sat in a circle on folding chairs and passed around a plate of cookies, and nobody said much, and I have never felt so close to strangers.
The trial took place in the autumn, in a courtroom where I had delivered the mail for twenty eight years. I did not testify about the murder; I did not have to. The evidence did the talking. The video from the Golden Bell Chapel, kept by Earl in a drawer, showed my mother in her church coat, in the middle of a small room, with her purse on her arm and a look of such helpless confusion that the jury turned away. When the foreman read the verdict, a woman in the third row of the gallery began to sing very softly, a hymn I knew.
Lionel Batson was sentenced to life in prison without parole for the murder of my mother and for the murders of two of the other wives, whose exhumations proved the same thing. His assets were seized. The savings of my mother, one hundred sixty three thousand dollars, came back to me intact, and I did what I think she would have done. I gave a tenth to the church. I gave another tenth to the senior bus. And I kept the rest in an account in her name, for the grandchildren, who will go to college on the hymns of their grandmother.
In the spring, on the first Wednesday of the month, I rode the senior bus to Tunica with the ladies from church. I wore my good coat and carried a roll of quarters in my purse, twenty dollars, the exact limit of Mama. We sat in a row in front of the slot machines, six old women with plastic cups of coffee. I fed my quarters in one at a time. I lost every one. When the last coin went down, I put my hand over my mouth, and I laughed until the whole row of women turned to look. “That is the best twenty dollars I ever spent,” I said. “Mad money.”
