The Weaker Sex (Unedited)

Chapter 23

Sheriff Whitley offered me a cigarette. I was never much for smoking or drinking or anything that reminded me of my father, but in this instance it seemed like an excellent idea. However, just as I was about to light it, I remembered I had a little bundle of joy baking in my tummy and I wasn't about to kill it like Tobias had the first. I declined last minute and pushed the white roll back to Sheriff Whitley.

"There's no denying that you were an innocent girl back then." He said, taking up the cigarette I had rejected.

"Tobias always had a way of getting what he wanted. I was pure up until the second day of our honeymoon then he cornered me and well I was Mrs. Delaney in more ways than one."

"You were married no harm, no foul. Tobias had always been a good Christian boy."

"Haha, possibly with me, but his ex-girlfriends can all tell a different story."

"What made you so different?"

"Well, he was saving me for other reasons."

He stared at me completely un-amused. I knew I'd been boring him with the good details, but I wanted to remember the good old days for a little bit. They seemed so long ago.

"What is the point of this story?" he asked.

"You know the point. You know the ending too, you're just humoring me."

"I want to know why you killed him."

"Believe me, there is plenty of time for that."

"No, there isn't. We already have enough evidence to put you in the electric chair. I'm just giving you a chance to repent."

"You're wasting your time then Sheriff because that sure as hell is never going to happen. He got what he deserved and you can all live in your idyllic little worlds thinking Tobias Delaney was a saint and an innocent victim of his psychotic bitch of a wife."

I was as positive as that pregnancy test I'd taken, that everyone in Blair County was calling me a psychopath who took away their model citizen. Oh, but men like him there were many, especially with Peter Delaney still around.

"I don't understand why you're keeping me here." I said.

"We're all curious to know, even the Assistant DA. He went to Columbia with Tobias."

"Oh how nice, the justice system is tainted. You should have declined the case Mr. ADA."

Sheriff Whitely snapped his fingers for me to look at him.

"You've been dragging this story on for hours, now get to what we want to hear." He ordered.

"I was just trying to establish the kind of relationship we had before I signed my life away to him. Marrying him was the biggest mistake I ever made."

His nostrils flared in anger. I knew very well that it killed him inside every time I defamed Tobias, but hell, I wasn't going to play the part of the grieving widow. I may have been a battered woman, but I wasn't blind to everything he had put me through. "Fine, I'll skip all the happy days we shared in our first two years of marriage and skip to the third year when this town was on the brink of financial ruin." Yes, good old Tobias Delaney had to see the town through a money crisis. The farms were doing poorly and the banks were hiking up their interest rates, now what was a mayor to do?

***

It'd been a blissful three years with the typical arguments of married couples. He never picked up his laundry off the bathroom floor and left his towel wherever he desired. I would cringe and groan every time I found his rolled up socks at the end of the bed. Sometimes when I'd get especially fed up, I'd round them all up and would prepare to yell at him, but then I'd see him wiped out from a long day at the office and would just help him get comfortable and kiss him goodnight before I'd throw his socks away. Other than that, things had been going well for us. I'd been teaching second grade at Blair Elementary School for the past three years and Tobias had been running the town smoothly.