David Abbott was the last person the citizenry of Centerville expected to commit suicide, much less in broad daylight and by such unsightly means, his broken and bloody corpse splayed on impact from its five-story fall onto the sidewalk in front of the Playhouse Cinema. And the Reverend Jeremy McCallum was the last person the congregation of Christ First Baptist—a zealous percentage of Centerville’s worshippers—expected to desert his stricken flock by vanishing into thin air in its time of need.

Dave Abbott exuded such virile confidence, upright values, and financial prowess that he seemed untouchable—least of all by the emotions that merited suicide—and the Reverend McCallum, well, he was simply the most charismatic orator who’d graced the pulpit of Christ First Baptist in its fifty-seven-year history. The increase in offertory envelopes that followed every fiery Sunday sermon, to say nothing of the number of smitten female parishioners who left boldly colored dress shirts at his doorstep (“The Reverend looks so nice in bright colors, don’t he?”) were testaments to his skills of suasion.

The melodies of “Some Enchanted Evening” and “Bali Ha-i” still lingered on the tips of everyone’s tongues when the double tragedy occurred: upstanding citizen struck down, smashed flat as a pancake right in full view of any passersby, and the succor that their minister of God would, should, ought to have been offering his shocked and saddened flock—Dave Abbott having been so prominent a member of Christ First Baptist—having vanished with the Reverend McCallum’s unexpected announcement that he was moving on to greener pastures.

And South Pacific, dammit, lay at the root of the tragedy. Or, more precisely, the local community production of the Broadway hit that had played for four nights at the Playhouse the prior week—movie screenings cancelled to make way for the stage extravaganza, cosponsored by the Kiwanis Club and the Women’s Better Business League. The week of the tragedy, the dogwood trees lining the two main streets of downtown Centerville— Market and Broad Way—had reached their peak, a riot of white and pink blossoms appearing on cue for the town’s Dogwood Festival, which began with the crowning of the new Dogwood Queen, Felicity Furst, and culminated in the opening night of South Pacific at the Playhouse. For decades the five-story edifice and its bright marquee had dominated the intersection of Market and Broad Way—though the prophetic nature of the latter street’s name had occurred to nary a soul till advertisements for the musical in the Daily Register spelled out the obvious: “See Broadway on Broad Way!” The show had royally served its purpose, ushering Centerville into the 1970s as one united, happy front. The times, city elders agreed, they were downright dangerous, what with the hippies and riots in the streets and free love threatening small-town life as they’d always known it.

So putting on the play had been a calculated effort to bring the community’s various contingencies together in a team effort to prove that their collective identity as proud Centervilleans triumphed over occasional differences, whether in politics, religion, caste, or race. The WWII setting of the 1949 hit musical appealed to the patriotism of one sector of the community (many of whom had seen time in the Pacific), its interracial themes spoke, in suitably displaced fashion, to the more liberally disposed among the Southern town’s population (after all, so the planning committee patted itself on its collective back, hadn’t Reginald Shumaker, of the all-black Morningside Glee Club, notched a place among the Seabees?), and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s songs appealed to, well, just about everyone.

Mrs. Fitzbottom had exited Dixon Drugs and was preoccupied tucking her prescription nerve pills into the depths of her black purse when she strolled past the Playhouse on the Tuesday afternoon that Abbott’s body dropped from above. The dogwood branches shading the sidewalk barely slowed its descent as all 185 pounds of his manhood landed at the poor lady’s feet. Later, she declared that the falling projectile had passed so close that she felt a whoosh of air against her well-rouged cheeks. In the instant that it took the lady to locate her smelling salts, a swarm of gasping and gaping pedestrians circled the ghastly corpse with as much determination as iron filaments writhing their way to a magnet’s poles. Millie Caldwell’s twin boys forgot the grape popsicles staining their fingers lurid purple and looked on bug-eyed as dogwood petals, shaken loose by the velocity of Abbott’s fall, floated as serenely as swans on the crimson blood oozing from the back of the ruggedly handsome man’s cranium. Miss Trimble, who ran the dress shop next to the pharmacy, had yet to stop shrieking when a policeman whose badge identified him as one of the Millsaps boys elbowed his way to the front of the onlookers.

“It’s a body!”

“Darn right it’s a body! Whose?”

Whowhowhose? reverberated throughout the growing crowd like a hoot owl on amphetamines.

“Is he dead?”

“Look alive to you? Don’t look alive to me.”

“Mom! It’s Mr. Abbott, I swear, Mom, it’s Mr. Abbott! He took our Sunday school class camping on Lake Morbid!”

“Don’t step so close,” Mrs. Caldwell hissed a warning to her boys. “Them sneakers are bran’ new!”

“I say it’s him. Him! It’s Mr. Abbott—”

“—was Mr. Abbott,” a laconic voice from the rear added. “Not is. Was.”

“Where did in the high heavens above did the man come from?”

Pointing fingers provisionally decided on an open window above the Playhouse marquee, where faded sheers grotesquely sucked in and out of the weather-beaten frame as if applauding a job well done. So too thunderous applause had met Dave Abbott when he took his bow during the final curtain call of South Pacific. He’d ruled the stage of the Playhouse as the dashing Émile de Becque—magnificently so, popular opinion agreed. He’d done Centerville proud. Opinions were more varied about Janice McCallum’s performance as perky, quirky, naive Nellie Forbush. Janice was the Reverend McCallum’s wife, and some Christ First Baptist folk thought it wasn’t appropriate for the pastor’s helpmate to be showing off on stage like that—wearing aught but a bath towel in that shower number!— and making such convincing pretend-love to Dave Abbott’s suave Émile. It behooved the both of them to remember that they were happily married.

“From all the way up there?”

“Not from the window, stupid—I saw him sitting on the edge of the roof, then he just heaved himself forward. It was deliberate, it was. I say it was!”

“No wonder he’s squashed flat as a tractor done plowed him down. A goddam Deere tractor.”

“Lord save us all.”

Bart Cowan, the druggist, had appeared on the scene, and as he knelt by the body and lifted Dave’s right hand to feel for his pulse, a crumpled envelope fluttered from the dead man’s fingers, coming to rest on the pavement.

“Dead,” Bart pronounced the obvious, straightening up. The badge-bearing Millsaps boy pushed the eagerly horrified onlookers back as the siren blare of an ambulance drew so close that it drowned out Miss Trimble’s wails.

But not before Buddy Whitelaw had retrieved the envelope, the very second the seeping blood reached its edge. Fortuitously, for the curious minded, it proved to be unsealed.

By the time the ambulance workers had lifted the corpse into the rear of their vehicle, Buddy had scanned the handwritten contents of the piece of stationery he’d pulled from its cover. Miss Perdita Overcash craned from his right side, as did Teddy Turnipseed to his left, and before you could say jackrabbit, the revelations penned by Dave Abbott in the minutes before his fatal leap were pulsing through the crowd faster than the blood draining from his body. Soon, everyone knew some version of the scandalous truth. His widow and three children would never live down the infamy.

Sin had come to Centerville, and South Pacific lay squarely to blame.