Strangely, it never occurred to her to ask why they never went to church if he was that religious. For that matter, she never knew just what religious group had baptized him or to which church he held allegiance. Her parents had been Unitarians and she didn’t give a tinker’s damn in Hades about the ceremonial aspects of religion. She knew that the Spirit of the Creator/Creatrix was within her and had always acted accordingly.

Until the moment that Louise had opened the restaurant’s outer door and had passed within, Louise knew that her entire life had been lived in accordance with goodness and integrity. If the justice she would exact from her husband was wrong, than it would be the first evil act of her life. In charity though, she planned to forgive her husband for his sins against her once the deed was done. It might make little difference to him once she was finished with his corpus, but his soul might need her forgiveness nonetheless. Whether his silent soul would forgive her afterwards for what she was about to do to him, she could not imagine. As she opened the restaurant’s second door to enter the foyer, she prayed to the Spirit within her to forgive her in his stead.

The justice she needed could not be rendered by temporal authorities, so she had to forge a lasting judgement by herself by main force. Louise had been appalled when it was revealed that all her erstwhile husband was interested in was his mistresses, which was the unconscious reason for her trip to the salon. She subconsciously wanted to compete with the other women and permanently bind him to her apron strings on even ground, even though she was so thoroughly fed up with him that she had no intention of ever “sleeping” with him again. If she couldn’t do that, then her subconscious had decided that he was better off dead. She’d had enough of his behavior!

Although she had never used the contents of the rugged, blue, zippered, ripstop nylon bag that she had brought with her before, she was positive she would need its contents before the afternoon was over. Louise’s parents had made sure that she had mastered two skills as a teenager to survive as a woman; how to care for an infant and how to shoot a pistol accurately under stress in order kill a man if her life was imperiled. When she married, she wanted a husband who would be her life’s companion and the father of her child. She neither needed nor wanted a paternal caretaker who would guard her from the outside world. Louise was more than capable of taking care of herself. If attacked, she was emotionally prepared to render a swift, decisive justice to anyone who threatened either her existence or that of her family. That afternoon she intended to use one of those skills to end her husband’s unfaithfulness forever. She had a score to settle with her womanizing husband and what she carried in the bag would set things right again.

Their marriage had been a failure at the very beginning, Louise realized. She had not known that her husband was so narcissistic and so self-involved that he wouldn’t even consider having a child when she married him. Louise had wanted a baby of her own all her life and had married him with the expectation that he would enable her to have a family of her own. He had told her that it didn’t matter to him that Louise was exceedingly plain and unalluring when they got married. He had said he loved her soul and not her looks and had promised to give her a baby. Soon after, he had begun hitting on every woman in sight, as if the only reason he had married her was to avail himself of her family’s fortune which she had inherited upon her parent’s death.

Louise opened the massive red oak door with stained glass panels depicting verdant fountains gushing forth waters into placid pools. The panels had been leaded with three-quarter-inch wide lead came and had been inset into the tall arched window of the double doors of Louder’s Café with a master’s touch. As the door closed behind her, she chanced to turn around and saw that a triplet of quarter-inch steel, horizontal reinforcing bars had been soldered at the top, middle and bottom of each pane. The stained glass window on the massive wooden doors bothered her conscience somewhat; it reminded her of a church’s stained glass windows. For a fleeting moment, she had the impression that the edifice’s indwelling spirit was well aware of her plans for her sinful desire for revenge. She shivered at the thought that she might punished her for what she was about to do to her unfaithful spouse, but then shook the feeling off. Her husband’s fate would be born from the womb of perfidy which he had impregnated with his deceits. From what she had been told about the restaurant by her friend, Dinah, Louder’s was the perfect venue to assess punitive reparations from her “soon to be” erstwhile spouse for his duplicity and faithlessness.