“When Nora told me what Harry had done, and I saw that little dog and the way that kitchen looked, and the way Nora was, I said, ‘I’ll go and get that bastard. I’ll give him the thrashing of his life.’ I saw what he’d reduced Nora to. I wanted to get my hands on him. But Nora screamed at me: ‘No, Reggie, no. Don’t go near him. Tonight he’s worse than he’s ever been. The drink has finally driven him mad. He’s completely out of control.’
“I ejected the two cartridges she’d fired and dropped them into my slicker pocket. Then together we buried that little dog. I went to the orchard and dug a hole where Nora said while she wrapped it in a bath towel. She sort of collapsed, weeping, on its grave. She was in a shocking state, wet and muddy, and cold. I do believe if I could have got my hands on Bagley right then there wouldn’t have been much left of him. I picked Nora up and carried her into the house. After she calmed down we both noticed that my arm was bleeding. I’d taken off the slicker, even then not realizing I’d been hit. I had felt a bit of a sting. Nora got out some of the shot and put iodine on the arm and bandaged it. I said I’d get it looked after. I tried doctoring it myself later when it began to fester.
“When I thought that Nora was all right I left, taking the gun with me. She was overwrought, and Harry, no telling what mood he’d be in, she might have another go at him. I didn’t see Harry that night. I’d promised I’d not go back looking for him. I didn’t know that Harry was dead until I came into town the following Monday. I’d a deal going through at the bank for the purchase of some farm machinery. Seems when Harry had been found shot Nora thought that I had gone back to find him. Up the mountain as I was most of that week, building my cabin, I heard no news at all. Evenings, I got the chores done and slept mostly.”
Two mysterious cartridges. Someone had waited for Harry, or had met him crossing the lot, and had killed him, then had gone down Meadow Lane ejecting the spent cartridges. Someone other than Nora or Reggie had wanted Harry dead. But who? Well, that could be all the rest of us.
“The hand of God is in it. Charlie Fitzmaurice came back from the grave!” What had been whispers began to be boldly outspoken. Wishful thinking, I say, a way out when nothing logical works; something to mitigate the unbearable frustration. I couldn’t shake the feeling that, collectively, we’d all had a hand in it.
Being released didn’t free Reggie or Nora from suspicion. The grim shadow of doubt hung heavy, a black cloud. Two fine people whom we had watched grow from childhood, whom we all loved, should they come together at last were never to escape the burden of suspicion. Knowing their own innocence could provide no real peace as long as accusing eyes were turned on them. That’s how Longvallians are, we have to have it in black and white. I couldn’t get my heart up out of my boots. The detectives did not leave Longvalley. They had arrived back at the point of beginning all over again, with a trail gone cold. And that, we all sensed, should make them dig deeper, failure being unacceptable to them.
And then George Banner died. With his death the devastating truth was revealed. In wonderment we heard how it had happened. That fateful Friday night, following his nightly routine, George had gone for a leisurely horseback ride. At Rachel’s suggestion he’d taken his gun, hoping to get a rabbit or two. Rachel did make the best rabbit pie, George’s favorite. Returning home as the storm rumbled overhead, George, unobserved among the trees on his own side of the river, saw Nora run towards the hotel parking lot, and also Bagley in the distance, in some sort of trouble with the horse, going off into Main Street. Nora, deeply disturbed, weeping and stumbling, had turned back through the trees and along the river path towards her home. “My poor Brownie. My little Persha, dead, murdered, murdered! Charlie! Charlie! Oh, God! Let me die tonight!”
On his horse George sat, his blood running cold at Nora’s desperate sobbing. Still loving Nora and feeling in his very soul a duty to his lifelong friend Charlie, George put his horse to fording the river, heading into Meadow Lane. Totally without plan or purpose, merely seeking movement to work off the anger pounding in his head, hearing only Nora’s voice, seeing only Nora’s face and Charlie’s.
At the top of the lane he drew rein, not quite knowing why he’d come there. No one was in sight. Lightheadedness seemed to lift him; he no longer felt earthbound. Outside of himself he floated skyward. Vaguely George realized that some untoward thing was reaching a climax inside him, knew that a final destiny was unfolding over which he had no control. Thunder crashed, lightning split the clouds and found its way into his head. It didn’t matter; the pain he’d lived with was gone, numbness was developing. In his ears an ocean roared and pounded.
And in the shadowy distance there was Bagley, and the mare, entering the rubble-strewn lot from the Main Street side. Among the scattered masonry Harry stumbled and fell, losing his hold on the mare’s bridle. A crack of thunder and the mare plunged, rearing, whinnying in terror, then, finding herself free, galloped off.
Without haste, as though other forces than his own had the ordering, George raised the gun and, as a sheet of lightning illumined the area, he fired. There was stillness and darkness, and then the gentler sounds of rain. George’s horse, sensing no restraint nor guidance on the bit, turned homeward. George, following the habit of years, with fingers that fumbled now, ejected the shells into the lane.
At the river’s edge where the footbridge spanned the narrower, deeper water, George let the gun go. It fell into the water with a barely audible splash and sank at once, soft black mud sucking it down, a quiet gurgle. The water’s surface, briefly rippled and mud-dyed, had settled by the time George had crossed. He shuddered and slumped forward. Once home he had had to be carried into the house. He could neither walk nor talk.
“A stroke,” Doc Entwistle said. “But vital signs are good. He’ll come out of this.”
Rachel was horrified. “He’d been feeling so good lately. I shouldn’t have let him — he never should have gone riding.”
“Why the hell not?” Doc said. “I told him to do whatever he felt like doing.”
Only with difficulty had George finally been able to tell Doc what had happened, not being quite sure that it had. Perhaps his realization of what had really happened came only then, for George suffered a second stroke, his overstrained heart giving way. His end had been peaceable. Rachel, who had suffered along with George’s days of pain, felt calm, her own burden lifted. Of course, Entwistle had had to tell Hardman. But they never did find the gun.
The shockwave through Longvalley, though profound, was only briefly devastating. In awed tones Longvallians whispered: “We said all along that the hand of God was in it that night. Since the beginning of time hasn’t He wrought his ordering through special people?” They thought that Charlie, through George, had been the instrument.
As for me, it made me shiver. Never before had I recognized the burden that the ancient ones had carried, the staggering responsibility of asking and of having been listened to.
Tonight, the first in a long time, my poor exhausted Earl is sleeping like a babe. From the window I can see over the moonlit valley. Beneath the lovely trees the river flows, silvered with starlight. So quiet the street outside. The storm, at last, is really over.
Mystery and Magic on the Steppe
by Arthur Porges
Tugai Bey and his nephew, Burlai Khan, scouting well ahead of the Horde as ordered, found one small farm in a sheltered valley among the foothills, a rather rare configuration on the vast, level steppes. It was the first human habitation in many versts of featureless plain.