Jim swung for all he was worth, a haymaker to the jaw. His knuckles screamed in pain but Corrigan went down on his ass.
“That—” Jim’s turn to holler like a mad dog. “That is for giving my son brass knuckles!” He limped back, snapping his hand to whisk away the sting. “You stupid son of a bitch.”
Fortunes flipped, Corrigan sat in the wet road and laughed. “Feel better?”
“Stay away from my family.”
Corrigan kneaded his jaw. “Enjoy the moment, Jimmy. You won’t get another.” Now he extended a hand. “Help me up.”
Jim backed up. Was he supposed to fall for that?
The rain had stopped. Maybe it had stopped all along, Jim didn’t know. Corrigan pushed himself up, shook the muck from his hands. “You should have come to me,” he said. “You should have brought those confessions to me.”
Jim kept his distance.
“What does it say? Those papers.”
Jim teetered on his heels. Seasick. “You were right. About all of it. The men in town marched up to that house and killed everyone inside. All the people you named.” Jim told himself to shut up but it all just spilled out. Burning his throat as he purged. “Mine too. The man who led the mob was a Hawkshaw.”
“Blood libel,” Corrigan said. The grin stretching across his face was smug and victorious. “Where is this confession?”
“I don’t have it.”
“Give it to me.”
Jim staggered sideways. “It’s out of my hands.”
“Don’t be part of the lie, Jim. They all need to know. They need to see it.” He took a step forward, fingers balling into fists. “Oh they’ll deny, they’ll call it a hoax. But they’ll know. Deep down, they’ll know that their whole shit-stained world was built on murder and lies.”
“And then what? You think somebody’s gonna apologize to you? All it will do is make them hate you more.”
Corrigan laughed. “Poor me.”
“This is all a joke to you, isn’t it? You’ve pissed off everyone and now they want to hurt you. You need to leave. Now. You proved your point.”
“The locals are going to get violent? How unusual!”
Jim was wasting his time, the man deaf to reason. Still. “Get the hell out of town, Corrigan. Because if you don’t, history is going to repeat itself.”
“Of course history is going to repeat itself! It always does. It has to.” Spit flew from Corrigan’s gnashing teeth. “You don’t think anyone learns from history, do you? Tell me you’re not that naive? We all keep making the same mistakes, no matter how many cautionary tales we’re told. How could it be otherwise?”
“Stop. I don’t want to hear anymore of your craziness.”
“We don’t repeat history, Jimbo. It repeats us.”
The leer on Corrigan’s face was telling. A devil’s perverse grin. It chilled his blood but popped something in his brain. Some twisted puzzle piece clicking into place. “You want this to get violent, don’t you? You want this to happen again.”
“I want justice. Retribution—”
“Drop the martyr act, for one minute.” Jim cut him off, felt himself coming unglued. “You want justice, you’re gonna have to pay for it.”
“Don’t play me. You don’t have the stomach for it and you will get burned.” His voice dropping octaves. “Where are the confessions?”
A line drawn in the sand. Jim pictured it in his mind. Tread carefully here. “I’ll give them to you on one condition.” He watched Corrigan’s grin drop away, then he pushed his chips forward. “You have to leave town and never come back.”
Corrigan scrutinized him with a cold eye, like he’d misjudged his neighbour all along. “That’s hardly fair. I was just starting to like it here.”
Wrong answer. Jim turned and limped to his truck without a word. “Go to hell.”
“You’ve got a deal.”
Jim stopped, one boot on the runner. Expecting to be tricked or trapped.
“I’ll do it, goddamnit,” Corrigan said. “Where are these papers?”
“They’re with someone safe.” Jim left the door open, a warning he’d walk away if Corrigan tried to play him again. “This is how it’s going to work. I’ll give you half of the documents now. The rest I’ll courier to whatever rock you crawl back under.”
The man was already shaking his head, chipping at some leverage. “Jim, you can’t—”
“Yes or no. That’s all you get.”
Corrigan grunted to the affirmative. Then he grinned, still looking to drive a wedge in. “And you’ll buy me out at your offer?”
Jim stifled a shudder looking at that perverse grin. It was like looking eye to eye with a coiled snake. “Agreed.”
No handshake, no gentlemen’s agreement. Jim slid back into his pickup and fired it up.
Corrigan shielded his eyes from the headlights. “Who else knows about this?”
There was no reply. The truck gunned up out of the ditch and rumbled away.
Thirty minutes ago, Kate could have fallen asleep standing up but now any thought of rest was gone. Back inside the stillness of her office, she gazed into the stone fireplace and cursed Jim Hawkshaw for being such a goddamn busybody. Why couldn’t he just leave it alone?
She lifted her eyes to the portraits over the hearth. The founding fathers and heroes. Once, she had taken inspiration from these stern faced men ringing the walls of her office, no small sense of pride and tradition. Duty even. Now she just felt dirty and no amount of single malt would scour it away.
After Jim had stormed out, she had taken the smelly folio to her office and laid it on her desk. Go home, she’d told herself. Leave it till the morning. But who could resist? The foul thing beckoned to be opened, like some forbidden grimoire in a storybook. If Pandora couldn’t resist, how could she?
It was worse than she could have imagined, all of it there in arch script. Page after page, each man describing their part, their actions, their sins. Each confession ended with a plea for clemency from the magistrate and a prayer of mercy from God Almighty. Repugnant details of the murders. How the mother, Johanna Corrigan, begged for a moment to pray before being bludgeoned with her own shillelagh. How the patriarch was run through with a pitchfork and clubbed so many times his skull was shattered flat into the snow. The girl killed in the loft with a knife, raped before and after.
Kate turned the rest of the pages, unable to stomach the narrative any longer. The last page in the cracked leather was a letter from Judge Charlton Gallagher, magistrate in charge of the inquest into the Corrigan incident. Judge Gallagher explained how he had forced the confessions from the guilty men but scuttled the laws of Middlesex County and buried the truth. The conviction, imprisonment and eventual hanging of nineteen community leaders would be a devastating blow to their small village. Judge Gallagher declared that the Corrigans had brought their fate upon themselves and the town would be a better place without them. In a clandestine ceremony, the magistrate swore the conspirators to secrecy and bartered their freedom in exchange for a tithe from each, to be paid annually on the anniversary of the crime. The monies from these tithes would be put to public works. Digging roads and erecting a proper town hall. A public library and the town square. The guilty men would police themselves in the keeping of the secret tithe, the judge forewarning that if but one defaulted or lapsed in his obligation, all would be exposed and hanged. Judge Gallagher’s letter ended the same as the confessions did, with a plea for mercy from the Almighty.
How could anyone sleep after reading that? Kate downed the rest of the scotch but it did nothing to settle her. She had made a decision and would simply have to live with it now. Like those men all those years ago.