When the service began, the comforting rhythm of the ritual washed over him without his being aware of the sense of the words. He stared up at the stained-glass window of the plump Victorian angel guiding a boy and girl over a bridge. As a child he had loved the radiant image, but its cloying sentimentality could not reach him now. He became distracted by the rhythms of his own body: the thud of heartbeat, the prickles of sweat on his forehead, the clump of bandage just above his waist which itched beneath his starched blue shirt. His body had become a clock ticking off the seconds of his allotted time until he reached the abyss, and the bridge that he would have to cross, angel or not.
He was thinking that in twelve more days Fate Harkryder would go to the electric chair. While the opening hymn was sung, Spencer was standing silent, oblivious to the words, working out the number of hours in twelve days. Another part of his mind was wondering if he ought to try to talk to the condemned man on the eve of the execution. What was there to say, though? Please tell me that you did it, so that I’ll feel better? Why should he be allowed to feel better when in 288 hours Fate Harkryder would feel nothing at all.
He felt regret at the thought of a man’s life being taken from him, and he forced an image of Emily Stanton’s body into his mind to remind him that this man deserved his death, but it did not lessen the uneasiness, and he realized that he was picturing the sullen adolescent that he had sent to prison years ago. Let him see the canting, frightened killer who had grown old and hardened in confinement, and perhaps he would resign himself to letting the man go. He would be able to watch it happen.
Spencer had been sitting there thinking about the Harkryder case for some time, while the voices of the other parishioners faded into a hum at the back of his mind, when he realized that he was no longer in the sanctuary of the white frame church. He was standing in the shadows on a trail in the deep woods, and a small blond girl in a white dress was squatting a few yards away from him in the stony shallows of a mountain stream. The creek, forever shaded by deep woods, would be more melted ice than water, and even in summer it would be so cold that wading more than a few feet along the streambed would make your legs ache and your feet tingle, then go numb.
The pale girl was washing a white cloth in the swift, silver water. Her hair was a faded gold, and she was small-boned, a white shadow in the filtered sunlight of the forest clearing. She was leaning over the stream, submerging the cloth in the bone-chilling water. She seemed not to feel the cold on her fingers. She scrubbed the stained cloth against a flat rock in the streambed, intent upon her work and indifferent to the observer. After a moment she looked up at him, without a smile or a flicker of expression, just a look that said he was there, and he knew that she was Frankie Silver.
He tried to move toward her, but he found that he could not. When he opened his mouth to call out to her, she looked straight at him with narrowed eyes and a cold smile. Then she lifted the white cloth out of the water, and he saw the bloodstains that she had been trying to wash away.
When he came to himself, he was standing with the rest of the congregation, and the last strains of a hymn were dying away into silence. Spencer saw that his hymnbook was open to “Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb,” and his mother had placed her hand on his arm and was shaking him gently.
“I’m all right,” he murmured, rubbing his forehead to banish the last fragments of the dream. “I think I dozed off.”
“I told you it was too soon for you to be out!” she hissed back.
“No. I’m all right. I just have too much on my mind, that’s all.”
People were beginning to file out of the pews now, and he realized that the service was over. It seemed to him that only a few minutes had passed since he’d gone into the church. Several of his mother’s friends paused in the aisle to wish him well, and he shook white-gloved hands with a tentative smile. He hoped his mother had not invited company over for Sunday dinner. He was not equal to the small talk of village acquaintances.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, Sheriff,” said a soft voice beside him.
He turned to find that Nora Bonesteel, one of the oldest parishioners, had slipped into the pew behind them. She was tall and straight in her blue church dress with the gray wool shawl draped over her shoulders. Her hair, still more dark than silver, was pulled back in two wings framing her face, and drawn into a knot at the back of her head. She touched his arm and he suddenly felt cold. “The poor in spirit,” he murmured, recognizing the Beatitudes. Miss Bonesteel had been his Sunday school teacher more years ago than either of them cared to remember. “For they shall see God.”
The old woman smiled and shook her head. “You never could keep those verses straight, could you? It’s:For theirs is the kingdom of heaven. ”
He shrugged. “Well, I guess that’s why I didn’t see God.”
“What did you see?”
People told tales about Nora Bonesteel, though nobody ever said she wasn’t a good, righteous woman. She knew things, though. She saw things before they happened, and she had a way of knowing secret things no one would have dreamed of telling her. She didn’t exactly meddle in other people’s lives, but if you went to her for help, she always knew what it was you’d come about. The old folks claimed that Nora Bonesteel even talked to the dead, but Spencer could not let himself believe that, so he chose never to consider the matter at all. He had known her all his life.
What did you see?
“Frankie Silver.” He blurted it out before he thought better of it. Nora Bonesteel had always been able to get the truth out of him, even when he was a sullen teenager who passed the few minutes between Sunday school and church sneaking a cigarette in the back of the churchyard with some of the older boys. Nora Bonesteel had put a stop to that one spring morning without so much as a word passing between them.
Frankie Silver.
Anyone else might have said, “Who?” or, “You must have been dreaming!” Or they might have passed the remark off as a joke, but Nora Bonesteel did none of those things. She considered the matter for a moment and nodded slowly.
“I have heard that she walks,” she said. “Though I have never seen her myself. It’s not surprising, though, is it?”
“No?” He could not believe that he was having this conversation in broad daylight in the sanctuary of the little white church. The place was nearly empty now. His mother had walked toward the door to speak to some of her friends, so there was no one to overhear them.
“They say that those who die by violence often walk. Hers was a cruel death.”
“Do you know what really happened that night?”
Nora Bonesteel shook her head. “It’s not for me to say. But if you have seen her, she means to tell you something, Spencer. You’d best find out what it is.”
That night Spencer Arrowood sat in a circle of light at his dining room table with case-file papers and books of North Carolina history mingling in a pile in front of him. What was there about the Harkryder case that had reminded Nelse Miller of Frankie Silver? He couldn’t see it. He didn’t think Nelse had known the connection, either. It was a hunch of some sort that had never clarified itself in the old man’s mind. Spencer hadn’t taken much stock in such things in those days, but now, twenty years older and wiser, he believed that the intuition of an experienced cop could be counted as probable cause. If you lived long enough, you knew things just from instinct and observation.