“He had a lot of gypsies up here lookin’ at the view. Footprints don’t mean a thing.” Sheriff Lens walked over to the open trap door.
Suddenly I remembered something. “Sheriff, we both agree that Wigger looked as if he was running away from you. What was it you were so anxious to see him about?”
Sheriff Lens grunted. “Don’t make no difference, now that he’s dead,” he replied, and started down the stairs.
The next mornin’ at my office I was surprised to find April waitin’ for me. It was a Saturday, and I’d told her she needn’t come in. I’d stopped by mainly to pick up the mail and make sure no one had left a message for me. Most of my regular patients called me at home if they needed me on a weekend, but there was always the chance of an emergency.
But this time the emergency wasn’t the sort I expected. “Dr. Sam, I’ve got that gypsy woman, Volga, in your office. She came to me early this morning’ and she’s just sick about her husband bein’ arrested. Can’t you talk to her?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Volga was waitin’ inside, her face streaked with tears, her eyes full of despair. “Oh, Dr. Hawthorne, you must help him! I know he is innocent! He could not kill Parson Wigger like that-the parson was our friend.”
“Calm down, now,” I said, taking her hands. “We’ll do what we can to help him.”
“Will you go to the jail? Some say he will be lynched!”
“That can’t happen here,” I insisted. But my mind went back to an incident in Northmont history, after the Civil War, when a black man traveling with a gypsy woman had indeed been lynched. “Anyway, I’ll go talk to him.”
I left her in April’s care and walked the three blocks through snowy streets to the town jail. Sheriff Lens was there with an unexpected visitor-Minnie Haskins.
“Hello, Minnie. Not a very pleasant Christmas for the town, is it?”
“It sure ain’t, Dr. Sam.”
“You visitin’ the prisoner?”
“I’m tryin’ to find out when they’ll be off my land. I was out there to the caravan this mornin’, and all they’d say was that Carranza was their leader. They couldn’t go till Carranza told ’em to.”
“I thought you give them permission to stay.”
“Well, that was before they killed Parson Wigger,” she replied, reflecting the view of the townspeople.
“I’d like to speak with the prisoner,” I told Sheriff Lens.
“That’s a bit irregular.”
“Come on, Sheriff.”
He made a face and got out the keys to the cell block. We found the gypsy sitting on the edge of his metal bunk, staring into space. He roused himself when he saw me, somehow sensing a friend. “Doctor, have you come to deliver me from this place?”
“Five minutes,” Sheriff Lens said, locking me in the cell with Lowara.
“I’ve come, Carranza, because your wife Volga asked me to. But if I’m going to help you, I have to know everything that happened in the belfry yesterday.”
“I told the truth. I did not kill Parson Wigger.”
“What were you doing there? Why didn’t you leave with Volga and the others?”
He brushed back the long raven hair that covered his ears. “Is it for a gadjo like yourself to understand? I stayed behind because I felt a kinship for this man, this parson who had taken the roms unto himself. I wanted to speak with him in private.”
“And what happened?”
“He went down after the others had left the belfry and stood in the doorway, looking after them. Then he came back upstairs, quite quickly. I heard him throw the bolt on the door below, as if he feared someone might follow him. When he came up through the trap door my back was turned. I never saw what did it. I only heard a slow gasp, as of a deep sigh, and turned in time to see him falling backward to the floor.”
“You saw no one else?”
“There was no one to see.”
“Could he have been stabbed earlier?” I asked. “Down in the church?”
“He could not have climbed those steps with the knife in him,” Lowara said, shaking his head. “It would have killed him at once.”
“What about the knife? You admit that jeweled dagger is yours?”
He shrugged. “It is mine. I wore it yesterday beneath my coat. But in the crowd after services I was jostled. The knife was taken from me.”
“Without your realizing it? That’s hard to believe.”
“It is true, nevertheless.”
“Why would anyone want to kill Parson Wigger?” I asked.
He smiled and opened his hands to me. “So a gypsy would be blamed for it,” he said, as if that was the most logical reason in the world.
The snow stopped falling as I walked back to the church. In my pocket, neatly wrapped in newspaper, was the jeweled dagger that had killed Parson Wigger. The sheriff had given up any hope of finding fingerprints on the corded hilt with its imitation ruby, and had allowed me to borrow it to conduct an experiment.
It had occurred to me that the knife could have been thrown or propelled from some distance away, and that it might be slender enough to pass through the chicken-wire barricade. To test my theory I entered the unguarded church and climbed once more to the belfry in the steeple.
But I was wrong.
True, the knife could be worked through the wire with some difficulty, but coming at it straight ahead or even at an angle, the width of the crosspiece-the hilt guard-kept it from passing through. It simply could not have been thrown or propelled from outside.
Which left me with Carranza Lowara once more.
The only possible murderer.
Had he lied?
Remembering that moment when Sheriff Lens and I found him standin’ over the body, rememberin’ the terror written across his face, I somehow couldn’t believe it.
I went back downstairs and walked around the pews, hopin’ some flash of illumination would light up my mind. Finally I stuffed the dagger back in my coat pocket and went outside. It was as I took a short cut across the snow-covered side yard that somethin’ caught my eye, as white as the snow and half buried in it.
I pulled it free and saw that it was a white surplice like the one Parson Wigger had worn during the Christmas service. There was a dark red stain on it, and a tear about an inch long.
I stood there holding it in my hand, and then turned to stare up at the steeple that towered above me.
“I reckon we gotta ship the gypsy over to the county seat,” Sheriff Lens was saying when I returned to the jail and placed the dagger carefully back on his desk.
“Why’s that, Sheriff?”
“Eustace Carey says there’s talk o’ lynchin’. I know damn well they won’t do it, but I can’t take no chances. It happened fifty years ago and it can happen again.”
I sat down opposite him. “Sheriff, there’s somethin’ you’ve got to tell me. That man’s life may depend on it. You sought out Parson Wigger on Christmas Day for some reason. It was somethin’ that couldn’t even wait till after the holiday.”
Sheriff Lens looked uneasy. “I told you-it don’t matter now.”
“But don’t you see it does matter-now more than ever?”
The sheriff got to his feet and moved to the window. Across the square we could see a small group of men watching the jail. That must have decided him. “Mebbe you’re right, Doc. I’m too old to keep secrets, anyway. You see, the Hartford police sent through a report suggesting I question Parson Wigger. Seems he wasn’t no real parson at all.”
“What?”
“He’d been passin’ himself off as a parson down Hartford way for two years, till somebody checked his background and they run him outta town. Some said he was runnin’ a giant con game, while others thought he was more interested in the parish wives. Whatever the truth, his background was mighty shady.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“Like I said, the man’s dead now. Why blacken his character? He never did no harm in Northmont.”