“I don’t need to know-” Marc said, wondering whether his touching her would be welcomed or resented.
“I think you do. That milking stool was tipped over. He’d used it to stand on, then kicked it halfway across the barn. He’d even made a kind of rope-manacle for his hands and somehow tied them behind his back.”
“Behind his back?”
“He wanted nothing to tempt him from his purpose.”
They stood staring up at the scar on the beam where the noose had rubbed it-one of them imagining, the other reliving.
“You see, I misled you a little last time when I said Jesse wasn’t tempted by the radical solutions being whispered throughout the district. In truth, he’d become desperate and depressed.”
Marc spoke only because the silence continued longer than he could bear. “Do you know if he actually had contact with any seditionists?”
“He may have. If he did, he didn’t tell me. There seemed to be a lot of things he couldn’t tell me … near the end.”
“I’m thinking that he may have learned something that his father might have subsequently come across, something incriminating-”
“But that’s what I’m tryin’ to show you,” she said. “Jess was unlike his father in many ways, but there was one thing they had in common. They believed in the law and the rights it gives us and the duties it demands in return. In any other time and place, my Jesse would’ve been as conservative as his father. I believe he stared sedition in the face, he may even have let it whisper treason in his ear, and when he realized the rule of law was about to fail him, he had only two choices left.”
“To break it-”
“-or take himself out of its reach,” she said, suddenly weeping.
Marc held her, and she shuddered against him, letting her hurt and anger pour out.
“There was nothing you could have done,” he said as she wiped her cheek with his handkerchief, then blew her nose in it.
“I know that,” she said. “But I can’t make myself believe it.”
As they were about to leave the barn and the scene of its past horror, Marc paused to stroke the nose of a dappled draught horse in a stall near the door.
“She used to pull our cutter,” Beth said, “but we had to sell it last week. Bessie here goes off to a man from our church next Monday.”
“But your father-in-law will have left you some money and valuables?” Marc said with some surprise.
“He intended to-that I know-but he left no will,” Beth said matter-of-factly. “When Father came back here to live, he engaged Mr. Child as his solicitor. And Father mentioned to him that he had a brother who went down to the States before the war, so there could be nephews and nieces he never heard from. It might be months and months before I know-”
“While your solicitor pursues them as part of the probate,” Marc said with a rueful sigh.
“But Father did pay off our mortgage,” Beth said firmly, “and sweated behind a plough and harrow.” She turned abruptly as if to leave.
At the back of Bessie’s stall Marc noticed that the horse had knocked over a bale of straw and exposed the barrel it had been concealing. A barrel with a spigot.
Beth came up beside him and followed his gaze. “Oh, dear,” she said, but it wasn’t in alarm.
“Whisky?” Marc asked.
“Rum, from Jamaica. Elijah thinks it’s his secret cache.” She smiled. “And we’ve never had the heart to let on.”
“Was it here when he came?”
The note of levity in Beth’s voice evaporated. He felt her grow tense, and wary, as she had been in their first encounter. “Why can’t you let him be?” she said. “Jesse wasn’t a rum-runner. Or a bootlegger. Such men don’t take their own life on a matter of principle.”
“You’re right,” he said. “Please accept my apologies.”
She leaned against him and, despite the layers of winter clothing, her womanliness and its effects were unmistakable. “Do you always talk like you’re in some duchess’s drawing room?”
“Always, ma’am.”
“I’ve never been a ma’am, or even the missus,” she said. “Just Beth.”
“I’d be honoured if you’d call me Marc, then.”
Beth tilted her face towards Marc’s, who gathered her close. But the door behind them was jerked open without ceremony or concern for what it was interrupting. It was Aaron, wide-eyed.
“Co-come, quick! You’re wa-wa-wanted!”
“Who wants me?” Marc said sharply.
“Mister Ha-Ha-Hatch. He’s seen the pe-pe-peddlers!”
Supernumerary Constable Hatch was waiting in front of Beth’s house with his own horse and Marc’s. He was flushed with excitement.
“Come on, lad. Durfee spotted the peddlers’ donkey clumping onto the ice at the foot of his property.”
“Which way were they headed?”
“There was only one of ’em, and he went east, real hasty, up the shoreline.”
“Be careful!” Beth called after them.
They swung onto the Miller Sideroad and galloped down towards the highway.
“If he’s headed east on the ice,” Marc shouted, “we could surprise him and cut him off at Bass Cove.”
“By golly, you’re right,” Hatch replied. “That donkey can’t run too fast on the ice, and we’ll save the horses by taking the road.”
So they wheeled east onto the Kingston Road, galloping apace, and retraced the route they had taken an hour after Marc’s arrival in Crawford’s Corners on Tuesday. Twenty minutes’ hard riding found them on the Indian trail that wound its way up to the scene of the murder and the cave beyond. With no new snow to fill in their previous footprints, they were able to urge their mounts past the deadfall trap before abandoning them and surging ahead without the aid of their snowshoes.
“Christ, he’s in the cave!” Hatch cried.
Marc looked up to see the snout and ears of the donkey poking above the rim of the ridge where the cave was situated. Ferris O’Hurley was floundering towards it, apparently spooked by their approach. An unexpectedly deep drift slowed Hatch and Marc just long enough for the jackass and its master to scamper down the far slope and hit the ice of the cove. They were in full flight west.
“Don’t worry,” Hatch puffed when they had struggled to the top of the ridge. “I’ve got James watching the sideroad north. If the bugger tries to get back into the Corners he may end up with a buttful of Durfee birdshot.”
“My hunch is he’s heading back towards Toronto and Lewiston.”
“Then why come east to the cove?”
“The cave, you mean.”
They went to have a look.
O’Hurley had indeed been making for the cave, for the evident purpose of collecting or destroying materials left there earlier. Ashes from a fire more recent than Tuesday were clearly visible, and papers had been torn and burned in it. Several bottles that had once held what appeared to be contraband spirits or wine had been smashed and scattered, their labels singed.
“They must’ve been here yesterday,” Hatch said ruefully. “Somebody who should know better has told them we’ve become interested in this place, so the skinny one beetled out here to obliterate whatever they’d left in the vicinity-before picking up his partner in the bush farther down and lighting out for the States.”
Marc sighed.
“What’s wrong?” Hatch said cheerfully. “We’ve put the fear of Jehovah into them. They won’t be back here for a while.”
“Don’t you see?” Marc said, sifting idly through the debris. “These fellows are likely advance men for smugglers. They’ve been using this cave as a hideout, a drop point, and a storage bin for a long time.”
“And?”
“And that means that the snowshoe print and broken pipe stem we found on Tuesday could have been left here by one of these peddlers or by any one of a dozen possible confederates.”
“And therefore not likely left by the killer of Joshua Smallman?”
“Right.”
“But that pipe stem hadn’t been here long,” Hatch said. “That break on the stem looked fresh, and the thing wasn’t completely covered with snow. Even though the ledge here is sheltered, a fair amount of snow would have drifted over it.”