A Stranger in the Kingdom (42 page)

Now, almost literally in our own backyard, a young girl had been murdered in cold blood, apparently with a botched attempt to conceal her body, since presumably whoever threw her into the quarry had expected her body to sink and Claire LaRiviere never to be seen again.

Somewhere, quite possibly in Kingdom County and perhaps in the village itself, a murderer was at large. There were no more fishing trips alone for me that summer, or with anyone else for that matter. I was forbidden to stray out of sight or earshot or our dooryard, forbidden even to go to the meadow pool or up the burn. Nor was I at all inclined to. Besides being more frightened than I had ever been in my life, I actually felt partly responsible for Claire's death because I'd waited until the morning after she turned up missing to search for her at the quarry.

On the afternoon of the day after Sheriff White drained the quarry, I confided to Mom how terrible I felt and why.

“Tell you what, Jimmy,” she said, “let's go see if the red raspberries are out in that cut-over woods across from your brother's. On the way we can talk all this over.”

I didn't feel like going anywhere, except possibly to California on the next freight, but before I knew it Mom had gotten her sun hat and a stack of quart berry baskets, and we were climbing up the hillside where, just as she had hoped, the raspberries had sprung up like magic. The warm, sugary fragrance of ripe raspberries suffused the slashed woods for acres around, but although I had always loved berrying with my mother, I couldn't stop thinking of Claire, wondering whether she'd picked berries at her Laurentian grandmother's, wishing she were here with us on this sunny hillside picking berries today.

“You know, Jimmy,” Mom said, “when your grandfather the poor captain died in the typhoid epidemic, and then my poor mother, I remember feeling just the way you do now. I kept thinking that if only your dad and I hadn't gotten married and left Boston, somehow the captain and my mother wouldn't have caught that dreadful illness. And I felt terribly guilty, as though I was completely to blame for their dying. Even at the time, I knew it was silly of me to think that way, and goodness knows I loved your father so much I never for a second regretted marrying him. But still I felt very, very guilty. I cried for days over it. And that made your father feel bad, which made me feel worse. But I couldn't help it.”

This was exactly the way I felt about Claire's death, with the added problem that I couldn't stop thinking that if I had gone up to the quarry sooner, maybe somehow I really
could
have prevented it. I was so teary-eyed all over again that I couldn't say a word.

Mom patted my arm. “I stopped feeling that way after a while, and you will too. What happened to Claire undoubtedly happened before we ever knew she was missing. There wasn't a thing you could have done to prevent it, then or earlier, any more than I could have prevented the Boston typhoid epidemic.”

As usual, Mom had hit the nail right on the head. Still and all, I didn't see how she or anyone else could truly know how bad I felt, and despite her assurances I was very certain, with all the certainty of my thirteen years, that I would never feel any different.

In the meantime, the biggest manhunt in the history of northern Vermont was under way. With the help of two bloodhounds and their trainer, a hatchet-faced hunting guide from across the state line in New Hampshire, Sheriff White combed the spruce thickets and blackberry brakes around the quarry. But no clues turned up.

Before the bloodhounds went home, their trainer and the sheriff beat through several acres of swamp along the Boston and Montreal tracks, in the outside hope of finding a bloodstained tramp or hobo, and Zack had ordered the Dog Cart Man to remain in the county, where he could be questioned if need be, as soon as anyone could think up a way to question him. But I doubt that Zack or anyone else ever believed for a minute that the deaf and mute artist had anything to do with Claire's death.

On the morning after the bloodhounds left, Zack decided to drain the quarry in search of evidence. Around ten o'clock I heard the siren of the volunteer fire department's twenty-year-old American LaFrance hook-and-ladder, and a minute later it appeared on the gool, with the equally antiquated town pumper truck chugging along in its dust. Sheriff White manned the wheel of the hook-and-ladder, with Zack in the seat beside him. A dozen or so volunteer firemen were riding the sideboards of the truck, and several carloads of veteran local fire-engine chasers, including Plug Johnson and the entire Folding Chair Club, brought up the rear. Seeing those old ghouls made me sick, but when Dad showed up a few minutes later and asked if I wanted to walk up with him to the quarry I went along, knowing that if I didn't I'd probably never be able to go near the place again.

“Good morning to you, editor!” Mason said, when we arrived, as though we were all on a picnic together. “Morning to you, Jimbo.”

The sheriff lowered his voice confidentially. “Between I and you, boys, I don't believe we're going to find anything in this old hole much more incriminating than a few of Cousin R's Old Duke empties. Zacker, though, he's got his mind made up that she's got to be flushed out.”

In fact, I think that Zack and Mason both felt that a major public spectacle as appealing as draining the quarry would increase their political stock in the county, and by eleven o'clock there was already a big crowd at the quarry, mostly made up of town folks, though a fair number of farmers were there, as well.

Around noon the first major discovery was made. The sinking water had revealed first the rusted tin roof, then the broken windows and hood and trunk of a 1929 Packard, balanced precariously on a rock shelf a few feet below us.

“I believe that would be one of the vehicles Henry Coville lost smuggling Canadian booze down over the line years back during Temperance time,” Zack Barrows said. “Go down and have a look-see, will you, Mace?”

Somewhat reluctantly, Mason climbed down on the fire department's extension ladder and promptly discovered a dozen cases of Seagram's whiskey in the Packard's trunk. Many of the bottles were broken but some were still intact, and soon an argument broke out between Zack, who wanted to confiscate the contraband as “evidence,” and Cousin Welcome Kinneson, who claimed that since the quarry was on his and Resolvèd's property, everything in it belonged to them. The dispute was resolved only when Plug Johnson suggested sampling the Seagram's on the spot “to see if it had gone bad or not.” To everyone's relief, both Welcome and Zack pronounced it excellent, the evidence was passed around liberally, and from then on, the work seemed to go much better.

Almost despite myself, I was interested in the accumulating heap of relics from the various levels of the quarry. Besides the bootlegger's Packard, the sheriff and his crew salvaged a flintlock rifle, several flawed or broken granite gravestones, including three or four spooky ones with the beginning letters of names carved on them, any number of Old Duke bottles and several antique bottles, including a flat glass flask inscribed with the name KINNESON from our ancestors' potato whiskey distilleries, and a rusty set of bed springs.

Bumper Stevens poked the springs with his cow cane. “Look at these, boys. Some enterprising young blade from days of yore lugged his own girling equipment up here along with the girls!”

“A girl's been murdered, for God's sake,” my father said angrily. “You're all making a circus out of this. Come on, James. Let's get the hell out of here.”

“What did they find up there?” my mother asked us when we got back to the house.

“A set of bed springs and a few empty wine bottles,” my father said. “Nothing more.”

But just as we sat down for supper an hour later the hook-and-ladder's siren shrieked out again and the old truck came careening down the gore road past my cousins', swerved onto the gool, and screeched to a stop in front of our dooryard.

“Editor!” Mason called as we hurried out onto the porch. “We just stopped to say if you see that dog cart fella before we do, you can send him along on his way now.”

“You mean he's no longer a suspect?”

“I mean, as of this evening, he's free to go. Period. Let's get this rig over to the village, Mace. We've got a great deal of work to do in a short time.”

This, at least, was good news. But the following evening, the evening before Claire's funeral, my father came home from work furious. Not only had Zack Barrows excluded Charlie from a secret hearing to be held the next day in front of Judge Allen to determine whether there was enough evidence to bring charges in the murder case—a hearing at which Charlie's own client, Resolvèd, had been subpoenaed to testify—but Reverend Andrews had just minutes ago told Dad that he hadn't been able to prevail upon the church cemetery committee to allocate a space for Claire except in the so-called pauper's corner—under the cedar trees where Satan Smithfield and other outcasts were buried.

 

The funeral was held at two o'clock the following afternoon—the same day the inquest convened at the courthouse. Neither Dad nor Charlie had been able to find out exactly what (if any) “evidence,” besides the Seagram's bottles, Zack and Mason might have discovered in the quarry, and at two o'clock a dozen cars were still parked along the common across the street from the courthouse.

I had dreaded Claire's funeral terribly, in part because I'd been tapped as a pallbearer. Worse yet, there was a large crowd of curiosity-seekers, most of whom had probably never even said hello to Claire on the street when she was alive. With Julia Hefner tied up at the courthouse in her capacity as clerk and stenographer, my mother had been recruited to play the organ; Dad and Athena and Charlie and I slid into the Kinneson pew just as Reverend Andrews started the service.

He began by speaking about Claire's unusual childhood in Quebec, her ambition to become a movie star, and her marvelous talent as a mime. To this day I do not know precisely what Reverend Andrews' metaphysical convictions were. But I recall his saying in Claire's funeral sermon that no human being ever dies without leaving a spiritual gift behind—a legacy not measurable in money or property, but infinitely more meaningful. Claire's gift, he said, was her courageous faith in a providential future, to which she herself had now passed. And her presence in the village left us with an example of how providence gives each one of us many opportunities to exercise our Christian and human obligation of charity—however far short we are all bound to fall of that obligation.

When Reverend Andrews finished his last prayer consigning Claire's soul to an immortal eternity, which to this day I do not know for certain he himself literally believed in, and my mother began the funeral processional on the organ, Dad and Charlie and George Quinn and I remained seated until everyone else had left. Just as we picked up the coffin (so light that it hardly seemed to contain a body), Elijah began tolling the funeral knell on the Revere church bell my great-great-great-grandfather, Charles I, had brought over the mountains to Kingdom County by oxcart one hundred and fifty years ago.

“Easy does it, gentlemen,” George whispered as we headed out the door and down the church steps. “Watch your footing now.”

The old fuddy-duddy acted as though he'd been drinking too much of his own castor oil, but of necessity I did watch my footing and so didn't see the two men coming toward us from the courthouse until they were halfway across the baseball diamond.

It was Sheriff White and his deputy, Pine Benson.

For a moment, as the bell continued to toll, I thought they were going to intercept us and prevent us from sliding the coffin into Mason's hearse. But as we eased the box along the silent rollers and into the hearse—“Watch your fingers, gentlemen, let's not have any pinched fingers today!”—Pine and Mason passed us without so much as a glance in our direction.

They strode through the crowd to the top of the church steps, where Reverend Andrews was standing in his funeral robes. Mason said something to him that I couldn't make out over the reverberations of the bell.

“What the—” my father started to say.

Reverend Andrews was jerking his hands away from Sheriff White. To my astonishment Mason pulled out his gun.

The coffin safely in the hearse, my father sprinted toward the church, but Mason and Pine were already on their way down the steps with the handcuffed minister between them, and the shocked crowd of people were in an uproar on the same lawn where nearly a hundred years ago their ancestors had watched, shocked and outraged, as my great-grandfather Mad Charlie Kinneson had ridden out of the church with the corpse of Satan Smithfield slung over his saddle and thundered furiously across the same green and into the same courthouse toward which Mason and Pine were now hustling the protesting minister.

Then the three men were through the courthouse door, with Charlie right behind them, and Reverend Andrews was not seen again until the inquest adjourned at six o'clock that night, this time with his hands cuffed behind his back and Charlie at his side, to be led downstairs to jail.

“What in hell is going on here, Farlow?” my father demanded when the bailiff appeared a minute later.

“Good news and bad, editor. Which do you want first?”

I thought that my father was going to muckle onto Farlow Blake on the spot. “Just tell me what's happening here, damn it. I don't care how you tell it, just tell it.”

Farlow nodded sagely. “Then I'll give you the bad news first, and save the good for last. The bad news, I'm sorry to report, is that the inquest has just handed down their decision to indict our friend the reverend for first-degree murder!”

My father looked at the bailiff as if he didn't understand him.

Farlow leaned toward him. “I don't know if I should tell you this yet, editor, but strictly off the record, it was the preacher's revolver that Zack and Mason dredged up out of the granite quarry yesterday. Doc H identified it as the probable murder weapon in front of Judge A this afternoon.