On the Head of a Pin (14 page)

“I can't let you go without thanking you, Preacher,” he said. “I know Danny's gone, but it's important to Brigid that the priest is here.”

Lewis nodded.

“We had Methodist neighbours back in Ireland, and we had no trouble with 'em,” the man said. “Still, it's one thing to try to just live peaceably and another to do what you did. There's not many that would even try.”

“I've lost many children,” Lewis said. “There were none of them that were easy, but this reminds me of the first one. We were alone and no one came by to pray with us. I know how hard that is.”

“Still …” The man stopped and Lewis knew that he was thinking of the old enmity, the intolerance that had been transported whole across the ocean. “Oh, damn,” he said. “Could I at least offer you a drop of something to see you on your way?”

Lewis smiled. “You should know better than that if you had Methodist neighbours. No, I'll give my horse a rest and then I'll go. You need to be with your wife now.”

“Thank you,” the man said, and he plodded back to the cabin.

Lewis found some feed in the small barn behind the house and scooped some out for the horses. He gave them some water, then curled up in the sweet-smelling hay. It had been a long day, and an even longer night, and fatigue soon overwhelmed him. But his sleep was fitful and full of strange dreams. He awoke to the sound of the barn door opening. It was the priest.

“Oh, you've seen to the horses, then?”

“Yes. They were in quite a sweat.”

The man hesitated for a moment while Lewis sat up and rubbed his eyes. “I want to say thank you, on behalf of the family. I think it meant a lot to them that you were there.”

In spite of the suspicion and hatred that existed among their adherents, he had always found that there was little enmity between priests and Methodist ministers — almost a recognition that they were both striving toward the same goal, and he felt no particular emotion against this man who had ridden so hard and fast to reach a dying child's side.

“I'd like to think that you'd have done the same.”

The priest smiled a little. “I don't know that I'd have been let in the door.”

“I wasn't sure there myself for a time. One of the little ones thought I was the bogeyman.”

“Well, even a bogeyman needs to eat. They want to know if you'll be needing breakfast.”

It was such a poor, small place. Lewis thought it was doubtful there was breakfast enough even for the children. There was the heel of a loaf of bread in his saddlebag and he decided he would make do with that, after he'd got down the road a bit.

“Tell them I'm very much obliged, but I have appointments waiting. And give them my sincere sympathies. Now that my horse has had a rest, we'll go on.”

The priest nodded and disappeared into the house.

IV

L
ewis hesitated as he debated which way to go. It was far too late to go pounding on someone's door to ask for a bed for the night. In fact, the night was mostly gone; the eastern sky had the faint glow that heralded the coming morn. He'd carry on through to the Blue Church and then turn westward again.

He had an excellent sense of direction, a crucial facility for someone who spent so much time on little-trod paths that snaked through forests and fields, and realized that he could save himself several miles of riding if he headed south, rather than backtracking westward to the road. He found a small path that seemed to be heading in the right direction. If it veered, he could always cut across someone's land until he reached the river.

He began to regret his decision a half-hour later. There was an icy drizzle falling now, and whenever he brushed against an overhanging branch he loosed a cascade of cold water that unerringly found the gap between his coat and the back of his neck. There was just enough ice on the path to make the footing treacherous and he made poor time as his tired horse picked its way along. After riding for another mile or so, he realized that he could smell smoke — a sure indication that there was a cabin, or at the very least someone with a campfire, nearby — and was sure whoever tended it would be willing to let him bide by the fire for a while to warm up.

The path grew easier to follow, trees and brush were cleared back from the edge and a group of large fields enclosed with snaked wooden fences came into view. In the distance he could see a small crude cabin, though its raw logs had been faced with clapboard and an attempt had been made to whitewash it. Smoke curled from the chimney and as he drew closer he saw that the door stood gaping. He dismounted and stuck his head in the open door with a word of greeting on his lips that faded as soon as he took in the scene.

It was the same here as the others in most respects, but with a difference of degree. The woman in her bed, hands clutched around the little red book, eyes bloodshot and staring without sight at the wall, face mottled, small discs of bruising darkening on her neck. As in the other cases, her skirts were thrown up, but here the major difference lay — neither Rachel nor Sarah had been disturbed, which had made it easy to assume that their clothing had become disarranged while in the thrashings of the fits that supposedly consumed them. This woman's lap was a pool of blood and feces, the cuts deep, the gore clotting, the bedclothes soaked black. There was no mistaking this death for anything but what it was — a violent, murderous attack.

Lewis noted something else — tiny pinpoints of silver, glinting in the morning sun that poured in through the cabin's one small window. It was hard to tell because of the mutilated tissue that surrounded them, but as he leaned in to get a closer look, it appeared to him that whoever had done this had highlighted the slash by ramming steel pins along its edges. Driving the point home, he thought. (Or had it been a twisted attempt to repair the damage?) He could only hope that this violation had occurred after death and not before — it was unthinkable that it could have been done while she lived.

He was no stranger to the havoc one human being can inflict on another, but this mayhem brought bile to his throat and he ran outside before he could add to the putrescence in the cabin. He heaved several great breaths and stood with one hand on the fence to steady himself enough that he could go back into the cabin. There were details he needed to see before he rode out to report the death, and he steeled himself to re-enter. He stepped carefully as he went in again, but there appeared to be nothing unusual on the floor — no footprints that he could see, nothing dropped inadvertently, nothing left behind that might give the identity of the murderer away. He knew he must disturb the body as little as possible, for any small thing might be a clue. Gently he peeled one finger away from the book it clutched. Though lifeless, it was not yet dead cold — she had not been gone long. And there it was again, Chapter Five from the Book of Proverbs, and beside it, tucked into the page, another shiny dressmaker's pin. He carefully moved the pages so that he could see the flyleaf, but there was no writing on this one, no dedication to indicate the woman's name. He let her finger slide back across the page, and as he did so, he realized that there was no blush of dye on her palms, no red stain that had come away with the sweat of her hands. There had been no sweat on her hands, for she had been dead when the book was placed in them. Nor had she died peacefully reading her scripture: the bluish nails of both hands were ragged, the tears across the ends fresh and hanging. She had fought, and torn her hands in the fighting.

He forced himself to look more closely at her wound, wondering if there was any pattern to the way the pins had been placed, but he could see none. They were simply rammed in, sunk into the flesh until only the heads were visible. The slash itself was still oozing a small trickle of blood, a macabre parody of a woman's normal function.

He turned his attention to the marks at her neck. When he shifted the head, a tip of blackened tongue protruded from a corner of her mouth. Was there a wound here as well? It looked as if the tongue had bled, but he was uncertain what this meant. When he lifted the chestnut hair away from her neck he could see that whoever had strangled her was a large man, or at least a person with large hands, for he could see that marks extended all the way around to the back and overlapped by a considerable amount, the imprint of fingers outlined in the bruises.

There would be no mistake this time, no calling upon the notion of some strange fit, no laying this at God's door. It was murder, pure and simple.

He took one last look around the cabin, but could see nothing else to take note of.

After stopping at the pump in the front yard to wash the vileness from his mouth and his hands, he mounted his horse. By dead reckoning he figured that he wasn't too far from Prescott — there must be a constable there, and if not, he would find an officer at Fort Wellington.

He would stop at the first house he came to and tell them the news, warning them not to disturb the body, but to protect it until the authorities arrived. And then he would ride for Prescott.

The family was at their morning meal when he burst in through the door. He so startled them that one of the little ones, who reminded him of Martha, spilled a mug of milk in her surprise. The frothy liquid slowly rolled across the table as he related his awful news. The woman's hands flew to her mouth.

“Aye, I'll go and guard the door,” the man said. “And I'll not even go inside. Ride fast, preacher, and bring the constable.”

“But, Jacob,” the woman said. “What if the fiend is still about? What if he comes here and attacks the living while you're guarding the dead?”

“I doubt you're in danger,” Lewis assured her. “I have seen this before. He attacks only lone women, and you have two big boys here, as well as all the little ones. He won't come near. Look after your mother, now, you hear, boys?” and they swelled with pride at the notion that they would protect the family against a mad murderer.

Lewis left and rode toward the river. The path was faster now, and he could feel the bite of the November wind blowing from the water. He pushed his horse as fast as he dared, but in places the going was so icy that the animal's hooves skittered and chattered. He would have seen them sooner, if he hadn't been paying such close attention to his footing. When at last he looked up, he was astounded — he was on a rise that gave him a view of both Prescott and the river, the buildings of the town huddled together. But it was the sight beyond that alarmed him. A few miles downstream he could see a collection of vessels, the first of them just reaching the shore in the early-morning light. When he squinted, he thought he could make out the banner the largest ship was flying — the American flag. A ship in trouble, sailing for the shore it could most easily reach? He hoped so, but he had an unsettling conviction that there was a more malevolent reason.

His fears were confirmed when he reached the town and found alarm and confusion. An armed force had attempted to attack Prescott itself first, a surprise nighttime attack, but the garrison had been forewarned, or perhaps merely vigilant. The invaders had been repulsed and two of the American ships had become mired and aground on the mud flats where the mouth of the Oswegatchie River met the St. Lawrence. A third boat had pulled them free, but the river's current had swept them downstream and toward the Canadian shore. There, a few miles east of Prescott, an army had landed.

The British troops at Fort Wellington were preparing to march out to meet the threat, he was told, and groups of Canadian militia were mustering to march with them. Already the streets of Prescott were clogged with people — militiamen racing for the fort, men frantic for news, families packing their belongings and preparing to leave, farmers desperate to thread their way through the jam and ride home to protect their families — each of them jostling and shoving, calling and shouting, attempting, it seemed, to push their way against a tide of traffic that had no discernible pattern.

Lewis had difficulty finding a constable in the confusion, but after an hour of searching, he eventually located a burly man who was attempting to direct traffic around an overturned wagon.

“There's been a murder,” he shouted in the man's ear.

“What, already?” the constable replied. “Those thievin', murderin' bastards. Well, there'll be more I expect before this is over.”

“No, nothing to do with this. A woman in a house back from the river. I found her and I rode to get help.”

“So them damn Yankees have been marauding in the country? They've attacked civilians first?”

“No. At least I don't think so. I don't think it has anything to do with the Yankees.”

“Well, I can't sort it out now. I've got my hands full. It'll have to wait.”

Lewis wanted to scream at the man, but he knew it would do no good. And he had to admit that the current crisis trumped a single crime, but unless someone went right away, it would be too late to do much good. He wished now that he had looked closer, taken more note of the details, ransacked the cabin for clues, for, in spite of his instructions to the contrary, he was certain that the woman's body would be washed and laid out, if not promptly buried, in very short order. Her family would want to get her into the ground before it became too frozen to dig. He wondered if he should try to find someone at Fort Wellington to talk to, but then he realized that he would likely get the same reception there.

He overheard snatches of conversation as he led his tired horse along the main street.

“It's Mackenzie,” one woman said. “He's raised an army.”

“No,” said a man running by, “Mackenzie's in jail. It's pirates.”

“It's the Americans,” another said. “They've declared war and launched a full-scale invasion. It's 1812 all over again.”

“No, it's the Hunters. There are thousands of them.”