These Honored Dead (14 page)

I
tossed and turned all night, but I awoke before dawn with crystalline clarity of thought. I had to warn Rebecca. I had to get her out of harm’s way. And if that meant helping her flee from Prickett’s clutches, even at great risk to myself, so be it.

I left our bed, careful not to wake Lincoln, dressed silently, and went to van Hoff’s yard to saddle up Hickory. The horse was surprised to see me at that hour but eager for the early morning exercise, and we were out on the prairie just as the sun edged over the horizon. I took an indirect route out of town, and I thought I’d been successful at avoiding witnesses to my departure. If I was about to help Rebecca become a fugitive, I wanted to make it as difficult as possible for the sheriff and Prickett to reconstruct our actions.

My plan was only half formed, because much depended on Rebecca. She was, as I knew better than anyone, a proud, independent woman who would not readily take suggestion, to say nothing of direction. She would be reluctant to abandon her business. But I was hopeful that when presented with the stark reality of the impending arrival of the sheriff and his manacles, she would see there was no course available to her other than flight.

I would help her get to the great Illinois River, two days’ ride to the west. From there, she could board a steamer or hitch
onto a flatboat and head downriver. I’d arrange for her to obtain a purse full of gold coins from my father’s agent in St. Louis. And at that point, the entire length of the Mississippi River would be open to her. I didn’t know where she’d go or what she’d do, but I had no doubt there were several avenues of survival available to a woman of her abilities.

Of course, all this meant I’d never lay eyes on Rebecca again. But I felt no sadness at that prospect because I knew the only alternative was to witness her standing trial in Springfield for two horrendous crimes she did not commit. A trial, I realized full well, where my own name might be sullied during the attack on her character. And then—unless Prickett’s supreme self-confidence from last night was very much misplaced—to watch her swing from the gallows.

I wasn’t sure how much time we had to flee Menard before the sheriff arrived. In reality, I thought as Hickory and I rode through the stillness of the wakening prairie, I might have been better served by riding up to Menard in the moonlight, as soon as I’d overheard the sheriff’s conversation with Prickett. But riding through the prairie at night was treacherous. And I knew the sheriff, with his regular evening rounds, to be a late riser. He had no reason to suspect Rebecca would be alert to his design. In all likelihood, he would enjoy a full breakfast at his table before mounting his horse. Even so, I would have less than two hours to convince her of the necessity of my plan and get her on the trail.

I reckoned we were within a few miles of Menard when I spotted in the distance a large white mound, like a huge snowdrift, hard against a stand of dark timber. As the mound came into focus, it took the shape of an enormous tent, and the small forms darting in front of it resolved into soldiers in full military attire. I cursed my misfortune at the presence of witnesses.

I tried to hurry past the soldiers without interaction, but as Hickory and I began to circle around the tent, the closest soldier squinted at us through the risen sun and shouted out a greeting. He was a boy, surely not yet sixteen years of age, with the burnt
features of a farmhand. He wore light blue trousers that were much too long and obscured his shoes; a long, darker blue coat with shiny buttons and a golden sash; and a tight-fitting cap, also in a shade of blue.

“What’s all this?” I shouted, waving with my straw hat at the several clusters of similarly clad soldiers who were loitering in front of the tent, which I now saw was large enough to have sheltered a couple dozen men.

“Colonel Hinkle has ordered a general muster today, for the field at Menard,” the boy replied, his voice cracking with adolescent excitement. “All the regiments of the Illinois Militia will be there, and we hear several columns of veterans of the Indian Wars, the Black Hawk, even some boys who went south to gut the Creek, are marching on as well. Should be a right spree, the lads all think. Brandy and whiskey and women too.” He grinned hungrily. “Do you think—”

I spurred Hickory onward before he could finish the sentence. General musters were invariably the site of great public merriment, outdone as an occasion for general drunkenness and debauchery only by election days. It was sure to be hectic at Rebecca’s store, with men and women arriving in want of new items of clothing and bagatelles to attract the opposite sex, though scarcely anything beyond the abundant alcohol would be necessary for that trick.

There would be witnesses, and plenty of them, to whatever Rebecca and I decided upon. No matter; the sooner I reached Rebecca, the sooner I could spirit her away from the sheriff’s path. The presence of so many onlookers might mean I would have to answer for my role in the affair, but that was a risk I’d already undertaken.

I pressed Hickory into a fast trot. As we neared Menard, we encountered military troops mustering in from all directions. Some groups were well uniformed and coordinated, like the first I had encountered, but many more were ragtag groups of a half-dozen men, a single rifle among them, straggling along the road.
I doubted anyone in these units had ever been within earshot of an actual battle. Many regiments brought along their bands, drums, and fife and an occasional large horn, such that the air soon filled with a discordant jumble. I guessed several hundred men, at least, were converging on the little settlement.

At last Hickory picked her way across the rocky streambed and we were there. The commons was already bustling. Several battalions had erected battle flags to claim a particular portion of the green as their own. Soldiers milled about in boisterous congregation.

I tied Hickory to a post and walked up to the familiar storefront. There was no sign of anyone inside and the door would not budge. I tried pulling it harder when a portly old man came up behind me, his white and blue uniform instantly marking him as a veteran of the Late War with Great Britain.

“The damned widow’s not there,” he said in a gruff voice reeking of liquor. “I’ve been trying all morning—need a patch for my topcoat here—but the damn place’s never open. Someone told me she wasn’t here yesterday neither. May have to let myself in through the window if she doesn’t show her haggard face soon.”

Without responding, I raced back to Hickory, who was whinnying at two young soldiers who had started to poke at her fine saddle, and I remounted the animal. Rebecca had been in Springfield two days prior. I realized I had no idea where she’d gone after she left Lincoln’s office. What could it mean that she hadn’t opened her store yesterday? Had she stayed in Springfield for some reason?

With a jolt, I had the horrible thought that perhaps she had gone back to Torrey’s and remained there and that the sheriff and Prickett knew it. Perhaps her presence there was somehow connected to the letter Prickett had mentioned last night. Had I ridden off to Menard only to abandon Rebecca to the sheriff, who might at this very minute be arresting her a mere few blocks from my store? The idea terrified me.

I slapped Hickory’s flank and urged her on toward Rebecca’s cabin. We arrived there at a gallop two minutes later. The house looked deserted. The iron bar protecting the front door was firmly latched, and I couldn’t make out any movement as I peered through the windows. My heart beating faster, I walked around to the rear of the cabin. And then the ground beneath me gave way and I was pitched headlong into the void.

The limp body of the woman who had taught me everything she knew about love lay wedged between the cabin wall and the adjoining stable. I knew at once she was no more. Her arms were thrown out helplessly and her head lay twisted to the side. Her still eyes were open and wide with fear. I sank to my knees, held my head in my hands, and wept.

T
ime passed. I felt numb. The silence of Rebecca’s death roared in my ears, as if I was standing at the seashore and waves were crashing down all around me. I wanted nothing more than to be carried away by one of those waves, carried away into the deep, where I could let go of the visible world and sink slowly to the bottom. Maybe at the bottom—just maybe—would I ever find peace again.

Eventually I found the strength to approach Rebecca’s body. Either side of the base of her neck was marred with ugly red bruises. I knelt and reached for her with both arms. Her body was cool and inflexible, and her head lolled back sickeningly when I cradled her and drew her toward me. Her mourning veil remained pinned to the top of her head, a grim reminder of the long hardships of a too-short life.

“Rebecca!” I wailed. “Oh, Rebecca! Oh, how can it be?”

I put my lips on hers, somehow hoping to infuse her body with my breath, but her lips were cold and blue and indifferent to my touch. So I lay her body across my lap and held her tight. I stared at her lifeless blue-gray eyes and tried to remember their shine. I contemplated her calloused fingers and recalled their electric touch as they’d traced patterns on my naked chest, twenty feet and a lifetime away. I felt my eyes stinging with tears.

I knew neither time nor place. The roar of the silent ocean continued unabated.

S
ome time later, there was movement behind me and a shout: “What’s this?” And in the next moment: “Speed? Is that you?”

Roused from my daze, I looked over my shoulder and saw Sheriff Hutchason on foot, leading his horse. His brows were knit in confusion, trying to decipher the scene he’d happened upon.

“I was too late, Sheriff,” I said. “She’s gone.” I gulped. “She’s been strangled, I think.”

“What?” shouted the sheriff. He dropped the lead from his horse and rushed over. “Are you saying
you
 . . .”

“Of course not. I found her like this. Found her lifeless body when I arrived this morning.”

The sheriff knelt beside Rebecca’s body. He examined her from head to toe, gently prodding her body and moving her clothing around as he did. Meanwhile, I took a few steps away, staring off into the distance and trying very hard not to be sick. At last, the sheriff rose to his feet and let out his breath in a long, low whistle.

“She was strangled, all right,” he said. “And she didn’t put up a fight for some reason. There aren’t any bruises on her hands, as there should have been. I wonder.”

“You wonder what?”

He did not elaborate.

“How long do you think she’s been dead?” I asked.

“At least twelve hours. Maybe considerably more. I was visiting with the surgeon colonel from the war back at the muster earlier today. I’m going to go fetch him now to have a look.”

The sheriff mounted his horse, and as he did, I perceived for the first time he was dressed in the uniform of the Winnebago Wars, with a gray clawhammer coat, pantaloons, and knee-high boots. Both of his shoulders were decorated with gold-braided epaulets of command. I noticed too that the sun had already passed its apex and was arcing into the western skies. I had spent many hours alone with Rebecca’s body, I realized, before the sheriff arrived.

The sheriff soon returned with an older man in a tattered version of the same uniform. The man weaved up unsteadily to where I stood, saw the widow’s silent form, and stopped short. “Too late, I see,” he said. “Don’t know why you made me come all this way, General Hutchason.” He turned to head back in the direction of the muster.

“Wait and take a look at her body first, will you, Hiram?” the sheriff said. “I only see the strangulation wounds to her neck. But I’d like you to make sure I haven’t missed anything. She can’t have been dead for too long, as the wolves haven’t had at the remains yet.”

The medical man bent over Rebecca’s body and I looked away again. I stared at one of the nearby birch trees, tall and haughty, and I realized I had last contemplated that particular tree one morning through the window of Rebecca’s cabin as I lay beside her in bed, my hand resting on her warm, bare skin as she breathed in and out peacefully. My head pounded with grief.

“I’ve got nothing to add,” the doctor said from behind me. “She’s been dead for a while. A few hours—a few days—it’s impossible to know. Now I must return. There’s to be a tug-of-war and I’m the anchor for our troop.”

He teetered off toward the muster. In his wake, the sheriff muttered, “He was almost as useless when we were in pursuit of
the Winnebagos. More of a threat to my men than the Red Man ever was.”

“She can’t have been dead for a few days,” I said, “because I saw her Thursday afternoon in Springfield. Lincoln and I met with her at Hoffman’s Row.”

The sheriff looked at me with interest. “Is that so?” he said. He stared into the sky for so long I thought he might have forgotten about my presence. Then he turned back to me and said, “That might explain a few matters. Except this one—what are you doing here today, Speed?”

“I thought perhaps she could use an extra pair of hands selling to the muster,” I said, thinking fast. “Her store was closed when I arrived, though, so I headed out here, to her house. That’s when I found her.”

“Yesterday evening,” he continued, “when I got home, Molly and your sister said I’d just missed you. They said I must have seen you as I rode up. But I didn’t. I wonder why.”

“I couldn’t guess, I’m afraid.”

“It is quite a coincidence,” the sheriff said, as if puzzling through matters slowly, “because I came here to arrest her after the muster. Prickett had become convinced she killed her niece and nephew.”

Even in my grief-stricken state, I had the good sense to gasp in surprise. Nonetheless, the sheriff looked at me with narrowed eyes.

“If there’s anything of relevance you haven’t told me,” he said, “I want to hear it now.”

I desperately searched for a plausible response, but my aching head proved barren. I was on the verge of confessing my intent to help Rebecca flee, a design now horribly for naught, when I suddenly hit upon a different answer, one that might actually help the sheriff find her killer.

“Rebecca—the Widow Harriman—wasn’t at a market fair at Buffalo Heart on the day her niece Lilly was killed,” I said. “A merchant who was there told me as much. I came here this
morning to ask her why she’d lied to us. I think perhaps she was covering for someone else. Someone who’s now killed her, too.

“I confess I suspected Gustorf, the Prussian traveler,” I continued. “But he’s laid up under Dr. Patterson’s care now. He couldn’t have managed to come all the way here from Springfield to attack her, not with the condition of his leg.”

The sheriff was looking at the corpse with intense concentration. “I’ve a fair notion,” he said, more to himself than to me.

“What is it?” I demanded.

“I suppose there’s no harm in sharing this with you now,” he said. “We had thought it evidence of
her
guilt, but now I wonder whether it doesn’t still provide the answer, only a different one than we’d originally perceived.”

He reached inside the pocket of his commanding officer’s coat and pulled out a small packet of paper. As I unfolded it, I recognized Rebecca’s looping script. The writing was dated two days earlier, the day we had all met in Springfield. My heart pounding, I read:

“‘Allan,’” I said, looking up. I hadn’t taken a breath since I had started reading the letter. “Dr. Allan Patterson?”

Hutchason nodded. “She’d left it for him with the innkeeper Saunders, but Prickett managed to intercept it. Regrettably, both of us misread its import, it seems.”

“But how could this letter have made you think she’d killed her own kin?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” he returned with a huff. “She speaks of them as obstacles that have been removed. Obstacles to her own gratification. Only a cold-hearted woman could write in those terms. Or so we thought. Now it would appear this same letter points decisively in a different direction.”

It took me a moment to understand his meaning. “Are you saying you now suspect Patterson of the murders? Of doing
this
?” I nodded over my shoulder while trying to avoid looking again at Rebecca’s lifeless body.

“I’m saying,” the sheriff replied, “that Prickett has already gone to the judge this morning to tell him we have a murder trial to commence on Monday morning. That, in all likelihood, Matheny will be at this very moment canvassing on the green for potential jurors. That the people of Springfield will be much relieved to hear we have at last identified the wicked person responsible for these terrible crimes. That if the Widow Harriman is not the guilty party, then it stands to reason her secret paramour, Dr. Patterson, is the man we’ve been seeking all this time.”

I looked again at the letter from Rebecca, which I still clutched in my hand, and I felt a churn of emotions. Thinking
back to the moment when Rebecca had appeared at the doctor’s doorstep on the night of Jesse’s disappearance, I couldn’t say I was completely surprised to learn of a relationship between the two. But to hold confirmation of the same in her own handwriting was a different matter altogether. It was inescapable that the future she had long ago denied to me she had been prepared to give willingly to Patterson.

At the same time, I had trouble bearing ill against Patterson. Rebecca had written she
needed
the match with him. This was, surely, a reference to her financial straits. I could hardly quarrel with her conclusion that the wealthy, widower doctor could satisfy these far better than could the minority shareholder of a struggling general store. Ever the shrewd woman of business, she had struck the best bargain available. Just as she had written to Patterson, her true nature had been plain to me from the outset.

“That’s quite a stretch,” I said aloud to the sheriff. “They had some type of tiff two days ago. That’s hardly a cause for murder. Especially not if they’d made an arrangement some months back.”

“Perhaps so,” Hutchason returned. “I suspect Prickett is going to have a different view of the evidence. And I’ve always wondered about Patterson myself, with all his potions and bleedings and inscrutable arts.”

He rested his hand on my shoulder. “I believe you were close to her, Speed. What do you think she would have desired? For a burial, I mean.”

The answer came to me at once. “She wouldn’t have wanted a funeral,” I said. “She’s got no kin left at this point. Any neighbors who attended a service, if one took place, would be there to gawk and gossip, not to mourn. Not that she much cared what people said about her, mind you.”

I had noticed before a stone marker, covered with a light shadow of moss, on a small mound about twenty feet from the back of the house. “That’s where Harriman’s remains are interred,” I said, pointing. “I think all that was left was his
clothing.” Next to the marker were two gnarled sticks, stuck upright in the mound above freshly dug earth. Rebecca hadn’t even had time to give her niece and nephew proper gravesites.

Sheriff Hutchason went into the barn and came back with a blanket, which he laid over Rebecca’s corpse, and a shovel.

“I need to return to Springfield at once,” he said. “I wonder if I can ask—”

“Of course.”

And so, in a haze of grief I dug a grave for Rebecca alongside the sorry remains of the family she’d never had. The still afternoon air was heavy with regret. My only company was the flock of crows, which watched me silently from their branch. Sweat dripped from my forehead into the deepening hollow. Every now and then I turned and stared at Rebecca’s shrouded body, as if expecting her to rise and come stand next to me.

At last, I dug deep enough that I figured her corpse would be safe from scavengers. I laid her body into the open grave, giving her one final embrace before returning her to the dust. I recited the Lord’s Prayer aloud. Then I knelt beside the void and began pushing the mound of freshly dug earth on top of her body. And as I did, I promised her soul I would not rest until the blackguard who had taken her had received his full measure of justice in Hell.