Whistling Past the Graveyard (6 page)

She pulled her hand away. “The law! Where is justice in the law if it allows a girl to be murdered and her killer to walk free?” She looked at Preston, and at Holmes, and at me. “How many more women will he marry and then murder? How will the law protect them?”

I opened my mouth to mutter some meaningless words of comfort, but Mrs. Heaster whirled away and ran from us into a side room, her sobs echoing like accusations in the still air of the hallway.

Preston gave us a wretched look. “I can only do what the law allows,” he pleaded.

Holmes smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. “We must trust that justice will find a way,” he said. Then he consulted his watch. “Dear me, I’m late for luncheon.”

And with that enigmatic statement he left us.

-8-

The trial ground on and true to Preston’s fears the evidence became thinner and thinner, and the defense attorney, a wily man named Grimby, seemed now to have taken possession of the jury’s sympathies. Had I not looked into Shue’s face during the autopsy and saw the cold calculation there I might also have felt myself swayed into the region of reasonable doubt.

Again and again Mrs. Heaster begged Preston to let her testify, but each time the prosecutor denied her entreaties and I could see his patience eroding as quickly as his optimism.

Then calamity struck.

When the judge asked Mr. Grimby if he had any additional witnesses, the defense attorney turned toward the prosecution table and with as wicked a smile as I’d ever seen on a man’s face, said, “I call Mrs. Mary Jane Robinson Heaster.”

The entire courtroom was struck into stunned silence. Preston closed his eyes, looking sick and defeated. He murmured, “Dear God, we are lost.”

I wheeled toward Holmes, but my friend did not look at all discomfited. Instead he maintained what the Americans call a poker face—showing no trace of emotions, no hint of what thoughts were running through his brain during this disaster.

“Mrs. Heaster?” prompted the bailiff, offering his hand to her.

The good lady rose with great dignity though I could see her clenched fists trembling with dread. To have been denied the opportunity to speak against this evil man and now to become the tool of his advocate! It was unthinkably cruel.

“Holmes,” I whispered. “Do something!”

Very calmly he said, “We have done all that can be done, Watson. We must trust to the spirit of justice.”

Mrs. Heaster took the oath and sat in the witness chair, and immediately Grimby set about her, gainsaying niceties to close in for a quick kill. “Tell me, madam, do you believe that Mr. Shue had anything at all to do with your daughter’s death?”

“I do, sir,” she said quietly.

“Did you witness her death?”

“No sir.”

“Did you speak to anyone who witnessed her death?”

“No sir.”

“So you have no personal knowledge of the manner of your daughter’s death?”

She paused.

“Come now, Mrs. Heaster, it’s a simple question. Do you have any personal knowledge of how your daughter died?”

“Yes,” she said at length. “I do.”

Grimby’s eyes were alight and he fought to keep a smile off of his face. “And how do you come by this knowledge?”

“I was told.”

“Told? By whom, madam?” His voice dripped with condescension.

“By my daughter, sir.”

Grimby smiled openly now. “Your...dead daughter?”

“Yes sir.”

“Are we to understand that your dead daughter somehow imparted this information to you?”

“Yes, my daughter told me how she died.”

The jury gasped. Preston could have objected here, but he had lost his nerve, clearly believing the case to be already lost.

“Pray, how did she tell you?”

Mrs. Heaster raised her eyes to meet Grimby’s. “Her ghost came to me in a dream, sir.”

“Her ghost?” Grimby cried. “In a dream?”

There was a ripple of laughter from the gallery and even a few smiles from the jury. Preston’s fists were clutched so tight that his knuckles were bloodless; while to my other side Holmes sat composed, his eyes fixed on the side of Mrs. Heaster’s face.

Grimby opened his mouth to say something to the judge, but Mrs. Heaster cut him off. “You may laugh, sir. You may all laugh, for perhaps to you it is funny. A young woman dies a horrible death, the life choked out of her, the very bones of her neck crushed in the fingers of a strong man. That may be funny to some.” The laughter in the room died away. “My daughter was a good girl who had endured a hard life. Yes, she made mistakes. Mr. Grimby has been kind enough to detail each and every one of them. Yes, she had a child out of wedlock, and as we all know such things are unthinkable, such things never happen.”

Her bitterness was like a pall of smoke.

“Mr. Grimby did his job very well and dismantled the good name of my daughter while at the same time destroying each separate bit of evidence. Perhaps most of you have already made up your minds and are planning to set Trout Shue free.” She paused and flicked a glance at Holmes, and did I catch just the slightest incline of his head? “The law prevents me from telling what I know of Mr. Shue’s life and dealings before he came to Greenbrier. So I will not talk of him. Mr. Grimby has asked me to tell you how I came by my personal knowledge of the death of my daughter, and so I will tell you. I will tell you of how my dear Zona came to me over the course of four dark nights. As a spirit of the dead she came into my room and stood at my bedside, the way a frightened child will do, coming to the one person who loves her unconditionally and forever. For four nights she came to me and she brought with her the chill of the grave. The very air around me seemed to freeze and the ghost of each of my frightened breaths haunted the air for, yes, I was afraid. Terribly afraid. I am not a fanciful woman. I am not one to knock wood or throw salt in the devil’s eye over my left shoulder. I am a mountain woman of Greenbrier County. A farm woman with a practical mind. And yet there I lay in my bed with the air turned to winter around me and the shade of my murdered daughter standing beside me.”

The room was silent as the grave as she spoke.

“Each night she would awaken me and then she would tell me, over and over again, how she died. And how she lived. How she endured life in those last months as the wife of Edward Trout Shue. She told me of the endless fights over the smallest matters. Of his insane jealousy if she so much as curtsied in reply to a gentleman tipping his hat. Of the beatings that he laid upon her, and how he cleverly chose where and how to hit so that he left no marks that would show above collar or below sleeve. My daughter lived in hell. Constant fear, constant dread of offending this offensive man. And then she told me what happened on that terrible day. Trout Shue had come home from the blacksmiths, expecting his dinner, and when he found that she had not yet prepared it—even though he was two hours earlier than his usual time—he flew into a rage and grabbed her by the throat. His eyes flared like a monster’s and she said his hands were as hard and unyielding as the iron with which he plied his trade. He did not just throttle my daughter—he shattered her neck. When I dared speak, when I dared to ask her to show me what his hands had done, Zona turned her head to one side. At first I thought she was turning away in shame and horror for what had happened...but as she turned her head went far to the left—and too far. Much too far and with a grinding of broken bones Zona turned her head all the way around. If anything could be more horrible, more unnatural, more dreadful to a human heart, let alone the broken heart of a grieving mother, then I do not want to know what it could be.”

She paused. Her eyes glistened with tears but her voice never disintegrated into hysterics or even raised above a normal speaking tone. The effect was to make her words a hundredfold more potent. Any ranting would have painted her as overly distraught if not mad; but now everyone in the courtroom hung on her words. Even Grimby seemed caught up in it. I hazarded a glance at Shue, who looked—for the very first time—uncertain.

“I screamed,” said Mrs. Heaster. “Of course I did. Who would not? Nothing in my life had prepared me for so ghastly a sight as this. After that first night I convinced myself that it had all been an hysterical dream, that such things as phantoms did not exist and that my Zona was not haunting me; but on that second night she returned. Once more she begged me to hear the truth about what happened, and once more she told me of the awful attack. I only thank God that I was not again subjected to the demonstration of the extent of damage to her poor, dear neck.” She paused and gave the jury a small, sad smile. “I pleaded with Mr. Preston to let me tell my tale during this trial and he refused. I fear he was afraid that my words would make you laugh at me. I believe Mr. Grimby placed me on the stand for those very reasons. And yet I hear no laughter, I see no smiles. Perhaps it is that you, like I, do not find the terrible and painful death of an innocent girl to be a source of merriment. In any case, I have had my say, and for that I thank Mr. Grimby and this court. At least now, no matter what you each decide, my daughter has been heard. For me that will have to be enough.”

She looked at Grimby, who in turn looked at the jury. He saw what I saw: twelve faces whose eyes were moist but whose mouths had become tight and bitter lines and whose outthrust jaws bespoke their fury.

Then the silence was shattered as Shue himself leapt to his feet and cried, “Tell whatever fairytales you want, woman, but you will never be able to prove that I did it!”

The guards shoved him down in his seat and Holmes leaned his head toward Preston and me. “Do you not find it an interesting choice of phrase that he said that we will never ‘prove’ that he did it? Does that sound like the plea of an innocent man or the challenge of a guilty one?” And though he said this quietly he pitched it just loud enough to be heard by everyone in that small and crowded room.

-9-

That was very nearly the end of the Greenbrier affair and Holmes and I left West Virginia and America very shortly thereafter. Erasmus Stribbling Trout Shue was found guilty by the jury, which returned its verdict with astonishing swiftness. The judge, with fury and revulsion in his eyes, sentenced Shue to life imprisonment in the State Penitentiary in Moundsville, where Shue died some three years later of a disease that was never adequately diagnosed. Mr. Preston sent Holmes a newspaper account from Lewisburg after Shue’s death in which the reporter recounted a rumor that Shue complained that a ghost visited him nightly and as a result he was unable to sleep. His health deteriorated and when he died he was buried in an unmarked grave. No one that I knew of attended the burial or mourned his passing.

But before Holmes and I had even set out from Lewisburg, as we shared a late dinner in our rooms at the hotel, I said, “There is one thing that confounds me, Holmes.”

“Only one thing? And pray what is that?”

“How did Mr. Grimby know to ask Mrs. Heaster about her story? It was not commonly known as far as I could tell, especially not here in Lewisburg. Certainly neither she nor Mr. Preston shared that information.”

Holmes ate a bit of roast duck and washed it down with wine before he answered. “Does it matter how he found out? Perhaps he learned of it from a ghost in his dreams.”

I opened my mouth to reply that it surely did matter when an odd thought struck me dumb. I gaped accusingly at Holmes and set my knife and fork down with a crash.

“If it was someone on this physical plane who tipped him off then it was criminal to do so! The risk was abominable. What if she had raved?”

“We have not once seen Mrs. Heaster rave,” he observed calmly. “Rather the reverse.”

“What if the jury did not believe her? What if Grimby had managed her better on the stand? What if—?”

Holmes cut me off. “What if once in a while, Watson, justice was more important in a court of law than the law itself?” He sipped his wine.

Once more I opened my mouth to protest, but then a chill wind seemed to blow through the room, making the curtains dance and causing the candle flames to flicker, and in that moment I could feel the heat of my outrage and anger leak out of me. Holmes cut another slice of duck and ate it, his glittering dark eyes dancing with a strange humor. I followed the line of his gaze and saw that he was looking at the curtains, watching as they settled back into place; and then the chill of the room seemed to touch my chest like the cold hand of a dead child over my heart. Though the day had been a hot one the night had been cool, and the maid had shut the window against the breeze. The curtains hung now, as still as if they had never moved, for indeed they could not have.

When I turned back to Holmes he was looking at me now, half a smile on his mouth.

Was it a breeze that had found its way through the window frame, or perhaps through an unseen crack in the wall? Or had some voiceless mouth whispered thank you to Holmes in the language of the grave? I will not say what I think nor commit it to paper.

We said nothing for the rest of that evening, and in the morning we took ship for England, leaving Greenbrier and the ghosts of West Virginia far behind.

Author’s Note on “Calling Death”

A few years ago editors Eugene Johnson and Jason Sizemore contacted me about writing for an anthology they were putting together called
Appalachian Undead.
All zombie stories set in that strange and storied mountain range that stretches from Georgia to Maine. There were two big draws for me. First, I’ve traveled those mountains from end to end a couple of times. I spent a lot of time on the road and on foot and there is magic in them thar hills.

The second draw was that so many of my friends were involved.
John Skipp, Gary A. Braunbeck, Tim Lebbon,
Maurice Broaddus
, Lucy Snyder, Bev Vincent, Tim Waggoner, John Everson…well, nearly everyone in the book! So, sure, I was in. And besides, I already had a story in mind about those mountains.