The Devil Amongst the Lawyers (20 page)

The village of Pound, when they reached it, offered no relief from his feeling of claustrophobia. There was little more than a stone’s throw of distance between the steep cliffs that hemmed in the town in a narrow river-cut passage. A bedraggled row of wood frame shops and
houses huddled close to the river, facing steep embankments on either side, where the mountains seemed to have been sheared off in a straight line to make room for a village. From the edge of the cliff tops, dense hardwood forest stretched away to the crest of the distant ridges.

The buildings comprising the village were not shacks, though. Well, they might seem so to Henry, who had been raised in a Philadelphia mansion, but Shade thought the white frame houses seemed pretty typical of the small towns that he had seen in his travels coast to coast: from New England to Seattle, you could find much the same. Rose, raised in the concrete canyons of New York, had probably been expecting log cabins or teepees, but she was half a century too late to see the picturesque quaintness of the American frontier. This town was maybe a century old. It had sprung up so that the loggers and coal miners would have someplace to live, and so that there would be a few stores to accommodate them and the farmers in the surrounding area. But Henry had been right about one thing: there weren’t any sidewalks, either.

Shade pulled the car off to the side of the main road, studying the line of one-story buildings, trying to decide how best to frame a shot that would capture the essence of the place. He wondered which house belonged to the Mortons. Surely, they’d have to find somebody to tell them that. The newspaper readers wouldn’t know any different, of course, but since they weren’t the only nationals covering the story, they might as well get it right, to save embarrassing challenges later. With a sigh of resignation he cut the Ford’s motor. It was going to be cold out there. The wind probably whipped through that narrow valley like a butcher knife.

“So this is it, huh?” said Rose. “Not much to it. How can people live in a little place like this?”

Shade raised his camera, sighting along the ridgeline, more out of habit than because he wanted a shot of it. “The way I figure it, everybody lives in a little place, Rose. Sure, you’ve got the five
boroughs of the city, but how often do you set foot in any of them except the one you live in? Mostly you eat at the same joints, frequent the same handful of stores, and keep to your own neighborhood, where you probably don’t know any more people than there are in this little town. And don’t give me the Statue of Liberty and the art museums speech, either, because when was the last time you went there?”

Rose shook her head. “Guess you can’t take the hick town out of the boy, Shade. So this little burg is your idea of heaven, huh?”

“No, I just think there’s good in both places—city and country—and maybe not as much difference between the two as you’d like to think.”

“Where are the millionaires and the scholars, then?”

“I can name you parts of New York that don’t have any of them, either. And maybe there aren’t any right here, but somebody owns those coal mines, so I’ll bet you somewhere in this county there are mansions and maidservants. And that writer fellow who wrote
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
. Where did he live?”

Rose looked around at the row of wood frame houses, and the encroaching mountains that seemed to hold the town like a vise. “I’ll bet Erma Morton wishes she had gotten out of here.”

The fact that the car was not moving had finally awakened Henry, and, finding himself alone in the parked vehicle, he clambered out of the backseat, cinching the belt of his overcoat tighter around him to protect against the cold. For a moment, he stood in the street next to the car, making cloud breaths and taking in the sights of the tiny main thoroughfare. The wind ruffled his hair, and he pulled his scarf up over his chin as he stared at the shabby dwellings with their backs to the river. Rousing himself from the last vestiges of sleep, he murmured, “They’re built too close together. Wooden. If a fire broke out in one of them, it would sweep away the whole village in the blink of an eye.” He shuddered and turned away.

“Well, Henry, I wouldn’t exactly call that a tragedy,” said Rose. “This isn’t Versailles. Whatever they built to replace them would be an improvement.”

Henry kept staring at the buildings and the hills that loomed over them, but he did not respond to Rose’s banter. He only said,
“Jishin,”
and turned away, tears glittering in his eyes.

Rose and Shade looked at each other and shrugged. When the black mood took Henry, it was best just to wait it out. They had given up trying to draw him out about it. No one is less susceptible to a friendly interviewer than a journalist. After a couple of minutes he usually managed to overcome whatever had upset him, and he would carry on as usual, only a bit more subdued, perhaps. Henry didn’t talk much about his past. They had learned not to ask.

“Guess I’ll get ready to take my pictures before I lose the light,” said Shade, moving away from them. “I hope I’m not shivering too hard to get a steady shot.” He opened the boot of the Ford and began to haul out the rest of his camera equipment. As he fiddled with the tripod and the lenses, Rose led Henry out of camera range, and they walked a little way up the street, keeping close to the buildings in an effort to escape the wind.

“There’s the post office,” said Rose, nodding at a building across the street. “Too bad it’s Sunday or we could ask for directions there.”

“Oh, give it a minute or two. I’ll warrant that strangers are a sufficient novelty around here to send someone out to examine the exhibits.” Henry tugged gently at the sleeve of her coat and nodded toward a window, where a lace curtain had been twitched aside to reveal the round-eyed face of a small boy peering out at them.

Henry nodded gravely to the watching boy, and made a show of reaching into his trouser pocket. He drew out a buffalo nickel, holding it up speculatively between his thumb and forefinger. Then he turned toward the still-watching child and beckoned to him with a
crooked finger.
Never pretend you like children,
he often said.
They can spot a phony in a heartbeat.

The window curtain fell back into place. Henry stopped a few feet from the doorway of the house while Rose took a cigarette out of her purse and attempted to light it, using Henry as her shield from the wind. A moment later, the front door opened and the boy came out, glancing back over his shoulder to make sure he was unobserved. He was a freckle-faced blond whose shrewd blue eyes matched the hand-knit sweater he wore over his faded overalls and scuffed boots. He was just pulling on an old corduroy coat for his foray into the street, but his head and hands were bare. He glanced warily at Henry, who was still holding out the nickel nonchalantly, as if he had forgotten about it.

Noting that he—or rather the coin—had captured the boy’s undivided attention, Henry nodded again in his direction, this time holding the nickel down within the child’s reach. “Good afternoon, young sir. Would you be the mayor of this charming community?”

“Naw.” The boy took the coin and shoved it into his pocket. “I ain’t but nine year old. You’uns come about the murder?”

“What an astute fellow,” Henry said to Rose. “I daresay he might make a mayor one day. At any rate, I think we have found our local authority.”

“What makes you think that?” asked Rose, beaming at the boy with that simpering smile that she always hoped would conceal her unease with children. It never worked.

The boy, apple-cheeked with cold, gave her a blank stare, and then he pointed to Shade, who was positioning his camera for a general view of the houses along the main road. “He’s taking pictures.”

“Would you like your picture taken?” asked Rose.

He looked at her scornfully. “Naw.”

Henry smiled. “I am Henry Jernigan, and this is my colleague, Miss Rose Hanelon. And what is your name, young man?“

“Jake Hardy. I got a new pup. You wanna see him?”

“Perhaps later, thanks. Jake, we are newspaper reporters from New York City. Perhaps you’ve heard of us?”

The boy nodded. “Knowed you warn’t laws on account of the lady,” he said, addressing Henry, whom he judged to be the one in authority. He looked appraisingly at Henry’s tailored black overcoat and his silk scarf. “And I reckon you dress too good to be one o’ them do-gooder missionary types, which I’d as lief set the dogs on. So I figured you for sight-seers, but seeing him over yonder with his camera, I knowed you for newspapermen. My mama’ll tan my hide if she catches me talking to you’uns.”

“We shall be brief,” said Henry. “Just point out the Morton house and we’ll leave you to rusticate in peace.”

The boy shook his head. “I don’t know if I ought to. My mama wouldn’t like it if I was to do that. She says newspaper men—”

Henry sighed, reached into his pocket, and extracted a dime. “Make it quick before she catches you, then.”

The boy tugged up his sweater and pocketed the dime. “Reckon I can oblige you,” he said. “You see that little shop over across the road?”

“The post office?” said Rose.

The boy looked at her as if he was surprised that she could talk. “That’s right. Well, the white building beside it is where the Mortons live. Used to be a garage, but they fixed it up and made it into a place to live. They rent it from the man who lives on the other side. He owns the drugstore and a lot of other buildings around here besides.”

“A regular backwoods Rockefeller,” murmured Rose. “We’d better go and tell Shade which house to get a shot of.”

Henry waved her on. When Rose was out of earshot, he leaned down close to the boy and said, “Well, young man, there has been a good deal of excitement around here, hasn’t there? A murder investigation going on right across the street. Do you fancy yourself a detective? Any thoughts on who might have killed the late Mr. Morton?”

The boy shook his head. “Don’t know that anybody did. Might’a fell on his own.”

“Do you think it likely?”

“I ain’t the one to ask. Nobody seen nothing. And as for the other way of knowing, my grandmaw’s got the Sight, and we’re beginning to think my little sister Moselle might have it, too, but she ain’t but five, so it’s hard to tell. Young’uns are awful fanciful, ain’t they?”

“Unlike a man of the world such as yourself,” murmured Henry. “The Sight, did you say?”

“Yeah, sometimes they’ll see or smell smoke a day or so before there’s a house fire, or they’ll see things nobody else does. My sister Moselle used to play with a little Injun girl down by the river. Reckon there was a camp there once’t.”

Henry nodded. This tale had the makings of a story, but such emotional excursions were Rose’s line of country, not his. “I don’t suppose she has seen Mr. Morton walking about, haunting the scene of his demise?”

“Naw. Leastways she never said.”

“Well, perhaps you have heard the grown-ups talking it over when they thought you weren’t listening. Do you know what they think?”

The boy blew on his reddening hands while he considered the matter. “Well, there warn’t no love lost between Mr. Morton and his womenfolk. That’s certain sure. But I reckon that if Miss Erma done it, it weren’t on purpose. No reason to, is there? Not on account of getting whupped for coming home late, like the Law’s been saying. Why, that happens to me regular as clockwork, and you don’t see me fixing to kill nobody over a whuppin’.”

Henry nodded encouragingly, hoping that the boy would go on.

“It ain’t nothing to get a hiding from your daddy. I reckon she’d do what I do: take what he dishes out and don’t give him the satisfaction of seeing you cry. That Erma’s got a temper, though. You
wouldn’t think it, being so pretty and little like she is, but underneath all that proper speaking and store-bought clothes, she’s a regular wildcat. One time last spring she caught me copying the homework sums off of Billy Lanier, and she smacked my hand so hard with that ruler—”

Henry’s eyes widened, but he gave no other sign of quickened interest. “Miss Morton was your teacher, then?”

“That’s right.”

“Was she a good one?”

The boy kicked at pebbles with the toe of one scuffed boot. “Middlin’, I reckon. I ain’t so hot on studying myself, so it didn’t make me no never mind. But Miss Erma wasn’t overmuch set on making us learn. Seems like she was always looking out the schoolroom window, a-watching the road. Every now and again, a carload of her friends would pull up, and she would set us to writing lines while she sashayed off to visit with them a spell.”

“Some young man had come to court her, then?”

“Naw. Just a crowd of her friends, I reckon. Nobody special. Maybe she didn’t like to be cooped up in the school, neither. I’d’a done the same if I could.”

Henry nodded sympathetically, reframing the story in his mind: lively, educated young woman trapped in a stagnant little town, yearning for excitement . . . Lonely . . . A questing spirit longing to be free . . . There were other ways to look at the matter, of course, but more negative constructions would not suit the slant of the story.

He noticed a movement at the ground-floor window where the boy had first appeared. Henry’s expression of rapt interest did not change, but he kept his eyes on the window, and a few moments later the curtain was pushed back farther, and two round blue eyes peeped over the sill, watching him intently. A mop of blond ringlets haloed the pale little face, whose expression registered more curiosity than alarm. Henry decided not to smile this time, nor to proffer coins to
entice the child outside. He judged that showing rapt interest in his conversation with the child’s older brother would lure her out of the house to claim her share of the attention. He continued to nod and smile at the boy, glancing over at the window every ten seconds or so to gauge the reaction of the tiny observer. When he glanced up again, the child was gone.

Silently, Henry counted to ten, and sure enough the front door opened and the halo-haired girl marched out, and draped her arm around her brother’s waist, leaning her head against his side. Her bright blue eyes, though, were fixed unblinkingly on the stranger in the black overcoat.