These Honored Dead (5 page)

Johnson had returned and now stood beside us; one of the tankards that had been in his hand a moment earlier clattered onto the tabletop, the ale cascading out and spilling all over my riding pants. I looked up and saw to my surprise the innkeeper’s red face was twisted not in apology but rather in fear.

“I’m going to have to ask the two of you to leave at once,” he said, his voice trembling.

“Us? But we’ve caused no disturbance,” I said.

“Nonetheless. If you please.” He held out his arm toward the doorway.

“What’s the meaning of this?” demanded Simeon.

Johnson glanced nervously toward the door to the kitchen. “If Mrs. Johnson hears you mention that name in our premises,” he said softly, “a bit of spilled beer will be the least of your problems. Mine too.”

“Lilly Walker? What does your wife have against Lilly Walker?” Simeon asked. With each renewed mention of the girl’s name, Johnson’s face became more contorted, and he frantically motioned for Simeon to stop talking.

“I’ve said too much already,” the innkeeper said.

“If you won’t tell me, I’ll have to go ask Mrs. Johnson myself.” Simeon rose to his feet, notebook and pencil poised at the ready.

“Sir, if you please.” Johnson had a panicked look in his eye. “Won’t you leave it alone?”

Simeon did not budge. Johnson sighed.

“Very well, if you must know, Mrs. Johnson thinks there was some encounter between me and that wretched girl. Which there wasn’t, of course. I was merely kind to her on one occasion, and she was a friendly sort. Flirtatious, even. But there was never anything else.”

Judging by the fervor of the man’s reaction, I was skeptical of his profession of innocence. I could tell Simeon was as well. Nonetheless, the newspaperman nodded and resumed his seat.

“We shan’t mention her again,” Simeon said, “if you’ll bring us a towel, a new glass of ale for my friend here, and two bowls of beef stew. You tell Mrs. Johnson we’ve heard far and wide her stew’s the best in the whole entire county.”

“As you wish,” said Johnson, retreating grudgingly.

“What do you think?” I asked Simeon a half hour later when we had collected our horses from the stables and sat astride them as they grazed in the middle of the Menard commons.

“You heard what the Widow Harriman told the sheriff about the girl’s nature,” Simeon said. “I wager there is no shortage of men around here who had encounters of one sort or another with the girl.”

“And no shortage of wives who bear a grudge,” I added.

“But can you imagine any of them doing what someone did to her?” he said, rubbing his rough chin with both palms. “Such intense violence. That’s the difficulty.” He paused. “Back to Springfield, then. We’ve learned quite a bit for one day.”

“You go ahead,” I said. “I’ve a customer to visit up north near Miller’s Ferry. I want to see if I can’t get him to increase his take-up for the harvest season.”

Simeon stared at me for a moment, then slapped his horse on the backside and headed off on the trail toward Springfield. Hickory and I watched until man and steed became a small, ungainly speck on the horizon.

T
here was no customer near Miller’s Ferry. Instead, once Hickory and I were out of sight of the Menard commons, I pulled her up and we looped around the woods toward the familiar log cabin by the stream just beyond the main settlement.

Our conversations with Johnson and the stable boy had made it clear there might be a number of persons about who bore ill will toward Lilly. But if my goal had been to establish, for the newspaperman’s satisfaction as well as my own, that Rebecca could not be among them, I knew I had not yet succeeded.

Rebecca’s house looked deserted when we came upon it. My eyes glanced up to the roof and I saw with pleasure that my patches still held. I’d devised them the prior summer on a sultry evening as Rebecca stood below on the ground, her hair falling beguilingly in front of her eyes, offering alternatively encouragement and direction. She had suggested, laughing, that fixing the new leak in her roof was the price of one more night spent in her bed, and it was a price I happily paid.

I tied Hickory to one of the birches and walked around behind the cabin. The door to the adjoining barn was secured by a rusty padlock. Rebecca used to keep the key in an eye-level hollow in the closest birch. As I walked over to the hollow, I heard a metallic noise from above. I looked up and gave a little jump.

A murder of crows, some three dozen in all, lined the upper branches of the birch tree. Three dozen pairs of steely black eyes stared down at me. Their spokesman was on a low-hanging branch and he reproached me insistently:
caw caw caw
. His fellows clicked their beaks rapidly in concurrence.

“Quiet down,” I said.

The birds clicked even louder.

My hand found the key, just where it used to be, and it turned in the padlock. The wooden door to the barn opened reluctantly. I peered in cautiously at first and saw with relief that Lilly’s corpse had been removed. I hoped Rebecca had given her a decent burial; whatever the imperfections of her life, the young woman plainly merited as much.

As my eyes adjusted to the dim interior, I gazed around the small enclosure, not sure what I was looking for but looking nonetheless. The slatted walls were bare. Loose bales of hay lined the perimeter of the room. In the center of the dirt floor, like an awful beacon, lingered an irregular dark stain. I gulped and stared at the shadow of Lilly’s final moments.

I tried to picture the scene as it had been several weeks earlier. Could someone have attacked the girl outside of the barn and later moved her body inside? The sheriff had dismissed the possibility, and as I looked around now, I couldn’t detect any signs of blood underneath the dirty footprints leading in and out of the barn. Surely, given the amount of blood that had flowed from the fatal wound at her final resting place, moving her injured body would have produced some kind of trail.

For the first time, I focused on the fact that the bale of hay against which Lilly had been reclined had been positioned to the side of the barn door, and her body had been facing away from the door when we had found it. Someone walking silently might have entered the barn without her knowing it, especially if her perceptions had been dimmed in some fashion. Perhaps she had fallen asleep in the barn and been set upon before she could
awake and react. Or perhaps the whiskey Prickett thought he’d detected had played a role.

I crouched and looked around the barn from Lilly’s vantage point in those final moments. What had she seen, sitting there against the bale of hay?
Whom
had she seen?

“Who’s there?” shouted a familiar voice.

In one motion, I rose to my feet and turned. Rebecca was standing in the doorway to the barn. There was a shotgun clutched in her hands.

“Hallo,” I said with a weak smile.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded. The gun in her hands was pointing toward the ground a few feet from where I stood, and while she didn’t shoulder it, she did nothing to lay it down either.

“I needed to see again where Lilly died,” I said. There seemed no way around it. “I thought perhaps I could find something, something the sheriff had overlooked, that might show who did this.”

“You shouldn’t have come onto my property without permission. I heard from a neighbor there were two men walking about today, stirring up trouble about Lilly. From the description, I was afraid it was that corpulent publisher. And you.”

I nodded. “I’m on your side, Rebecca,” I said. “I’m trying to help—”

“I don’t need your help. Or want it.”

At that moment, there was a great fluttering behind Rebecca and the crows took the skies as one, screeching in angry tones. Immediately Rebecca swung around, raising the gun to her shoulder and advancing out of the barn as she scanned the horizon. Her finger was coiled on the trigger. I took a few steps forward so I could see out over her.

Someone or something had unnerved the crows. But the cause of their sudden flight was nowhere to be seen. We were all alone.

I was about to say as much when Rebecca swung around again. The shotgun was still at her shoulder and this time it was pointing straight at my heart. Less than ten feet separated us.

“Don’t shoot,” I said, my hands raised over my head.

There was a beat of silence. The still air between us was fraught.

“No, of course not,” Rebecca said softly. She lowered the gun and rested it on the ground.

I became aware that I was breathing very deeply. Rebecca was as well, the captivating curve of her breasts rising and falling with each breath. Her face, made beautiful by the life she’d lived, had a look I hadn’t seen in a long time. And I felt sure my face was a mirror of hers. We took a step and then rushed toward each other, arms outstretched.

“I think it was the wind,” I whispered as my lips urgently felt for hers. My blood surged; my head pounded. I inhaled the moment deeply.

“The wind . . .”

I pulled her toward the interior of the barn, but she managed to shake her head, our bodies and arms and lips still enmeshed, and I realized her meaning at once. She was right; not there.

So I led her to the back door of her cabin and pushed it open. On the threshold she hesitated, resisting my pull, and said, without conviction, “I can’t, Joshua. We can’t.”

“We have to,” I whispered as my lips met hers again fiercely. I drew her inside and she did not resist.

We were silent for a long time afterward, lingering in each other’s arms, unwilling to let go of the precious now. I was transported back to those early mornings in her bed. The touch of her bare skin had been like putting my hand over a flaming candle—unbearably hot yet irresistible. But I knew there was no way to resume our prior relationship. Inexorably, the cold-hearted machinery of time only moves forward, never backward.

I felt her starting to stir.

“Rebecca . . . ,” I began.

“You’re not going to ask me to marry again, are you?” she said, smiling.

I shook my head. “I’m worried about your safety out here, alone. Someone killed Lilly. Who’s to say they’re not coming for Jesse next? Or you, for that matter.”

“If anything happens, I’m prepared,” she said. “If it was anyone but you in the barn this afternoon, I would have gladly pulled the trigger. But there’s not going to be a next time. Whoever came for Lilly came specifically for her. They don’t pose a threat to me or Jesse.”

“How can you be sure?”

“She was
my
niece.” Rebecca’s eyes flashed in anger. “You never knew her. In truth, I saw a lot of me in her. Just two weeks before she was killed, the three of us had ridden into Springfield for supplies. I kept Jesse with me while Lilly wandered around. Springfield was the largest city she’d ever seen. She asked me afterward about this business and that. She was trying to figure out the aspects of the town’s economy and resources for herself.”

“You must have had to pay off all their remaining debts to redeem them from the poorhouse,” I said. “How did you manage, especially these days?”

“I managed,” Rebecca said simply. “My ledger’s remained decently firm. Fewer and fewer people are paying in cash, of course, but the private drafts I’ve had to take have held up in value pretty well.

“Lilly was very aware of my situation,” she added. “I imagine she was afraid of ending up back in the poorhouse. When we came home from Springfield that day, she assured me she’d earn enough money to pay her and Jesse’s expenses. I don’t think she had the first idea how, but surely she wished it’d be so.”

Thinking back to the village fair the previous summer, I felt confident Lilly would have been skilled in contributing financially to Rebecca’s household had she lived.

“Let me help you,” I said. “Send some customers your way, perhaps, or give you some goods to sell on consignment. I know you must be low on capital.”

“I’ll manage on my own, Joshua,” she said. “Always have.”

“But—”

She put her finger over my lips and let me kiss it without protest. But when I moved to embrace her more fully, she pulled away and started adjusting her petticoat and fixing its laces. I had a final, fleeting glimpse of the softness of her breasts before they disappeared beneath the many folds of her garment. And without further congress, we parted.

T
he following Monday morning, I sat opposite Lincoln at the heavily scarred common table in the dim public room of the Globe Tavern, waiting for the innkeeper Saunders to bring us our breakfast. The Globe was a ramshackle two-story building that stood around the corner from our lodgings. There were a number of finer places to eat in Springfield, but none was more convenient.

Lincoln held the back page of the
Sangamo Journal
close to his nose as he scanned the small-type columns of legal notices—estates being probated, land sales, tax rolls, debtors’ auctions.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

“Employment,” he said, his head still buried in the paper. “All these people need lawyers. A few might even be able to pay for one. I’d be overjoyed to collect a debt for a three-dollar hog.”

“I suppose this hasn’t been the most favorable time to commence law practice.”

Lincoln gave a short laugh and put down the paper. “No, indeed,” he said, a lopsided smile creasing his face. “Logan might have warned me, when he was extolling the virtues of Springfield, that a financial panic was coming. Reminds me of a farmer I knew up in New Salem. He’d go on and on about how juicy his peaches were. The man would not shut up about his peaches. Ah, here we go.”

Saunders had finally arrived with breakfast. He set down on the table between us a battered metal plate containing several rashers of ham, sausages, boiled potatoes, bread and butter, and two large mugs of coffee. Lincoln and I took up our knives and dug in.

“Of course,” Lincoln said after he’d wolfed down a few bites, “that farmer in New Salem? He forgot to mention he’d cut down all the peach trees for firewood the previous winter.”

He laughed heartily and I joined him.

“That’s more like it,” he said.

“What’s more like it?”

“You’re being quiet. You have been, ever since Saturday evening.”

“Perhaps I have.”

“I heard you and Simeon rode up to Menard on Saturday.”

I nodded as I chewed.

“Is your business so bad you’re thinking of taking on the sheriff’s job?” Lincoln asked. “Or Simeon’s?”

“Of course not. I—”

There was a loud jangling of a bell. Two young boys materialized and sprinted through the public room toward the street. The Globe doubled as the stage line office, and the bell signaled the arrival of a new stage, bringing prospective customers as well as horses needing to be watered. Saunders bustled through the room, and soon we could hear him haggling with the new arrivals over the price of room and board.

Lincoln gestured to me with his knife. “You were saying?”

“I think it’s only natural I have an interest in the girl’s murder. As I’ve said, I know the Widow Harriman. Through the trade, of course. And it turns out I had met the niece once previously, or seen her, at least.”

“‘Through the trade,’ yes,” Lincoln said with a sly smile. “I believe I’ve heard you say that before.” He gulped down a potato. “In fact, I was speaking to Prickett yesterday about his investigation.”

“Do they have any suspects?” I asked quietly, so the soot-faced blacksmith at the far end of the table could not hear.

“Prickett told me he’s more convinced than ever that the widow, your acquaintance through the trade, is the one responsible.”

I felt my temper flaring. “It’s nonsense,” I said. “Why would she have wanted to slay her own kin? And gruesomely so. There’s no logic to it at all.”

“That’s not how Prickett sees it,” Lincoln returned.

Before I could respond, the proprietor of another store on the square stopped by the table and asked Lincoln a few questions about a dispute he’d been having with a customer over a rotten barrel of beer. Lincoln patiently listened to the merchant’s complaints and advised him to split the difference with his customer. The merchant wandered off, still mumbling about the unfairness of the situation.

“That’s the sort of free advice that’s going to put you under if you’re not careful,” I said as we watched him go.

“Spoken like a true businessman,” Lincoln said with a rueful nod. “I’m sure you’re right.”

“If you’re giving out free advice—” I began, but Lincoln glanced at his pocket watch and pushed his chair back with a groan.

“I’m due in court soon,” he said. “Dr. Patterson’s case. Walk with me. Last time I was two minutes late for my hearing, I couldn’t remember where I’d left my notes. Judge Thomas was awfully hard on me.”

Lincoln was dressed in his formal frockcoat and bow tie. He stood and wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. Then he checked the pockets of his trousers and coat and, finding nothing, started looking around frantically. Laughing, I pointed to the floor beside his chair, where he’d set down a thin packet of papers when we’d arrived some thirty minutes earlier.

“Why don’t you take my hat?” I said. “I think we’re the same size. You can keep your notes here, in the band.”

I habitually wore a different hat from my inventory each day as a form of walking advertisement. That day, I happened to
have a tall, black stovepipe hat with a band of black velvet running circumferentially above the brim. Lincoln looked the hat over quickly, twirling it in his hands, and then tucked his packet of papers into the band. When he settled it atop his head, the combined height of the man and his costume nearly reached to the ceiling.

Outside on the street, the summer sun was already beating down without mercy. I raced to keep up with Lincoln, taking three strides for his two.

“Since you’re in the habit of handing out free legal advice,” I persisted, “I’ll take some myself. What’s the best way for me to help the investigation into this wretched girl’s death?”

“Is your principal interest finding the killer or merely ensuring the Widow Harriman does not face legal jeopardy?”

I considered this as we turned the corner and headed for the town square. “Both—but mostly the latter, I suppose. Of course, I’m dreadfully sorry about what happened to the young woman. But she’s gone now. I don’t want the tragedy compounded by an unjust accusation against her aunt, who’d taken her in out of the goodness of her heart.”

Lincoln looked over at me skeptically. I was going to have to be more adept in my defense of Rebecca, I realized, if I wanted it to make a difference.

We had reached the town green, and we walked past a large rectangular cornerstone surrounded by unruly weeds. The Illinois state legislature had voted to move the state capital to Springfield some months earlier, and like the rest of the village’s merchants, I was eagerly awaiting the arrival of the high aspirations and low business of government.

A grand new capitol building and courthouse was to rise in the center of the town square, and its perimeter was already chalked out in the grassy field. But after an elaborate ceremony to lay the cornerstone of the new building, the town fathers had thought to ask who was going to pay for the project. The town thought the legislature should; the legislature thought the
reverse; and the increasingly cash-poor banks announced they would not lend to either group. Construction had come to a halt, and the lonely cornerstone remained the full extent of the state government in Springfield.

In the meantime, the legal business of Sangamon County continued to be conducted in the old courthouse in front of us. It was a two-story brick building, topped by a low, hipped roof and a cupola. The structure had long ago begun to fall into disrepair, and its brick walls bowed outward perilously.

“If I were you,” said Lincoln, “I’d start by finding out the basis for Prickett’s conjecture. The man’s a snake in the grass, but he has some relationship, however distant, with the facts. There must be something he’s learned that’s caused him to view the widow with heightened suspicion.”

We reached the courthouse steps and I pulled open the heavy oak door for Lincoln. At that moment, the senior lawyer Logan, a lit corncob pipe clutched in his hand, hurried up from behind us. None other than Prickett was at his side.

“That’s quite a hat,” Logan said to Lincoln with a laugh. And the two lawyers pushed past us into the courtroom.

“Did I tell you? Logan’s my adversary today,” Lincoln said. “The old saw is right. A man who’s the only lawyer in town has got nothing to do, but once a second lawyer arrives, neither of them will ever want for work.” He chuckled and ducked inside.

I hesitated for a moment then followed him in. Lincoln’s advice made sense; I would see what I could learn from Prickett.

The courtroom was a dark, shabby affair, a long, narrow room with six crowded rows of wooden benches in the back for spectators and two counsel tables in the front of the room. At the far end rose a low platform that served as the judge’s bench. The entire room was obscured by a thick haze of smoke clinging menacingly to the low ceiling like storm clouds converging on the prairie.

Peering through the smoke, I saw the audience this morning consisted of some two dozen persons, mostly lawyers waiting to
be heard on other matters, along with a smatter of village residents who habitually attended court sessions as a form of free entertainment. I spotted Prickett off to the far right of the gallery and headed in his direction.

Lincoln was seated on the other side, conferring in whispered tones with Dr. Patterson. Patterson was a small, precise man with thinning hair and an elaborate moustache. As usual, he was wearing his double-breasted, knee-length surgical coat. Dark splotches on the navy blue coat served to advertise the many surgeries he had conducted. It had occurred to me to wonder whether Patterson chose to display these visual reminders of his craft because of the scarcity of living patients who could testify to his services. Next to Patterson was an attractive young woman with light brown hair: his daughter.

In front of us, Judge Thomas was concluding a prior hearing. As I slid in next to Prickett, the judge dismissed the lawyers with an impatient wave of his hand and said to my friend Matheny, who was working as the clerk today, “Call the next matter.”

“
Patterson against Richmond
,” shouted Matheny in a voice an octave deeper than his usual one. Logan and Lincoln stepped forward into the well of the courtroom.

“What’s this one about, Logan?” the judge asked.

“If I may be heard first—” began Lincoln.

“You may not,” Judge Thomas said severely. Jesse B. Thomas Jr. looked like a pugilist, with a brawny body; a wide-set, florid face; and a permanent sneer. I had never seen him without a smoldering cigar clenched in his fist, and he now gestured angrily with it toward Lincoln.

“I appreciate greatly you are on-time today, Mr. Lincoln,” the judge continued, “but in my courtroom, you will speak when spoken to, and not before. Now, Logan—”

The judge looked over at the senior lawyer, who had been sucking happily on his pipe stem during the exchange between the judge and Lincoln. In front of me, the doctor and his daughter exchanged worried glances.

“Thank you, Your Honor,” Logan began with a flourish of his arms. “Your Honor, this is a case of land fraud. My client, Major Sylvester Richmond, is an esteemed veteran of the Late War with Great Britain. The government granted him his bounty land, over in the Military Tract, and earlier this year he contracted to sell it to Dr. Patterson. But then, over the summer, as land prices began to collapse . . .”

I shifted my focus to Prickett on the wooden bench next to me. The prosecutor had been intently studying several packets of paper in his lap, paying no attention to my presence or to the proceeding in front of us. I knocked against his shoulder and whispered, “Pardon me. I didn’t see you there.”

“Speed,” he said with a nod, then looked down again at his papers.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” I whispered, “regarding the murder of the Menard girl—have you made any progress in your inquiries?”

“A good deal,” he replied without looking up.

“What have you—”

Suddenly there was a commotion in front of us. An older man had been sitting in the first row of the gallery, directly behind Logan, dressed in full military regalia with a blue coat, white breeches, and a tall plumed hat, all badly faded. This was, presumably, the esteemed Major Richmond. He was on his feet now, pointing at Patterson with a trembling arm.

“We had a contract,” Richmond shouted, his prominent nose glistening an angry red. The crowd murmured excitedly.

“No, we didn’t,” growled Dr. Patterson, turning in his seat to glare at Richmond across the gallery. “We never signed anything. We—”

“Silence!” shouted the judge, banging his gavel with so much force I thought it would split in two. “Only the lawyers may speak in my courtroom. If either of you says another word”—he pointed with the burning end of his cigar toward Patterson
and Richmond in turn—“I’ll have the sheriff throw you in his jail cell.”

Richmond sat down, still shaking his fist in anger and muttering to himself. Patterson and his daughter exchanged self-righteous looks.

“Thank you, Your Honor,” Logan resumed smoothly. “As I was saying, the nub of the matter is Dr. Patterson doesn’t want to pay the agreed upon price for the land anymore. He doesn’t want to fulfill his agreement, given what’s been happening to land values, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell Your Honor.”

An angry shadow passed over Judge Thomas’s face and he spit into a tarnished spittoon resting at the side of his bench. I expected the judge carried in his pocket at that very moment a half dozen land deeds; most officials did these days, and in my experience, they were constantly monitoring the prices at which similar properties were exchanging hands.

I turned back to Prickett. “What have you found?” I whispered. “I’d like to help you, if I can.”

“You don’t want to know where the investigation is going,” he replied in a low voice. “Trust me.”

“If you mean to suggest you still think the Widow Harriman had some involvement, I’m sure you’re wrong,” I replied in an urgent whisper. “She’s a kindly woman. She’d just rescued her niece and nephew, an act of Christian charity. Why would she have done so if she meant to harm the girl?”