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
Lewis 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,
