Page 93 of The Giver of Stars
‘Officer Dalton here has just been speaking with old Nancy Stone. She says you was making your way to her back in December when she heard a gunshot and some kind of a commotion. Says you never arrived and that, rain or shine,you had never once missed a book delivery before that day. Says you were known for it.’
‘I recall I couldn’t get past the ridge. The snow was too deep.’ Margery’s voice, Alice realized, had taken on a slight tremor.
‘Not what Nancy says. She said the snow had eased two days past and that you was by the upper levels of the creek and that she heard you talking right up until minutes before the gun went off. Says she was mighty worried about you for a while.’
‘Not me.’ She shook her head.
‘No?’ He pondered this, his lower lip pushed out in exaggerated thought. ‘She seems pretty sure there was a packhorse librarian up there. You telling me then it was one of these other ladies that day, Miss O’Hare?’
She gazed around her then, a trapped animal.
‘You think maybe I should be talking to one of these girls instead? Think maybe one of them is capable of murder? How about you, Kathleen Bligh? Or maybe this nice English lady? Van Cleve Junior’s wife, yes?’
Alice lifted her chin.
‘Or you – what’s your name, girl?’
‘Sophia Kenworth.’
‘Soph-i-a Ken-worth.’ He said nothing about the colour of her skin, but rolled the syllables around extra slowly so that they felt loaded.
The room had grown very still. Sophia stared at the edge of her desk, her jaw tight, unblinking.
‘No,’ Margery said, into the silence. ‘I know for a fact it was none of these women. I think maybe it was a robber. Or a ’shiner. You know how it can be up there on the mountains. All sorts going on.’
‘All sorts going on. That’s true enough. But, you know, seemsmighty odd that in a county stacked full of knives and guns, axes and coshes, that the weapon of choice for your neighbourhood hillbilly robber would be …’ he paused, as if to recall it properly ‘… a fabric-bound first edition ofLittle Women.’
At the dismay that flickered, unchecked, across her face. something in the sheriff relaxed, like a man sighing with pleasure after a big meal. He squared his shoulders, pushed his neck back into his collar. ‘Margery O’Hare, I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Clem McCullough. Men, take her in.’
After that, Sophia told William that evening, all hell broke loose. Alice flew at the man like a woman possessed, shouting and hollering, hurling books at him until the officer threatened to arrest her, too, and Frederick Guisler had to wrap both his arms around her to stop her fighting. Beth was yelling at them that they had it all wrong, that they didn’t know what they were talking about. Kathleen just looked silent and shocked, shaking her head, and little Izzy burst into tears, kept crying, ‘But you can’t do this! She’s having a baby!’ Fred had run for his car and driven fast as he could to tell Sven Gustavsson, and Sven had come back white as a sheet, trying to get them to tell him what the heck was going on. And all the while Margery O’Hare had been silent as a ghost, allowing herself to be led past the crowd of onlookers, into the back of the police Buick, her head down and one hand over her belly.
William digested this and shook his head. His overalls were thick with black dirt where he was still trying to clean up the house, and when he ran his hand over the back of his head he left an oily black trace of it on his skin.
‘What you think?’ he asked his sister. ‘You think she did murder someone?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I know Margery ain’t a murderer but … there was something off, something she wasn’t saying.’ She looked up at him. ‘I do know one thing, though. If Van Cleve has any say in this, he’s going to make her chances of getting out of it a whole lot smaller.’
Sven sat that night in Margery’s kitchen and told Alice and Fred the whole story. The incident on the mountain ridge, how she had believed McCullough would come after her in revenge, how he had sat out on the porch for two long, cold nights with the rifle across his knees and Bluey at his feet until both were reassured that McCullough had surely slunk back to his falling-down cabin, probably with a sore head and too drunk to remember what the hell he had even done.
‘But you have to tell the sheriff!’ Alice said. ‘That means it was self-defence!’
‘You think that’s going to help her?’ said Fred. ‘The moment she says she slammed that book into him, they’ll treat it as a confession. She’ll get manslaughter at best. The smartest thing she can do just now is sit tight and hope they don’t have enough evidence to keep her in jail.’
Bail had been set at $25,000 – a sum nobody around there could get close to. ‘It’s the same sum they posted for Henry H. Denhardt, and he point-blank shot his own fiancée.’
‘Yup, except being a man, he had friends in high places who could post it for him.’
Nancy Stone had apparently wept when she heard what the sheriff’s men had done with her testimony. She had made her way down the mountain that evening – the first time she had done so in two years – banged on the door of the sheriff’s office and demanded that they let her retell herstory. ‘I said it all wrong!’ she said, and cursed, through her missing teeth. ‘I didn’t know you was gonna arrest Margery! Why, that girl has done nothing but good for me and my sister – for this town, hang you, and that’s how you’re going to repay her?’
There had indeed been a murmur of unease around town at the news of the arrest. But murder was murder, and the McCulloughs and the O’Hares had been the death of each other for generations so far back that nobody could even remember how it all started, just like the Cahills and the Rogersons, and the two branches of the Campbell family. No, Margery O’Hare had always been an odd one, contrary since she could walk, and that was just the way these things went sometimes. She could certainly be cold-hearted too – why, didn’t she sit stone-faced at her own daddy’s funeral without shedding a tear? It didn’t take long for the endless seesaw of public opinion to begin to wonder whether maybe there was something of the devil in her after all.
Down in the low-lying little town of Baileyville, deep in the south-eastern reaches of Kentucky, the light disappeared slowly behind the hills and not long after, in little houses along Main Street and dotted among the mountains and hollers, the oil lamps flickered and went out, one by one. Dogs called to each other, their howls bouncing off the hillsides, to be scolded by exhausted owners. Babies cried and were, sometimes, comforted. Old people lost themselves in memories of better times and younger ones in the comforts of each other’s bodies, hummed along to the wireless or the distant playing of somebody else’s fiddle.
Kathleen Bligh, high in her cabin, pulled her sleeping children close, their soft, yeasty heads like bookmarks on each side of her, and thought of a husband with shoulderslike a bison and a touch so tender it could make her weep happy tears.
Three miles north-west in a big house on a manicured lawn, Mrs Brady tried to read another chapter of her book while her daughter sang muffled scales in her bedroom. She put the book down with a sigh, saddened by the way life never quite turned out how you hoped it would, and wondered how she was going to explain this one to Mrs Nofcier.
Across from the church, Beth Pinker sat reading an atlas on her family’s back porch and smoking her grandmother’s pipe, thinking about all the people she would like to hurt, Geoffrey Van Cleve being high on that particular list.
