by Argyle, Ray
“No trouble?”
“I don‘t think anyone even noticed me.” Leonard stirred his tea and crossed his legs. “I’m glad things are quieting down. Look, it’s nearly six o’clock.”
They were interrupted by the arrival of Leonard’s deputy, Roland Cooper, who was wiping grime from his face and brushing ashes from his coat. “They’ve finally got the fire under control but you can still see flames in the burnt out buildings. There’s debris all over the streets. The pavement’s heaved and cracked and the telephone poles have burned and fallen down.”
As Cooper finished his account, the first faint light of dawn was filtering into the room. “It’s been a night we won’t forget,” he said, and fell silent. He crossed the floor to his desk and sat down after brushing shards of glass away from his chair. Leonard, Kathleen and Owen were left to contemplate the implications of his words.
“Some good has to come of this,” Leonard said. For Kathleen and Owen, he thought, the fire would have different meanings than it had for him. Owen might have seen it through his artist’s eyes, an opportunity to renew the city with buildings more grand than any that existed before. Kathleen, with her love of nature might have thought of the Phoenix, the mythical bird that builds its own funeral pyre but rises from the ashes to live again. He saw the fire as a metaphor for cleansing. Perhaps it would show him the way to examining the embers of his own dispirited life. And what would Molly Leppard or Rosannah, if she were still alive, think of the fire? Rosannah might see it as a comfort rather than, as Molly Leppard would be wont to think, a punishment for mankind’s sins.
Chapter 37
AT THE ASYLUM
April 20, 1904
Leonard Babington settled down on the floor beside his desk, using his jacket as a pillow, and hoped for an hour of sleep. Kathleen had left the Telegram, saying she would walk home. The presses were about to roll with the story of the Great Fire. A little after seven o’clock, Leonard roused himself and went to the composing room to make a final check of the news pages. That was when the trouble began. The pneumatic tube that carried copy to the composing room quit working. Leonard had to call for carbon copies of two missing stories that would fill the last page. The roll of newsprint on the press cylinder kept splitting and it took Ginty Harper, the head pressman, forty-five minutes to straighten that out.
Leonard moved the printing of the eleven o’clock edition up to nine o’clock, giving the circulation department a head start on getting the Telegram into the hands of readers anxious for news of the fire. Police and firemen stood outside the pressroom dock as the first bundles of papers were handed out to newsboys. Police were keeping anxious readers outside of the fire zone and it wasn’t until the newsboys reached King street that they found their first customers.
Leonard scanned the eight-page issue, looking for errors that could be fixed in the next edition. At a quarter to twelve, hungry for some lunch, he picked up his jacket and took a last glance at the clutter on his desk. That was when he spotted a piece of paper he’d not noticed before. It was a note from David Carey, who covered the railway stations and labour unions. It had lain unnoticed in the chaos of the fire: “There’s a ‘Slim’ Tackaberry at the Colonial Rooms on Agnes St. One of the sleazier places in The Ward. Passes himself off as an ironmonger. He could be your man.”
Leonard knew what he had to do. Get hold of Tackaberry and take him to the Asylum to confront Molly. It was the only way to get them both to tell the truth. He was more certain than ever that Scarth was implicated in Rosannah’s death, and that Molly knew of his involvement. If only Rosannah could speak to him, she’d put all his doubts and questions aside. But that was stuff of midnight fantasies, not reality.
Leonard found a taxi idling on King Street and asked to be taken to the Colonial Rooms. His mind was filled with guilt about his failure to find a solution to Rosannah’s death. In a small way, he resented Kathleen having brought him the message that Molly wanted to see him. He thought again about the vow he had made to Dr. Sproule the day Cook Teets was hanged. He might at last be able to coax from Tackaberry and Molly the truth of what had happened.
The Colonial Rooms turned out to be a grungy little hotel, three floors of squalid catacombs in one of the cheap wood frame and stucco buildings that had been thrown up in The Ward. It offered cheap rooms to immigrants. Leonard found a clerk behind a desk in the vestibule and demanded to know Tackaberry’s room number. “Room 309, top floor at the back,” he was told. Leonard kicked aside a pile of trash at the top of the stairs and made his way to the end of the hall. At the last door, he pounded on the thin frame and demanded to be let in. “I know you’re there, Tackaberry, open up.” He heard a movement behind the door, heaved against it, and the lock gave way. A figure backed against a dresser was reaching for a pair of pants draped over a chair. It was Scarth Tackaberry.
“What do you mean, busting in here?” Tackaberry asked. “I’ll tell you what I mean,” Leonard said. “Get yourself dressed and listen to me. You’ve some explaining to do.”
Over the next fifteen minutes, Leonard heard denials, entreaties and finally pleas from Scarth Tackaberry. He hadn’t meant to hurt that guy at Munshaw’s, he was just too mouthy. He had a train ticket for the North West and was to leave that afternoon on the Canadian Pacific. Promise to let him go and he’d tell everything he knew about Rosannah’s death.
“I’ll need a better story than that,” Leonard told him. “You’re coming with me to the Asylum. We’re going to talk to Molly. We’ll get the truth out of you. If she clears you I won’t tell the cops I’ve found you. But if she proves you’re guilty you’ll have to face the music. Otherwise I’ll frog-march you down to the police station right now. They’ll be glad to get their hands on a bail jumper.”
“You’ve been bird-dogging me for years,” Tackaberry complained. “You still think I killed Rosannah. You think Molly will say it was me.”
“Or you’ll admit it yourself.”
“I ain’t saying nothing. And who cares what Molly says? Who’d believe a crazy old woman? So why should I be afraid to go with you? Looks like I don’t have no choice. I’d as soon stare down Molly as have you turn me into the bulls. But you’ve got to keep your promise. Let me get out of town this afternoon.”
The stark lines of the Insane Asylum gave it an even more forbidding appearance on this cloudy spring afternoon. Leonard found the security precautions more stringent than in the days when he had been visiting Kathleen. He had to sign in at the basement office and wait for permission from Dr. Clark before he and Scarth were allowed to see Molly. Leonard said Tackaberry was her nephew. It was the only way he could get him in.
Escorted by an attendant, Leonard led Tackaberry to Molly’s ward. Mrs. Wilson was still there, looking older and a little more harried than he remembered.
“Molly’s been taken to the infirmary,” she said. “Go up two flights and you’ll find it at the east end of the building.”
As they passed through the same dreary hallways Leonard had loitered in with Kathleen, he thought of how the patients looked as they always had, their faces vacant and their bearing dejected. It could have been just yesterday that he’d last seen them. Some slumped in chairs while others wandered about waving their arms and muttering oaths. They spoke in a variety of languages, or was it tongues? He heard a man declare his wife was God. “All who are here must obey her.” An old man stepped into the corridor and asked Leonard if he had seen Jesus Christ. “I keep looking but I can’t find him,” he complained. A woman stood chanting outside the infirmary. “Get away, Devil,” she muttered, sweeping her arms before her. Hearing such religious delusions disturbed Leonard. It troubled him that so many inmates were beset with such phantom beliefs.
The infirmary nurse examined the pass proffered by Leonard and motioned he and Scarth to the back of the room. “You must speak quietly and you’ll have to leave if Molly becomes upset,” she told them. Leonard heard groans from several patients. Others raised
themselves to stare at the visitors. Tackaberry seemed overwhelmed at what he was witnessing. His face had lost its usual ruddy colour. He now looked grey and ashen as he sucked in sharp, quick breaths.
Molly appeared to be sleeping. Leonard sat beside her and focused his eyes on the iron grey linoleum on the floor. He heard Molly murmur and saw that she was waking up. When she turned on her side and opened her eyes, she was only inches away from him. How lined and waxen was her face, he thought. Her hair was completely white and one bare arm, exposed above the blanket, was wrinkled and fleshy. All old people get to look like that, he knew. He was almost glad his mother and father had not lived so long as to become but hulks of themselves, absent their natural vitality and familiar features.
“Is it you, Leonard?” Molly asked. “You’ve come to see me?”
“I have, Molly. How are you feeling?”
“All right, I guess. My head’s not so mixed up anymore. But the consumption’s got me bad.” She began to cough and Leonard helped her sit up. She brought a handkerchief to her mouth and spat into it. Leonard could see a red stain darken the cloth.
“Kathleen told me you wanted to see me,” Leonard said. “I’m sorry I haven’t been around more often. There never seems time to do everything you want. But I’ve brought you a visitor. Look, here’s Scarth Tackaberry.”
Molly lay back on her pillow and stared at the ceiling. “Well, don’t we make a pair, Scarth and me. How are you, Scarth?” Only then did she lift her head to look at him.
“All right, Molly. Haven’t seen you for awhile.”
“Can’t say I’ve missed you, Scarth,” Molly answered.
Leonard was anxious to learn why Molly had wanted to see him. He needed to find that out before challenging her to implicate Scarth in Rosannah’s death.
“What was it you wanted to tell me, Molly?” he asked.
“Mebbe you don’t have time to listen to me, an old woman. Not important anyway, what I have to say.” She fell silent.
“We’d like to hear it, just the same.”
If he could just get her talking, Leonard thought. He knew he had to be careful – a wrong word could send her off on some tirade and he’d never get to the bottom of what Molly might know.
“The fire got me to thinking, Leonard. About you and Rosannah. You always cared for her. Maybe if you two had gotten married, I mean a proper marriage in a Catholic church, things would have been different. You know her oldest girl, Lenora, is yours, don’t you?”
So that was it. What he’d suspected all along. Leonard sucked in his breath and licked his dry lips. For an instant, he was on the verge of tears. The feeling passed.
“I always thought the child was mine, but Rosannah would never tell me. So I quit asking and decided to let her do as she wished. I couldn’t have stopped her, anyway.”
“There’s something else,” Molly said. “Something awful you need to know. Mebbe I’d better not tell you.”
“Is it about Rosannah? About how she died? Did Scarth have anything to do with it?”
Leonard held his breath as he waited for Molly’s answers.
“I used to think it a terrible sin what Rosannah did,” Molly told him. “Going off and marrying that Protestant, Cook Teets. The priest told me she’d go to hell. I believed it. Maybe I still believe it. I had visions of demons dancing all around her. There were voices and wailing. They told me to find some way to wash away her sin. They never let me alone.
“I prayed and prayed and told God I would do anything to save Rosannah. I feared she’d spend eternity in the fires of hell, for marrying that blind man, in a Protestant church. It’s all I thought about.
“One day, it came to me how to save her. A greater sin can wash away a lesser sin. Did you know that, Leonard?”
He said he didn’t. Her voice was faint and he decided not to say anything more, just to let her talk as long as she had the strength to mouth the words.
“How I used to love making jam. Do you remember my jam, Leonard?”
What is this about jam, he wondered? What has that got to do with Rosannah’s sins? He remembered Molly made jam from anything she could get her hands on, as long as she had a bit of sugar. Wild blueberries, alderberries, a few strawberries from the garden, apples, she’d boil them up and make jam. A pail usually sat on the kitchen table, the only thing sweet the Leppards ever ate.
“It was the jam, Leonard, crabapple jam. That’s what killed Rosannah.”
“How’s that, Molly? What do you mean? Jam can’t kill a person.”
“It can if it’s got strychnine in it.”
“You mean Scarth put strychnine in the jam?” He watched Scarth out of the corner of his eye, half expecting him to try to flee from Molly’s indictment.
“Tell us exactly what happened that night,” Leonard said.
“Like I told the trial, Scarth come around, bothering us again. We finally got rid of him after about an hour.
“I was really tired, and Rosannah wasn’t feeling well. So we went to bed early. I fell asleep right away. Later on, the noises woke me up. Rosannah woke up, too. So we both got up.
“Rosannah said she was hungry. I toasted some bread for her. That crabapple jam, so tart a body could hardly swallow it. I only made four jars of it, them little beggars’ hard to cook up. Sour, that’s for sure, but that covered up the taste of strychnine.”
“You’re saying Scarth put poison in it, Molly?” Leonard thought of other possible perpetrators – Rosannah’s one-time lovers who might have allowed passion to snare them into an act of cold-blooded retribution. It must have been one of them. Rosannah’s first husband, David Rogers, or perhaps Nelson Teets. But most likely it was Scarth. If Molly were to incriminate him now that would solve the puzzle.
Molly was sitting up and she brushed a strand of hair from her face. Leonard had never forgotten that Scarth Tackaberry had been the last visitor to the house the night Rosannah died.
“Then it was Scarth that put strychnine in the jam?” Leonard repeated.
Leonard heard Scarth shuffling his feet beside him. “God damn it Babington, no need of you to try to coach her. Just let her tell the truth.”
Scarth Tackaberry’s outburst produced laughter in Molly. It began as a gurgle and turned into a full-throated cackle. Her head bobbed and her eyes rolled. Leonard feared she’d pass out at any moment. Molly coughed and seemed to recover her senses.
“Ah, Leonard, you’re pretty good at guessing the truth and I know you figure that Scarth had something to do with Rosannah’s death. I let one man suffer for something he didn’t do. I can’t allow another man to go down the same way.”
Her answer didn’t make sense to Leonard. He didn’t like the way this conversation was going.
“Sure, Scarth was at the house for awhile,” Molly repeated. “But after he left, there wasn’t nobody around but us family. I had such awful visions. And the wailing, it was the wailing of the banshee, it was terrible, it meant someone close was going to die.”
Leonard had heard of the ancient Irish legend of the banshee, the fairy woman who comes around when a death is imminent, and wails for the soul to be released.
“That was no banshee, Molly. Don’t you remember? It was Halloween night. What you heard was neighbourhood kids. Out for a bit of fun. Set up outside your house, singing and wailing.”
Molly didn’t seem to hear what Leonard had said.
“The wailing kept on and on. Even Rosannah heard it. I didn’t want her to know what it was, that someone was going to die. I said it was just the dog. She went to the door and stuck a big knife in beside the lock. To stop someone from coming in.
“The wailing was driving me insane. Telling me over and over that someone was going to die. I knew it meant I had to sin against Rosannah. Do something to wash away her own sin.”
Leonard caught his breath, astonished at what he had heard. “Whatever do you mean, Molly?”
“I mean it was me that fed Rosannah the poisoned ja
m.”
“You couldn’t have done that, Molly. Not on purpose, anyway. You’re just imagining that. You didn’t have any strychnine. Scarth must have put it in the jam.”
“Oh, no, he didn’t” Molly said. “I’d had the stuff for a long time. Cook Teets gave it to me. I told him I needed it to stop the wild dogs chasing the cattle.” She shuddered and began to cry.
Leonard looked away, then found himself studying Scarth Tackaberry’s face. There was a gleam of a smirk, followed by a look of contentment at what he had just heard.
Was it really possible, Leonard thought, that a Halloween prank could have triggered Rosannah’s death? Halloween’s a night for ghosts and goblins – and mischievous children. Molly must be leaving something out. He’d never heard of a mother killing her own offspring. He considered getting up and leaving. He wasn’t going to listen to this ridiculous tale of visions and voices. He was half out of his chair when Molly put her hand on his arm.
“I thought it was the Devil’s angel, that banshee I was hearing. Poor Cook Teets. Never was worse use made of a man than to hang him.” Saying that, she turned her face away.
“If Cook gave you the strychnine, why didn’t he say so?”
“I guess he thought the jury would never find him guilty,” she said, turning back to Leonard. “Or if they did, they would never hang him. He was really a good man. It took his death to convince me.”
Leonard found it hard to realize that so long after the trial, evidence of Cook’s innocence had at last fallen into his hands. But there was so much more he needed to know. “What about that shot somebody took at me? They were trying to scare me off.”
“That was Scarth Tackaberry.” She raised her head to stare at him. “You’re just a poor, dumb fool, Scarth. Not fit to mind mice. You were scairt, weren’t you, Scarth, scairt you’d be blamed after testifying against Cook, and all?”
Looking at Scarth, Leonard saw that the smirk had left his face. He was shrinking within himself at the ferocity of Molly’s remarks. It was time to interrupt her tirade.