The Unquiet Grave: A Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  I hurried inside while Johnson saw to the horse and buggy, but I waited for him in the lobby so that we could approach Mr. Preston together. I hoped that by the time Johnson came in the redness would have faded from my nose and cheeks and the feeling would have returned to my fingers and toes. I huddled there just inside the door of the lobby until Johnson appeared, and then I followed him up a flight of stairs to the lawyer’s office, a little surprised to see that he knew the way without having to ask anybody.

  “I hope he’s in,” I said softly as we walked down the upstairs hallway.

  Johnson considered it. “Well, he ought to be. It’s business hours, but this here’s a small town, so I reckon we could find him and rout him out if we had to.”

  Johnson tapped on the door, and a quiet voice said, “Come in.”

  The office was just big enough for a desk, a bookcase, and a couple of chairs for visitors to sit in. A map of Greenbrier County took up half of one wall, next to a little wooden shelf divided into compartments and stuffed with papers. The bookcase held row after row of identical leather-bound volumes—law books. And the plain wooden desk, also littered with papers, held an assortment of inkwells, a long-handled contraption for notarizing documents, and half a dozen pens and pencils set upright in a glass tumbler. At least he had a window, looking out on the back lawn of the building, but I doubt he got much comfort from it on bone-chilling days like this one.

  The man himself looked much the way I’d pictured a county lawyer. He was closer to Johnson’s age than mine, maybe a year or two older—it was hard to tell, for being stout and bewhiskered makes a man look older than he is. I couldn’t fault him for his manners, though, for he stood up when I entered his office, and waited until I had settled in one of the visitor’s chairs before resuming his own seat behind the desk.

  Johnson introduced us, ending with, “My sister-in-law here, Mrs. Jacob Heaster, has a serious legal matter to take up with you, Mr. Preston, and the details of it are most unusual, so I ask you to keep an open mind as you listen to her story. She is not a fanciful woman; I will vouch for that.”

  Mr. Preston did not smile, and I was grateful for that, for I think a prosecutor ought to be a solemn man, and mindful that an entire county looks to him to see that they get justice.

  “At your service, Mrs. Heaster,” he said, nodding for me to begin.

  I stammered a little at first, bashful to be talking about private family matters with a stranger, but I told myself that he was sort of like a doctor in that you had to tell him things in order for him to be able to help you. “Well, sir, I lost my daughter last month . . .”

  “You lost— The child died, do you mean?”

  “She wasn’t a child—she was a bride of less than three months. And the reason she died is because her worthless husband murdered her.”

  He had been watching me closely, but when I said that, he gasped and looked down at the stacks of papers on his desk. “I don’t know of this case. Was it here in Greenbrier?”

  “Livesay’s Mill. My daughter’s husband—Edward Shue is his name, or one of them anyhow—works as a blacksmith there with James Crookshanks. My daughter’s name was Elva Zona Heaster—until she married this Mr. Shue, that is. They lived over in Colonel Livesay’s old house near the smithy.”

  “And how did your daughter die, ma’am?”

  “Well, at first we thought that she had come over faint, and taken a tumble down the stairs at their house. That’s what Dr. Knapp said at the time. He was the one they called to examine Zona after she was found.”

  “And he said that she had died of natural causes?”

  “I don’t believe he had much of a chance to do a thorough examination. Zona’s husband hovered over her body and kept everybody away from her as much as he could. He even dressed her for burial himself.”

  “But you went ahead and buried her.”

  I nodded. “Well, we didn’t know any different then.”

  Mr. Preston nodded. “I see. But later you found out that this was not the case?”

  “He killed her. He wrung her neck like a chicken’s and put her at the bottom of the stairs to make it look like an accident.”

  “He admitted it?” He sat back in his chair now, regarding me with astonishment. “Your son-in-law told you this?”

  “No, sir. It was my daughter that told me.”

  The light faded from the courthouse window as we sat there, the three of us, on that gray February afternoon, going over and over the circumstances of Zona’s death and how I came to know about it. I know that my story must have sounded fantastical to Mr. Preston, but to his credit he did not laugh at me or turn me out of his office. I had been afraid he would dismiss me as a hysterical old biddy, but I couldn’t let that deter me from doing my duty to seek justice for Zona. He took me through my story over and over, asking questions six different ways, trying to see if I would contradict myself or change my story, but I held fast.

  “Your daughter’s spirit appeared to you—when?”

  “Late at night, there in our house.”

  “The night of the funeral?”

  “No, sir. It was sometime afterward.”

  He thought for a moment. “I suppose you had been brooding day and night over your daughter’s death.”

  “No, sir. I wouldn’t say that. I was grieving, of course, that she should be taken so young, but that was God’s will. I just prayed to the Lord that Zona should be allowed to come back and tell me what had happened.”

  “And you dreamed that she did just that?”

  “I wasn’t asleep. I know what dreams are like. This wasn’t one.”

  “How can you be sure, Mrs. Heaster? Sometimes dreams can seem very real.”

  “I haven’t slept much since Zona died.”

  “A hallucination then. Back in the war, I remember that after soldiers had stayed awake for too many days—night marching and that—they would start to see things that weren’t there. It might have been that.”

  “No, sir. I was wide-awake, and I saw my daughter standing right there in the room with me.”

  “Could you see through her? Was she enveloped in a bright light?”

  I shook my head. “No. None of that.”

  “Too bad. In the tales you hear, ghost stories and such, the dead always come back filmy and insubstantial. And sometimes people say that they seem to glow with an inner light.” He peered at me watching to see how I’d take to his suggestions.

  “Well, I couldn’t see through her and she didn’t glow. She was just like she always was—mostly.”

  He seemed pleased by that. “All right. Was she wearing something like a choir robe? You know, the way you see angels dressed in paintings.”

  Zona was no angel, nor likely to become one, but I thought it best not to go into that. “She was wearing the dress we buried her in. And when she spoke to me, she sounded just the same as ever.”

  “I don’t suppose you touched her, did you, Mrs. Heaster?”

  “I did. That first time she appeared, I reached out from the bed and I touched her. I wanted to know if people came back to the living in their coffins, but there was no coffin around her. It was just her, same as ever.”

  He leaned back and stared at me, and I could tell that my answer hadn’t been what he was expecting to hear. “You knew that she was dead, and yet you reached out and touched her?”

  I gave him a tight smile. Men give themselves airs about being braver than women, but I never could see it myself. “She was my daughter, sir. I had no cause to be afraid of her, alive or dead. And I had prayed for her to come, remember. It was a blessing—nothing to be fearful of.”

  “So you conversed with her, just as you would with any ordinary person?”

  “That first night when I saw her, she didn’t have much to say. It seemed like she couldn’t bring herself to tell me what happened. Four times she appeared to me, all told. It was the second time she came to me that she was able to talk more about it. That�
��s when she told me that her husband had killed her.”

  Mr. Preston made a little note on the paper in front of him. Then he leaned back and thought for a moment. “Did she say why?”

  I nodded. “She said he came home from work starving that evening, and when he found out that she hadn’t cooked up any meat for supper, he got so angry that he choked the life out of her.”

  John Preston gave me a rueful smile. “You’re claiming he murdered his new bride over a complaint about dinner? Really, Mrs. Heaster, does that seem likely to you?”

  I happened to glance at Johnson, in the chair beside me. We had been closeted there with Mr. Preston now for several hours, and I knew Johnson had been restless, worried that nightfall would overtake us and afraid of missing his own supper, but now he was also red with embarrassment. I sighed. “I know it sounds foolish, sir, but I cannot help that. No meat for his supper—that’s what she told me. And the man does eat like a famished wolf; I can testify to that. There ought to have been enough food for his dinner, though. She had potatoes in the cellar, and late last summer, we’d put up beans and tomatoes—”

  “Never mind about that, Mrs. Heaster. If a man has a murderous temper, it doesn’t take much to set him off. Still, it isn’t proof that he is guilty of murder.”

  “There’s one other thing, Mr. Preston. As Zona was taking her leave of me that second night, she turned her head all the way around—to prove to me that he had wrung her neck.”

  Mr. Preston turned pale and blinked a couple of times, but he didn’t ask me anything else. After a moment, he made some more squiggles on his paper, and then he clasped his hands together, leaned back in his chair, and looked lost in thought. Johnson was making restive motions, hoping that we had been dismissed, but I hadn’t got an answer yet, and I was willing to wait all night for one if I had to.

  Finally Mr. Preston seemed to come to a decision. He leaned forward and gave me an earnest stare. “Mrs. Heaster, I must believe you. You strike me as a God-fearing woman who would not make such an accusation frivolously or out of spite. But it is a story to confound any court, and I don’t think we can indict a man—much less hang him—on your word alone, but what you have told me gives me cause enough to look into the matter further. There may be proof, after all.”

  I nodded, relieved that he had not dismissed my story as foolishness. “What must you do to prove it?”

  “You said that Dr. Knapp attended the body, but that he hadn’t made a proper examination?”

  “Edward Shue wouldn’t hardly let anybody go near her. Now that I think back on it, it seemed like he was covering up for something.”

  “Let me talk to George Knapp, then. I’ll see what his impressions were, and then I think we’d better give him a second chance to examine the body.”

  “Dig her up, you mean?”

  “Yes, ma’am. It’s the only way I can think of to get proof that she was murdered. I can understand that you would find this distressing . . .”

  I stood up and started putting on my coat. “My daughter was murdered by her own husband, Mr. Preston. Nothing beyond that is going to distress me as long as it furthers the cause of getting justice for her. You do what you have to do. We’ll stand it.”

  Dr. George Washington Knapp was forty-four years old, too young to remember the carnage of the war and too far removed from large cities to see much in the way of clandestine murder. Oh, there were sudden deaths in the county, of course, many of them violent. Farmhands and loggers cut themselves on sharp blades and bled to death where they fell; horse-drawn conveyances overturned and crushed their passengers; people died of snakebite, or tetanus, or they fell off cliffs or out of trees. There were even murders every now and then, but they usually didn’t amount to much more than a drunken altercation that got out of hand, one that ended in gunfire or at the point of a knife. But the causes of those deaths were easy to divine—you needed little more than a glance to know what had killed the victims of such tragedies.

  Besides that, there were the expected, inevitable deaths: childbirth, strokes, heart attacks, pneumonia, consumption. He saw them all, year in and year out, as a matter of course, and did what he could to delay the inevitable result. But in a community mostly composed of simple, straightforward people, what he mostly did not look for were the secret ways of dispatching an enemy or an inconvenient loved one. If frail old ladies died from foxglove leaves mixed in with their helping of salad greens, or a brutish husband had a side of rat poison with his dinner, Dr. Knapp might catch it—or he might not. In the ordinary way of things, he didn’t attend his patients expecting them to be murdered.

  Mrs. E. Z. Shue, a newlywed in the Livesay’s Mill community of the Richlands section of the county, was no exception. She was a new patient of his, calling on him only after her recent marriage. He remembered her as a pert, handsome woman who had enjoyed good health for most of her life, but suddenly, after her marriage, her good fortune had ended. He had treated her for several weeks for what he had privately considered a female complaint, perhaps a pregnancy, some imbalance in her reproductive organs, or possibly just hysteria. Then, on January 23, he was called to the house because she had been found dead at the foot of the stairs. The occasion was sad, but not suspicious. The distraught husband could scarcely bear to be parted from the body of his young wife.

  It had seemed logical to conclude that the poor woman had come over faint and had fallen down the stairs, breaking her neck in the process. A sad ending for a young life, but not unprecedented, and not cause for suspicion. Women did faint, even when they weren’t suffering from female complaints. They starved themselves to stay thin, and laced themselves into corsets that constricted their internal organs until the very configurations of their bodies were altered. But those aberrations mostly occurred among the society women that you might find staying at the Old White; he didn’t suppose that a blacksmith’s wife in Livesay’s Mill would have indulged in such foolishness. She had fainted in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and it had cost her her life. There was nothing he could have done, so he signed the death certificate and went back to worrying about the living.

  Now this.

  A month after the patient went to her rest in the churchyard, John Alfred Preston called on him at home one evening to say that there was some doubt over the cause of Mrs. Shue’s death. Thinking back on it, Preston asked, did it strike him as in any way suspicious?

  Dr. Knapp wasn’t offended by the question. What profession doesn’t make mistakes? Cooks cover their errors with sauces; architects, with ivy; and doctors cover theirs with sod. He had been in practice too long to think himself infallible. Against all expectations, healthy young people died, and patients he had given up on got well just to spite him. So, without resentment, he thought about it. He remembered the widower hovering at his elbow, begging him not to disturb “poor Zona.” Well, that might have been grief—he had thought so at the time—but it might just as well have been something else. There was no denying that the husband’s overwrought behavior had hindered his examination of the deceased. It wouldn’t hurt to take another look at the remains, just to see if there was anything he might have missed.

  Preston seemed satisfied with his response. He had promised to secure the proper legal forms to permit the exhumation. Dr. Knapp mustn’t perform the autopsy alone, of course. In order for the results to be official, there needed to be witnesses to the findings, both laymen and medical men.

  “Witnesses, yes, I concede the point, Mr. Preston, but I expect you will arrange for us to have more onlookers than a presidential inauguration.”

  Preston smiled over his glass of the doctor’s excellent port. “The law believes in being thorough, Dr. Knapp.”

  “I only hope you know what you’re doing. Cutting up a body in an empty schoolhouse with an audience of rubberneckers is asking for trouble. Like as not, they’ll be fainting or vomiting on their shoes, and then I’ll have to leave off what I’m doing and attend to the living.” />
  “Let’s hope they’re made of sterner stuff, then. Of course, we’ve agreed that you won’t be the only physician present, so perhaps, if need be, you could take it in turns to administer first aid.”

  A few days after his meeting with Dr. Knapp, Preston appeared before Judge McClung and argued that rumors pertaining to the death of Mrs. E. Z. Shue warranted an exhumation of her remains so that they could put an end to the speculation once and for all. The woman’s family did not oppose an autopsy—indeed, they welcomed it—and the widower, under suspicion of her murder, had no standing with which to object. McClung granted the request of the new state’s attorney. To put the rumors to rest, they would disturb the repose of the dead.

  So there they were on a bitterly cold Monday, the twenty-second of February, at a remote country church twenty miles from town, ready to get on with the gruesome work of exhuming the body. They had made a grim procession that morning, a line of various horse-drawn conveyances and riders on horseback, all heading west out of Lewisburg toward Soule Chapel, the little Methodist church near Little Sewell.

  Justice Homer McClung himself had come to observe the proceedings he had ordered, accompanied by the five members of the jury of inquest. Dr. Knapp and Dr. Houston McClung rode out together, and the third physician, Dr. Lualzo Rupert, who had attended Zona before her marriage and lived at that end of the county, met his colleagues at the church. Lualzo Rupert was still a young man, but three of his siblings were also physicians, and his father, old Dr. Cyrus Rupert, had tended to the medical needs of that end of the county for at least half a century. Because his siblings had taken their medical talents elsewhere, Lualzo had inherited his father’s practice, so the tradition of being tended to by a Dr. Rupert continued uninterrupted.