On the Head of a Pin

by Janet Kellough

  What about the Caddick brothers? They peddled their wares themselves. They were the makers of the pins that had been found with each of the victims, and they had been part of the crowd of young men who had hovered around Rachel. Benjamin was often out on the road selling his portraits. Willet, he had been told, had not the personality of his brother and went less often, but still he went at times. He seemed so often in his brother’s shadow; had Rachel expressed a preference for Benjamin, unleashing a jealous fury in the younger boy? But the Caddicks gave the pins to Simms to sell, as a rule. Did they also commission others to sell them? And what about the books? Both were such popular items that almost anyone would have had access to them.

  There was a key here, somewhere, a commonality that would point to the culprit, he was sure of it. His tired mind just couldn’t seem to find it.

  As the year wore on, Lewis became increasingly convinced that his spiritual fatigue was related in some way to the conundrum. Night after night he studied the chapter in the Book of Proverbs. He felt sure that the words were somehow tied in with the murderer’s twisted motives. Why else would they have been left in the women’s laps, and open to the same place every time? He pored over the passage that seemed most appropriate:

  For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.

  It seemed almost a description of the murderer’s intent, except that when he read farther, the admonition was clear: “Remove thy way far from her, and come not nigh the door of her house.”

  The killer had not removed himself — he had sought the women out, strangled them, and mutilated one. How had he misinterpreted the words so badly that he was driven to such horrific deeds? Lewis tried to put himself in the killer’s place, in his mind, to try to understand what it was that was driving him, but he got no closer to understanding. It only seemed to make his fever flare up again.

  II

  Lewis and Betsy fell into the habit of attending a different service every Sunday, at least any that were within reasonable riding distance. At some time, with any luck, in the not too distant future he felt he would be ready to take on his ministerial duties again, and he wanted to keep his hand in and make himself known to as many congregations as possible. He reflected that by the time his career was over he would probably be familiar to almost every Methodist society in the eastern part of Canada West.

  Some weeks they would travel a considerable distance, visiting many congregations in turn. Other times they stayed closer to home. One of his favourites was at Millcreek. It was where he had grown up, and he still had many relations and old friends there. It was a comfort to him to be back among his own, to catch up on news of previous acquaintances, to hear of the milestones of births and deaths that lend a stately and measured pace to life.

  As usual, Martha managed to charm everywhere they went, and the young women and girls would clamour to look after her. It was less “looking-after” than “doing-for,” with the girls competing with one another to amuse the child. Martha took it all in stride, looking as if all the attention was no more than she was entitled to. It was as well the child was so good natured, Lewis thought, otherwise she would become quite spoiled.

  One fine fall Sunday, a day when the air was crisp with the demise of summer and the smell of ripening apples wafted around them, they rode once again to the little village of Millcreek, all of them looking forward to the occasion. They were met, not with the usual welcoming faces, but with grim and sorrowful ones. Another young girl was gone.

  “It was Jemima Clark,” the miller informed Lewis when he asked what the trouble was. “You know her. She was Elias Clark’s daughter. She was one of the ones that played with your young one.”

  Lewis recalled her, only vaguely, as having dark brown hair, maybe even chestnut. Beyond that he could form no clear vision of her features.

  “What happened?” he asked. Let it be an accident, he prayed silently. Let it be fever, or a fit, or fire. Let it be anything but another murder.

  “The family lives some way out of town. It’s pretty isolated. The rest of the family had gone off to visit an aunt, but the girl said she wasn’t feeling well, so they left her at home. When they returned, they found her dead in her bed.”

  Lewis felt sick as he waited for the details he knew would follow.

  “Her clothing was all rucked up and she had bruises round her neck. They think she was attacked by someone with ill intent, you know, with the clothing like that.”

  The miller blushed. “It was probably some outlaw — there are enough of them around, and their farm, as I say, it’s pretty far out with no one else around.”

  “I heard it was Bill Johnston,” said a woman who was standing nearby listening to them. “He and Kate have been sighted down along the front. Who’s to say he wouldn’t head north and start attacking anywhere.”

  Lewis gave this theory the short shrift he felt it deserved. “That’s nonsense. Bill Johnston is a thief and a pirate, but as far as I know he’s not given to attacking innocent girls.”

  The woman opened her mouth to protest, but Lewis cut her short. “You’ll say nothing of this silliness to the family, do you hear me? They have troubles enough to deal with, without having to listen to wild speculation on your part.”

  He had brought the full weight of his authority as a preacher to this pronouncement, and the woman abruptly closed her mouth.

  For once in his life he was impatient to see the service at an end. The minister alluded to the girl’s death briefly, offering comfort to both the family and the church members. The group of Martha-minders was red-eyed and downcast, and not even the little girl’s antics could enervate them. They filed soberly out the door at the end, none staying behind to tease or play. To Lewis’s surprise, Isaac Simms’s red and blue painted wagon was pulled off the road just outside the gate, and Simms himself was leaning against it, waiting for the meeting to be over. Everyone clustered around him, for if anyone had the latest details of the crime, it would be the peddler.

  “They think it was a thief who hadn’t expected to find anyone in the house,” he said. “Maybe one of the Patriot Hunters who escaped and is still roaming the country.”

  This made no sense to Lewis. The Hunters who had been captured at Prescott had all been executed, transported, or returned to the States. Any who had avoided arrest would have melted back across the border as soon as they could. They wouldn’t have lingered long if they could help it, for every moment at large was a moment in which they could be seized.

  “I heard it was Bill Johnston, or one of his men gone off on his own.” It was the same woman again, the one who had proffered this opinion before.

  To his surprise, Simms seized on this statement. “It could well be,” he said. “Johnston is finding it harder and harder to get supplies. Everyone knows Kate and everyone is watching her every move. Maybe he got desperate and came in off the river. If that’s the case, we’d all better watch out.”

  This statement caused a great alarm in the crowd. If Johnston could attack here, he could attack anywhere and none were safe. The fact that the peddler had allowed this as a possibility was as good a confirmation as any of them needed: It was the pirate Bill Johnston and they were all in mortal peril.

  It was at this point that Simms reached into the back of his wagon and brought forward his box of bibles and prayer books. If anything was guaranteed to generate interest in religious materials, it was the prospect of meeting one’s maker in a sudden and violent way. Lewis was disgusted at Simms’s obvious manipulation of the crowd for his own mercenary purposes, but everyone else seemed oblivious to it. They pushed and shoved their way to the front in order to be the first one to buy. The most popular items were the small books of prayers and psalms, each of them bound in cheap leather covers that left dye stains on the palms of those who handled them. Those and the praye
r pins.

  The details, when Lewis got them, for the most part matched what the smith had told him, and what he expected to hear. The girl had been left alone and was later discovered in her bed, fully dressed, by her returning family. Again, a small red Book of Proverbs was in her hands, open to Chapter Five. And like the last time, her petticoats had been thrown up and her womanhood exposed, and although it was not general knowledge, Lewis discovered from the local doctor that she had been slashed, not only below her skirts, but around her breasts as well.

  Lewis outlined his interest in the case, and the doctor listened soberly to the details of the earlier deaths.

  “Have you discussed this with the chief constable?” was his first question.

  “Not yet. I’ve gone to the law on previous occasions. With the first murder, of course, no one thought it was a murder. With the second, I was suspicious but the local constable didn’t show much interest. The Coroner’s jury ruled it was a natural death, and he was little-disposed to investigate beyond that. I got no farther with the third. That time it was evident to all that it was foul play, but the constabulary was too busy to do anything about it until it was far too late to make any sense of it. Unfortunately, the crimes all took place in different jurisdictions, so I don’t know who to talk to next.”

  The doctor nodded. “Yes, that’s one of the things that I hope will change now that we’ve been organized into a country of sorts. As long as there’s an amateur police force, we’re going to see amateur results. We need full-time police.” He exhaled in a long, whistling breath. “I have never in my thirty years as a doctor seen anything like this. I think you’re right, there’s a monster out there. The question is, what do we do now?”

  Lewis felt an enormous relief at these words. His encounter with Francis Renwell had shaken his confidence and he had not communicated his theories to anyone since. He had been obsessed with Renwell, and now he was obsessed with the details of the murders. He had been wrong about Renwell, so he could have been wrong in his conclusions concerning the entire matter.

  “Well,” he said, “I think we need to inform the local constable and hope he has enough sense to see the pattern. After that, I suppose, it’s up to him, but I can’t help but feel that he’ll take my words more seriously because you have.”

  The doctor was deep in thought. “If this man has killed four, he’ll kill more. It’s only a matter of time. The real question is where he’ll strike next. Unfortunately, he, and I’m assuming it’s a ‘he’ …”

  It hadn’t occurred to Lewis that it could be a woman. His heart wanted to instantly dismiss the notion of any woman being capable of committing such a deed, but in his mind he knew the doctor was right. Evil lives in women’s hearts as well as men’s, as much as everyone liked to claim otherwise.

  “I think, for the moment, we should assume it’s a man. I mean, there’s a prurient aspect here that speaks of a man, and the marks on the neck looked to me as though they were made by someone with large hands.”

  The doctor agreed. “Whoever it is has an excuse to travel. There are not many women who are unaccountable for their whereabouts for any length of time.” He looked at Lewis shrewdly. “Do you have a list of possibles? You must have at least thought about it.”

  “There are a number of men I know who were in the different communities at the right time, or at least had the opportunity to be there. I’m disinclined to start pointing fingers, because truth to tell, one of those men is myself.”

  The doctor chuckled. “Thank you for that. It had occurred to me that this was the case, but I suspect you wouldn’t have been pointing it out to me if you were the murderer.”

  “Unless I was deviously clever.”

  “No, I don’t think this is a clever man. I’m not even sure the murders are premeditated. He’s left too many clues. It’s almost as though there is a ritual that has to take place when the madness strikes him. The book, for example, would argue a religious man, yet what religious man would do such a terrible thing? The skirts thrown up, yet no act of intercourse undertaken.”

  “That’s one of the things that has differed from time to time,” Lewis pointed out. “With the first two murders, he was careful to leave the skirts so that they seemed to have become disarranged through some thrashing of the victim. It’s only with the last two that his intervention is obvious.”

  “So, his madness is growing. The ritual is becoming more complicated. Lust is not a factor here, I think; otherwise he would have assaulted them. It’s more like some strange version of revenge. But revenge against whom?”

  “Well, women, I suppose. Else why would he murder only women?”

  “There is another possibility. It could be somehow tied up with his feelings toward religion, or some sort of guilt that the verses emphasize.”

  Deep down Lewis felt the truth of this assessment. The Proverbs warned against the wiles of strange women, the Lord’s Prayer promised comfort and forgiveness for the sin.

  “There’s something else,” Lewis said. “With the first murders, it’s as if he waited for extraordinary external events to occupy everyone’s attention to help cover his crime. This last time there was nothing — no turmoil in the community, no battle, no fire. It happened with no reason and no warning.”

  “He’s becoming bolder. He’s killed three times with no consequence. He must believe that he can kill at will and that no one can catch him. Why else would he leave so many clues behind?”

  Again Lewis felt a shimmer at the edge of his mind, a grappling toward understanding, but it was so elusive that he couldn’t even begin to express it in words, except that it had something to do with the relationship between madness and mayhem. But he couldn’t catch it, and it remained just a dancing mote.

  “What do you make of the pins?” he said finally.

  “A grisly thing to do with them,” the doctor said. “As to their meaning, I have no idea. Unless …” “What?”

  “It’s almost as if he’s leaving them as a signature, a trademark, so that there will be no confusion about who has committed the deed. Why else stab something so inconsequential into a body that’s already dead?”

  Lewis had no answer to this. “We need to find him before he does it again.”

  But how? They agreed they would talk to the chief constable, and hope for the best from that quarter, but Lewis vowed to somehow narrow his list of suspects and keep his ear firmly to the ground.

  III

  By the end of the year, Lewis had had enough of school teaching. Although several of his students were quite bright and a joy to instruct, more were either too dull or too hungry to grasp much beyond the basics or failed to attend enough classes to have even those facts stick. Physically he felt fit and rested, and he longed to return to what he felt was his true calling.

  He broached the topic with Betsy one evening after supper. Meals in his household tended to be riotous affairs, Martha bubbling with her adventures of the day. She was a talented mimic, and could produce a passable imitation of everyone she met, from the cobbler, who started every sentence with a throat clearing “harrumph,” to the widow who lived next door — a woman Martha had quite charmed and who could be counted on for a cracker or a pickle every time the little girl wandered across into her yard. When she had finally settled enough to give thanks for their food, Lewis privately added a small personal thank-you for this little being that was brightening their lives so much. She was amusing, yes, but a real help to Betsy, too, and was eager to perform whatever tasks her grandmother deemed she could manage — and even some that she couldn’t though she tried anyway. She was an easy child to fall in love with and he enjoyed her presence immensely, yet there was something in him that held back, that didn’t return affection quite as freely as it was given. He knew it was because of Sarah. He often wondered, if he had been less prone to let her have her way, would his daughter still be alive?

  “Nonsense,” said Betsy firmly the one time he voiced this opinion to
her. “There’s no question that you were always easier on your daughter than your sons, but Sarah was Sarah and she would have lived her life the way she did no matter what you had done. And Martha is Martha and she’s not her mother. Stop taking so much on yourself, Thaddeus, and leave it to God to sort things out.”

  As usual, it was good advice, and he prayed for wisdom in dealing with his children.

  “What do you think?” he asked Betsy, after Martha’s face and hands had been washed, her hair combed into braids, and she was tucked down into her little bed upstairs. “I’ve got a hankering again.”

  She knew exactly what he meant. She looked at him with her clear grey eyes, the eyes she had passed on to both her daughter and her granddaughter. “I’ll say to you the same thing I said the first time you talked to me about your ‘hankering.’ Do what you need to do, and I’ll stand by you.”

  He felt a rush of love and gratitude to this woman who had stood by his side for so many years.

  “There’s only one thing I’ll ask of you,” she went on. “Don’t expect me to live with Will and Nabby. And if you’re going to leave me on my own again, I’d as soon find one place and stay there. It would be better for Martha, too.”

  “Agreed.” He sighed. “Speaking of which, I suppose I should check on Will. The year is up.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up, Thaddeus. I doubt there’s been much change there.”

  There wasn’t. Or rather, things had changed in detail but not in substance. Nabby’s baby, a boy, was a mewling little thing who was more or less ignored by his mother except when it was necessary to feed him — a task that she complained about bitterly. “It takes so much out of me,” she said. “I’m tired all the time.”

  Will had hired a neighbour to help her, and as far as Lewis could see it was this girl who kept the household running, for Nabby still refused to have anything to do with the chickens or the kitchen garden — or the cooking or the cleaning either as far as he could see. The kitchen, which had been scrubbed and tidy when Betsy was there, was now muddy and cluttered with unwashed pots, muddy boots, and pieces of harness. It wasn’t the hired girl’s fault, he knew, because though she worked hard enough, she was trying to do the work of three.