The Unquiet Grave

by Sharyn McCrumb

  The jurors’ expressions over the course of the trial had changed from frank curiosity to a stony disapproval. They looked at the defendant with increasing animosity, and finally they ceased to look at him at all.

  Early in the second week of the trial, John Alfred Preston finally put Mary Jane Heaster on the stand. He had waited to do so until a solid case had been built up against the defendant, because he knew that the fantastic testimony of the grieving mother might prove dangerous to his case. As he had told her before the trial began, he did not propose to question her about her encounter with the ghost of her murdered daughter, but in a small, sparsely populated place like Greenbrier County, word inevitably got around. She had made no secret of the incident. Still, he reasoned that if he did not allow her to testify, people would wonder why, and the rumors about that might do more damage than the testimony itself. So, with some misgivings, on Tuesday, June 29, Preston finally called Mrs. Heaster to the stand.

  After the steady drumbeat of condemnation of Shue that had taken place over the previous days of the trial, Mrs. Heaster’s account added very little, except to reinforce the opinions of the previous witnesses. Yes, she said in response to questioning, Edward Shue had been jaunty and cheerful when he accompanied his wife’s body back to her parents’ home. He had been secretive and controlling, not allowing the family to visit Mrs. Shue in their new home. At the funeral, he had shown no indication of grief.

  Preston’s questioning of the grieving mother was routine, but most of those present had heard the rumors, and the courtroom was unnaturally quiet, with the jurors and the spectators concentrating on Mrs. Heaster’s testimony. At last, the precise recital came to an end, and with a sigh of resignation, Preston turned to the defense table. “Your witness.”

  Dr. Rucker hauled himself up from his chair, mopped his brow, and grinned at the jury, as if to say, Watch this. Then he inclined his head toward Mrs. Heaster with a feral smile, and the attack began.

  “I have heard that you had some dream or vision which led to this postmortem examination?”

  “They saw enough themselves without me telling them. It was no dream—she came back and told me that he was mad that she didn’t have no meat cooked for supper. But she said she had plenty, and said that she had butter and apple butter, apples, and named over two or three kinds of jellies—pears, and cherries, and raspberry jelly—and she says, I had plenty, and she says, Don’t you think he was mad, and just took down all my nice things and packed them away, and just ruined them.”

  Dr. Rucker was looking at the jury, inviting them to share his amusement at the little lady’s prattle.

  “And she told me where I could look, down back of Aunt Martha Jones’s, in the meadow, in a rocky place; that I could look in a cellar behind some loose plank and see. It was a square log house, and it was hewed up to the square, and she said for me to look right at the right-hand side of the door as you go in, and at the right-hand corner as you go in. Well, I saw the place, just exactly as she told me, and I saw blood right there where she told me, and she told me something about that meat every time she came, just as she did the first night. She came three or four times, and four nights, but the second night she told me that her neck was squeezed off at the first joint, and it was just as she told me.”

  “Now, Mrs. Heaster, this sad affair was very particularly impressed upon your mind, and there was not a moment during your waking hours that you did not dwell upon it?”

  “No, sir, and there is not yet, either.”

  “And was this not a dream founded upon your distressed condition of mind?”

  “No, sir, it was not a dream, for I was as wide-awake as I ever was.”

  “Then if not a dream or dreams, what do you call it?”

  “I prayed to the Lord that she might come back and tell me what happened, and I prayed that she might come herself and tell on him.”

  “Do you think that you actually saw her in flesh and blood?”

  “Yes, sir, I do. I told them the very dress that she was killed in, and when she went to leave me, she turned her head completely around, and looked at me like she wanted me to know all about it. The first time she came, she seemed that she did not want to tell me as much about it as she did afterwards. The last night she was there, she told me that she did everything she could do, and I am satisfied that she did do all that, too.”

  “Now, Mrs. Heaster, don’t you know that these visions, as you term them or describe them, were nothing more or less than four dreams founded upon your distress?”

  “No, I don’t know it. The Lord sent her to me to tell it. I was the only friend that she knew she could tell and put any confidence in it. I was the nearest one to her. He gave me a ring that he pretended she wanted me to have, but I don’t know what dead woman he might have taken it off of. I wanted her own ring, and he would not let me have it.”

  “Mrs. Heaster, are you positively sure that these are not four dreams?”

  “Yes, sir, it was not a dream. I don’t dream when I am wide-awake, to be sure, and I know I saw her right there with me.”

  “Are you not considerably superstitious?”

  “No, sir, I’m not. I was never that way before, and am not now.”

  “Do you believe the scriptures?”

  “Yes, sir, I have no reason not to believe it.”

  “And do you believe the scriptures contain the words of God and His Son?”

  “Yes, sir, I do. Don’t you believe it?”

  “Now I would like, if I could, to get you to say that these were four dreams, and not four visions or appearances of your daughter in flesh and blood?”

  “I am not going to say that, for I am not going to lie.”

  “Then you insist that she actually appeared in flesh and blood to you upon four different occasions?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did she not have any other conversation with you other than upon the matter of her death?”

  “Yes, sir, some other little things. Some things I have forgotten—just a few words. I just wanted the particulars about her death, and I got them.”

  “When she came, did you touch her?”

  “Yes, sir. I got up on my elbows and reached out a little further, as I wanted to see if people came in their coffins, and I sat up and leaned on my elbow, and there was light in the house. It was not a lamplight. I wanted to see if there was a coffin, but there was not. She was just like she was when she left this world. It was just after I went to bed, and I wanted her to come and talk to me, and she did. This was before the inquest, and I told my neighbors. They said she was exactly as I told them she was.”

  “Had you ever seen the premises where your daughter lived?”

  “No, sir, I had not, but I found them just exactly as she told me they were, and I never laid eyes on that house until her death. She told me this before I knew anything of the buildings at all.”

  “How long after this when you had these interviews with your daughter until you did see these buildings?”

  “It was a month or more after the examination. It had been a little over a month since I saw her.”

  At this point, Dr. Rucker retired from the field and indicated to the prosecution that they might redirect questions to the witness. Preston approached the box. “Mrs. Heaster, you said your daughter told you that down by the fence in a rocky place you would find some things?”

  “She said for me to look there. She didn’t say I would find some things, but for me to look there.”

  “Did she tell you what to look for?”

  “No, she did not. I was so glad to see her I forgot to ask her.”

  “Have you ever examined that place since?”

  “Yes, we looked at the fence a little, but didn’t find anything.”

  The jury waited for more, for some sort of final statement that would make sense of the convoluted story of the search for unspecified items in the little shack near the rocks, but there was no enlightening explanation, no re
sult to the odd little quest. Mary Jane Heaster simply answered the final question and sat there in the witness box with folded hands, waiting for further instructions from Mr. Preston.

  The court fell silent, waiting with her. At last he seemed to give up the idea of rebutting the cross-examination altogether, as though belaboring the grieving mother’s ghost story no longer mattered. He finished lamely, by murmuring, “Thank you, Mrs. Heaster, you may step down now.”

  With one last meaningful look at the jury, she stood up and made her way out of the silent courtroom. Only when the doors closed behind her did the buzz of voices break out among the spectators, punctuated by the pounding of the judge’s gavel.

  Another witness was called, and the trial ground onward in the breathless heat of the little courtroom.

  The chief witness for the defense was Edward Erasmus Stribbling Shue himself. He wore a white shirt cleaner than the one he had worn on the previous days, with a clumsily knotted necktie at his throat, apparently meant to show that he evinced the proper respect for the authority of the court. His lawyers regarded him with the wary misgivings of parents watching a small child mount a skittish horse. He wiped his right hand on the side of his trousers before placing it on the Bible, obscuring it completely with a sweaty palm and thick, stubby fingers that curled over the edge. When he took the oath, looking as carefully solemn as a choirboy, he looked up at the jury and nodded, smiling, as if to say, No hard feelings, fellas.

  No one smiled back.

  There were no questions. The defendant had taken the stand on this last day of the trial in order to make a statement, and no doubt his attorneys had impressed upon him the necessity of impressing the court with his sincerity and his wholesome charm.

  He offered to shake hands with the judge, who politely indicated that Mr. Shue should be seated in the witness chair and get on with it. Shue sat, composed himself for a moment, and then he faced the jury with the earnest look of a horse trader. “I’ll be honest with you . . .” he began.

  Nobody could remember much of what he said after that. He rambled on for most of the afternoon, talking about what a poor, hardworking fellow he was, and claiming that the prosecution had taken against him, bolstering their case with lies and coincidences. He said that his wife (he never called her by name) had died of natural causes, and that all the evidence against him had either been invented or misconstrued by people who were out to get him. He smirked at the outlandish claim of Mrs. Heaster that her daughter’s ghost had accused him of murder, tacitly inviting the jury to have a chuckle at the foolishness of fanciful older ladies.

  His tanned face beamed with sweat, and one black curl dangled just over his right eyebrow, giving him the look of a boyish rascal.

  He had dearly loved his wife, he said, and he swore that even though he had indeed served time in the pen at Moundsville, he was once again an honest, upstanding citizen.

  He could have made all these points in a quarter of an hour, but apparently he realized that his life depended on what he would say, and he seemed determined to use every minute he was allowed in order to waste no opportunity to charm the court, and to leave no argument unspoken. He mopped his brow with a soiled red bandana and kept on talking. Once, when his voice faltered, Mr. Gardner got up from the defense table and took him a glass of water from the lawyers’ pitcher. Shue gulped it down, coughed a bit to clear his throat, and launched into speech again, making the same points he had already made twice before.

  At one point, he broke off in his declaration of love for his dead wife to look over at the jury. “Look at this face, gentlemen,” he said, big-eyed and solemn. “Look in my eyes. Do I look like a murderer to you? Do I look like a heartless killer?” He seemed on the verge of tears, and his voice quavered. The jurors squirmed in their seats and looked away, perhaps embarrassed at such a fervid display of emotion in the otherwise staid and somber courtroom.

  All his life “Trout” Shue had been a virile, handsome man, relying on his easy smile and a lazy charm to make people willing to give him his own way. Mostly his manner had served him well. He had managed to acquire three wives, a host of friends, and a decent job, despite his criminal record. He must have reasoned that his good looks and affable personality would impress the jury so much that they would be loath to convict him of such a terrible crime.

  In this, he was not entirely wrong.

  After lengthy closing arguments, the twelve men retired to deliberate on Thursday afternoon, July 1. One hour and ten minutes later, they came back and filed into the jury box, ready to render their verdict.

  Judge McWhorter poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher beside him, and drank deeply while he waited for the courtroom to settle down. The foreman stood at his place, twisting the paper with sweaty fingers and licking his lips in anticipation of his big moment.

  At a nod from the judge, Rucker and Gardner stood, helping their client to his feet. Shue swayed a little, and the color drained from his face. He glanced first at the jury, but they were resolutely looking in any direction except at him. Next he seemed to be searching out the exits to the courtroom, but the bailiff moved closer to the defense table, his hand on his pistol. Rucker stood at attention, a soldier awaiting grim orders, but James Gardner touched his client’s arm and leaned over to murmur soothing words to him.

  In a tired voice, Judge McWhorter uttered the formula: “Has the jury reached a verdict?”

  “Reckon we have, your honor.” The wiry little man in a worn black suit jacket and a string tie held up the scrap of paper, and his fellow jurors folded their arms, nodding in agreement.

  “Well, let’s have it then.”

  “We find the defendant guilty of first degree murder. Guilty as charged.” He paused for a moment, cleared his throat, and added, “But we recommend that instead of hanging him, that the judge sentence him to the penitentiary for the rest of his natural life.”

  When the spectators heard the verdict, a clamor broke out in the courtroom, but Dr. Rucker shouted them all down. “Motion for a new trial, your honor!”

  Judge McWhorter nodded in his direction, just to indicate that he had heard him above the din. Then he thanked the jury and adjourned the court.

  Edward Shue allowed himself to be manacled and led away by the officers. He stumbled from the courtroom like a sleepwalker, without a word to his attorneys or a glance at anyone present.

  Dr. Rucker gathered up his papers and prepared to leave.

  James Gardner pushed his chair back and stood up. “Well, at least he wasn’t sentenced to death.”

  Rucker nodded, apparently unmoved by the outcome of the trial. “It was a sensible verdict, really. The jury believed that he did it, but we managed to make them understand that the evidence was only circumstantial, and apparently they felt that there was just enough of a sliver of doubt to keep them from ordering him hanged.”

  “What about Mrs. Heaster’s testimony?”

  He laughed. “The ghost of his dead wife claiming that he did her in? I think the jury saw through that quick enough. A spiteful old woman out for revenge, that’s all that was. You notice that Mr. Preston did not question her about it himself when he had her on the stand. Perhaps I should have let well enough alone and not mentioned it, but I thought it would show the court how vindictive and unreliable she was. I had hoped that her testimony might sway the jury to favor Mr. Shue, but perhaps they were a credulous bunch.”

  “She was most steadfast on the witness stand. I think the jurors were impressed.”

  “I know. I was surprised. Who’d have thought that a backwoods farmwife would have had so much composure in a court of law?” Rucker picked up his white straw hat and placed it on top of the stack of papers he was carrying. “Ah, well! I don’t suppose we could have got him off, James, no matter what we did. A defendant with two dead wives and a prison record for horse-stealing has too much baggage to receive an acquittal even if he had a pair of archangels defending him. Don’t take it to heart. We d
id all we could.”

  Gardner nodded. “And I suppose there’s always another chance for him, since you’ve requested a new trial.”

  “Oh, that!” Rucker gave him a cold smile. “Lawyers have to claim to be unhappy with a guilty verdict. It’s good for business. Remember that. But I shall have a talk with our client about the prospect of a new trial, and I believe he will agree that it would be best to abandon that idea. After all, this jury did spare his life. The next one might not be so accommodating.”

  A few days after the trial ended, John Alfred Preston and his wife joined a dinner party at the Old White Hotel, at the request of an old friend and fellow board member at Washington and Lee University. A number of his acquaintances were summering at the hotel in White Sulphur Springs, always a popular alternative to the heat and miasmas of the lower elevations. The dinner party was by no means a celebration of his victory in court, he told Mrs. Preston, for to celebrate another man’s ruin would be unseemly, but the prospect of wearing evening clothes and dining with people of taste and refinement was most gratifying. It would be a pleasant change from the crowded courtroom, reeking with the sulfurous smell of sweating, unwashed bodies.

  The dinner party was quite elaborate. In the Old White’s beautifully appointed dining room, the last rays of the July sun shimmered in the long windows. Places for fourteen were set around the banquet table, an expanse of starched white damask, twinkling in candlelight with fine crystal and gleaming silver serving dishes. Preston greeted his old friends and exchanged pleasantries with the new acquaintances before they settled in to dine. He had noticed, however, that one of the gentlemen had a copy of the Greenbrier Independent folded next to his plate. He steeled himself, suspecting that he was to furnish the evening’s topic of discussion.

  The party had nearly finished the soup course, an interval dominated by remarks about fashion and the weather, before the gentleman with the newspaper cleared his throat and addressed the attorney across the table.