Words Spoken True: A Novel

by Ann H. Gabhart

  “It’s all right. I’m here now.” He reached toward her, but stayed his hand before he touched her. When he saw the blood on her dress, his throat tightened. She was hurt. “You’re bleeding.”

  She looked down at her front. “Not mine. His blood. He pulled me down with him.” Her words were flat and clipped, as if she fought to keep herself under firm control.

  Very gently then, he touched her cheek and moved her face around in the light. The terror in her eyes stabbed through him. “It’s all right, Adriane,” he repeated softly as though soothing a frightened child. “It’s over now.”

  She met his eyes fully, the terror, if anything, growing. “He said they’d hang me if I shot him. That nobody would believe he was the river slasher.”

  “The slasher?” Even with the man lying dead at his feet and Beck maybe dying on the other side of the room, Blake could nevertheless hardly comprehend what she was saying. “Stanley Jimson?”

  She went on as though he hadn’t spoken. “He said it was my fault. That I was the reason he killed those girls, because I was so cold toward him. He was going to kill me too.” She pulled in a breath, and her voice got stronger as she went on. “I decided I’d rather hang.”

  “Shh, darling.” Blake gathered her into his arms and stroked her hair. “They don’t hang people for defending themselves.”

  She stayed stiff against him as she kept talking. “He grabbed for the gun. He thought I’d given up, but I pushed him back and we fell. The gun went off and there was blood everywhere.” A shudder went through her. “I didn’t know if it was his or mine as he grabbed for my throat. He wouldn’t die.” She pulled back from Blake to let her eyes touch on the body on the floor. “He wouldn’t die.”

  “He can’t hurt you now.” Blake tried to pull her close again, but she wouldn’t let him as her eyes came back to his. Wounded. Troubled.

  “But he’s dead,” she said. “I—”

  Blake didn’t let her finish. “You did what you had to. He needed killing.” Blake tightened his arms around her, and at last she relaxed against his shoulder and let him hold her.

  A few minutes later Duff pushed through the door into the pressroom. He stumbled over Beck’s body and fell on his knees beside the old man. “Oh no, not old Beck,” he cried.

  “He’s not dead yet, Duff. Run for a doctor.” At Blake’s words, Adriane raised her head away from his shoulder to look across the room at Beck.

  Instead of running to do as Blake said, Duff lit the gas lamp just inside the door. When light spilled across the room, the boy’s eyes widened as he took in Blake holding Adriane and then Stanley’s body on the floor.

  “He was the one, wasn’t he?” Duff said, but didn’t wait for an answer. “I see me sister’s blood on his hands.”

  “Get Dr. Hammon, Duff.” Some life came back into Adriane’s voice as she pulled away from Blake. “Beck needs help.”

  Blake didn’t like letting her loose even though he knew she had to see to the old man. She completely forgot her torn bodice as she grabbed a printer’s apron from a hook on the wall and folded it to press against Beck’s wound. The man groaned, and she talked to him as she tried to staunch the bleeding.

  “You can’t die, Beck,” she told him. “You just can’t. You hear me, I know you do, so don’t you give up. You can’t die!”

  Blake heard the terrible loneliness in her voice and knelt beside her. “Let me.” He nudged her hands off the makeshift bandage to take over applying the pressure on Beck’s wound. “Beck’s tough. He’ll make it.”

  She stared down at Beck and her next words were barely above a whisper. “But what if he dies? Like Father. Both because of me.”

  “You didn’t do this. Stanley did.”

  She didn’t say anything then, but it was easy to guess what she was thinking. He pushed his words at her. “You couldn’t marry Stanley Jimson. You knew that. Beck knew that. I knew that. In time, if your father had lived, he would have seen that too.” He looked over at her bent head, willing her to turn her eyes to him. When at last she did, he went on. “Beck’s not dead yet. You told him not to give up. Don’t you give up either.”

  A tear slipped out of her left eye and traced down through the blood on her cheek. She had said the blood wasn’t hers, but her chin was dripping blood. It was all he could do to keep pressing the bandage against Beck’s wound and not reach over to lift her head so he could see how badly she was injured. But she needed Beck to live more than she needed her own wound seen to.

  She looked back down at Beck and picked up one of his hands in both of hers. “I haven’t given up, Beck. We’ll pray. You, me, Blake.” She glanced over at Blake.

  “I’m not too good at praying.” The words were hardly out of his mouth when he remembered the desperate prayers that had risen up inside him as he was running from the waterfront. Prayers the Lord had answered. “At least out loud.”

  “You don’t have to pray out loud.”

  “All right. Then I’m praying.” And he was. Praying for Beck to keep breathing. Praying for the doctor to get there soon. Praying for Adriane, that she wouldn’t have to lose Beck.

  She kept Beck’s hand in one of hers and put her other hand on Blake’s arm as she looked upward. “Dear Lord. Please. Let it not be Beck’s time the same as it wasn’t my time. Let him live. Please. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Blake repeated after her as she leaned over to kiss Beck’s hand.

  “He feels so cold,” she said.

  “He’s lost a lot of blood, but his heart isn’t giving up. I can feel it under my hands.”

  Duff came bursting through the door with Dr. Hammon in tow. The doctor looked from Beck to the body across the room. He settled his eyes a moment on Adriane before he told Blake, “You’d best send the boy for the police.”

  “Not yet.” Blake looked up at Duff. “Go get Coleman Jimson.” Blake’s voice turned hard on the man’s name. “Tell him it can’t wait till morning. That it has to do with Stanley.”

  The doctor paled at the name and took another look at Stanley’s body. He opened his mouth as if to say more, but after looking at Blake again, he knelt beside Beck without another word. Blake lifted his hands away from the bandage to let the doctor examine the wound.

  At the first probe of the doctor’s fingers, Beck groaned loudly, opened his eyes, and began fighting to sit up. When Blake and Dr. Hammon held him down, he fought harder. “Let me at him,” the old man shouted. “He’s got Addie.”

  “I’m all right, Beck.” Adriane leaned over close to Beck’s face to calm him. “Now be still, and let Dr. Hammon take care of you.”

  The old man began breathing easier as his eyes fastened on Adriane’s face. “I was feared he was going to kill you.”

  “That’s what he had in mind.” Adriane took the old man’s hand in hers. “But we stopped him. You and me.”

  Beck’s eyes sharpened on her. “It must’ve been more you than me.” Then when she didn’t say anything, he went on. “But I reckon there ain’t nobody that can beat us in the headline war tomorrow.”

  By some miracle, the knife had missed any of Beck’s vital organs, and the doctor said with the proper rest and care, the old man had a good chance of making it. Once Beck was bandaged and settled in his bed, Dr. Hammon turned to Adriane. “Now, my dear, it appears that you too are bleeding.” His eyes touched on the blood staining her torn dress that she had pulled together as best she could.

  “It’s not my blood.” Adriane attempted to keep her voice from trembling as she desperately tried to block from her mind the image of Stanley’s face as he died. She failed on both counts.

  Blake moved closer to her and put his arm around her waist. She leaned against him, glad he was there beside her. Glad Stanley hadn’t been able to steal him away from her by whatever trap he’d set for him down on the waterfront.

  The doctor went on kindly, but insistently. “I think some of it may be yours. There appears to be a cut on your chin.”


  Adriane shut her eyes a moment and remembered Stanley’s knife slicing into her face as she jerked away from him. “It’s nothing,” she said. She reached up to touch her chin and was surprised to feel the warmth of fresh blood on her fingers.

  “No arguments. You need stitches.” Dr. Hammon’s voice was calm and businesslike. “Come out to the kitchen and we’ll fix it.” When he put his arm under her elbow to usher her out of Beck’s room toward the kitchen, Blake’s arm tightened around her. The doctor looked at him. “She’s safe now, man. There will be plenty you can do for her later, but now I need to tend to that cut.”

  When Blake turned her loose, the doctor led her out of Beck’s room back into the pressroom where the sickening smell of death assaulted her. Adriane felt faint, but she forced herself to keep walking toward the kitchen, her eyes straight ahead.

  Beside her, Dr. Hammon glanced toward Stanley’s body and then over his shoulder at Blake, who had followed them out. “For the love of mercy, Garrett, do the decent thing and cover the man’s body before his father gets here. If I need your help with your wife, I’ll call you.”

  So Adriane was sitting at the kitchen table doing her best not to flinch as Dr. Hammon stitched up the cut when Coleman Jimson came storming in the front hall and into the pressroom.

  “What’s the meaning of this? Dragging me out this time of night. I don’t care what Stanley’s done. It could have waited till morning.” His voice was loud and angry.

  Adriane’s heart began to thud back and forth in her chest. Whatever else Stanley had been, he was the Jimsons’ only son, and her gun had killed him. His blood would always be on her hands, his dying face forever in her nightmares.

  Dr. Hammon looked toward the pressroom for a moment. Then all his attention was back on Adriane. “Try to relax, Adriane. I’m almost finished here.”

  But although she was no longer feeling the pain of the stitches, she couldn’t relax. Not with Coleman Jimson about to look at his son’s body.

  The doctor must have noted her unease because he began talking in a low, kind voice. “Whatever happened to Stanley, he brought it on himself.” He looked up from working on her chin and met her eyes. “I think you can trust your husband to handle this and spare you any additional agony. He seems a decent sort.”

  From the pressroom she could hear Blake’s voice, calm but cold as he told Coleman Jimson his son was dead. Jimson’s voice trailed off, and there were no more shouts. Neither were there any sounds of grief. Instead Coleman Jimson only sounded extremely weary as he said, “His mother will take this very hard.”

  Blake gave the man no word of sympathy. Instead he said, “He was the river slasher.”

  Dr. Hammon pulled in a sharp breath, but Adriane could hear no response from Coleman Jimson in the next room.

  After a moment, Blake spoke again, the shock evident in his voice. “You knew.”

  Adriane pushed the doctor’s hands away from her chin and stood up. The doctor stopped her long enough to tie off his last stitch, then let her go. She paused in the doorway to the pressroom. Trembles ran through her as she remembered standing there earlier, feeling the evil throbbing in the darkness. Stanley’s evil. An evil his father had evidently been aware of.

  Coleman Jimson was staring at the sheet-covered body of his son. “I didn’t really know,” he said finally. “I only suspected.”

  “And you didn’t do anything,” Blake said.

  “What could I do? He was my son.”

  “And what about Adriane?” Blake seemed to nearly choke on the words. “You were willing to sacrifice her life.”

  “I never thought he’d hurt Adriane. Never.” His eyes flew back to Blake, and even from across the room, Adriane could see the concern in his face. “He didn’t, did he? She’s all right?”

  “I’m alive,” Adriane said from the doorway, her voice stronger than she’d thought it would be. “Five other girls are not.”

  Coleman Jimson stared at her a moment, taking in her torn dress, the blood. Then he looked back at Blake. “You did right to shoot him.”

  Blake didn’t contradict him, and even as Adriane started to speak, Dr. Hammon lightly touched her arm to stay her words.

  “It will be better this way,” the doctor whispered in her ear.

  And so having accepted what he thought was the truth about his son’s death, Jimson turned his mind to the future. “You can’t print this,” he told Blake.

  “It’s not the kind of thing you can hide,” Blake said.

  “Maybe not all of it, but some of it. The whole truth would kill his mother.”

  “And destroy your political career,” Blake said harshly.

  “Perhaps, but people do not always hold a father responsible for a son’s sins,” the man said, and Adriane could see him beginning to regain some control. “But think, Garrett, what it could do to Adriane if you publish the truth. The gossip.”

  “There will be gossip no matter what we print.”

  “We can control it. We must control it.” Jimson narrowed his eyes as he looked at Blake before he went on. “It will give you a certain power over me, and the loan will be forgotten.”

  “We are not for sale,” Adriane spoke up, her words fierce and determined.

  Jimson turned his eyes toward Adriane. “I wasn’t suggesting that you were, my dear, but I do hope we can be reasonable. For the good of us all. There could be some difficulties for Mr. Garrett here if the circumstances were examined too closely by the police. Plus, I’m sure neither of you would want the matter to go to trial where you might have to take the stand to testify about Stanley’s attack on you. Think how distressing that would surely be for you.”

  Blake’s voice was tightly controlled as he said, “What story can we print that people will believe?”

  “A duel,” Jimson answered quickly. “People will understand that.”

  “I don’t fight duels,” Blake said.

  Jimson thought a moment before he asked, “Was it Stanley’s gun?”

  “No.” Adriane had difficulty pushing out the words. “He had a knife.” She shuddered as she pointed to where it still lay on the floor. “It was Beck’s gun.”

  Jimson stared down at the knife before touching his eyes on the cut on Adriane’s chin. His face went white as if fully realizing what his son had thought to do. He shut his eyes and stood very still. After a long silence, he moistened his lips with his tongue and said, “All right. So this is what we’ll say. Stanley, crazed with jealousy, breaks in here to confront Adriane. Wade’s man pulls out his gun to make him leave. Stanley fights with the old man, and in the struggle Wade’s man is wounded and Stanley is killed. We don’t have to make mention of the knife.”

  Blake looked across the room at Adriane. She met his eyes and nodded. There was the germ of truth in the story.

  Duff suddenly spoke up from where he’d been watching the men from the door. “But what of me sister? What of the slasher?”

  Blake turned and answered him softly, with kindness. “Naming the murderer won’t bring back Lila, Duff, but no more girls will die.” He paused a moment, his eyes searching the boy’s face before he went on. “Will that be enough?”

  Duff looked from Blake to Adriane. “If it’s best for Miss Adriane this way.”

  Blake’s eyes lifted from Duff to Adriane. “It is.”

  And so the deal was made, the story planned with silence in regard to the whole truth vowed by all present.

  33

  Before the police came, Adriane went upstairs where she scrubbed her hands three times in her washbowl. Then she sat on the edge of her bed and stared at those hands in her lap. She thought she should change out of her bloodstained dress in case the police wanted to talk to her. Downstairs she heard the front door opening and then the murmur of unfamiliar voices, but she couldn’t make out any of the words. She was glad. She didn’t want to know what they were saying.

  She remembered how when she was a child locked inside the closet and the
monsters had edged too close, she had shut her eyes and whispered the Bible verses about light. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

  She needed light. She needed to block out everything. Stanley slicing off the buttons of her dress, then the sharp point of the knife under her chin. The deafening boom of the gun as they’d fallen. The way even as he was dying he’d reached for her throat to take her with him. His eyes changing into something not quite human as he’d fought for his last breath. And then Blake was there, anger mixed with the fear on his face. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking even as he had pulled her close and held her as though worried she might break or perhaps was already broken. Then Beck bleeding. They had to think about him.

  She tried to think about Beck now. To pray for him. That was better than thinking about what had happened. She didn’t want to think about what had happened. Not even about the deal they’d struck with Coleman Jimson. A deal to tell and publish lies. That didn’t seem right. Best for everyone perhaps, but was it right?

  The minutes ticked slowly past as she stared at her hands and waited, and though the lamps in her room were lit and light danced all around her, the monsters of the dark lurked in her mind.

  It seemed like hours later when she finally heard Blake’s step on the stairs. Once again she was the child in the closet hearing her father coming in the house and knowing that soon she’d be rescued from the dark. For a moment she felt that same joyous leap of her heart, but then she mashed it down. This time there might be no rescue. What if the police didn’t accept their story? What if they demanded to know the truth? From her. What if they decided she was guilty of causing Stanley’s death? She had wanted him to die. That was surely reason for guilt.

  She didn’t look up when Blake came into the room, but kept her eyes on her hands. Was that more blood under her fingernails?

  He came over to stand in front of her. When she kept her head bent, he gently touched her hair. “They’re gone.”

  She made herself ask, “They believed what you told them?”