A Stranger in the Kingdom

by Howard Frank Mosher

  At dusk, the Dog Cart Man and his dogs retreated into the hayloft for the night. All in all, it had been one of the best days I could remember, and just before I went up to bed myself, Mom said I could go with my new friend again in the morning.

  We spent most of the next day in the Academy auditorium, where the Dog Cart Man refurbished the mural of the entire village on the stage backdrop—the church, the Academy, the Common with its gorgeous wine-glass elms, the brick shopping block, the hotel and commission sales barn, and the cemetery, with Jay Peak and the Green Mountains in the background.

  Around three in the afternoon, we returned to the gool by way of the covered bridge, stopping briefly to touch up the signs over each end that said CROSS AT A WALK. Then we struck off up into the gore, and turned onto the old trace leading to the granite quarry.

  Somewhat guiltily, I thought of Claire for the first time since the previous morning, but instead of following the burn all the way up to the falls where I’d called her name in the mist until the echo scared me, we cut off the trace and out around the deep pit. In the bright afternoon sunlight, it no longer looked eerie to me—just empty and forlorn. On the back side of the quarry, the Dog Cart Man unhitched his dogs, handed me four buckets of paint, and hoisted the homemade ladder to his shoulder. In single file we pushed our way through a tangle of blackberry canes, to the faded pictograph he’d painted long ago on the granite face of the cliff above the quarry of the gypsy stonecutters who had once come regularly to Kingdom County. Over the years it had faded almost beyond recognition, and at this time of year it was obscured by the leafy summer foliage of second-growth hardwoods.

  As we approached the cliff, something let out a cough. Up from the pit flapped one of the ravens I’d seen two days ago. But if the Dog Cart Man noticed it, he paid no attention.

  He propped his ladder against a slanted defile, and climbed up to a shelf just below the faded picture of the gypsies and motioned for me to hand him the paint cans. He pulled the ladder up behind him, got out his pipe, and began to smoke and study the painting.

  It was actually more discernible from a distance. Up close, I could just make out the faint tracery of the gypsy figures. The Dog Cart Man smoked a bowlful of the evil-smelling hemp, staring at the painting and the woods and the sky, and all at once he was painting fast.

  As the dogs and I watched from the foot of the cliff, the old gypsy stonecutters took shape again, four men in vivid blue pantaloons with wide crimson sashes and billowing green and yellow shirts, hauling a block of granite out of a pit of opaque, green water below. It was wonderful to watch the painter at work, and he worked so fast that the painted figures taking form above me seemed themselves to be working and sweating in the great heat.

  I was so absorbed by the wonderful tableau that I jumped when the lead dog, a spaniel-hound cross with floppy ears and long legs, tugged at my pants cuff.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  The dog released my cuff and ran into the blackberry patch nearby, then returned and tugged at my pants again.

  This time I followed it.

  I bulled my way through the briers, trampling on the tough thorny canes. The dog was thrashing somewhere out of sight ahead. I was pretty sure it scented a partridge and braced myself for the sudden roaring whir of wings; I expected it to flush thundering out from under my feet at any moment.

  Abruptly, I came out of the blackberry cane patch by a pin cherry tree growing on the very brink of the quarry. The spaniel-hound ran to the very edge and wagged its tail and looked back at me. I snapped my fingers. “Come back here, boy.”

  The dog looked at me inquiringly.

  I crept closer and peered over the edge. Fifteen or so feet below me was a ledge, and below the ledge the surface of the flooded quarry. As I started to turn away, something on the ledge gave an odd sort of jerking heave. I grasped the slender trunk of the pin cherry and leaned far out over the edge and peered down again.

  An enormous raven was standing on something long and bright, sprawled on the ledge below. Except for the torn bright garment I would not have recognized it because it had no face where its face should have been, the ravens had seen to that. I yelled. I reeled back, tripped over the dog, and fell crashing into the blackberry bushes. I was on my feet, screaming for help and plunging back through the bushes, heedless of the raking thorns on my arms and hands and face, shrieking Claire’s name at the Dog Cart Man on the shelf above me, who, oblivious to my screaming and to all the sounds of the world worked rapidly on under the hot afternoon sun beating down on him and his painting and the dogs, on me and the quarry and the shattered body of Claire LaRiviere on the ledge in the quarry.

  Fleeting, jumbled, indistinct nightmare images remain: woods flying by me, the silvery falls spilling over the lip of the quarry, riffles and pools I would never fish again. Welcome Kinneson looking up and waving at me from his steam crane, a jarring spill on the gravel at the junction of the gool and the gore that cut the heels of my hands to bloody shreds. Somehow I was on the porch at home, where my mother sat in her sun hat snapping green beans, and then I was in my mother’s arms and pieces of beans were raining down on us both and I was crying and shouting something about Claire, an accident, ravens.

  Finally my mother managed to understand what had happened. Her hand shot to her mouth as though to keep herself from crying out. Then we were inside the house and she was on the phone to my father, and then she was hugging me again.

  “That poor, poor waif,” Mom said over and over again. “Oh, Jimmy. That poor little girl. . . .”

  Within minutes, Sheriff White and Doc Harrison and Zack Barrows and Deputy Pine Benson and Reverend Andrews and my father were standing on the porch and I was trying to tell them how I had found the body.

  “On the back side, the woods side, you say, Jimbo?” Sheriff White kept asking me. “You say it was on the back side of that old hole up there? You’d best come along and show us where.”

  Mason reached for my arm, but Reverend Andrews told him that there was no need for me to go back up there now, they’d locate the body all right.

  Mason whirled around and pointed at the minister. “Reverend, I’m going to tell you something. I don’t know how they work things where you come from, but up here the preachers stick to preaching and leave the elected officials to take care of enforcing the law. In case you didn’t know it, you’re in enough hot water as it is.”

  “Just what do you mean by that?”

  “For God’s sake, gentlemen, let’s not start quarreling between ourselves,” my father said. “There’s a dead girl up on that mountain.”

  The last thing I heard as they went down off the porch was Doc Harrison saying in his dry sardonic voice, “Leave your siren off this time, will you, Mason? She isn’t going to get any deader than she already is, you know.”

  How I got up to my bedchamber I have no idea. I cried my eyes out there and pounded my pillow furiously, overwhelmed by grief and my first encounter with a great indifferent universal injustice, which, if I had suspected its existence at all, had never before touched my life. My mother sat beside me, trying to comfort me, trying to explain that with all her problems, poor Claire was better off out of a life that had never shown her a day’s kindness since the death of her father. But to me at thirteen, any life seemed better than no life, and I was inconsolable.

  Besides being infatuated with Claire from the moment I’d set eyes on her, standing scared half out of her wits on the tailgate of a truck in a tent show, I had genuinely liked her. The contrast between the affectionate, engaging and good-natured girl I had known and the faceless, crumpled heap of bones on the ledge in the quarry was terrible. I cried for a long, long time, before falling into an exhausted broken sleep in which I dreamed of Claire’s body, floating down through the green water of the quarry, her long hair trailing above her, while Resolvèd stood sneering on the brink above, under the pin cherry tree, with his smoking shotgun crooked in his arm, and the woods b
ehind him ringing from the shot.

  It was pitch dark and the phone was ringing. It rang for a long time before my father answered it, so I knew it must be very late.

  “Mister Baby Johnson!” he said.

  I got out of bed and tiptoed to the head of the stairs.

  Dad listened another moment, then said he’d be right over.

  “Charles? Who is it?” My mother had come into the kitchen too now.

  “You’d better sit down, Ruth,” Dad said. “That was Perry Harrison with some very bad news. The LaRiviere girl didn’t just wander up into the woods and stumble into that quarry the way we thought. According to Harrison, she was shot and thrown in.”

  Often and often my father had said and written in the Monitor that there was little or no law in the Kingdom. Yet so far as I knew, nothing like Claire’s murder had ever happened here before. With the possible exception of the Ordney Gilson lynching, to find anything as brutal in the annals of local lawlessness you would have to go back at least as far as the shooting of the slave catcher, Satan Smithfield, in the pulpits of the church by my great-grandfather Mad Charlie Kinneson, nearly one hundred years ago. And even that shooting, as horrible as it was, had been regarded by my ancestor and most of his New England contemporaries more as an act of war than a crime. Dad said there had never even been an official inquiry.

  Now, almost literally in our own backyard, a young girl had been murdered in cold blood, apparently with a botched attempt to conceal her body, since presumably whoever threw her into the quarry had expected her body to sink and Claire LaRiviere never to be seen again.

  Somewhere, quite possibly in Kingdom County and perhaps in the village itself, a murderer was at large. There were no more fishing trips alone for me that summer, or with anyone else for that matter. I was forbidden to stray out of sight or earshot or our dooryard, forbidden even to go to the meadow pool or up the burn. Nor was I at all inclined to. Besides being more frightened than I had ever been in my life, I actually felt partly responsible for Claire’s death because I’d waited until the morning after she turned up missing to search for her at the quarry.

  On the afternoon of the day after Sheriff White drained the quarry, I confided to Mom how terrible I felt and why.

  “Tell you what, Jimmy,” she said, “let’s go see if the red raspberries are out in that cut-over woods across from your brother’s. On the way we can talk all this over.”

  I didn’t feel like going anywhere, except possibly to California on the next freight, but before I knew it Mom had gotten her sun hat and a stack of quart berry baskets, and we were climbing up the hillside where, just as she had hoped, the raspberries had sprung up like magic. The warm, sugary fragrance of ripe raspberries suffused the slashed woods for acres around, but although I had always loved berrying with my mother, I couldn’t stop thinking of Claire, wondering whether she’d picked berries at her Laurentian grandmother’s, wishing she were here with us on this sunny hillside picking berries today.

  “You know, Jimmy,” Mom said, “when your grandfather the poor captain died in the typhoid epidemic, and then my poor mother, I remember feeling just the way you do now. I kept thinking that if only your dad and I hadn’t gotten married and left Boston, somehow the captain and my mother wouldn’t have caught that dreadful illness. And I felt terribly guilty, as though I was completely to blame for their dying. Even at the time, I knew it was silly of me to think that way, and goodness knows I loved your father so much I never for a second regretted marrying him. But still I felt very, very guilty. I cried for days over it. And that made your father feel bad, which made me feel worse. But I couldn’t help it.”

  This was exactly the way I felt about Claire’s death, with the added problem that I couldn’t stop thinking that if I had gone up to the quarry sooner, maybe somehow I really could have prevented it. I was so teary-eyed all over again that I couldn’t say a word.

  Mom patted my arm. “I stopped feeling that way after a while, and you will too. What happened to Claire undoubtedly happened before we ever knew she was missing. There wasn’t a thing you could have done to prevent it, then or earlier, any more than I could have prevented the Boston typhoid epidemic.”

  As usual, Mom had hit the nail right on the head. Still and all, I didn’t see how she or anyone else could truly know how bad I felt, and despite her assurances I was very certain, with all the certainty of my thirteen years, that I would never feel any different.

  In the meantime, the biggest manhunt in the history of northern Vermont was under way. With the help of two bloodhounds and their trainer, a hatchet-faced hunting guide from across the state line in New Hampshire, Sheriff White combed the spruce thickets and blackberry brakes around the quarry. But no clues turned up.

  Before the bloodhounds went home, their trainer and the sheriff beat through several acres of swamp along the Boston and Montreal tracks, in the outside hope of finding a bloodstained tramp or hobo, and Zack had ordered the Dog Cart Man to remain in the county, where he could be questioned if need be, as soon as anyone could think up a way to question him. But I doubt that Zack or anyone else ever believed for a minute that the deaf and mute artist had anything to do with Claire’s death.

  On the morning after the bloodhounds left, Zack decided to drain the quarry in search of evidence. Around ten o’clock I heard the siren of the volunteer fire department’s twenty-year-old American LaFrance hook-and-ladder, and a minute later it appeared on the gool, with the equally antiquated town pumper truck chugging along in its dust. Sheriff White manned the wheel of the hook-and-ladder, with Zack in the seat beside him. A dozen or so volunteer firemen were riding the sideboards of the truck, and several carloads of veteran local fire-engine chasers, including Plug Johnson and the entire Folding Chair Club, brought up the rear. Seeing those old ghouls made me sick, but when Dad showed up a few minutes later and asked if I wanted to walk up with him to the quarry I went along, knowing that if I didn’t I’d probably never be able to go near the place again.

  “Good morning to you, editor!” Mason said, when we arrived, as though we were all on a picnic together. “Morning to you, Jimbo.”

  The sheriff lowered his voice confidentially. “Between I and you, boys, I don’t believe we’re going to find anything in this old hole much more incriminating than a few of Cousin R’s Old Duke empties. Zacker, though, he’s got his mind made up that she’s got to be flushed out.”

  In fact, I think that Zack and Mason both felt that a major public spectacle as appealing as draining the quarry would increase their political stock in the county, and by eleven o’clock there was already a big crowd at the quarry, mostly made up of town folks, though a fair number of farmers were there, as well.

  Around noon the first major discovery was made. The sinking water had revealed first the rusted tin roof, then the broken windows and hood and trunk of a 1929 Packard, balanced precariously on a rock shelf a few feet below us.

  “I believe that would be one of the vehicles Henry Coville lost smuggling Canadian booze down over the line years back during Temperance time,” Zack Barrows said. “Go down and have a look-see, will you, Mace?”

  Somewhat reluctantly, Mason climbed down on the fire department’s extension ladder and promptly discovered a dozen cases of Seagram’s whiskey in the Packard’s trunk. Many of the bottles were broken but some were still intact, and soon an argument broke out between Zack, who wanted to confiscate the contraband as “evidence,” and Cousin Welcome Kinneson, who claimed that since the quarry was on his and Resolvèd’s property, everything in it belonged to them. The dispute was resolved only when Plug Johnson suggested sampling the Seagram’s on the spot “to see if it had gone bad or not.” To everyone’s relief, both Welcome and Zack pronounced it excellent, the evidence was passed around liberally, and from then on, the work seemed to go much better.

  Almost despite myself, I was interested in the accumulating heap of relics from the various levels of the quarry. Besides the bootlegger�
�s Packard, the sheriff and his crew salvaged a flintlock rifle, several flawed or broken granite gravestones, including three or four spooky ones with the beginning letters of names carved on them, any number of Old Duke bottles and several antique bottles, including a flat glass flask inscribed with the name KINNESON from our ancestors’ potato whiskey distilleries, and a rusty set of bed springs.

  Bumper Stevens poked the springs with his cow cane. “Look at these, boys. Some enterprising young blade from days of yore lugged his own girling equipment up here along with the girls!”

  “A girl’s been murdered, for God’s sake,” my father said angrily. “You’re all making a circus out of this. Come on, James. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “What did they find up there?” my mother asked us when we got back to the house.

  “A set of bed springs and a few empty wine bottles,” my father said. “Nothing more.”

  But just as we sat down for supper an hour later the hook-and-ladder’s siren shrieked out again and the old truck came careening down the gore road past my cousins’, swerved onto the gool, and screeched to a stop in front of our dooryard.

  “Editor!” Mason called as we hurried out onto the porch. “We just stopped to say if you see that dog cart fella before we do, you can send him along on his way now.”

  “You mean he’s no longer a suspect?”

  “I mean, as of this evening, he’s free to go. Period. Let’s get this rig over to the village, Mace. We’ve got a great deal of work to do in a short time.”