by Oak, B. B.
“Oh, I get your meaning all right. But I got nothing to do with my husband’s unlawful undertakings,” Mrs. Tripp replied.
“Could you at least tell me if he left for Carlisle last night?”
She nodded.
“By way of Drover’s Lane?”
She nodded again.
“Alone?”
“No, with that shipment, as you call it, in the back of his wagon under the cover of a blanket. I reckon the master she ran from would call her his rightful property.”
“We should simply call her a human being, Mrs. Tripp,” I put in. “Same as we are.”
“But for her skin! And that makes a world of difference, as you know as well as I do,” she replied.
I opened my mouth to argue, but Henry gave me a silencing look and addressed Mrs. Tripp. “What time did your husband leave for Carlisle?”
“A few hours before daybreak.”
“Aren’t you concerned that he has not yet returned?”
“Not at all. He is no doubt having himself a good time with his drinking cronies in Carlisle. He’ll be back when it suits him and no sooner. Now Good Day to you. I have told you all I know, and I have chores to attend to.” She turned and tugged the dog inside the house with her.
“I must go find Tripp,” Henry told me. “I hope I’ll meet up with him along the byway as he is returning home, but if I don’t I’ll walk all the way to Carlisle and seek him out there.”
“I’ll go with you.”
He gave my damaged boot a disparaging look. “Time is of the essence, and you would only slow me down.”
I didn’t argue with him, for I knew he was right. “I’ll go home then. If you locate the fugitive, and she is in need of a place to stay, pray bring her to me.”
“I will,” Henry said. “It is obvious that she would not be welcomed back by Mrs. Tripp.”
We parted and went in opposite directions on Drover’s Lane. But I did not get very far before further walking became near impossible. Realizing I would never make it to town unless I mended my boot, back I limped to the Tripp homestead.
The front door was ajar, and I called to Mrs. Tripp. She did not respond, but I heard Ripper’s toenails scratch against the bare wooden floor as he ran across it. He came charging out and cornered me on the porch before I could retreat down the stairs. His barking and snarling terrified me, but I challenged him by stamping my feet and yelling. This went on for a long moment or two until Mrs. Tripp finally came out. Her face was wet with tears.
“Ripper,” she said softly. “Settle down now, boy.” And he did!
“Forgive me for disturbing you again, Mrs. Tripp,” I said, “but my boot is in need of mending. Would you happen to have a large needle and strong thread or string? Even some rags would do. I could wrap them around the boot to keep the sole from flapping.”
With a sigh Mrs. Tripp motioned me to come inside. It was a humble place, with little in the way of decoration, but for a daguerreotype of two boys framed in cheap pasteboard upon a simple shelf.
“Your sons?” I said, indicating the picture.
She nodded.
“Fine looking boys.”
“They take after their father. Billy is ten. He’s at school now. And Jared is sixteen. He went to Ohio to work on his uncle’s farm.” Mrs. Tripp turned and looked me in the face as tears continued to run down hers. “He left two weeks ago.”
She obviously missed him a great deal, and I hoped he was not the sort of boy who would forget to write home to his mother. “Well, at least he didn’t go off to fight in that horrible Mexican War.”
“Oh, he wanted to! And he would have too, if not for his brother.” She blotted her eyes with the edge of her apron. “But never mind about Jared. Let me hunt you up a darning needle and yarn.”
I set to work mending my boot at the kitchen table, and Mrs. Tripp put on the kettle. She said very little over tea, and I did not stay long. But I could not help thinking she was not a bad sort despite the ignorant prejudices she’d expressed concerning slaves. Perhaps she resented the time her husband devoted to helping them escape to freedom. The farmstead was in sad disrepair and certainly could have used more of Mr. Tripp’s attention.
When I reached the end of the rutted drive I was surprised to see Henry running down Drover’s Lane from the direction whence he’d gone. As he neared I saw that his countenance was most grim. I rushed to him and asked what had happened.
“Tripp has been shot dead,” he told me. “I found his body by a bog less than half a mile up the lane.”
“No! What about the fugitive?”
“Vanished,” Henry said. “I was on my way to Plumford to report the murder, but if you would do so instead, I’ll return to the bog to look for her.”
“Yes, I’ll inform Constable Beers.”
“Best inform our good doctor first, Julia. I would like Adam to have time to examine the body without Beers’s interference.”
I did not question Henry’s instructions, for I have come to trust his judgment completely in matters concerning murder.
ADAM
Wednesday, May 17
As I stood on my office doorstep gazing across the road at the Green this afternoon, every living thing before my eyes seemed to mirror my desire for Julia. The songbirds clad in gaudy mating colors were singing with an ardor that near matched my own, and the coronas of the narcissus were opening wide to the swallowtail butterflies hovering above them. Finally Julia came into view, running across the Green as fleet of foot as the goddess Atalanta, her pale blue dress billowing like a cloud. When she reached my doorstep I pulled her inside, slammed shut the door, and threw the bolt. Ere she could utter a word I curled my arms around her waist and pressed my lips to hers, greedy to taste her nectar. Although we’d had our customary tryst at cockcrow this morning, my hunger for Julia is never satiated, and I would have taken her right then and there if she’d allowed it. She did not. Instead, she broke away from me, breathless and flushed from my kiss or, more likely, from running.
“We’re quite alone,” I assured her. “Molly went home early to help her mother dig a garden, so we have the whole house to ourselves.” I grasped her hand. “Come. We’ll go up to your chamber.” She shook her head and pulled back her hand. Her reluctance confounded me. She had been my ardent lover for five blissful months. “What’s wrong, dearest?”
“A man has been shot dead, Adam. A farmer named Ezra Tripp. Henry Thoreau found his body on Drover’s Lane near a bog, and he awaits you there.”
“How did Henry get involved? Or more to the point, how did you, Julia?”
Her brief explanation confirmed my belief that she should take no part whatsoever in the Underground Railroad. But now was not the time to resume our ongoing argument concerning this. I hastened to the barn, hitched Napoleon to the gig, and drove off to the bog. I had learned from experience that it is best to examine a corpse before Constable Beers and the Coroner’s Jury gathered around it and mucked up evidence. I knew the murder victim, but not well. I had treated him only once since he and his family had become tenants of a farm off Drover’s Lane last year. And I was familiar with the bog up the lane from the farm, having had a few boyhood adventures there. We locals called it Phantom Bog, and as I drew closer to it, I saw four redheaded vultures circling above, ominous portents in a cloudless blue sky.
And then I saw a man of middle height and solid build in the center of the bog. It was Henry David Thoreau, and he was walking on water. Now I have witnessed Henry perform a number of athletic feats, but this was a new one. Of course he was not actually walking on the water itself but upon the sphagnum moss that covered its surface. As he raised a hand in greeting and continued toward me, he had to keep shifting his body weight this way and that to maintain his balance on the spongy, decaying vegetation that quaked and undulated beneath his feet.
There was a horse hitched to an empty wagon near the edge of the bog. A body lay beside the wagon. I climbed down from the gig and id
entified the dead man as Ezra Tripp. Last month he’d fallen from his hayloft, and I’d popped his dislocated shoulder back into place, much to his great relief. And now he was staring up at the vultures with unblinking eyes as a whirl of flies danced on the clotted blood of the wound in the center of his chest. I knelt beside the body to inspect it more closely.
Henry joined me. His clothes were soaked through. Assuming he had taken a misstep and fallen into the water before I arrived, I did not remark upon it.
“Tell me what you see, Doctor,” he said. It was not the first time he had given me this directive over a corpse.
I attempted to flex the dead man’s arms and legs to no avail. “Rigor mortis has taken hold,” I said. “That indicates he has been dead for at least ten to twelve hours.” I unbuttoned Tripp’s waistcoat and shirt to examine the wound. “He was shot through the heart with a rifle, not a fowling piece,” I continued. “The entry hole of the ball is clean and small as my thumb. He died instantly. And since he is lying on the ground I assume he was standing beside his wagon when he was shot.”
“I think not,” Henry said. “Note the blood spatters on the dashboard. And see there.” He pointed at hoof marks gouged deeply into the soft soil a dozen feet from the body. “I hypothesize that the shot was fired at close range just to the left of the horse, and the animal reared at the sound, yanking the wagon to the right. This caused Tripp to fall out of the wagon rather than tumble straight back into it.”
The horse, now peacefully grazing on spring grass, cast looks back at us, curious at the sound of strange voices.
Henry led me a few rods up the road and pointed at a set of boot prints. “Here the shooter waited, turned sideways as the wagon approached, and raised his gun. The back foot, as you can see, dug more deeply into the ground when the recoil of the gun against his shoulder drove his weight backwards onto that foot.”
“But who would kill a poor farmer in cold blood?”
“Perhaps someone who wanted his precious cargo,” Henry said.
“A slave catcher?”
Henry nodded. “The killer could have followed the runaway’s trail to Plumford, accosted Tripp here, and when Tripp refused to hand her over, shot him.”
“And then dragged the poor slave off with him,” I said with a sinking heart.
“I see no signs of that,” Henry said as we walked back to the wagon. “It looks to me that when she heard the gunshot she threw off the blanket she was hiding under, jumped from the wagon bed, and ran for her life. You can clearly see shoe prints in the dirt here. Their small size indicates a woman. And look how they become more widely spaced as she sprinted down the road, toes digging deeper into the dirt.”
We followed the prints until they veered off the road and disappeared into a tangle of red maple shoots and blueberry bushes. “And here is where you lost her trail,” I said.
“Not quite.” Henry guided me into the undergrowth to show me where the runaway’s feet had pressed down the maple shoots and broken twigs of the bushes. “Beyond here, the trail disappears altogether as she ran onto the bog sphagnum. And over yonder are the shooter’s tracks going from the road into the bog as well.”
The boot prints were easier to follow, but they too disappeared altogether on the pond’s mossy cover. “The killer pursued her,” I said grimly.
“So it appears.”
“It’s no easy feat to get across a bog without falling through the sphagnum,” I said. “Especially in the dark of night.”
“I have already examined the bog’s perimeters and could find only one set of prints coming out of it.”
“Which ones?” I dreaded the answer.
“The shooter’s,” Henry said, confirming my fears. “He went due west until he gained the road toward Acton. I lost his tracks on the busy turnpike.”
“Then the poor runaway most likely drowned.”
“That’s why I went probing beneath the sphagnum,” Henry said, explaining his sopping clothes. “But I did not come upon her body.”
“Unfortunately, that doesn’t prove she’s still alive.”
“Yet my instincts tell me she is,” Henry emphatically declared.
It has never ceased to surprise me that as much as Henry values the science of deduction and analysis, he trusts his intuition as much as empirical evidence. He claims we all have this inborn knowledge, and it irks him how few of us use it.
We returned to Tripp, and I rolled him over to see if the bullet had passed through his body. There was a small but decided bulge in the fabric of his coat at the center of his back. I took out my pocketknife and sliced through the material. A lead ball of a large caliber tumbled out.
“The bullet punched right through his backbone,” I said. “That’s what slowed it enough to be caught and held by the fabric of his coat.”
Henry took the bullet and eyed it closely. “There’s a triangular nick on one of the grooves. Do you think it was made passing through his body?”
“No bone is hard enough to nick a bullet so neatly.”
“Then no doubt a small defect in the barrel of the gun marked it so.” He slipped the bullet into his pocket.
We covered the corpse with the blanket from the wagon, led Napoleon and Tripp’s horse out of the sun, and sat ourselves down under a cedar to await the constable and the Coroner’s Jury.
“I confess I love the smell of decaying vegetation,” Henry said, inhaling deeply. “It is the strong, wholesome fragrance of the very earth itself.”
“Strong for certain,” I replied. “But fragrant? I think not.”
Henry smiled. “Fortunately, most folks don’t find bogs as pleasant as I do. Hence, they remain undisturbed and continue to be sanctuaries for scarcely seen plants such as leatherleaf and sheep laurel.”
“Well, this particular bog is also the sanctuary for a phantom,” I informed him.
“That makes it richer and wilder still! Is there a legend attached to this phantom?”
“Yes, a sad one that goes back more than a hundred years.”
I related to Henry that a couple named Jacob and Charity Stiles had lived in a cabin near the bog back in the seventeen hundreds. Jacob beat his wife unmercifully when he was drunk, but the town fathers, respecting a man’s right to discipline his wife and fearing Jacob’s vicious nature, put off calling him to task for his abuse despite pleas from those who pitied the poor young woman. It was known she often fled into the bog to escape Jacob’s fists and boots until he regained control over his drunken bouts of fury. Then one day she disappeared altogether. Jacob claimed she had just run off, but it was feared that he had murdered her. No one would have anything to do with him after that, and he eventually moved away. But Charity’s ghostly presence remained. More than a few townsmen traveling past the bog at nightfall saw her rising up from it. Hence, it became known as Phantom Bog.
“Guilt caused them to see the apparition because none had lifted a finger to help the poor woman,” Henry said.
“Yet long after those men were dead and buried,” I said, “there have been sightings of a beautiful water wraith hovering over the bog in the twilight mist. In truth, as a boy I would come here at nightfall with my mates to wait for her to emerge from the water, for it was said she was clothed in nothing but a cloud shroud. Of course all we got for our trouble was countless mosquito bites.”
“And that’s all you deserved,” Henry said and went back to regarding the bog with renewed interest.
Soon after that Constable Beers arrived on horseback. When he dismounted I breathed a sigh of relief for his swaybacked horse. To carry about such a heavy load as Beers cannot be easy.
We three gathered over the body. The constable visibly bridled at Henry’s disclosure that Tripp was killed in the act of conducting an escaped slave, now gone missing, toward freedom.
“I am surprised that a citizen of Plumford was involved in slave smuggling,” the constable said. “I thought such law breakers and trouble makers as that only resided in you
r town, Mr. Thoreau.”
“The Underground Railroad has stations from the Deep South all the way up to the Canadian border,” Henry told him.
“Well, I would like to know who else in Plumford is breaking the law. And it is your obligation to tell me.”
“The only obligation I have is to do what I think right,” Henry stated firmly. “The reason I informed you of Mr. Tripp’s involvement in the Underground Railroad is because you should know that he might have been killed by a slave catcher.”
“That’s the last thing we need in our peaceful town—escaped slaves and the murderous hunters that come after them!” Beers sputtered.
Henry ignored his indignation. “Here’s the bullet that killed Tripp,” he calmly said, extracting it from his pocket.
Beers, whose stomach is most delicate despite its girth, put his hands behind his back rather than touch a piece of metal that had gone through a man’s heart and bone. “Since it cannot tell us who fired it, why bother me with the bullet?”
Henry returned it to his pocket. “Very well, Constable Beers. Let us focus on the facts at hand.” He described how he had tracked the two sets of footprints into the bog and the one set out of it.
“Well, she must have drowned,” Beers said.
“I explored the bog as well as I could and did not find a body,” Henry said.
Beers shrugged. “Very well then. She didn’t drown.”
“To be certain of that, you should form a search party and conduct a more exhaustive investigation,” I told him.
Frowning, Beers waved his hand to ward off mosquitoes. “I doubt I can drum up much concern for a missing runaway. What business is it of ours?”
“Is not the injustice of slavery every man’s business, Constable?” Henry said.
“It is every man’s business to mind the law,” Beers retorted. “And slavery is still lawful in this country.” He glanced down at the corpse and then quickly averted his eyes. “If Tripp had minded his business, he would still be alive.”
“What do you intend to do about his murder?” I asked him.