The Stills

by Jess Montgomery

  “My husband’s out hunting,” Sally says as she leads the way inside. “Just fixing myself sassafras tea. Care for a cup?”

  Lily smiles. Life is hard. Have tea. Then she nods.

  “And as for Daddy, well, he can go to hell, for all I care.” Sally’s pleasant tone doesn’t match her harsh comment. She’s at peace with how she feels.

  Lily sips the hot tea, between jotting notes in her notebook.

  “Pa did well enough, getting off the liquor—after years of being on it. I grew up with him drunker-’n’-a-skunk half the time. Said it was the Lord and prayer’d saved him. Don’t know about that. ’Bout drove me crazy with his constant Scripture quoting and preaching at us, trying to nag us to church. Where was all that fervor when Ma wanted us to go, when I was a kid? Seven of us—Ma died with the last one.…” Here, Sally pauses to point at a boy, about age ten. “None of my brothers or sisters would take Pa and Junior in, so we did, and figured we was doin’ enough work for the Lord with that. Well, soon as that snake Luther Ross came around a few weeks ago, flashed some coin, told him he needed Pa to take him to round up men who might want to work for his boss—some big-city fella, George something—Pa went back to his carousing ways. Never thought I’d miss the Scripture spouting and Bible thumping. Anyway, Pa disappeared nights at a time. Cried myself to sleep worrying, then I recollected Pa said he’d left his drinking troubles on the altar. Well, I mayn’t go to church much, but in my mind, I just decided I’d leave my troubles on the altar, too.”

  “Did your father ever say anything about a revenuer coming around?” Lily asks.

  “No.”

  “All right. When did you last see him?”

  “Lessee, that’d have been late Friday night—well, really Saturday morning. Pa came back by hisself, looked shaken up, grabbed some clothes, said he was going to head down to Portsmouth, get a job at some manufacturing company there. We don’t know nobody ’cept folks here; whole family is here!—but he said that he had it in his head to start over for a while, Luther had told him there were good jobs there, and you know what? I just laughed. Said what skills you have for some fancy manufacturing company—you’re old and you don’t know nothing except grubbing out a life farming, and you ain’t done that for years. Anyways, Pa said he’d write and send money when he got settled. And send for that one.”

  Sally waves toward her little brother, the languid gesture showing she doesn’t believe that will ever happen. But when the boy looks over and grins, Sally’s return smile shows she doesn’t much mind.

  Lily heads back to her borrowed automobile. So, if Arlie had headed down to Portsmouth, had he gone on foot back to Kinship? Taken the train? Taken Luther’s automobile? The best she can do is see if Arlie had bought a train ticket in Kinship, alert the police department in Portsmouth.

  * * *

  An hour later, Lily trudges on to the Harkins house. When it comes in view, she stops short, partly from her calves cramping up at the last bit of uphill walking and partly because the house feels, even across the snowy stretch of yard, lifeless and empty.

  She goes to the kitchen door on the side porch anyway. Knocks. Waits. Starts turning back when the door creaks open.

  Ruth stands in the doorway. Her face is ashen. “Sheriff Lily. How did you know to come? Did you bring help?”

  “Mind if I come in? It’s mighty cold out here.”

  Ruth steps back, and Lily enters. Dishes are piled up in the pump sink, and there’s a gag-inducing smell of food scraps piled up too long in the compost bucket by the door. Ruth, who has on two sweaters over her dress, shuts the door, but it’s not that much warmer inside.

  “I came to talk to you about Zebediah.”

  “Oh—is he still all right?”

  Lily nods. Well, at least she hadn’t heard different. As sheriff, she’d expect a telegram from the hospital if there was a change, so she could take news—good or bad—out to the family. “Ruth—you told me that Zebediah came home, groggy, around four, but he was at Marvena’s still in the morning, and you told me you found the revenuer badge on Zebediah.” Lily puts her hand gently on the girl’s shoulder. “But I think though the man was hurt, he was the one who helped Zebediah home.”

  Ruth breaks down sobbing. Lily gives her a little shake. “Child, look at me! I need to find the man. Tell me what you know.”

  Ruth gulps back sobs as she explains. “He did come here. And I tended to him in the barn. When I—when I could get away. He was in and out, sleeping a lot, but when he came around on the morning of Thanksgiving, he was able to talk, and wanted to know where the Murphy farm is. Wanted to go there. I reckoned I’d get in trouble for hiding him away, but I felt so sorry for him. I told him I’d tell Daddy about him—ask him to take him over.”

  Lily’s breath catches. She forces her voice to remain steady, soft. “Did you?”

  Ruth shakes her head. “The man was right adamant—told me no. It was too dangerous. He’d light out by himself to the Murphy place. When I took a bit of food to him at noon, he was gone. By then, Zeb still hadn’t come around, and so I lit out to find Dr. Goshen. Daddy—none of the others—knew he’d ever been here. Just me and Zeb.”

  Lily considers the implications of this. The Murphy farm—where George and his men are ensconced. Including Luther and Elias. And this Bureau of Prohibition agent—who wasn’t even supposed to arrive until tomorrow but who showed up early, who was shot at Marvena’s shine stand near her still—wanted to go by himself to that farm. It might make sense—if he was on the take with Vogel. He could want to get back to Vogel but still have the heart not to involve this girl and her family.

  But him being on the take doesn’t explain who shot him.

  Unless, as Lily has theorized, it was Luther.

  In that case, would Colter have tried to go after Luther, even at the Murphy farm? He would have to be delusional, naive, or stupid to wish to do so.

  Lily lets go of Ruth’s arm but tightens her hard stare, willing the girl to tell the full truth. “Did he say why he had to get to the Murphy farm?”

  Ruth nods. She rubs the back of her sleeve across her face. “Said the man who shot him was there. Said it was Luther Ross.”

  The revelation, though not entirely unexpected, hits Lily like a sucker punch to the gut. Oh God. The image of Luther, grinning and taunting, emerges—in her office on Friday morning, with Barnaby, knowing he’d shot Colter, thinking he’d left him dead at Marvena’s still, setting Lily up to look incompetent just before Mabel Walker Willebrandt’s visit—a revenuer getting shot on Lily’s turf—and Marvena to look guilty of Colter’s murder. Forcing Lily to arrest her friend.

  And she had—along with her husband—but for Luther’s death.

  Could Barnaby have been in on Luther’s plan? She considers how solicitous the agent had been toward Luther.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Sorry, Ruth. Please repeat what you were saying.”

  “Just that I remember the name Mr. DeHaven gave ’cause that’s your last name. Kin?”

  “Distant,” Lily says. “Very distant.”

  “Well, I said we should fetch you, but he got really mad, said he didn’t need to talk to you, he just needed to get to the Murphys. I don’t know why your kin’d be staying with the Murphys?” Lily’s heart hurts for the poor girl. She’s glad Ruth’s not aware of the likes of Luther, but to be so cut off from her family’s earlier community that she doesn’t know Mr. Murphy’s died—well, that’s sad.

  “It’s a long story, Ruth. I promise I’ll fill you in sometime.” Well, sometime in the far future. “Please go on.”

  “Well, Mr. DeHaven was scary mad, and I reckoned anyone who could be that mad had to be getting better, and it was getting too hard to help him and Mama, too, and to tend to Zeb, so I told him the whereabouts of the Murphy place. Back when we were at our old church, sometimes all of us would go after for Sunday supper, all of us, me and Zeb and Daddy and Mama, but it was to help them a bit, too, even t
hough it was a Sunday and Daddy and Mama used to say you can’t work on a Sunday, but Mama told me it was all right, ’cause we were doing the Lord’s work and the Good Book says we need faith, hope, and charity, but the greatest of these is charity, and it was a charitable thing, helping them out a little. They were getting older, Mama said.” Tears course down Ruth’s face again. She whispers, “I don’t think Mama would say I did the right thing, the charitable thing, tellin’ that man what I remembered about finding the farm. I shoulda told Daddy about the man, had him fetch you, but—”

  Lily pats the girl’s back. “It’s all right, honey. You did the best you could, in really awful circumstances.”

  “Well, late Thursday night after you left with Zeb and the doctor, the other man, the one he said shot him, Luther Ross, he came here, demanding to know where he was, with this fellow from the church—Arlie—and Daddy, he ran them both off, threatened to shoot them dead.”

  “I need to know, did you say anything to anyone about the revenuer?”

  Ruth shakes her head. “I didn’t. I was just glad Daddy ran them off, and, and I’m sorry, Sheriff Lily, I gotta go; Mama is in a bad way.”

  Lily hears a moan from upstairs. Dora. “Isn’t your daddy with her?” She’d assumed as much, and that the twins were napping.

  But Ruth shakes her head again. “Mama took a turn. Pa went to fetch Brother Stiles, thought maybe hands-on prayer would help.”

  Fear sparks up Lily’s spine. “Where are the twins?”

  “He took them with him. Told me to tend to Mama, keep her well until he gets back.”

  Another moan. Lily recognizes the sound from her days tending flu patients. This isn’t just a moan of pain—it’s a death rattle.

  Ruth looks terrified. She starts crying again. “I—I can’t—I—”

  Given the new information Ruth’s shared, there is so much to consider, to do. She should go to the Murphy farm—she has a reason, bringing Elias news of Marvena’s and Jurgis’s arrest, though it rankles. She’s honor bound to do so, as she would for the family of any other victim. Still, she can hold back what Ruth’s told her. How bound is she to share that with Barnaby, though? Can she—should she—trust him?

  Yes, so much to do, to consider, but Lily takes Ruth’s hand. “Come on. You can do what you must—but you don’t have to do it alone.”

  As they start up the stairs, Lily already smells the suffocating odors of dying. She follows Ruth into the room where her mother lies.

  Dora is even more shrunken than on the day before yesterday, a bare scrawl of life, like she has no more substance than a bit of unraveled yarn, head curled forward, knees pulled up nearly to her belly. Her face already has the waxen look of the dead.

  Lily gazes across the bed at Ruth, whose eyes are wide. Anger rises in Lily, like the white-hot sparks of flint on stone. How could Leroy have left his wife like this, left Ruth behind?

  Lily hurries to Ruth’s side. She puts her arm around the girl’s shoulders. “Honey, this is just the natural order of things. It’s hard, but that’s the truth.”

  Ruth looks up at her. “You’ll stay?”

  Lily nods. “I’ll stay.”

  Dora shifts, opens her eyes, stares at Lily. Lily looks into her eyes—shiny and glazed and unfocused, the eyes of the blind, she thinks, but then Dora says, “Sheriff?” Her voice is raspy. “You come with news of Zebediah? He’s still fine?”

  Ruth inhales sharply—joy at her mama reviving. Lily’s seen it before—a last rally, before the end. She takes Dora’s thin, dry hands between her own, as she sits in a chair, pulled close to the bed. Truth has always been a cornerstone value of Lily’s. She doubts Zebediah will be fine for long, not unless his father accepts the boy needs insulin and finds a way to make sure he gets it for him, and even then, Zebediah’s life will be more fragile, and likely curtailed, with the sugar diabetes.

  Sometimes, though, offering solace and peace matters more than the hard-striking flint of truth. Hope. Earlier today, she’d watched Jolene light a candle for hope. Let Dora die with hope in her heart. Hope for her boy is the release that Dora needs.

  “Zebediah’s going to be just fine, Dora,” Lily says.

  Dora coughs. Ruth gets a glass of water, cradles her mother’s head, so she can take a few sips. “That’s enough, honey.” She looks up at Lily. “Don’t let Leroy put the children in an orphanage.”

  Lily nods, although there is no law she can apply to enforce Dora’s dying wish.

  “Tell him I want him to remarry.”

  Lily swallows hard, nods again. Dora stares at Lily a long moment. Then she looks at Ruth. “Tell the young ’uns—” The words catch and crackle.

  “Mama!” Ruth cries.

  Dora finds the strength to give Ruth’s hand a small squeeze. “Tell them about me, when they’re older. Oh, how I love you.” She touches her daughter’s cheek, lets her fingertips course along the river of tears. “You are my brave girl. The best of me.”

  Then her eyelids drift close.

  They sit like this, for a long time: Lily next to Ruth, Ruth holding her mama’s hand, murmuring to her, occasionally looking up at Lily, who nods at her—You’re doing the right thing, this incredibly hard thing, as Dora’s breathing slows, a ragged, rasping meter halving itself with every exhale.

  * * *

  Two hours later, Lily knocks at the door of the house where Benjamin rents a room.

  His landlady invites Lily inside to wait in the parlor, but Lily says she will wait outside, by Benjamin’s automobile.

  Lily stares up at the cold, dark, still sky. Still. But it seems to be swirling around her, and she imagines herself one of a million motes, swirling in it, and as impossible as the notion is, Lily feels she will, any moment now, fall up into the sky.

  “Now, Lily, I said you could keep my automobile for as long as—” Benjamin stops, his voice halting, his grin fading as Lily looks from the sky to him. He pauses on the porch.

  “Dora Harkins died,” Lily says. “Her daughter Ruth was going to be there alone with her, but thank the Lord—oh, if there is a Lord in heaven”—Lily’s voice hitches, and tears finally overflow down her face—“I was there with Ruth and Dora. I stayed until Leroy got back—”

  Benjamin does not say anything, but he rushes to Lily, and he pulls her to him, an enveloping embrace, and slowly the world starts to slow and steady again.

  CHAPTER 30

  FIONA

  Sunday, November 27, 1927

  9:30 p.m.

  There is something new between Lily and the handsome man, something—intimate.

  Not sex—well, there could be sex, Fiona supposes, although Lily has always struck her as traditional, if not prim, except in her tomboyish hobbies—letting it slip once at a Woman’s Club meeting, to more than a few gasps, that she enjoys hunting and fishing—and of course in her embracement of working as a sheriff.

  No, there’s something different, and possibly even more intimate than that, developing between them. Though the man again stands in the parlor entryway and Lily sits across the room on the edge of a wing chair, somehow he holds her in his gaze; somehow, she leans with complete trust back into it.

  Fiona wonders if they’re aware of how they are with each other.

  She wonders at jealousy rising, thick and choking, within her at what courses between and around them, slowly binding them.

  She wonders at the sorrow washing over her, as if she’s been plunged in a river but will never rise again, at the realization that she’s never had this—whatever this is, which they’ll probably take for granted like fools—even with sweet, gentle Martin.

  “Fiona!”

  She jumps at the sound of George barking her name.

  She turns to him on the settee. “I’m sorry, darling.” She puts a hand on her stomach. “It’s just that Lily and her—” She gives a quick appraising look at the man. Fiona transfers her hand to George’s knee—a show of intimacy for everyone in the parlor—as she goes on,
“—her friend have called on us so late, and I’m rather tired these days.”

  “I wouldn’t have bothered you if I didn’t have urgent business,” Lily says. “I was asking if Luther had mentioned any encounters that he may have had with several parties of interest.”

  Fiona’s heart pounds, and she pulls her hand back from George. Had Lily been talking to the Harkins boy—assuming he’d come around? If so, had he mentioned Luther shooting the revenuer? Would there be some way the boy would know Luther or that Colter is a revenuer?

  “She wants to know if Luther has brought up working with Arlie,” Abe says impatiently. He’s pacing in front of the window. He’d been preparing to leave for Kinship, to talk with Dr. Goshen about the boy, when Lily had arrived. “We’ve already told her no, but I guess she needs to hear it from everyone in the room, well, everyone who matters.”

  He cuts a cruel glance at Klara, standing off to the side, at the ready with a teapot in case anyone needs a refresher, though neither Lily nor the man accompanying her had touched the cups George had insisted must be served to their guests. As if the sheriff and her deputy—that must be his role, even with no badge—showing up so late is a social call.

  Fiona glances away to cover her flash of a smile at the harsh look Klara returns to Abe. Their mutual animosity is now hard-set. Through the window, Fiona notes another man, one of George’s guards, also pacing. Other guards are posted at the main entrance. Surely Lily’s noted them. What would happen if Lily knew of the other men, working on clearing land for the gravel road at the back edge of the property?

  Fiona focuses on Lily. “Luther and I rarely talked. I’m sure you can understand that we—didn’t have much in common. No, he never mentioned Arlie to me or in my presence.”

  Lily nods somberly. For a moment, her expression reminds Fiona of the night Lily had come to tell her, Martin’s been shot.… Of course Lily understands. Better than anyone else in her life, Fiona thinks. She clears her throat, looks away for a moment.