The Reckoning at Gossamer Pond

by Jaime Jo Wright

  “You can’t go back into town.” Libby took two steps to his one. She hoisted her dress up so she wouldn’t trip. “They’ll string you up like a lynching mob.”

  “No. They did that to my scarecrow,” he stated, as if an imitation of himself would appease the haters.

  “Why do you stay with your brother?” The words escaped her before she could stop them.

  Jacobus gave her a sideways glance. “Family has no obligation to you?”

  Libby took three steps to his one. “Of course. I didn’t mean it to be rude. Family is important. However”—she was growing out of breath trying to keep up with the man—“you’re not as . . . well, you see you’re different from your brother. He is—”

  “Explosive. Unpredictable. Offensive. Tactless. Aggressive,” Jacobus supplied.

  Libby nodded. “Yes. I was thinking that but—”

  “Never refrain from saying what you think,” Jacobus said firmly. “To me, anyway,” he added. “And I remain with my brother in an attempt to temper his passion and to try to keep him from damaging the message with his asinine approach to evangelism. I prefer to create an effective ministry.”

  Libby hopped over a rock that had rolled onto the walkway. Her breath came in puffs. Jacobus had no notice of her exertion. “What are you going to do?”

  “What are you going to do?” he countered.

  Libby wasn’t accustomed to having the decision, the plan of action, tossed back at her. She’d expected—what had she expected? A hero? The man who’d read her soul to save her? She couldn’t run to Elijah. Calvin? Her mother had left town this morning by train to visit her aunt, and Mitch had for all sakes and purposes disappeared in the “brouhaha” of recent events—as Mother had called them.

  “I don’t know what I should do.” She was helpless. Helpless in lieu of the obituary, in the memory of Dorothy Hayes’s body floating facedown in the pond, and in the shadow of Deacon Greenwood hanging from the rafters of his carriage house. Perhaps Jacobus could help her escape eternal death, but physical death? That was something altogether different.

  He didn’t seem to hear her. They reached the top of the hill and one of the side streets of Gossamer Grove. Jacobus paused for a moment, and his eyes shifted back and forth as if calculating.

  Libby dared to put a hand on his sleeve. He jolted, as if he hadn’t expected the physical contact, even with barriers of cotton and wool between them. She dropped her hand, but she finally had his attention.

  “What should we do?” she whispered.

  Jacobus’s mouth twitched. “Miss Sheffield—my dear Libby—God has granted you much more than a soul. He’s gifted you with a mind. Use it.”

  And with that bewildering statement, Jacobus marched toward downtown and the chaos without a backward glance. Abandoned on the outskirts with a death threat in her purse, Libby stared after him, stunned and not a little upset. The angel of death was after her, and the preacher walked away.

  His challenge rifled through her, scraping the edges of her timidity, slapping awake her stubbornness, and catapulting her determination into action. Jacobus was right, after all. There was only one person who could be her champion now, and that was herself.

  “How did you do it?” Libby burst into the press room, shouting over the mechanics of the press and ignoring the stunned looks of the men running it. Paul’s eyes widened, and he handed a wooden clipboard to an assistant, waving his hand toward the door in an impatient gesture.

  Once in the hallway, he shut the door behind him and seared Libby with a glare. “Do what?” he snapped.

  Libby had found her voice. She shook her index finger at him, the gray of her cotton glove inches from his face. “How did you escape death?”

  Paul set his teeth and grabbed her arm. His fingers bit into her flesh, and Libby twisted away from him. “Don’t be barbaric,” she hissed. “Your hands will stay off of me!”

  Paul froze, his expression one of shock. “What’s gotten into you?”

  Libby reached into her purse and tugged out her obituary. She pushed it toward Paul.

  “It’s my turn. I want to know how you convinced the killer to allow you to live, because I’ve no intentions of dying tonight.”

  “I didn’t convince the killer of anything!” Paul unfolded the obituary and read it. With a blank look on his face, he handed it back to Libby, turning on his heel and striding down the hallway toward the closet office he called his own.

  A momentary twinge of indecision caught her, but the knowledge that she would never live if she didn’t fight for herself urged her forward. She needed to know Paul’s story, why he’d been spared, and why he’d even been targeted in the first place. He had nothing to do with Deacon Greenwood and Dorothy Hayes.

  “I asked you how?” Libby insisted, following him into his office.

  Paul shoved his glasses against his face. “I don’t know. I don’t know! One moment you and Elijah Greenwood were knocking on my door with the abominable message, and the following morning, for all sakes and purposes, Dorothy Hayes had taken my place! Maybe I wasn’t accessible enough. Gullible enough. Now leave me alone, Miss Sheffield, please.”

  Libby almost didn’t notice it, but then it caught her attention. The tremor in his voice. The tremble in his hands that he hid by folding them behind his back.

  “What are you hiding?” she asked.

  For a wild and frightening moment, Libby wondered if Paul was the killer himself. It would stand to reason. He had seen, witnessed, and heard many a sight and rumor. Perhaps he knew about Deacon Greenwood and Dorothy Hayes. About their illegitimate son, Lawrence. But, how could he know about that night, when Calvin claimed her first kiss and she left him behind when he needed her the most?

  “I’m not hiding anything,” Paul spat.

  “Please, Paul, in good conscience you must tell me.” Tears watered her voice. No. She wouldn’t cry. It would help nothing. Solve nothing. “Someone wants retribution for—for my sins.”

  “What have you done?” Paul’s eyes narrowed. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Why would the obituary writer target you?”

  Libby stared at him. Telling Paul wasn’t her preference, but then apparently telling her wasn’t his preference either.

  “God gifted you with a mind. Use it.”

  Jacobus’s exacting words rang in her ears. Use her mind. Outside, she had felt abandoned, diminished in importance to him. But now clarity pushed its way through her mind as though awakening years of a sleepy, guilt-suppressing haze. Jacobus had empowered her. He’d given her the shove she needed to finally fight for herself, for honesty, and for her own atonement.

  “I’m going to the basement.” Libby lifted her nose in challenge, then swept around and started down the hallway. As expected, she heard Paul’s footsteps chasing after her.

  “No. No, you mustn’t go down there!” he argued, but Libby tugged open the door and stepped into the alley. A burst of fresh air met her, only to be swallowed by the damp silty air of the basement as she hurried down the steps and opened the basement door.

  “Miss Sheffield!” Desperation laced Paul’s voice now.

  She entered, determined. Her entire life she had hid behind Elijah, stifled the reality of the consequences for her choices, and recalibrated herself into a timid echo of the person she’d been in the process of becoming as a young woman.

  Libby lit a lantern that sat on a crate as Paul huffed at her side. The glow of the light, coupled with daylight streaming in through the doorway, made the cave-like room easier to see.

  “What are you hiding?” she whispered.

  Paul tightened his lips.

  Libby lifted the lantern. Crates and filing cabinets crowded the basement. She wove in between them. A trunk with metal corners and an iron latch and hinges sat in the far corner. Swinging around, Libby lofted the lantern high.

  In the southwest corner was a table and four wooden ladder-back chairs. A few bottles of liquor were perched on an upturne
d crate. She shot Paul an incredulous glance before walking toward the sight. He sagged against a filing cabinet, and his sigh of resignation followed her.

  Libby neared the table and set the lantern on it. A few glass tumblers, two still partially full of old brandy, rested on the table. Three decks of cards. An ashtray with stubs of cigars in it. Newspapers were piled on the floor against the wall, as if it were an extra stool to squeeze in one more place for a person to sit.

  She turned her back on the table and leveled a bewildered stare on Paul. “Gambling? You’ve been gaming here?”

  Paul drew in a deep breath through his nose and let it out slowly. He gave a curt nod.

  “But . . .” Libby paused, trying to calculate the situation. Gambling in its raw form—poker and the like—wasn’t necessarily illegal, but it wasn’t embraced as socially responsible or even remotely Christian. Still, it wasn’t akin to having an extramarital affair and fathering an illegitimate child. “I don’t understand.”

  Paul grumbled as he pushed past her and stacked the brandy glasses as if tidying up would somehow help. “I’m not proud of it.”

  “But, it’s—cards.” She’d expected worse. What, she wasn’t sure of. “Why would someone wish to target you over a game of cards?”

  Paul’s head shot up, his spectacles sliding down his nose. “Precisely why I didn’t believe the obituary to be serious. And, I was correct.”

  “So you believe Deacon Greenwood and Mrs. Hayes should have been killed?” Libby leaned against a wooden filing cabinet, incredulous.

  “No!” Paul almost shouted. “No,” his voice lowered. “Of course I don’t. But the pattern seems to have been set. Someone is grading sins. Mine . . . was not as bad.”

  “Who do you game with?” Libby pointed at the chairs. “Who fills the chairs? Certainly one of them might be the—the killer. Did you win someone’s livelihood, or maybe you simply offended them with your propensity for successful but sinful gambling.”

  Paul whitened, choked, and then slumped onto a chair. “Successful would not be the proper adjective.”

  “Oh.” Libby nodded. Paul Darrow was prone to lose then. “So, who games with you?”

  Paul rubbed his hand over his balding head. “Typically, it is me, Dr. Penchan, your father—”

  “Mitch?” Libby exclaimed.

  Paul gave her a look that stated she should not be surprised. “And Harrison Greenwood.”

  Libby sat in the chair opposite Paul. “Deacon Greenwood gambled here too?”

  “Yes.” Paul reached for a deck of cards and shuffled them with nervous hands. “We haven’t gamed since. It’s all been—quite unsettling.”

  “Dr. Penchan games with you?” Libby was trying to piece the puzzle together. “Because my father wouldn’t have targeted you for sinful practices.”

  Paul’s eyebrow quirked over his left eye. “No. Most certainly not.” The positioning of his body, resigned and defeated, alerted Libby. She swept the basement with her gaze and then looked to the ceiling rafters as if to see through the floor above into the newspaper. Realization dawned on her.

  “Did you sell sixty percent of your paper to Mitch so you would have money to gamble with?” Her voice ended in an accusatory higher pitch.

  “Sell?” Paul groused. “Never. Won. Your father won it.”

  “You gambled your paper?” Libby’s words bounced off the basement’s foundation.

  Paul’s face sagged. “It’s no secret I came into financial difficulty. The only secret was why.”

  Libby was still reeling from the information. “Yes, but most people thought it was due to the paper’s popularity falling behind.”

  “Not at all.” Paul scratched the back of his neck. “My paper did—does—quite well without your father stirring up stories and trouble.”

  “So you play in secret? In the basement of the newspaper?”

  “I tried to stop.” Paul’s shoulders slouched.

  “So if Harrison Greenwood is dead, my father, quite innocent of it all, that leaves . . . Dr. Penchan?” It made sense really. That the medical examiner who gamed with Paul would know of the illegitimate child and know of Paul’s gambling addiction. What didn’t make sense was why he’d feel it his duty to cast judgment in a way that stole a life from the earth that he was avowed to save.And how he would know of her own past with Calvin.

  Paul removed his spectacles and rubbed his fingers over his eyes. When he looked at Libby, it seemed exhaustion had overtaken his fight. “Dr. Penchan is not behind the deaths of Harrison and Dorothy. He didn’t write any of the obituaries.”

  “How do you know?” Libby noticed Paul shuffling the cards for the tenth time. His hands split the deck with practiced ease and bent the cards only to flip them into each other with skill.

  “Because. The night—morning—what-have-you that Harrison hung himself, or was killed, Penchan was here. We’d been gaming through the night into the wee hours. Along with your father.”

  “But not Deacon Greenwood?”

  Paul lifted his eyes. “No, he’d not come that evening, but that wasn’t unusual. He wasn’t always able to make it due to appeasing his wife, who despised his practices.”

  Libby didn’t respond. Could she blame Elijah’s mother? If she knew of the affair, knew her own sister had dabbled with her husband and then bore a son from their indecencies, she certainly was not going to abide his leaving for long periods at night.

  “Old Man Whistler sat in that night,” Paul finished, interrupting her thought. “He was usually drunk. It was easy to win against him, and frankly . . .” Paul eyed one of the half-full glasses of brandy, as if he wished to gulp it down. “Frankly, I needed to win.”

  Libby lifted a deck of cards and thumbed through them. The four of spades, the queen of clubs, the two of hearts . . . “I’m still confused why your gambling is so offensive. In truth, it hurt only yourself.”

  Paul did finally reach for the glass. He swirled the brandy. “Perhaps whoever has decided to make things right for the sake of God doesn’t see it that way.” He raised the glass to his mouth and stared at Libby over the rim. “Gambling provided a way for Harrison to leave his home. It was an excuse for many years.”

  “I don’t understand,” she mumbled, setting down the cards.

  Paul tipped his head back and gulped the brandy. “Harrison only came now and then, but he told his wife he was here. This was easier to rectify before her than—”

  “Oh my!” Libby’s mouth dropped open. “They were still—the dalliance was—” She couldn’t say it aloud.

  Paul nodded and set the glass down on the table with a thud. “Harrison Greenwood married Elijah’s mother two years before her younger sister, Dorothy, returned from boarding school. Once she did, well, this has been going on for years.”

  Libby paled. “Under everyone’s noses?”

  Paul shrugged. “Most people didn’t know—didn’t care to know. Some did.”

  “And,” Libby concluded, “one of those who cared realized you were enabling it by holding the gambling sessions.”

  Paul nodded, removing his spectacles and wiping them with the cuff of his sleeve.

  “But why relieve you of your death sentence?” she asked. Still perplexed. Still bothered by Paul’s escape.

  He ran a hand over his bald head and put his glasses back on his face. His beady eyes locked on Libby’s. “Because I made penance? I’d been going back to church. I’d even gone to two or three of those twins’ meetings. And that night you and Elijah and Calvin came to warn me? The obituary—it rang in my ears. I knew what I’d been doing wasn’t atonement enough. So I snuck down to the Methodist church. I put all my spare money in an envelope and tucked it in the door. God may not forgive my sin, but I hoped upon hope the killer would.”

  “So they were watching you.” Libby’s eyes widened. “They knew you’d paid penance and were repentant.”

  Paul nodded. “Well, paid penance. They must have assumed repentance was ca
rried with it.”

  They were silent for a long moment, both of them staring at the cards they’d shuffled and fiddled with, now strewn on the tabletop.

  Finally, Paul cleared his throat. “I understand someone finding our sins repulsive. I do. But you? What do you have to do with any of this? And why are you sitting here now? Go make penance somehow so this Grim Reaper moves along!”

  Libby paled and lifted her eyes to meet Paul’s. “That’s my conundrum. I know what I’ve done, but there is no way, no compensation great enough, to ever pay for my sin.”

  Paul reached for the last brandy glass, a quarter full. He handed it to her, and she took the glass instinctively before she realized he’d intended it as his way of offering comfort.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, his apology empathetic, sad, and very, very final.

  Chapter 36

  Annalise

  I’m not quite sure I understand.” Doug Larson’s words emphasized every footstep as he led Garrett and Annalise down the hallway of the Senior Living Center.

  “We have a few questions for your dad,” Garrett responded. “Annalise and I have been doing some research on Gossamer Grove. Eugene Hayes. Our families.”

  Doug shot them a quizzical look over his shoulder. “You’re an odd couple to be working together.” His glance bounced off Annalise, and an almost triumphant twinkle marred his otherwise blasé tone. He had the mayor in his pocket, the town board on his side, and the wilderness center in his sights. His cooperation now was because of his working relationship with Garrett and the wilderness center. Nothing else.

  Annalise stared at Doug’s back as he rounded a corner. The floors of the home were shined, a marbled linoleum, but track marks from wheelchairs left dulled spots. Greenery was scattered decoratively, warm wall colors in hues of beige and brown, and landscape paintings meant to give a visual escape from the borders of the home.

  “Here we are,” Doug said, pushing open the door to his dad’s room.

  A distinct smell wafted through the air. The remnants from lunch, menthol, old age, and baby powder. A bed sat at the far end of the room, a sterile set of white sheets, a blue bedspread, and a brown throw pillow. In front of the television, a wheelchair was stationed and in it an elderly man. Wispy gray hair on the top of his head, thin shoulders, age spots on the hands that rested in his lap. He looked up, and Annalise was pleasantly surprised to see a full awareness in his eyes. They were sharp, exacting, and wary.