The Last Hanging: A Will Haviland-Abigail Carhart Mystery

by M. G. Meaney

  "Mr. Hopfner, at the time it seemed ..."

  Hopfner stood and now looked down on a nervously clicking Haviland.

  "You helped kill my Theodore. They listened to you then. They will listen now, if you tell them to find the real murderer.

  "My daughter and my nephews, they are taunted, shunned still. Mothers tell their children to stay away from the ones with the bad Hopfner blood. My wife, in the market, even today they look and whisper one to the other, 'There is the mother of the murderer.' Customers cancel orders from me, people I work for for years. They say this or that, but I know why: We are like lepers, we Hopfners, lepers now. We have blood on our hands. The people, they stop talking when we come, they look at us like we are ghosts, demons, then they talk to each other when we are gone. Do you know what it is like to be shunned in the place you love, in the place you work all your life to come to?"

  Haviland remembered Brooklyn — the awkwardness, the furtive glances, the turned-away faces, the icy greetings, the lonely isolation and finally, the fear in the stomach just before his ouster. He nodded ever so slightly.

  Hopfner did not notice. "You watched that day when they killed him. Without you, he would never have been arrested. Without you, my poor Hannah would never have had to ..." He blinked back tears at the memory. Fingers of perspiration darkened the brim of his bowler. He let out a long, hopeless sigh and crumpled back into the armchair.

  Hopfner ran his hand through his hair, increasing its disorder, and bowed his head for a few moments. He turned back to the minister, a tear carving its way down his left cheek.

  "You never had a son, Reverend."

  Haviland shook his head. Click.

  "You have a little boy. All he has to do is see you and he smiles," Hopfner said. "You can be filthy, sweating from sawing the pieces for a cabinet, he doesn't care, the little one. He smiles and wants you to play, to throw the ball. So, you throw the ball. He wants you to run. You run. He wants to pet the cat, so you hold the cat — let him scratch you, even — so the boy can pet him.

  "He gets older. You teach him to chop, to saw, to make the things that you make, but inside there is still the little boy. At the same time he is there, always, with the smile for his Dada. He becomes a man, with a smart mouth sometimes and trouble sometimes he gets into. But you see also the little boy running to you to play the ball, then the older boy smiling when he shows the bird feeder he made himself. To a father, he is all these at once. He carries part of you with him and you carry much of him with you.

  "And even when the worst happens, or so you think, and you cannot smile at him any longer, you cry inside. He is still the little one, you see, squealing, 'Dada, Dada!' He grows up outside, yes, but he stays always inside the father. And in here he never really grows up. He never really gets older. He never really ..."

  Dies, Haviland said to himself.

  "You will understand this when you have a son. Until then, you can never understand," the father told him.

  Haviland was drawn helplessly into the dark dead eyes of the father without a son and saw through them to the vacant, yearning eyes of 3-year-old Thomas Jenks, the son without a father.

  "I will find the killer, Mr. Hopfner," Haviland rasped. "As the Lord is our Savior, I will find him."

  CHAPTER 7

  It was the ax he remembered most clearly. The double-bladed ax and jagged stub of its broken handle protruded from the snow like a pheasant pecking at seeds, tail in the air. The frosting of snow had lent to the brownish-maroon gore the texture of cotton candy. Reverend Haviland had been driving his sleigh from the north, the wind at his back. The handle end angled out at him as he approached. It was no more than 3 feet off the road, struck into the snow after its grim labor was completed.

  What was snow then was now in June gently sloping roadside of green grass speckled with the yellow flowers and fluffy white heads of dandelion, and the broad green leaves and long spikes of plantain. The day after seeing Jenks' widow and Hopfner's father, the rector had ridden out on his horse, Preacher, with Pulpit along, to visit the site of the murder, to begin an investigation anew. He had failed to budge Constable Stillwell. The constable had not said no, exactly, but had not outlined a course of action or a time for determining one. The minister had not mentioned his intention to inquire into the matter himself. He knew, though, that the constable would find out almost immediately, even if Haviland adopted an air of mere academic curiosity.

  The rector stood now on the spot where he had picked up the foot-long ax handle stump and blade but had returned it unseeing to its slot in the snow when his eye strayed to the body it pointed at, 25 feet away.

  Jenks, or what remained of him, had lain next to a 4-foot-high stone wall. The body was more deeply covered in snow than the ax had been, but brownish-red blood from Jenks' head had melted some of the snow across the face and on the ground beneath. The peddler lay on his left side facing the road. He apparently had died face down, hands raised behind him, head and legs drawn up, trying vainly to ward off blows to the head. Then the killer, or perhaps Hopfner, had turned him onto his side to go through his pockets. His head was to the south, or downhill. Haviland wondered if it were proper to conclude then that the killer had come from his own direction — north, from up the hill. Jenks had been walking north but he wound up falling back the way he had come. He could have seen the killer coming, turned and run toward the wall along which Pulpit sniffed now. Perhaps Jenks hoped to hop it and escape, but he was cut down from behind. That scenario would tie in with the finding of the order book on the north then east route back to the village from this rural periphery, if the killer returned the way he had come.

  While remembering and analyzing, Haviland had moved toward the spot near the wall where the body had lain. He stood four feet away now, his back to the road. The meadow growth extended to the foot of the stone wall. Pulpit had finished his inquiries and was trotting across the dirt road toward the woods, ignoring his master's "Come, Pulpit. Stay, Pulpit. Here, Pulpit!" Shoots of English ivy had taken root at the base of the wall and climbed it, so portions were blanketed in glossy dark green leaves while other sections bristled with rugged slabs of fieldstone in assorted shades of gray. No sign of the dead man remained, but the spot triggered memories. That was Haviland's purpose in coming, but with the memories returned the horror and fright. He forced himself to retain the mental picture so he could sift it for details that might help.

  He had approached the form shrouded by 2 inches or so of snow. He was appalled now that he had first considered it a knotty log, sap draining from it at one end. His eye had been drawn to the dark stains. He had walked diagonally from the ax to them, studying the log as he plodded through the drifting foot and a half of snow. His chest had tightened. His stomach had dropped with fear, even before his mind had deciphered the form. Finally, he drew near, blinked the blowing snow away from his eyes, knelt and looked into the gory stare of a dead man. Snow caked on the brow, the nose, the eyelashes, but two brownish-red streams dissected the face. One flowed from atop the right ear, the other from beneath it. Haviland had not recognized the victim immediately and even now could not reconcile the face with that in the photograph at the Jenks' walkup.

  The 30-ish man in the photograph had a full oval face with dark eyes, high cheekbones, a nose with a thin bridge but expanding to large nostrils, as if to take in all the air of his new country. His ears were small, his black hair sprouted from his head, his teeth crooked with a gap between the center two on the top, his lips thin and his chin rounded. He had been smiling broadly in the photograph, clutching a cap and wearing a dark, baggy suit with a vest. He gave the impression of a sturdy, energetic working man — he had large hands — uncomfortable at standing still for the formal portrait. Haviland had to rely on the photo because he had taken little notice of the peddler the few times he had seen him. Jenks had struck him as compact, bustling, smiling and obsequious as he strove in his awkward English to pitch goods to
wary residents and workers. But of course he was much more. Haviland knew that now. Jenks' corpse wore only an expression of mild surprise, as if he had just fathomed something and was saying, "Oh."

  The back of Jenks' head seemed a mass of gore, turned grayish brown by the snow. Haviland had looked away quickly. The arms stretching above the head were buried by the snow; Haviland remembered the hands as being fists. The rector had stood and quickly surveyed the rest of the body as panic and nausea tugged at him. The body had been ransacked. The long dark coat was open and thrown back, and so was the black serge jacket beneath. The constables found a coat button and a jacket button nearby, along with his black wool cap. Jenks' backpack was found at the other side of the stone wall. The killer, or Hopfner, may have hidden behind the wall while rummaging through it.

  The killing had happened at the height of that winter's worst snowstorm, a sudden blizzard. Nearly a foot of snow fell in three hours, and a foot had fallen in two storms the previous week, so the real killer's footprints had been filled in. Haviland had noticed footprints near the ax and sections of trampled snow — some stained with gore — near the body.

  These had been Hopfner's. He had left minutes before Haviland had happened by, but it now appeared Jenks had been killed up to 45 minutes earlier, about 12:45, since the killer's footprints had been erased by the snow. The authorities, with Hopfner caught nearby and under lock and key, had dismissed evidence that pointed to an earlier time of death — the amount of snow piled on undisturbed parts of the body, for instance. Hopfner had gone through Jenks' pockets, tossing some of the snow off the coat. He also may have gone through the backpack since he was found with items from it. Also dismissed was the cooler than expected temperature of the body when the constables and coroner arrived. They theorized Hopfner killed Jenks, then stayed around going through his things and maybe even hiding out nearby. Haviland now found the idea that Hopfner would have stayed at the gruesome scene untenable given Haviland's own reaction at the time to rush away and alert the constable.

  "Lost something?"

  Haviland started. Farmer Ellwood Dusenberry sat on his horse cart, a sprig of hay between his teeth, three silvery metal canisters of milk roped in behind him.

  "Oh, Mr. Dusenberry, I am happy to see you," the rector said as he strolled up to shake his hand. "I was just stopped here to ..." Something told him to keep his inquiry secret.

  But the leathery faced, shaggy-haired farmer said: "Peddler died there. That order book got you all shook up, so's you're seein' what you might'a missed." Ellwood Dusenberry never used two words when one would do.

  "Something like that, yes. It was your ax that was used, as I recall," Haviland said conversationally, deciding he might as well begin his interviews now.

  "T'was stolen from my shed yonder. Wouldn't be a surprise if the Jenks fella himself nicked it. T'weren't the first thing nicked from there." The words connoted anger, but he spoke as if about the muggy weather.

  "You never know," said Haviland, now on the dirt road facing the bearded, white-haired farmer. "When did you say you had last seen the ax?"

  "I didn't." The farmer looked suspiciously at the minister, in his neatly pressed light gray trousers, crisp clerical shirt and beige, broad-brimmed hat. Not the clothing of a man that did real work.

  "Oh," Haviland mumbled.

  Dusenberry looked idly down the road. He relaxed the reins in his left hand and tucked his right thumb behind the tan suspenders that held up his wrinkled, smeared brown pants. He gave off the pungent odors of sour milk and cow dung. His horse had tugged the cart to the side of the road and was pulling up grass. In a few moments, Dusenberry raised his right eyebrow. He turned back to Haviland.

  "T'were three days before the killin' I last saw it, the ax. Sharpened it, chopped some wood, put it back."

  "You said some other things were stolen. Were they tools as well, and taken from the same shed?"

  The eyebrow remained arched.

  "You're a very curious fellow," he said. Haviland could not tell from the prickly tone in which sense he meant "curious."

  Spade, trowel, wittlin' knife, and a milkin' bucket's what I recall."

  "That were stolen," Haviland clarified.

  "T'was your question, wasn't it?"

  "Yes, yes, of course," the minister said apologetically, unnerved by the farmer's manner.

  "Were they stolen at once, or one at a time?"

  "From time to time, over the winter. I'll have to lock up the place if they keep up nickin' things out of it."

  "Was anything stolen since the killing?"

  "Spade, trowel, just last week. Peddler couldn't a nicked them, o'course."

  "Did you tell the constable?"

  "What fer? To have them noseyin' into my business like yourself's doin'?"

  Haviland blushed and looked down, to see that the horse had left droppings practically at his black-leather shoes. He retreated three paces.

  Dusenberry gripped the reins tightly again.

  "Need manure?" he asked the minister, seriously.

  The town-bred grocer's son looked at him, aghast.

  "Fertilizer," the farmer explained tersely. "Bad year. Have to sell fertilizer."

  "Oh, I understand. I don't really have much need of fertilizer at the parsonage."

  "Suit yerself." He jogged the reins and the brown and white mare clop-clopped off toward Westchester Avenue a mile to the south with the milk cart creaking behind.

  Haviland looked down the road after Dusenberry, then turned back northward. Dusenberry's dairy farm took in 50 acres on both sides of the road, one of several dotting the village's outskirts. The field beyond the stone wall belonged to him. The main part of the farm started about a quarter-mile north at the wooded side of the road. The tool shed was there, about 100 feet off the road, within the woods. These woods could have hidden the thief or thieves who stole from the shed — Haviland had elected not to tell Dusenberry his suspicions that the Leatherman had done it. The woods also probably had hidden the killer of Zife Jenks.

  The minister looked over the murder scene again — the roadside, the stone wall, the pasturage beyond — but could call up no more details. Pulpit was barking deep in the woods, so he crossed the road and plunged in. Theodore Hopfner had tried to flee into these woods while being hunted down by Haviland. Would that he had succeeded. A damp carpet of leaves covered the rocky ground, so Haviland was unsure what to look for while following Pulpit's voice. The broken off part of the ax handle had never been found, but he would find nothing in this clutter of last fall's detritus. He looked nevertheless, at the ground, at the trees themselves for any markings. He also sought a sense of the shadowy place, its cool damp air scented with moss and pine. He slipped up hillocks, scrambled over outcroppings of great gray slabs of rock and pushed branches back from his face, until he reached Pulpit and a sight that froze him:

  A fox's head mounted on a tree.

  Teeth bared, tongue out, its eyes looked out madly. Maggots filled the open mouth. Seven feet up, it was stuck on a 6-inch-long stub of a branch. The minister cringed and fell back to regroup. Pulpit, now quiet, launched himself again and again at the tree, crashed into it well beneath the head and rolled onto the ground. Haviland glanced about, but spotted nothing else suspicious, no other severed heads, no torsos, no wild beasts lying in wait. Calmer, he studied the head again. The hair was still clean, though matted and discolored around the neck by blood and flies. So, it probably had not been here more than a few days. Nothing was carved into the tree, no words, no symbols, nothing.

  A cry. Leaves rustled above. Haviland started, peered up. A bluebird darted away. The ominous quiet resettled.

  He can do nothing for or about the fox. He commits the scene to memory. He thinks of the Leatherman. No, not him. If a man's head were mounted there, yes, but not a fox's. Haviland stepped awkwardly back from the scene, like a visitor leaving a pasha, then rushed from the woods pulling Pulpit
along. He retrieved his black mare and continued north on Indian Hill Road, along the route he now felt certain Jenks' killer had taken — to and from the killing.

  A quarter-mile north the now-unsettling woods ended. He pulled over and rode up to a wooden fence that marked off Dusenberry's farmlands on this side of the road. He peered in and picked out the shed among the trees. It looked like an outhouse, red with white trim. A wire loop secured the door to a hook — secured it from animals, perhaps, but not from human predators. Dusenberry apparently preferred to vent his anger than do anything to deter thieves.

  North of the outhouse, Dusenberry's fields surrounded his dull-red and white farmhouse and barn like patches in a quilt, with the cedar railroad fence running along the edge by the road. The farm house seemed well worn in, its cozy front porch sagging at the steps. Some of the red paint had chipped off to reveal jigsaw puzzle pieces of dark green beneath, the red and white gingham curtains in the kitchen window faded by years of morning sun. Mrs. Dusenberry had taken a fever and died 10 years ago, but her curtains remained. Haviland, now trotting again on his way, spotted the cattle grazing behind the house today, and glimpsed others across the road through a thicket that had switched sides. No sooner had it ended on the west side at the shed than it took up on the east side, where the stone wall ended.

  How convenient for the killer.

  Father up the road lay two more farms, Elijah Carpenter's on the left and Joseph Sherwood's on the right, a quarter-mile beyond.

  Haviland found Elijah Carpenter in his dull-green barn shoveling the muck left from the morning's milking. He had heard that Dusenberry had repainted his house and barn red after Carpenter painted his own barn the same shade of green. And they had barely spoken since. That was 15 years ago.

  "Manure, Reverend?" Carpenter asked cheerily. "Plenty more where this came from." Haviland picked out a mischievous smile on the farmer's round, ruddy face in the half-light of the barn. The smile lacked a front center tooth from a fall from a horse some years before. Carpenter, small but muscular, finished up a stall, leaned his shovel against the wall and led the rector along the hay-strewn floor and out of the barn's manure-and-milk mustiness into the open air.