The Last Hanging: A Will Haviland-Abigail Carhart Mystery

by M. G. Meaney

  "No, no, not at all, Mr. Acker. I accuse no one. I just want to reconstruct the day in as detailed a fashion as possible."

  Haviland turned the talk to other matters — the upcoming Unity Brass Band concert at the gazebo on Main Street, the recent graduation of the 11-member class of the Union Free School District No. 4, at which the graduates had buried mementos and planted ivy over the spot, and Jared Towndrow's plans to offer classes in shorthand writing.

  Haviland then thanked his host, reiterated his admiration for the house and moved toward the door. Before leaving, he turned and asked: "Mr. Acker, do you own a black cape?"

  Acker laughed.

  "Will you never desist, my dear Reverend?"

  He shook his head in bemusement and closed the door gently in the rector's face.

  CHAPTER 17

  The black and white guernsey's tail swiped at Haviland as he stood in the barn talking to Ellwood Dusenberry's perspiration-stained back. The white-haired farmer was hunched over, rhythmically tugging the guernsey's teats, the streams of milk sluicing into a metal pail. When it was milking time, nothing and no one interrupted Ellwood Dusenberry.

  "What're you meddlin' into now?"

  "Same thing," Haviland shouted between squirts. A dozen cows, some black and white, some brown, were lined up facing the walls, their flanks in the rector's direction. Flies buzzed his head, the smell of warm milk, hay and dung stung at his nose.

  "Guess whoever 'twas shot at you over yonder'll have to finish the job if you keep on." He said it matter-of-factly.

  "Who shot at me?"

  "Twern't me, if that's what you were thinkin'."

  "I didn't mean to imply ..." His denial was interrupted when Dusenberry suddenly stopped milking, took up his stool and pail, brushed past the rector and around the cow and settled in under a brown guernsey to the right. The rector took three steps forward and barely missed being showered by a cow patty.

  The cleric, in brown shirt and pants today, quickly edged two steps to his right, away from the stalls. The squirt, squirt, squirt, squirt resumed.

  "Do you know who did shoot at me? Someone wearing a cape," he telegraphed between spurts.

  "Nope. Why didn't you see? You were there."

  Haviland elected not to defend himself under these circumstances.

  "You threatened Zife Jenks the day he was killed," the rector shouted.

  Squirt. Squirt. Squirt. Squirt.

  "I said you threatened Zife Jenks the day he was killed."

  "Who?"

  "Zife Jenks, the peddler."

  "Him? Shoulda thrashed him, but I missed. Musta nicked something from someone else too. Served him right."

  A tail whisked Haviland's face. The town-bred rector raised his hands and flinched. Dusenberry continued the rhythmic squirt squirt.

  "Tell me about the station. What happened?" the rector inserted between pulls.

  "Peddler'd been nickin' tools from the shed. I told you that before. I see's him paradin' out of the station, so I drive at him. Too fast he was. Missed. Told him to keep his fingers to himself or I'd ..."

  "You'd what?"

  "I'd let him have it."

  "Did you tell him you'd brain him?"

  "Mighta. Somethin' like it."

  "What did you mean by it: brain him?"

  "What anybody'd mean."

  "What would that be? Did you mean you would kill him?"

  The squirts ceased. A stall groaned as a cow lurched. A fly buzzed by the rector's ear. Dusenberry's leathery face turned from the cow. He stood, picked up his pail and stool, brushed past the cleric, strode across the barn, dumped the pail into a metal barrel, returned and paused briefly on the way to the next cow up the line.

  "You say some damn foolish things for a minister."

  "Well, what did you mean?" Haviland asked, hoping his bluntness would stand with the blunt farmer.

  "I meant don't show your face round about my shed again. That clear enough?"

  "Were you here that afternoon?"

  "Where else would I be and it snowing like blazes?"

  "Did you see him pass by?" Remembering how the farmer once winged the tax collector with buckshot, Haviland was avoiding asking Dusenberry directly if he'd killed the peddler.

  "How would you see anything passing by in such a snow?"

  "So you didn't see him later that day?" Haviland asked, as close as he wanted to get to asking about the murder.

  "What did I just say?"

  "OK. I see, then." The rector took two steps backward, and the farmer continued on to his next cow, this one black and white.

  The squirts resumed, with no change in rhythm.

  Haviland wondered if he dared broach something else, having avoided fanning the irascible Dusenberry's temper so far. He decided he would. He fumbled in his brown jacket pocket and pulled out the figure of the fox found beneath Dan White's shed.

  "What do you know about this?"

  Dusenberry shook his head, as if in amazement at the continuation of the interrogation. Finally, he glanced in the rector's direction. He continued milking, but in a disrupted pattern, like a child's drumming. Finally, the milking petered out.

  "Where did you get that?" the farmer demanded.

  The rector told him.

  "Don't know nothin' 'bout it. You're an awful nosy man, Reverend. It'll just serve you ill. That fellow that shot at you over there last time won't miss next, I'll wager, if you keep stickin' your nose in where it shouldn't be."

  He moved to the front of the cow and unlatched the rope. Then he clapped sharply twice and shrieked something that sounded like, "EEEEEE0000000000W!"

  Haviland started, then dove out of the way to avoid being kicked by the cow as she lurched back out of the stall, whirled and dashed out of the barn. The farmer moved up one cow and started to unlatch her.

  "Better be leavin', Reverend. Could get dangerous hereabouts. Can't trust a cow to stay out of your way."

  Haviland opened his mouth to thank Dusenberry, then heard the double clap and instead turned and strode toward the doorway.

  The rustle of hay beneath his shoes was slow at first, then accelerated as Dusenberry emitted his "EEEEEE00000000000W!"

  The cleric glanced behind him.

  A black and white guernsey, eyes wild, was galloping straight toward him. Once when he was a boy visiting his uncle's dairy farm, his uncle had to propel him out of the path of a dozen cows that had been whistled in to be milked. Now, he hurled himself into one of the stalls a moment before the frenzied cow tramped past. He heard yet another cow being unlatched, the clink-clink of the metal ring. The rector gathered himself, edged out of the stall, slipped in a pile of manure but kept his balance, then ran from the barn, sprinted to the front of the house, leaped onto his buggy, flicked the reins and hurtled off as the third cow stampeded from the barn.

  CHAPTER 18

  Abigail started when the porch step crackled under Haviland's weight, then she smiled and settled back when she saw who it was. She had been sketching intently in the rocker Daniel Carhart had made but never finished. No one else ever sat in that rocker, only Abigail. It was a custom in the village, Amelia Theall had told him, even if it was the only place left. One just stood, or sat on the steps.

  "I did not mean to disturb you, Abigail," he said, giving her name in a hoarse whisper, but he had used it. He glanced around furtively to see if anyone else might have heard. No one.

  "Oh, I'm most happy to see you, Reverend," she returned cheerfully, but somewhat impersonally, he thought, as if she had spotted an acquaintance at a fair. "I was, was not expecting anyone, and it is so quiet here." She flipped her sketchbook closed and folded her hands on it in the lap of her light brown bodice-dress.

  Dressed in light gray — he had changed suit and shoes after his disturbing adventure at Ellwood Dusenberry's — Haviland settled into a rocker next to Abigail's, one plainer and less solidly made. As he mounted
the hill she had seemed a powerful, almost imperial figure commanding the three-story, dark green house with its two gables, wraparound porch, windows accented in cream, and views down to the harbor and up to his church. Now, however, she seemed ill at ease somehow, smiling, yet weakly, as if something were on her mind.

  "Is anything wrong?" he asked.

  She looked down and quickly shook her head. "Fine, all fine," she said. "I have some news on our case, the Jenks case, but perhaps on your case as well. I talked to Tom Wetmore, Jordan Denham and Edward Adee about the day of the murder. They backed up Johnny Van Amringe's story, more or less, but they were vague on what they were doing at Dan White's."

  Haviland was about to thank her for her efforts and console her that she had turned up nothing else.

  "Except," she continued, "Tom Wetmore, after I badgered him and poked him with my parasol, admitted that they had some kind of a secret club and the animal figures were part of it, are part of it, for it still exists."

  "What is the purpose of this club?"

  "A social group, he called it, something they started as boys growing up. You know how children like to have secrets from adults. Well, to hear Tom tell it they just kept on with it right up to now. The figures represent pets they had or animals they spotted from childhood, part of some ritual they use when they meet. I'm not sure I believe him. They're practically grown men after all. To be keeping up these childish games, well it doesn't make sense. If it is true, it comes of not having a war to make you grow up and forget all this silliness." She rocked a couple of times. "Still," she noted quietly, "I'd rather have it the way it is today."

  He yielded to the melancholy and said nothing for a time. Then, "The fox head, what about that?"

  "Knew nothing about it, so they said, but they were nervous, I could see. I talked to them separately, but they started looking about, each one, like misbehaving pupils fearing the teacher, when I mentioned it. There's more to that, I'm sure, and they're involved."

  "But has this anything to do with Jenks?"

  "All of them said they were nowhere near the spot where he was killed. And it seems that if one of them killed him all of them would have. But you saw evidence of only one person?"

  "There would have been even more disturbance of the area had there been three. Also, the killer came from in front of him, not from behind," Haviland said.

  "By the way, none of them saw Johnny Van Amringe after the baseball game. He did not turn up at the inn downtown all that night, even though the rest of the team was there. Maybe he had gone hunting?" Her teasing tone was back.

  Haviland smiled wanly. He was not ready yet to joke about it. His back still stung. His arm remained raw and sore. He filled her in on his encounter in the Dusenberry barn, omitting the less dignified parts.

  "It's hard to tell with old Ellwood," she observed, "whether he's hiding something or just being Ellwood. But he set his cows on you? Better than his dogs, I suppose." She smiled. "But it's getting dark. Will you come in and have some tea?" When he hesitated, she added, "Mother's home and would be pleased to see you."

  Inside, he scrutinized the bright, functional furnishings with greater interest than previously. He followed Abigail through the varnished-maple front door with its beveled glass. She paused in the entranceway — cream and green, matching the exterior of the house — then led him into the sitting room on the right. His attention was drawn to the paintings and pencil sketches clustered on the pale-peach walls, between the deep blue dado below and sea-blue frieze above, matching the sea blue and gold draperies. The artworks were Abigail's, all of them scenes of Paulding.

  One sketch depicted a packet boat at the harbor unloading crates and boxes. One of the paintings showed the village as seen from her porch. With an Impressionist influence, it featured varicolored boxes intended to be houses, shops and the nut and bolt works clustered along the crescent of land embracing the harbor. A schooner, its three sails aloft, approached from Long Island Sound. Another sketch showed her house, with the porch in front. The house was impressionistic too, except for one thing: the empty rocking chair on the porch. This was in photographic detail, so the picture centered around it, lending the house an air of tristesse.

  "I have traveled little," Abigail explained. "Manhattan is as far as I have been. The city of Brooklyn seems far away and exotic. I draw what I know. Paulding is what I know, and it gives me plenty of subjects."

  "People are the same. Those who travel most, it seems, long most to be home. They voyage far and wide to discover what the villagers here know: family and friends are the beginning and end of happiness," Haviland said, rebuking himself for sounding like a preacher. "They are beautiful pictures. If I did not know Paulding, I would know it through these."

  "I am afraid you are just beginning to know Paulding," she said, with a hint of danger.

  "Excuse me?" he said, surprised by the change in tone.

  She shook her head and waved her right hand, to dismiss the topic. "Let's find Mother."

  As they passed through the red-walled, cherry-wood dining room, Haviland was arrested by the large centerpiece oil amid the clutter of smaller works, in the style of the day.

  "My father and mother," Abigail informed him. The large painting lacked a sense of depth, but care had been taken on the faces. The couple looked careworn but kind, quite lifelike and unromanticized, as they posed in their Sunday best in the sitting room he had just left.

  "Wonderful," Haviland exclaimed.

  In the formal parlor, Abigail's mother had set out tea and cake. They talked about the news of the village — the fever that had killed 3-year-old Willy Peck, whose funeral Haviland had preached that morning, the continuing accidents in which trains at street grade hit villagers, a theft from a house down the street.

  Then, Abigail's mother bid them good night and went upstairs.

  "Why do you have no pictures of yours in here?" Haviland inquired. The room aspired to impress more than did the family sitting room. The white ceiling featured plasterwork stars and suns, a 10-light cut-crystal chandelier, off-white walls with a royal-blue and gold frieze and checkered maple dado. Two blue wing chairs and a rocker faced the fieldstone fireplace.

  "Not good enough," she said.

  "Not much of yourself in here, then."

  "There is enough for the keen of eye, here and elsewhere."

  She was right. The high quality without being ornate, the orderliness, the straightforwardness, the suppression of sentimentality — she allowed herself just that sketch of the rocker on the porch. The others were scenic rather than emotional. Also, in decorating the house the awareness of fashion with the good taste to choose the attractive and discard the overbearing. The formality intended to keep intimacy at bay — did she display a portrait of Dan Carhart upstairs, perhaps, or any of herself? These were traits of the house, and of their furnisher.

  "I do feel that I know you the better for having really looked at these rooms. And it pleases me to know you better, Abigail." There, he had said the name again, crossed that boundary again, unleashed its unknown magic, not to mention observing the expressions of courtship.

  They had been sitting on the gold-patterned sofa. She sprung up and moved to the serving table. "More tea?" she asked, almost in a panic.

  "What is wrong?"

  "I ... I have been on my own too long, I fear. Too long to change. More cake?" She hovered over the wheeled table, tea cup and saucer in one hand, cake knife poised in the other. She seemed frozen.

  "I am sorry if I have been offensive, or too forward. I have not done this in many years. It goes against my nature. ..."

  Now a smile sprung onto Abigail's face. Her eyes widened, her eyebrows arched and her mouth opened in the way she had when she had heard something extremely foolish.

  "It goes against your nature? Is it now against nature for a man to compliment a woman? This is indeed news to me. Tell me, Will Haviland, the seminary or university tha
t is propounding this theory. What hope is there for the human race? Will the men and women withdraw into separate tribes, to snipe at each other over the hills? I for one would miss the folderol that men espouse daily as quasi-religious truth in their never-ending quest to consign everything into a category, to figure out like Thad Acker how it works so they can understand it, master it and dispose of it into their cabinets of things no longer interesting. We women will not be so easily consigned, stamped and caged. Nor, I think, will nature permit you to apologize for showing an interest in me. Men are supposed to be interested in women, and women in men, though nature seems to have restricted the women's role in this dance." She put down her tea and cake knife and plopped herself down next to the blushing reverend on the sofa. "Now, go on with what you were saying."

  She had found a way to mock his expression of, what might it be, respect ... love, so she was comfortable again, back in an often-played role.

  Haviland ran his hand through his hair, then set it on the back of his neck, ruminating on the unpredictability, or rather the predictability, of Abigail Carhart.

  "You will mock sincere emotions, but I tell you this anyway since I have grown used to being rebuffed lately: I have come to admire you very much, your frankness, your courage in joining me in this inquiry, your humor, though I must confess it takes me aback sometimes. I am coming to know how difficult it must be for you among the villagers."

  "More so than you know," she muttered, while he continued his oration.

  "Yet you have stood by me, the only villager to do so. …"

  Not for some noble motive, she was telling herself. It was the adventure, the gossip, the nose-tweaking she craved.

  "... your spirit, your brightness, they light corners of experience, ways of seeing that I have missed. I hope we can become closer as the days go by." He stopped abruptly at this, unwilling to proceed to the logical extension, a proposal of marriage. Sometimes his speeches took on a life of their own, going far beyond what he had intended. Taking her hand might, too, say more than he planned, so he placed a hand on each of his knees, as if waiting for a signal to spring into action of some sort.