The Last Hanging: A Will Haviland-Abigail Carhart Mystery

by M. G. Meaney

  "The night is not yet spent," he said, seriously.

  CHAPTER 28

  When Haviland arrived back at the parsonage, he found a rumpled David Seaman pacing before the front door.

  "Thank the Lord and Savior, you've returned," he exclaimed, dashing up before Haviland could dismount.

  "What is wrong, Mr. Seaman?"

  "It's Abigail — Mrs. Carhart," Seaman said.

  "What about her?" Haviland asked, alarmed.

  "She is distraught ... Something terrible ... You must go," he said, waving his hands and growing less coherent with each word. He had been restraining his panic, but now it was overwhelming him.

  "What happened? Is she hurt? Tell me?" Haviland demanded as he reined in Preacher.

  Seaman waved in the direction of her house and opened his mouth, but only a squeak emerged.

  Haviland stared, hoping words would materialize. None did.

  "Never mind. I'm going." He galloped recklessly down the dim, gas-lit dirt road.

  Haviland found Abigail on the top step of her porch, sobbing in her mother's arms. A handful of neighbors stood at the foot of the steps, watching helplessly. Abigail and her mother were in their nightclothes covered by robes. Abigail's black hair had come unpinned and nearly covered her face. She sobbed convulsively, as if wretching. In a moment Haviland's imposing figure had passed through the crowd and he was at her side.

  "What happened?" he pleaded as he put his left arm around her and tugged her from her mother. She looked up briefly, recognized him and let herself shift onto him. Her face was ashen in the gaslight, blotched with tears. She lowered her head onto his arm and renewed her sobs. Haviland looked at Abigail's mother. She gestured behind her. Haviland saw an open box. Inside was a 3-foot high rocking chair just like Abigail's beloved rocker from Daniel Carhart. On it sat two twig figures, a man and a woman who had been holding hands. But they were now separated:

  A bloody hatchet was driven into the rocker between them.

  "Infernal, infernal Lee, who did this?" he demanded of no one in particular.

  Abigail's mother shook her head and shrugged.

  "How long ago?"

  "David Seaman dropped it off about 20 minutes ago. Said he came across it near the skating rink.

  Saw her name and address on it, figured it had been misdelivered or lost and brought it here.

  Abigail couldn't sleep, had the lights on, so he knocked. He said he saw no one near the rink." She stood, now that Haviland was comforting her daughter, descended the steps, thanked everyone for their concern and set them off home. "I'll be inside," she told Haviland.

  Abigail continued to sob, though less convulsively. "Why?" she pleaded, turning her tear-stained face up toward his. "Why?"

  He had never imagined she could be this emotional. "They will never separate us," he told her.

  "Us?" she cried. "No. Me and Daniel." It was as if she were overwhelmed by sorrow about the married life she never got to live, and the enormity of her loss, as well as the extreme cruelty yet remaining in life, things she had insulated herself from through her fun-poking and teasing.

  Haviland blanched at his blunder. Of course the killer from Paulding would strike where Abigail was most emotionally vulnerable

  And what answer did Haviland have? He who proffered consoling words to the parents of 3-year-old Edwin Peck when he died of a fever. He who chose comforting verses and prayers for the dying mother of eight. Yes, he should have the answer, but the words so useful in his professional dealings seemed so hollow now, with someone he cared so much about. In fact, all words seemed hollow, just rationalization, just noise. Yet, she looked toward him still.

  He pulled her to him and hugged her hard, tears welling from his eyes. She calmed down there, in his wordless embrace, drawing strength from him.

  "He must have wanted someone to find the box … and bring it to me," she rasped after a long while. She was back on the case.

  Haviland examined the small rocker. It matched Abigail's in detail, including two circles set into the seat back where Daniel Carhart planned to carve cameos of Abigail and himself. The figures looked like those he'd found in Dan White's shed, but larger and mounted around a metal wire frame and a few metal tubes. The hatchet: Every kitchen or workman had one like it. The blood was red paint.

  Haviland thought to ask if it couldn't have been vandals, but no, it couldn't. Everyone in the village knew about the chair, everyone. No one would have committed such an outrage as a prank, not even the meanest spirited. No, it was a clear warning from the killer, the killer of Zife Jenks, Theodore Hopfner, and now, the Leatherman.

  Abigail said weakly: "I guess we should have announced we were giving up the investigation. He didn't hear the news."

  When he finally led her inside, sat with her some more, declined food or drink – he did not tell her about the devil worshipers – and said, "I should stay tonight."

  But she shook her head. "He just wanted to scare me. I'll be all right."

  As the minister reluctantly turned to leave, she said, "Will, please be careful. Please."

  "I will," he said. She bolted the front doors behind him.

  It was past 2 a.m. when he at last returned to the rectory. Weariness overcame him. He did not notice whiffs of smoke from a candle burning in an odd device in the first-floor meeting room closet. Soon, he was asleep, fully clothed, in his second-floor bedroom.

  CHAPTER 29

  The second shotgun blast finally woke him. It shattered a pane in the window overlooking the street. A groggy lethargy from a swirling fog tugged him back toward sleep, but, as if from a tunnel, voices, indistinct ones, shouted, pleaded. He would have ignored them, for the fog coaxed him to release and tumble back into the happy abyss of sleep. But a fit of coughing wracked him, chasing away the sleep. His eyes nudged open. The distant shouting grew louder. The fog enveloped him: smoke that poured into the room. A fire was burning in the parsonage.

  Another gunshot through the jagged window. He lumbered from bed. The voices were Abigail and Sam Merritt below, shouting up at the window. He saw them now out the window. Abigail wore her robe and nightcap, Merritt overalls pulled on over his undershirt. He cradled the shotgun in his right arm. They waved up at him and shouted to get out.

  In the hallway, acrid smoke poured up and stung his eyes as flames flickered like spirits on the first floor. He fought for breath.

  He pushed up on the window. It refused to budge. He shoved again. Nothing.

  "Open it, Will. Open it," Abigail shouted.

  "I can't," he coughed.

  He wrapped his face in a pillowcase and his hands in a sheet and tried again. Nothing.

  "Stand back," Merritt ordered.

  Three blasts shredded the lower-half sash.

  Haviland scoured the glass from the opening with his wrapped hands. The smoke seized his throat. He lunged to the window and gasped for air.

  "Jump. Jump," Abigail urged, moving closer to the house. Then she appraised the situation and halted. She turned in a panic toward Merritt, looking for a solution.

  "Have you a pillow or a cushion or something?" Merritt suggested.

  Haviland grasped in an instant what he had in mind. He inhaled deeply and plunged back inside.

  Abigail ran to Merritt.

  "What will we do?"

  "It's up to him, Abby," Merritt said, watching the flames engulfing the parsonage's meeting room. "God will take care of him." Maybe.

  In the distance the fire bell gonged wildly. It was 4 a.m. Abigail had been unable to sleep and noticed the flames at the parsonage. She woke Merritt and had her mother alert the volunteer fire company. Merritt, the Leatherman's death in mind, took along his shotgun.

  Abigail and Merritt had run the two blocks. Now, others were hastening up the hill.

  Haviland had been gone it seemed like hours, Abigail thought.

  "Where's Will?" Abigail quavered. Smoke poured from t
he window. "I'm going in after him." She ran off toward the porch, which undulated in the torrid heat and light.

  "No, you mustn't," Merritt shouted after her. She ambled on. She had made it onto the porch by the time he set upon her and dragged her off.

  "He'll die up there. I won't let it happen again," she cried as he tossed her over his shoulder and stumbled back.

  He looked up at the window again. Still nothing. No. Wait. Something was coming out.

  Something was being pushed through the opening.

  "Look there, Abby," Merritt urged as he set her down.

  The object filled the lower window. It emerged in fits and starts. Three feet long, four feet, five feet, finally six feet long it came, out the broken window.

  "He did better than a pillow," Merritt remarked. "He shoved out the entire bloody bed, girl."

  Haviland appeared finally, holding the end of the mattress. He suspended it against the building first, positioning it. Then in a fit of coughing he let it drop. The end hit the sloped porch roof, hesitated, then it tumbled gently onto the roof, smothering the flames in one section. Haviland wrapped his arms again and lumbered to position sitting in the window, his legs dangling. He took a breath. He looked down. Flames ate at the edge of the mattress. He grasped the inside molding of the window and eased off the ledge. Now he hung down. His arms strained. His gripping fingers cramped.

  "Jump, Will," Abigail pleaded. "For God's sake, jump."

  Haviland let go. He dropped three feet onto the porch roof. A section cracked. He bent his knees to absorb the shock of the landing, crouched into fetal position, then somersaulted on the smoking mattress. He rolled off the mattress, off the roof, straightened out and pitched face-first onto the ground at the feet of Abigail and Merritt.

  Abigail, tears tracking through the soot on her face, helped the rector to his feet, then embraced him. Both were shaking. They held each other tightly and the shaking gave way to relief.

  He wheezed every breath and his face was layered in smoky black grit.

  They retreated and turned over the fire to the horse-drawn steam pumpers from Reliance Engine Company No. 1, Putnam Engine Company and Harry Howard Hook and Ladder Company, which arrived in a clanging of bells and clatter of hoofs. Sam Merritt was an ex-chief and currently secretary of Harry Howard, so he moved to tend to the fire. Besides, he felt awkward in the presence of the emotion between the couple and guilty about being part of the plot to oust Haviland. He never intended to harm him and now was persuaded that the reverend had been right.

  There was a killer on the loose, and not one satisfied with a low-born foreigner. This killer had come very close to murdering the pastor of their church, and who knows if the fire might spread to the church itself.

  As he turned to leave, a hand clasped his shoulder. It was Haviland.

  "Sam, you saved my life tonight. And to think of everything I put you through. I can never make it up to you, never." He was about to hug Merritt, but Abigail raced in ahead.

  "You can thank Abby, Reverend. She's the one that saw it first. I owe you an apology.

  You can cut off my mustache if it don't turn out someone set this fire. Just like someone killed the Leatherman. None of us will be safe in our beds. We'll be waking up sniffing around for smoke until he's caught. Well, I'd better go." He strode into the chaos of shouting and horses and hoses and axes.

  The rectory fire was most intense in the meeting room at the bottom of the stairs and largely confined there because the building was constructed mainly of brick and fieldstones, so these kept the flames from spreading to Haviland's study, parlor and other meeting room. Thaddeus Acker, a captain of the Reliance Engine Co., was heading a salvage operation in those. Firemen were carrying out books, desks, chairs, papers, prayer books, vestry minute books and Haviland's trunks, which he had moved to the study after packing.

  John Van Amringe and Jordan Denham were members of the company as well and assisted in hastily moving out the items and more or less dumping them on the green in front of the rectory then rushing back for more, avoiding eye contact with Haviland. Other Reliance crew members poured water on the fire and hacked away at the walls and windows with axes, seemingly at random.

  In a half-hour the rectory fire was petering out. Acker and his crew had moved out virtually everything left, much of it soaked by water and all acrid with smoke. Finally, Denham emerged with an armful of odds and ends, which he dumped at Haviland's feet.

  They had come from deep within a closet in his study. One item was wrapped in a towel and unrolled when Denham dumped it. Inside was a sheet of tin rolled up. Haviland had never seen it before. Curious, he picked it up.

  "What's that?" Constable Stillwell was passing by en route from Harry Howard to Reliance.

  "Mr. Denham just brought it out, but I don't know what it is." The rector unrolled the tin. An ax handle slipped out. A broken ax handle.

  "Odd thing," the constable remarked. "Why'd you wrap up that old thing like that?"

  "But I didn't ..." Haviland said, then a thought seized him. He had seen it before. But where? He could not clarify the murky memory at first. Too much shouting and smoke and pain. He examined the shape of the break in the handle, the sweep then raggedness of it, the discolored wood, the worn-away finish. Where had he seen it before? A fear took root in his stomach, the emotions outpacing the rational. The fear grew. The mind sifted through scenes without luck.

  The constable stepped away.

  "Wait," Haviland ordered gravely.

  Stillwell turned back. The flames revealed a stunned look on Haviland's gritty face.

  "This is the missing ax handle, the one from Zife Jenks' murder," Haviland said, more to himself than to Stillwell.

  Stillwell scrutinized it, holding it by the end and rotating it in the firelight. "Can't be," he pronounced. "How'd it wind up in the rectory if it was?"

  "It was," Haviland insisted softly. Haviland's expression would admit no contradiction. "Do you

  have the ax?" the rector asked.

  "Let me think now. Why, yes, yes I know where it is." He paused, hoping to avoid the obvious.

  It was, after all, 4:45 and a fire still being doused. Haviland said nothing.

  "Why, of course you must go get it, Charley, and bring it here," Abigail put in. She had been observing silently, amazed at yet another shocking twist in the case.

  "I suppose I must, Abigail," Stillwell admitted. "The chief seems to have things in hand here. I'll be back in a bit." He unhitched his horse from a tree, swung aboard and started down the hill.

  "Will, what's happening? Why was this in the rectory?"

  "To solve the case when I was dead," he said.

  "But who?"

  "I thought I knew, but ..." And he told her of the devil worshipers in the woods and his vow to expose them.

  Soon Stillwell returned. Words had darted through the crowd about the ax handle and a goodly number followed him as he strode back importantly to Haviland and Abigail, unwrapping brown paper from the ax, still muddied with bloodstains.

  "Let's get this over with," he said. He took the ax handle and the ax, held them up dramatically for the crowd to see. he slowly put the pieces together.

  They fit.

  "I'll be damned," Stillwell said. He stood there admiring the fit.

  "What does it mean?" one man asked a neighbor in a stage whisper.

  "It means we've got a murderer loose in the village, that's what it means," Stillwell declared. Since he had fit the pieces together, he had adopted the handle as evidence he had uncovered, rather than Haviland.

  "I want every inch of the rectory searched," he announced. "And everything out here, everything." He strode off, deputized the Reliance Engine Company crew and set them examining everything that had been brought out — including Haviland's trunks.

  He thought to protest. It would be unseemly for a clergyman's undergarments to be tossed about in public, as the grim
y-fingered searchers were doing. But he was so relieved that the constable had finally taken on the case that he dropped the idea and stood with Abigail watching yet another official operation get under way beneath the night sky.

  The half-dozen searchers, including John Van Amringe, Dan White and Jordan Denham, pored through the items, not sure what they sought but proud to be involved in a murder investigation. For 20 minutes they sifted as best they could in the variable light. Then, Van Amringe picked out a piece of paper from the pocket of a jacket deep in Haviland's trunk.

  "Charley, look at this," the youth said. Stillwell held up the partly ripped paper.

  "Looks like another page from that peddler's order book," Stillwell said, squinting at it.

  Haviland and Abigail rushed over. Yes, it was. More records of orders and deliveries, these from the very morning of the murder.

  A deputy constable emerged from the rectory. Both deputies had been dispatched inside with oil lamps. He held by his fingertips a partly melted folding knife. The handle was crisscrossed with vines engraved by the owner.

  "Found this in his bedroom closet," the deputy said, nodding at Haviland. "The Leatherman carried one just like it, but he didn't have it on him today when they found him."

  "I have misjudged you, Reverend," a voice rumbled, silencing the crowd. Thaddeus Acker, in a fireman's hat, coat and boots, stepped into the midst of the crowd. "I had taken you for many things, but never a killer. I apparently was mistaken." Acker looked down at Stillwell.

  The constable was confused, profoundly so. Acker's remark, however, set his mind off in a never-before-considered direction. No, no, that couldn't be it, he told himself, shaking his head.

  Denham, White and Van Amringe had joined the onlookers waiting to see what he would do.

  Stillwell worked through his theory in light of the evidence. It seemed incredible, at first, but when you put everything together, all the evidence pointed to just one man.

  "Willet Haviland," Stillwell announced, "I place you under arrest for the murders of the peddler, Zife Jenks, and the Leatherman."