These Honored Dead

by Jonathan F. Putnam

  “You wonder what?”

  He did not elaborate.

  “How long do you think she’s been dead?” I asked.

  “At least twelve hours. Maybe considerably more. I was visiting with the surgeon colonel from the war back at the muster earlier today. I’m going to go fetch him now to have a look.”

  The sheriff mounted his horse, and as he did, I perceived for the first time he was dressed in the uniform of the Winnebago Wars, with a gray clawhammer coat, pantaloons, and knee-high boots. Both of his shoulders were decorated with gold-braided epaulets of command. I noticed too that the sun had already passed its apex and was arcing into the western skies. I had spent many hours alone with Rebecca’s body, I realized, before the sheriff arrived.

  The sheriff soon returned with an older man in a tattered version of the same uniform. The man weaved up unsteadily to where I stood, saw the widow’s silent form, and stopped short. “Too late, I see,” he said. “Don’t know why you made me come all this way, General Hutchason.” He turned to head back in the direction of the muster.

  “Wait and take a look at her body first, will you, Hiram?” the sheriff said. “I only see the strangulation wounds to her neck. But I’d like you to make sure I haven’t missed anything. She can’t have been dead for too long, as the wolves haven’t had at the remains yet.”

  The medical man bent over Rebecca’s body and I looked away again. I stared at one of the nearby birch trees, tall and haughty, and I realized I had last contemplated that particular tree one morning through the window of Rebecca’s cabin as I lay beside her in bed, my hand resting on her warm, bare skin as she breathed in and out peacefully. My head pounded with grief.

  “I’ve got nothing to add,” the doctor said from behind me. “She’s been dead for a while. A few hours—a few days—it’s impossible to know. Now I must return. There’s to be a tug-of-war and I’m the anchor for our troop.”

  He teetered off toward the muster. In his wake, the sheriff muttered, “He was almost as useless when we were in pursuit of the Winnebagos. More of a threat to my men than the Red Man ever was.”

  “She can’t have been dead for a few days,” I said, “because I saw her Thursday afternoon in Springfield. Lincoln and I met with her at Hoffman’s Row.”

  The sheriff looked at me with interest. “Is that so?” he said. He stared into the sky for so long I thought he might have forgotten about my presence. Then he turned back to me and said, “That might explain a few matters. Except this one—what are you doing here today, Speed?”

  “I thought perhaps she could use an extra pair of hands selling to the muster,” I said, thinking fast. “Her store was closed when I arrived, though, so I headed out here, to her house. That’s when I found her.”

  “Yesterday evening,” he continued, “when I got home, Molly and your sister said I’d just missed you. They said I must have seen you as I rode up. But I didn’t. I wonder why.”

  “I couldn’t guess, I’m afraid.”

  “It is quite a coincidence,” the sheriff said, as if puzzling through matters slowly, “because I came here to arrest her after the muster. Prickett had become convinced she killed her niece and nephew.”

  Even in my grief-stricken state, I had the good sense to gasp in surprise. Nonetheless, the sheriff looked at me with narrowed eyes.

  “If there’s anything of relevance you haven’t told me,” he said, “I want to hear it now.”

  I desperately searched for a plausible response, but my aching head proved barren. I was on the verge of confessing my intent to help Rebecca flee, a design now horribly for naught, when I suddenly hit upon a different answer, one that might actually help the sheriff find her killer.

  “Rebecca—the Widow Harriman—wasn’t at a market fair at Buffalo Heart on the day her niece Lilly was killed,” I said. “A merchant who was there told me as much. I came here this morning to ask her why she’d lied to us. I think perhaps she was covering for someone else. Someone who’s now killed her, too.

  “I confess I suspected Gustorf, the Prussian traveler,” I continued. “But he’s laid up under Dr. Patterson’s care now. He couldn’t have managed to come all the way here from Springfield to attack her, not with the condition of his leg.”

  The sheriff was looking at the corpse with intense concentration. “I’ve a fair notion,” he said, more to himself than to me.

  “What is it?” I demanded.

  “I suppose there’s no harm in sharing this with you now,” he said. “We had thought it evidence of her guilt, but now I wonder whether it doesn’t still provide the answer, only a different one than we’d originally perceived.”

  He reached inside the pocket of his commanding officer’s coat and pulled out a small packet of paper. As I unfolded it, I recognized Rebecca’s looping script. The writing was dated two days earlier, the day we had all met in Springfield. My heart pounding, I read:

  Dearest Allan—

  I regret having to leave you in such an unsettled state but the sun is getting low and I must be back on the trail. I am sorry we quarreled. I fear I cannot promise I will never again speak my mind. You have known all this time what your future with me would hold. I am and will remain my own mistress; it is my nature. You have desired to move forward with our plans nonetheless. I trust one confrontation will not change all that.

  You know how much I want our union to materialize. How, in candor, I need it to do so. It has been an arduous few months but the obstacles are, at last, cleared away. My sister’s children sadly no longer present a concern. And your affairs seem settled too. I think it is time to tell the world what we have known since the Spring: that the two of us are destined to spend our final years together. As horrible as the present circumstances are, nothing that transpired today should change months of design.

  Yours forever,

  R.

  “‘Allan,’” I said, looking up. I hadn’t taken a breath since I had started reading the letter. “Dr. Allan Patterson?”

  Hutchason nodded. “She’d left it for him with the innkeeper Saunders, but Prickett managed to intercept it. Regrettably, both of us misread its import, it seems.”

  “But how could this letter have made you think she’d killed her own kin?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?” he returned with a huff. “She speaks of them as obstacles that have been removed. Obstacles to her own gratification. Only a cold-hearted woman could write in those terms. Or so we thought. Now it would appear this same letter points decisively in a different direction.”

  It took me a moment to understand his meaning. “Are you saying you now suspect Patterson of the murders? Of doing this?” I nodded over my shoulder while trying to avoid looking again at Rebecca’s lifeless body.

  “I’m saying,” the sheriff replied, “that Prickett has already gone to the judge this morning to tell him we have a murder trial to commence on Monday morning. That, in all likelihood, Matheny will be at this very moment canvassing on the green for potential jurors. That the people of Springfield will be much relieved to hear we have at last identified the wicked person responsible for these terrible crimes. That if the Widow Harriman is not the guilty party, then it stands to reason her secret paramour, Dr. Patterson, is the man we’ve been seeking all this time.”

  I looked again at the letter from Rebecca, which I still clutched in my hand, and I felt a churn of emotions. Thinking back to the moment when Rebecca had appeared at the doctor’s doorstep on the night of Jesse’s disappearance, I couldn’t say I was completely surprised to learn of a relationship between the two. But to hold confirmation of the same in her own handwriting was a different matter altogether. It was inescapable that the future she had long ago denied to me she had been prepared to give willingly to Patterson.

  At the same time, I had trouble bearing ill against Patterson. Rebecca had written she needed the match with him. This was, surely, a reference to her financial straits. I could hardly quarrel with her conclusion that th
e wealthy, widower doctor could satisfy these far better than could the minority shareholder of a struggling general store. Ever the shrewd woman of business, she had struck the best bargain available. Just as she had written to Patterson, her true nature had been plain to me from the outset.

  “That’s quite a stretch,” I said aloud to the sheriff. “They had some type of tiff two days ago. That’s hardly a cause for murder. Especially not if they’d made an arrangement some months back.”

  “Perhaps so,” Hutchason returned. “I suspect Prickett is going to have a different view of the evidence. And I’ve always wondered about Patterson myself, with all his potions and bleedings and inscrutable arts.”

  He rested his hand on my shoulder. “I believe you were close to her, Speed. What do you think she would have desired? For a burial, I mean.”

  The answer came to me at once. “She wouldn’t have wanted a funeral,” I said. “She’s got no kin left at this point. Any neighbors who attended a service, if one took place, would be there to gawk and gossip, not to mourn. Not that she much cared what people said about her, mind you.”

  I had noticed before a stone marker, covered with a light shadow of moss, on a small mound about twenty feet from the back of the house. “That’s where Harriman’s remains are interred,” I said, pointing. “I think all that was left was his clothing.” Next to the marker were two gnarled sticks, stuck upright in the mound above freshly dug earth. Rebecca hadn’t even had time to give her niece and nephew proper gravesites.

  Sheriff Hutchason went into the barn and came back with a blanket, which he laid over Rebecca’s corpse, and a shovel.

  “I need to return to Springfield at once,” he said. “I wonder if I can ask—”

  “Of course.”

  And so, in a haze of grief I dug a grave for Rebecca alongside the sorry remains of the family she’d never had. The still afternoon air was heavy with regret. My only company was the flock of crows, which watched me silently from their branch. Sweat dripped from my forehead into the deepening hollow. Every now and then I turned and stared at Rebecca’s shrouded body, as if expecting her to rise and come stand next to me.

  At last, I dug deep enough that I figured her corpse would be safe from scavengers. I laid her body into the open grave, giving her one final embrace before returning her to the dust. I recited the Lord’s Prayer aloud. Then I knelt beside the void and began pushing the mound of freshly dug earth on top of her body. And as I did, I promised her soul I would not rest until the blackguard who had taken her had received his full measure of justice in Hell.

  CHAPTER 25

  The sun was low on the southwestern horizon by the time I mounted Hickory to ride home. I had rinsed my hands and face in the stream by Rebecca’s house, but the pall of death remained everywhere about my person. Though I considered bedding down in Menard for the night and getting an early start the next morning, I was in no mood for the boisterousness of the muster. As it was, Hickory and I barely made it through the muster field, stepping carefully over soldiers passed out from drink and weaving our way through a gauntlet of bonfires and bands and bare-knuckle boxing contests.

  We raced the sun and then, having lost, rode carefully through the moonlit prairie. A cool breeze ruffled Hickory’s chestnut mane and transformed the long grasses into rolling waves. The night sky was very clear. A thousand stars shone down from the heavens.

  Rebecca Harriman was dead. I repeated the unthinkable truth over and over in my mind. Her presence in Sangamon County had been inseparable from my own, and I felt keenly that a part of my own history had vanished alongside her. Bringing her killer to justice wouldn’t bring her back to life, of course, but it was the only thing I could think of to help salve my loss.

  I thought again about the words of Rebecca’s letter to Dr. Patterson. Could the sheriff be right that they pointed to the doctor as the murderous culprit? It seemed far-fetched. What possible motive could he have had for killing the two children? I imagined the sheriff, or at least the venal Prickett, responding that he had done so to remove them as “obstacles” to marrying Rebecca. But if that was the case, then why would he have killed her in turn? The doctor fancied himself, above all, as a man of reason, but there was no reason behind the actions they sought to ascribe to him.

  That left the question of the identity of the depraved man who had eliminated in turn each member of this tossed-about family. But by the time the farms surrounding Springfield began to materialize from the dark and perilous prairie, I was no further toward answering it.

  I took Hickory to her stables, gave her a much-deserved rubdown, and went home and collapsed into bed. Given the horrors of that very long day, it was a blessing I fell asleep immediately and did not dream.

  The next morning, Sunday, I awoke to a scribbled note on Lincoln’s side of the bed saying there would be a court session at two o’clock in the afternoon I might want to attend. After I dressed, I headed down to the storeroom, thinking I should go find Martha. As it turned out, my sister was at the bottom of the stairs waiting for me, her arms crossed impatiently.

  “At last,” she exclaimed. “I was about to come rouse you myself.”

  “I had a ghastly day yesterday,” I said, and I started to tell her about it.

  “I’m afraid I know all about the Widow Harriman,” she said. She put her arms around my shoulders. “I’m ever so sorry. Humble came home yesterday evening very agitated and told me and Molly what’d happened.”

  I returned Martha’s embrace and released her. “Wallowing in her death won’t do anyone any good,” I said. “I need to find out who did it. Lincoln left a note there’s to be a hearing?”

  Martha nodded. “Dr. Patterson’s been thrown into the jail cell. I caught a glimpse of Lincoln out there early this morning. I think he’s defending him.”

  “I can’t believe they actually arrested him.”

  “I called upon Jane Patterson a few hours ago,” Martha said, “and she’s devastated. Absolutely devastated. I assured her it’s all a mistake and her father would probably be set free this very afternoon.”

  Martha and I reached the town square several minutes before two. Word of the unusual court session had spread quickly, and large numbers of men and women in Sunday dress milled about in front of the courthouse, trading speculation about the purpose of the hearing. More than a few in the crowd had heard about a commotion at the Patterson house the previous night. Sheriff Hutchason stood at the top of the courthouse steps, holding the door shut against the multitude.

  There was a sudden murmur from the crowd, and we saw Jane walking toward us. Her countenance, previously clear and composed, was blotchy and her eyes were streaked with red. Martha hugged her, and I gave her my hand.

  “Father’s completely innocent,” Jane said fiercely.

  “I understand he’s asked Lincoln to defend him,” I said. “Lincoln will do his best, I’ve no doubt, to rebut the charges.”

  “He’s devoted his whole profession to saving lives,” she continued. “How can they think he’d take one?”

  Martha squeezed her arm comfortingly. At that moment, Sheriff Hutchason called out from the top of the stairs, “Court’s open. The judge says you can all come in now.” The crowd surged forward, nearly trampling us in their fervor to secure choice viewing spots for this unexpected but most welcome after-church entertainment.

  The public benches at the back of the courtroom were crowded with men in silk top hats and ladies in prodigious lace bonnets and ostrich-plume caps by the time the two young women and I managed to file up the dusty courthouse steps. I was looking around for a place where Martha and Jane could sit when Hutchason gestured toward me. He had saved a small space on the front bench, directly behind the defendant’s table. The women and I hurried over and squeezed in beside one another.

  Lincoln and Patterson were inclined toward each other in close conversation as we took our seats. Jane called out to her father, and he turned and gave her a smile and gave o
ne toward Martha too. He looked tired and anxious. Several of the men around us muttered angrily at the sight of the doctor’s face.

  There was a knock on the door of the antechamber and Matheny, the court clerk, shouted for order. Judge Thomas ascended the bench, wearing his dark church suit rather than his judicial robe. The judge had evidently given himself a dispensation to smoke his cigar on Sunday, as it smoldered in his clenched right hand.

  “It’s the Lord’s day, Prickett,” the judge began, looking over to the prosecutor, who was seated at the other counsel table in the well of the courtroom. “I understand, though, you have a matter that cannot wait.”

  “Your Honor,” Prickett said, rising confidently, “I am pleased to report to the Court, and to the people of Springfield”—he gestured to the assembled crowd—“we have apprehended the scoundrel responsible for the terrible murders that have lately afflicted our community. Your Honor, the People of the State of Illinois charge this man, Allan Patterson, with three counts of murder with malice aforethought.”

  Prickett pointed at Patterson with an outstretched arm cloaked in a ruffled sleeve and a long, powerful finger. The crowd around us erupted in jeers and angry shouts. More than a few men called out, “String him up!” Lincoln leaned over and whispered something into the doctor’s ear. I saw Jane trembling on the other side of Martha.

  From the bench, Judge Thomas puffed on his cigar and watched the crowd howl. Matheny looked over at him for instruction, but the judge gave a quick shake of his head. Let them rage, he was saying.

  After a minute or two, the crowd’s fire began to burn itself out. When it had been reduced to embers—mere growls and angry murmurs—the judge looked at Prickett again.

  “Have you confronted the defendant Patterson with your charge?” the judge asked.

  “We have, Your Honor. The sheriff and I questioned him together last night, just as soon as we uncovered the final pieces of evidence pointing ineluctably to his guilt.”