Solemn Vows

by Don Gutteridge

  THREE

  Good afternoon, Sergeant,” the harness-maker boomed cheerily, coming out to greet Marc on the wooden walk in front of his shop. “We been expectin’ someone like yerself to come callin’, haven’t we, Sarah-Mae?”

  Sarah-Mae, as tiny as her husband was gargantuan, poked her bonneted pink face out from behind her better half.

  “I’m Phineas Kimble, harness-maker to three townships for twenty-two years.” He threw out a hand the size of a pig’s rump. He towered over Marc, who was himself almost six feet and accustomed to peering downward when he talked.

  “How do you do, sir,” Marc said. “I’m Lieutenant Edwards, and I’ve been asked by Governor Head to discover who committed the heinous murder of Councillor Langdon Moncreiff earlier today.” Kimble’s handshake was surprisingly gentle, the fingers as supple as the leather he worked for a living.

  “I don’t reckon the governor does too much askin’.” Kimble grinned.

  “Do you want to come in, Lieutenant Edwards?” Sarah-Mae said in a soft, musical voice. “I’ve just made some tea.”

  “Officers in the British army don’t sip tea at five in the afternoon, Sari-girl. Why don’t you just whisk on into my study and fetch us a bottle of the best brandy?”

  “Nothing, please,” Marc said. “I merely wish to ask you and your wife some questions about the shooting. It will only take a minute or two.”

  “Well, sir, we saw it all,” Sarah-Mae volunteered. “Didn’t we, Phinn? The whole, horrible thing. I near to fainted right here on the walk.”

  “I caught her just in time, though, as you can see fer yerself, there ain’t much to catch!”

  “We was standin’ here watchin’ the proceedin’s from about two o’clock onwards, Phinn and me and our three eldest.”

  “We closed up shop like everybody else on the square,” Phineas added. “We got a better view by standin’ on one of our benches.”

  “And a lot of others did likewise,” Marc said. “There must’ve been about three dozen people around the edge of the square with a bird’s-eye view of the murder.”

  “Surely, then, somebody saw somethin’, Sergeant,” Kimble said. “All we could see from here is the old fella rear up like he’d been rammed you-know-where with a hot poker and then crumple backwards with a big swatch of blood under his arm. Then all hell broke loose.”

  “Did you see a man run past the general store with a gun in his hand?” Marc asked quickly, then stared intently at Kimble’s raw-boned face as he reached for an answer.

  “Well, now, funny you should ask me that,” he drawled. Was he stalling? Marc wondered. “Sarah-Mae didn’t see a thing fer several minutes, but when I looked up from steadyin’ her, I did see the old geezer sprintin’ fer Bill Frawley’s pinto by the stables. Looked to me like Crazy Dan, though I ain’t seen him in a dog’s age.” He paused and returned Marc’s searching stare.

  Marc hesitated, then said, “It was Crazy Dan. But he didn’t do any shooting.”

  “I thought not. Still, I found it awful puzzlin’ at the time.”

  “Oh, why is that?”

  “Well, Sari here figured she heard a crack like a gunshot somewheres nearby, but the baby’d started to cry back inside the shop and my boys was makin’ a considerable racket and the crowd was just startin’ to applaud, so she wasn’t sure—but then when I seen Crazy Dan doin’ his act and everybody and his aunt hollerin’ at him to stop … well, I just figured she must’ve been wrong about it.”

  Sarah-Mae was bobbing her pink chin in agreement.

  “Did you not hear the shot?” Marc said to Kimble.

  “Can’t say as I did.”

  “Phinn don’t always hear too good in June,” Sarah-Mae said by way of explanation.

  “Hay fever and devilish terrible sinus,” Phineas explained. “Plugged up like a constipated cow.” To Marc, his ears looked as if they were too big to be plugged by anything.

  “Well, you’ll not be overly surprised, then, to learn that we have good grounds for believing that the assassin’s bullet came from the opening up there in your garret.”

  Harness-maker and wife looked up slowly, in tandem and in joint puzzlement. “You mean the attic?” Phineas asked.

  “Yes.”

  “But there ain’t been nobody up there since Cecil was born ten years ago,” Sarah-Mae said in what appeared to be genuine alarm.

  Marc turned to Phineas: “Would you be kind enough to take me up there?”

  “If that’s what you want. We’re always pleased to be able to help an officer in King Billy’s service. Ain’t we, sweetheart?”

  Sarah-Mae bobbed her chin, then added, “But you may have to fly there.”

  AS MARC STARED UPWARDS at the back of the establishment, he saw the problem. The shop rooms of the business occupied the first floor, and the Kimbles lived in the apartment that comprised the second floor. A rickety ladder led up the outside wall to a small Spanish-style balcony that had long since lost most of its ironwork.

  “When Sarah-Mae and me first come here, that ladder was the only way we could get from the shop to our bedrooms and parlour,” Phineas explained patiently. “After one arse-freezin’ winter, I cut a hole and built a proper set of stairs inside the house.”

  “What about the attic room?”

  “You got in through a hatch in the parlour ceiling. We used to store saddles and extra harnesses up there, but so many bats and raccoons got in that after a while I just sealed up the hatch and plastered over her. And as far as I know, nobody’s been up there since. Even the coons seem to have found better spots to batten down in.”

  “How would you get in if you really had to?”

  Kimble looked at Marc as if he thought this were a trick question. After a pause, he said, “Can’t ever see why I’d want to do such a fool thing, but if ever I did, I’d use that vine growin’ up alongside and hoist myself up to the back window there. The vine’s as thick as Sari’s wrist and there’s never been glass in that window.”

  “Then that’s what I’ll do.”

  “’Course, the balcony could crumble as soon as you put yer big toe on it.”

  Marc took this as an example of the man’s humour. “We are positive that the shot came from that room, so I must examine it carefully.”

  “Then I better go with you,” Phineas said quickly.

  “Suit yourself,” Marc said.

  They moved over to the foot of the ladder.

  Marc whistled. “Someone’s been on this ladder recently. That break is fresh.”

  “Coulda been one of the boys, or the neighbour kids.”

  Marc ignored this and stepped onto a sound rung. Once on the balcony, he immediately spotted, in the inch-thick dust on the plank flooring, unmistakable signs of bootprints, though they were smudged and gave no indication of what boots had made them. But they were man-size, and fresh.

  “It wasn’t a youngster who made these,” Marc said as Phineas crawled up beside him.

  “And it sure as hell wasn’t me!” Phineas raised a giant boot into a smooth patch of dust to make his point.

  “And now we shinny our way up there,” Marc said, grasping the vine and giving it a trial tug with both hands. In this sort of gymnastic, he had only to draw upon his innumerable childhood experiences playing pirates or crusaders on his adoptive father’s estate. Within seconds he had scaled the wall and hauled himself through the paneless window. Then he turned to give the floundering harness-maker a hand up.

  While Phineas was surveying a room he had obviously not seen for some years, Marc went immediately to the opening on the far wall. The late-afternoon sun poured into the weathered room and illuminated every detail. Smudged footprints led directly to the rotting sill. Marc ran his fingers along the ledge and paused.

  “Could be a groove left there by a musket barrel,” Phineas said, peering over Marc’s shoulder. “Or any other kind of tool.”

  “Perhaps, but this is used in only one kind of tool,” Marc said,
holding up a wrapping that had been bitten off a paper-sheathed bullet. “And here’s the mark on it.”

  “You can tell the kind of gun from that?”

  “That and several other things,” Marc said. “The shooter, as you can see, was a good fifty yards away from the hustings as he knelt here and rested the barrel of the gun in the notch on the sill. No smooth-bore gun would be accurate from this distance, so our assassin must have used a rifled bore, which would account not only for its accuracy but for the damage it did to Moncreiff. The marking on the wrapper suggests that the rifle is of French design, a model of some recent make copied by the Americans. I’d hazard a guess that this is a U.S. army rifle manufactured within the past five or six years.”

  Phineas took a minute to absorb this series of logical deductions. “So you’re tellin’ me that some Yankee free-booter climbed up into my attic while Sarah-Mae and me were standin’ no more’n ten feet below on the sidewalk and blasted the bejesus out of the councillor?”

  “I expect that he was counting on the general hubbub and every eye being directed at the hustings. No doubt that is why he waited until the precise moment that the governor was about to rise and make his speech.” Or, Marc thought, the owner of these premises had become conveniently and temporarily deaf. “Also, at three o’clock, this window would still be in the shade of the overhang. With dark clothes on and the gun rubbed black, he would be hard to see. And he could be out that back window and down the vine to the ground in ten seconds. I expect he broke that rung in his haste to get away.”

  “With nothin’ but bush behind us,” Phineas said.

  “And it would have to have been somebody, wouldn’t it, who knew this place was here and never used, and was readily accessible.”

  “With a hundred-dollar Yankee rifle.” Phineas began to sound doubtful.

  “Well, that does narrow down the possibilities. But fifteen minutes ago I was contemplating the prospect of going house to house in search of a needle in a haystack.”

  The two men made their way back down the vine and ladder. As he stepped to the ground beside Marc, Phineas said, “Well, at least you found the haystack.”

  Marc was already studying the thick bush that began not more than ten yards behind the harness shop. For someone who knew the area, it would provide the perfect escape route. The assassin must have known both the terrain and the idiosyncrasies of Phineas Kimble’s three-storey establishment. A new thought struck him. “By the way, do you have anyone helping you with your harness-making?” he called after Phineas, who had turned towards the corner of the building.

  Phineas paused, or froze: it was hard to say which. He swung his huge body around and by the time he was facing Marc his face was lit up by a grin. “Now there’s a good question, Sergeant. I am real happy you asked me that, ’cause somebody along the square would’ve told you sooner or later, and I’d have looked the darn fool fer not rememberin’ it myself.”

  “Then you do have hired help.”

  “I did have hired help, and that’s why it slipped my memory somewhat just now.”

  “How long ago?”

  “A fella with the odd handle of Philo Rumsey worked as my helper fer two years—up to last winter. He was a dandy worker, mind, but not reliable.”

  “He drank?”

  “No more’n anyone else ’round here, though that’s plenty, I reckon. But he wouldn’t show up much of the time—’specially when the deer was runnin’.”

  “He was a hunter?”

  “And a damn fine one: he could pick a fly off the wall of the livery stable from this very spot.”

  “What kind of gun did he use?”

  “Well, it wasn’t no Yankee bluestockin’, I can tell you that. It was an old musket from one of the wars long past. Rumsey’s as poor as a church mouse, with a woman and six kids to feed.”

  “Yet you fired him last winter.”

  “Indeed, I done just that. But then I took to feelin’ sorry fer his missus and the bairns, so I let him come in now and again and do some piecework for me when I got more orders than I can handle.”

  Marc asked the next question and held his breath for the response: “Then Philo Rumsey is still hereabouts?”

  “Of course he is. He lives in a cabin about a hundred yards that way, straight into the middle of the bush—where he likes it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me all this at the outset?”

  Phineas Kimble grinned again, and this time he let the twinkle remain in place. “Well, now, how can I answer a question before it’s asked?”

  Trying to contain both his irritation and his rising excitement, Marc peered into the shadows ahead of him in the bush.

  “All you gotta do is step between them two birches,” Phineas called after him. “The path is as plain as the pestle on a pig. Walk straight on and keep an eye out fer the chiminey smoke.”

  “Thanks for your help.”

  “You’re welcome, but I oughta mention that Philo himself ain’t likely to be at home right this moment.”

  “What?”

  “I heard he went down to visit his dyin’ mother—last week.”

  “Down where?” Marc barked. “Dammit, man, tell me where!”

  Phineas was unperturbed by the shift in tone: “Down to Buffalo, where he was born.”

  MARGARET RUMSEY WAS PERCHED on the edge of a log stool like an emaciated sparrow watching an owl measure it for the kill: wary, fearful, resigned. What she was particularly afraid of, Marc wasn’t sure. The spectre of an officer in tunic and feathered cap standing—however politely or diffidently—in the sanctuary of one’s home was enough to strike terror into the most innocent heart. But, when Marc had first entered the gloomy, smoke-filled single room of the Rumsey cabin, its mistress had seemed more flustered than scared, more embarrassed than awed. The symptoms of her impoverishment and misery were everywhere evident: the grimy, runny-nosed children who clutched at her apron and dared to peek up at the uniformed stranger, the barrenness of the room itself. Marc could see only a few pieces of stick furniture, half a dozen vermin-infested straw pallets, and a charred kettle that had fallen into a sputtering fire.

  Between ineffectual attempts at keeping her two eldest from sidling up to Marc and brushing at his jacket as if it were a cardinal’s robe, Margaret Rumsey had been, at first, as curious as she was guarded. She had even managed a smile when Marc had reached down and ruffled the hair of one of his admirers. Marc had winced inwardly as he realized with a shock that this woman, gaunt and pale in dirt-streaked rags, had once been pretty—and happy. But as soon as he had begun asking questions about her husband’s whereabouts, her pinched brown eyes drew back into their hollow sockets. Did she know? Or was she merely afraid of what she didn’t know but strongly suspected?

  “You say your husband left for Buffalo to be with his dying mother?”

  “Yes, sir, last week. Elmer, don’t be touchin’ the gentleman’s sword!”

  “Do you remember the exact day he left?”

  Margaret Rumsey paused, as if thinking hard. “I lose track of the days of the week. With these young’uns one day is t’same as the next.”

  “Was it before or after the last Sabbath?”

  “Oh, we don’t go to service … no more.” Her eyes widened. “But they’re all baptized! I saw to that.”

  “I was merely trying to help you recall when Mr. Rumsey left for Buffalo.”

  “’Twas Tuesday last, I remember now, ’cause Mr. Danby, God bless ’im, had me over to the inn to help with the clean-up. He calls on me when there’s a gentlemen’s gatherin’ or lodge meetin’.” Marc looked skeptical, and she added with a blush that brought some colour into her grey pallor for the first time, “I don’t go over to the inn lookin’ like this. Mr. Danby give me a uniform.” Then as if further explanation were called for, she said, “No sense in puttin’ on anythin’ decent ’round this dump. The littl’uns’d just puke or slobber all over it.”

  “That would make it exactly a
week ago, then,” Marc prompted.

  Margaret nodded. Then with a trembling lip she said, “But you ain’t told me yet why I haveta answer all the governor’s questions.”

  “A man was murdered this afternoon, in the square. Did you know that?”

  Some of her fear drained away, and Marc could see that she was relieved, though still wary. “I heard about it. Everybody has. But Philo couldn’t have had nothin’ to do with that awful thing, he’s been gone since Tuesday last.”

  “And you’re certain he hasn’t come back?”

  “His mama’s dyin’ of womb cancer or somethin’. All his family lives in Buffalo. He said he’d be gone fer two weeks or more. He’s left us no food, and I’ve gone and spent the last of Mr. Danby’s pay on medicine fer the baby. If he’d’ve come home, these young’uns wouldn’t be whinin’ fer their supper, now would they?”

  Marc thanked her and turned to go. “You will let Mr. Danby know the minute your husband comes home. I will need to talk to him.” If Philo Rumsey were indeed in Buffalo—and until that was verified independently Marc was going to assume that his prime suspect had contrived an alibi for himself—then it was quite possible that before leaving he had passed along crucial information regarding the set-up of his sometime employer’s unused attic and was, therefore, at least an accomplice to some degree or other. Accomplice or assassin, Philo Rumsey was undoubtedly the key to solving this puzzle.

  At the door Marc thought of a final question. “Did your husband own an army rifle by any chance?”

  “Philo’s a good huntsman, sir, the best in these parts, else we’d starve. But he uses the Kentucky musket my daddy give him when we got wedded. And he makes his own bullets right here in this room.”

  “Philo was never in the army, back in New York?”

  “No, sir. He was only eighteen when he begun courtin’ me, and we left Buffalo to come up here and start a new life. But Philo weren’t much fer farmin’, and we lost the homestead. That’s when he took up harness-makin’ and brung us here.”

  “Well, thank you once again. If you’ll be kind enough to inform Danby of your husband’s return, he will pass the news along to me.”