“Is that the husband and their child there on the floor?” Loren asked.
“Yes it is,” Kimmel said. “Name of Rick. A decent fellow.”
“You live down here, right?” Loren asked.
“Yes I do.”
“Did you hear any quarreling tonight?”
“Not a thing, until . . . this. There was yelling. I figure he killed the baby and she killed him?” Kimmel said in a low whisper.
“That may or may not be,” Loren said. “I wouldn’t go spreading that story.”
“I’m just saying,” Kimmel said.
“Was there some other party around here tonight?” Robert said.
“Party?” Kimmel said. “I don’t know. That tavern opened up today—”
“No, some other person,” Robert said. “Someone who doesn’t belong down here that you might have noticed.”
“Oh,” Kimmel said. “No. I didn’t see anyone.”
“How about you others,” Loren asked the men with Kimmel: Ralph Horsley, a laborer on the Deaver farm, and Bob Bouchard, a woodcutter.
“No, sir,” Bouchard said while Horsley shook his head.
“I hope nobody touched anything,” Loren said. He knew next to nothing about the correct procedure. It occurred to him that forensics were now a thing of the past. There were no labs to send things to. The legal system of the old times was defunct: the courts, professional police, all of it. The truth of this tragedy would have to be determined by other means, and Loren was not sure it would be the truth.
“We didn’t touch nothing,” Kimmel said. The other neighbor men nodded.
“Thanks,” Robert said. “We’ll take it from here.”
They didn’t seem to understand.
“You guys can go now,” Loren said. Irritation was creeping into his voice.
When they had left, footsteps resounded overhead, and soon a familiar boxy figure resolved out of the shadows where the stairway opened into the dim hall. Brother Jobe wore a knee-length gray blanket greatcoat with a wool muffler draped about his neck. He carried his broad-brimmed hat in his hands.
“You fellows figure it out yet?” he asked Loren and Robert.
“No,” Loren said. “How about you?”
“Working on it.”
“Did you find anything upstairs?”
“Appears to me they don’t use it in the winter.”
Loren held his candle stub aloft and poked around the kitchen. Part of a round skillet–made corn bread sat on a cutting board with crumbs all around. It struck Loren as odd in a time when food was dear and manufactured mousetraps and chemical poisons were hard to come by. Mice were everywhere. Most people were careful about food. They put leftover food away in tins, old plastic storage tubs, and cabinets. There was some odd dark thing next to the corn bread. Loren looked closer with the candle. It was a fish head, from a smoked trout, he surmised, all desiccated, with a fragment of spine still attached. It was very cold in the cottage. Loren carefully touched the cookstove surface. It was barely warm. He opened the firebox and looked in. A few embers glowed.
“You better might have to take the girl into custody,” Brother Jobe said.
Loren digested the idea. “She’s not a suspect yet.”
“No?” Brother Jobe said. He stepped around Loren and gazed down at Rick’s body. “Got any other idears?”
“An intruder, maybe,” Robert said. “Someone who did this and fled the scene. A secret boyfriend maybe. I dunno . . .”
“You try to talk to her yet?” Brother Jobe said.
Loren stepped carefully around the body and the splintered crib and went into the room where the women sat on the bed. The woman and her dead husband were among the few people in town who did not attend the Congregational Church or belong to any of its social organizations. Loren had never spoken to Mandy though he had seen her occasionally around town. He stood before her for a full minute. The neighbor woman on her right stroked Mandy’s arm. Everyone’s breath was visible in the dim light. Mandy did not look up at him so Loren squatted down on the rug before her.
“Tell me your name?” he said.
Mandy did not respond.
“It’s Mandy,” said the neighbor woman on her right side, Anna Klum.
“Mandy, I’m Loren Holder. I’m minister of the Congregational Church and I’m the town constable as well. It’s up to me to find out what happened here.”
Mandy didn’t respond. She just stared through Loren.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
She would not. Mandy’s mind was a vast cavern of roaring reverberating voices, none of them making any sense. It left her numb and mute.
“Has she been like this all along?” Loren asked the other women.
“Yes,” said Tracy Tolleson on Mandy’s left. “Since we got here.”
Just then, Dr. Jerry Copeland entered the cottage. He nodded a greeting to the others. He saw the bodies on the floor and stooped down to take Rick’s pulse at the carotid artery. He lifted the baby off the floor, undid the baby’s swaddling on the kitchen table, and searched for a pulse. He palpated Julian’s little arms and jaw. The muscles were still flaccid; rigor mortis had not set in. The baby’s exposed pale skin and lifeless face made Robert shudder.
Loren quit his spot in the back bedroom and strode back to the kitchen. He, too, took a long hard look at the baby on the kitchen counter. All the men spoke lowly, in whispers.
“Not a mark on him,” Loren said.
“He’s sufficiently dead,” the doctor said.
“What do you think?”
“I’ll have to perform an autopsy.”
“How about Mandy,” Loren whispered.
“You need to find a place for her,” the doctor said. “Some place secure, where she’ll stay put.” The doctor paused a moment. “Some place she won’t hurt anybody.”
“My sentiment too,” Brother Jobe weighed in.
“Is there something wrong with her?” Robert said.
“She was a patient of mine last summer,” the doctor said. “She had some kind of meningitis. Of course, I didn’t have any antibiotics or antiviral drugs. People can get over it. I thought she mostly had. Her physical symptoms resolved. But she showed some apparent thinking problems afterward.”
“Is she psychotic?”
The doctor looked abashed. “Actually, I haven’t seen her since maybe back in October,” he said. “But she appeared capable of functioning. I certainly didn’t think she was a danger to herself or others.” He turned his glance down to Rick’s body on the floor with the handle of a cook’s knife protruding from his chest. “Now I’d have to assume she could be,” the doctor said.
“We don’t have any place to put her,” Robert said. “The town jail is unheated. She should be in a mental health facility.”
“Well, that’s not an option,” the doctor said. Along with the legal system, the hospitals in Bennington and Glens Falls had ceased operating.
“Yeah,” Robert said, puffing out his cheeks. “Not an option.”
“What about your infirmary?” Loren said.
The doctor ruminated awhile. “The windows don’t lock,” he said.
“We have a place for her,” Brother Jobe said.
The others turned to him.
“Warm, secure, and plenty of men to keep watch out in the hall. It’s heated and she could get meals and all. We’ll even pray for her.”
The four men swapped glances. They understood their mutual assent without having to express it out loud.
“I’ll send for a cart,” Brother Jobe said. “You’ll also have to get a message over to Bullock. It’s high time that sumbitch took his magistrate duties seriously.”
While they waited for the cart, Loren found some
paper and an old ballpoint pen and drew a diagram of the first floor of the house and where the bodies had been found. When the cart came, the women attempted to help Mandy off the bed and out of the house. They got her to her feet but, as they attempted to steer her out of the back room, Mandy became hysterical, shrieked, scratched at and struck the women with her fists, even tried to bite them. Loren, the doctor, and Robert had to step in. They seized her and brought her back over to the bed where she continued to carry on wildly, even while Loren and the doctor held her down. She screamed at them in words that were not from a language any of them recognized. Meanwhile, Robert went outside. The crowd had dwindled now to about twenty persons, mostly men, stamping their feet in the cold and dark. He asked for someone to fetch a length of rope.
“Are you going to hang somebody?” said Troy Cotterill, a cooper, who was still quite drunk from his evening in the Union Tavern.
“I suppose you already heard that we have two bodies in there,” Robert said, ignoring Cotterill.
There was agreement that this was so among the crowd.
“Don’t she get a trial?” said Kyle Tripp, another farmhand.
“Nobody’s been charged yet and there won’t be any lynchings,” Robert said. Just then, a two-wheeled cart raced under the old railroad bridge into Mill Hollow pulled by a fine bay gelding. Somebody came up with a length of old nylon rope, the really strong kind that was not manufactured anymore. Robert gave it to the doctor and Loren, who bound Mandy’s wrists behind her, and hobbled her ankles, and wrapped her in a blanket, and conveyed her out the door to the cart driven by Brother Boaz from the New Faith Brotherhood Covenant Church of Jesus.
There was plenty of time to take the bodies where they needed to go.
Seven
Hours later, Loren Holder returned to the rectory of the Congregational Church where he lived with his wife, Jane Ann, and his four little orphaned boys. The presence of the boys in their household—since their rescue from the criminal child trafficker Miles English in the nearby village of Argyle—had lit up their lives, even while Loren and Jane Ann grieved for their own missing twenty-year-old son, Evan, who had gone off two years earlier with Robert Earle’s son, Daniel, to see what had happened to America beyond the boundaries of Washington County. Nothing had been heard of them since. The big white clapboard rectory house with its figured gables and arched windows had once again become, for Loren and Jane Ann, the beating heart of their spirits, instead of a bleak outpost in the realm between the living and the dead. Striding up Van Buren Street in two inches of fluffy snow, Loren fixed his gaze on the candlelight that glowed through the curtain in their second-floor bedroom. A three-quarter moon spread enough soft radiance through the clouds that the street looked as vivid as a miniature scene in a glass snowglobe.
Loren entered the house carefully so as not to wake the children sleeping upstairs. A big Christmas tree stood in the front parlor. With the electricity out for good, there was no need to worry about a short circuit in a string of lights burning the house down. By standards of the old times, the number of presents under the tree would have seemed paltry. Christmas was no longer the frantic commercial potlatch it had been in the late days of the so-called consumer society. It was the custom in the new times to give children only one special present each year. Instead of manufactured wrapping paper, the gifts were concealed in scraps of fabric and garments that would be used when the holiday was over.
Loren lit a candle and checked the woodstoves in the front parlor and in the kitchen. They were well stoked. It put him in mind of the chill dreariness of the murder scene and how delicate the devices were that kept anyone from a life of tragic futility in these harsh new times. In the kitchen he poured himself three fingers of rough plum brandy in a pony glass. Upstairs, he found Jane Ann in bed, in a flannel nightshirt, reading the biography of a long-gone movie star renowned for her feisty independence and battles with the studio moguls. Jane Ann could tell by the way Loren was standing beside the bed, sipping the plum brandy, that something was up. She put down her book.
“I think you have something to tell me,” she said.
Eight
By the time Robert Earle returned to his 1904 arts and crafts–style bungalow on Linden Street, his housemate and girlfriend, Britney Blieveldt, was cleaning up the debris from her candle-making operation. It had taken her four hours to dip sixty beeswax and tallow tapers and fill two dozen old glass jars with triple wicks that she liked to use as lighting for other handwork—from basketry to sewing to making the candles themselves. She had hung the tapers to harden on a rack attached to a varnished wooden pallet that Robert had made for her to collect any wax drippings that could be scraped off and saved. Beeswax was dear. She was industrious because she believed she had to be, and at twenty-nine she still had the energy. In the old times, when she was a teenager, she spent countless hours supine in front of the flat-screen television following the so-called reality antics of strangers. The new times had transformed her as had the murder of her husband, Shawn Watling, half a year earlier by the thugs who managed the old landfill as a salvage operation. She had been left dangerously adrift with a seven-year-old daughter. In the new times, in a community demoralized by the failed religion of scientific progress, in what had become a hard subsistence economy, being without a man was an unpromising situation. Robert Earle had rescued her, quite literally, from her burning house. And so she and her daughter, Sarah, fell in with Robert, a widower who was a generation older than Britney, and she had joined his household.
Robert took his boots off and removed the heavyweight Polartec fleece jersey that had held up so remarkably since he first bought it for telemark skiing more than twenty years ago, when the world was full of miracle fabrics and miracles in general, and all that was necessary to beat back the dark of night was the flick of a switch when you walked into a room. Now everything that used to be automatic was a chore in a daily cavalcade of chores that some days added up to an ordeal of chores. He carefully placed his fiddle case on top of the upright piano and moved to the woodstove to warm his hands and face. The aroma of balsam pine filled the house from the tree in the corner farthest from the woodstove. It was covered with a mix of old manufactured glass ornaments and whimsical figures Robert had carved, festooned with swags of popcorn strung on sewing thread.
Usually, when he entered the house he had some news, especially if he had just come from a meeting where a lot of other townspeople were present, as he had this evening with the assembly of musicians and choristers for Christmas practice. News had no other way of traveling now that the immersive media of TV, radio, and Internet were not a presence in their lives. Britney observed him closely trying to guess what he was holding back from telling her. She concluded that Robert was making an effort to avoid eye contact.
“Would you like something hot to drink?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, not looking her way. “Milk with honey and whiskey, please.”
She disappeared into the rear keeping room, which was far enough from the various stoves to serve as a place of refrigeration this time of year. She returned shortly with a saucepan of milk and placed it on the parlor stove because the kitchen cookstove had been banked for the night and she didn’t want to stoke it again as their bedroom was upstairs from the kitchen and Robert hated to sleep in a hot room. Then she set about assembling a supper plate for him.
The cuisine of the new times was rich but monotonous, being limited mostly to what grew in the vicinity and what could be made from it. They had plenty of butter, cream, cheeses, meats, and sausage. Wheat would not grow in the northeast because of pervasive stem-rust disease in the soil, and deliveries of it from elsewhere were erratic at best. They got by on corn, rye, barley, oats. Stephen Bullock was experimenting with the ancient grain called spelt. He’d gotten one small crop in that year. In trials so far it made a dense, nutty loaf like rye and rough crumbly noodles, wh
ich his wife, Sophie, pronounced “inedible.” The staple in the new times was corn bread and many dishes were made around it, for instance the so-called pudding that Britney cut a big oblong of and put on a plate for Robert, with pickled garden vegetables and a side of fermented cabbage spiced with hot peppers, garlic, and green onions, not unlike the Korean kimchi that had been catching on in America just when things fell apart. Britney’s pudding this evening was a savory baked dish of day-old corn bread, eggs, cream, kale, onions, and leftover duck, of which she had used everything but the quack.
Robert seated himself next to the stove in a hoop-back rocking chair built with his own hands out of maple, oak, and poplar the month after his daughter Genna died of encephalitis at age eleven. It had required all his attention to build it correctly.
“You know, we could get a horse now,” Robert said.
“Why would you want to get a horse?”
This brought him up short. He wondered for a moment if Britney was being snarky with him, but this was not her way.
“I have quite a bit of hard money due. Enough for a horse.”
“You could always rent a horse from Mr. Allison,” she said. Tom Allison had been a vice president for administration at the county community college in the old times. Now he ran the town livery, a business he had to improvise because the model for running it hadn’t existed in a century. He rented out carts and wagons as well as saddle horses. In the new times most people not involved with the transport of goods did not have to go anywhere.
“I’ve wanted a horse for a long time,” Robert said.
“It’s not like having a car where you can just leave it sit until you need it,” Britney said. “You have to care for them constantly. And they get sick fairly often.”
“What do you know about horses?”
“I half-leased a palomino named Josie when I was twelve and thirteen. That is, my mom did for me. Josie got Lyme disease and we had to pay the vet bills. On top of everything else. All the routine stuff.”
A History of the Future Page 5
