Sweet Everlasting

by Patricia Gaffney

  But nothing happened, and when she craned her neck, she saw a splayed leg clad in gray denim. Artemis—drunk and unconscious. She took one more step, and saw the blood.

  Everywhere. A great pool of it under him, as if he was swimming on his back in it. His eyes and mouth looked like wide black holes of amazement. And where his stomach used to be was nothing except red and gray meat, shiny as wet rubber, with green bottle flies swarming all over it.

  Backpedaling, Carrie felt her shoulder smack the door frame, and then she did scream. Twisting away, she floundered back out on the porch. Fog and silence—just as before. She grabbed her skirts in both hands and ran down the mountain as fast as she could.

  18

  TYLER’S EMERGENCY WAS A twelve-year-old girl with a perforated appendix. He operated immediately, on the family’s kitchen table, with nothing but the instruments he’d brought with him boiled in a dishpan and no surgical linens except the clean sheets and towels the girl’s hysterical mother found for him. But he worked clean and fast; as appendectomies went, this one was a success. If he’d been called six hours earlier, he might have saved her. After the operation, he stayed with the family for the thirteen hours it took her to die, of acute peritonitis.

  His exhaustion was so complete, he could hardly bring himself to detour from the direct route home and stop by the livery stable on Wayne Street. He found Hoyle Taber in his tiny office, going over the day’s receipts. They greeted each other tiredly—working until nine o’clock made it a long day for Hoyle, too—and then Ty asked how Carrie’s mule was doing. “Did you notice anything in the right front foot, Hoyle?” he fabricated. “She said he was gimpy coming down the mountain, and she thought he ought not—”

  “Carrie Wiggins?” Hoyle butt in. “Ain’t you heard? No, you couldn’t’ve, you been up at Ettermans’ all day. I heard about their little girl. Say, Doc, that was a damn shame.”

  Ty acknowledged it with a nod, but it was a subject he had no heart for right now. “Yes, I know about Carrie, I treated her on Monday evening. She’s all right now, Artemis didn’t—”

  “No, no, what happened today! You didn’t hear this, I’ll bet.”

  “Hear what?”

  “She killed her pa! Least, that’s what everybody’s saying over at the town hall.”

  Tyler dropped his medical case on top of Hoyle’s littered desk. “What?” was all he could say.

  “Yeah! She come runnin’ down the mountain this morning, claiming somebody killed her pa. Billy Stonebrake went back up with her, and then they got deputies and the county sheriff down from Chambersburg, and now they’re all over at the town hall figuring out whether to arrest her. She’s got Peter Mueller for a lawyer, I heard, and Frank Odell’s up there, too, trying to get ’em to let her go. Hell, half the town was standing around outside till it begun to get dark, but now I heard—Hey, Doc! Wait, here’s the damnedest part,” Hoyle shouted, jogging after Ty to the stable doors. “The Wiggins girl? She can talk now! Good as you and me! Ain’t that—”

  The rest was lost as Ty raced up Wayne Street toward Broad. Town hall was a squat, two-story brick building with an incongruous pseudo-Greek portico taking up space across the narrow front. In the glow of a street lamp, two or three scattered knots of people still loitered, waiting for news. A solitary figure lurched away from the curb, and Ty made out Broom’s form bearing down on him.

  “Doc,” was all he could say at first. Impatient to get away, Tyler jerked on his skinny arms, but the boy held on like a spider monkey. “Carrie,” he got out, choking on tears and spittle. “Locked her up. Oh, mercy.” His body shook as if he had palsy.

  At a minimum he needed a sedative, but Ty had no time for him now. “Let me go so I can help her,” he said distinctly, finally getting a grasp on the spindly shoulders. He pushed Broom away and gave him a shake to get his attention. “I’ll go in now and fix it. You wait here. Understand?”

  “You’ll fix it?”

  “I’ll get her out.”

  “You will?”

  “I promise.”

  “Okay.”

  But he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, relax his grip, and in the end Ty had to pry him off with rough hands. “You wait here,” he said again and left Broom in the street, crying like a child.

  Frank Odell stopped pacing the linoleum-covered foyer when he saw Tyler come through the door. “Hey, Ty,” he greeted him, the grimness in his boyish face lightening a little.

  “Where is she?”

  “Carrie? They pulled a drunk out of the lockup and put her in there.”

  His hands curled into fists. “Who do I have to talk to to get her out?”

  “Well, it’s too late for that. Peter’s been—”

  “Why?”

  “They arrested her, they’re going to keep her overnight. Tomorrow they’ll have the arraignment and set bond. Peter and I figure we can get up about five hundred dollars between us by then. He thinks that’ll be enough, but if you’d like to help us out, Ty, we’d—”

  “Who’s still here? I want her out now.”

  Frank’s blue eyes widened at his adamance. “You can’t now, I’m telling you. They’ve arrested her, she’s—”

  “Why? Why do they think she did it? Tell me what the hell happened!”

  A door opened down the hall; he whirled to see Peter Mueller close it behind him and come toward them, already shaking his head. Mueller was a large, bald-headed man with a bulbous nose, as ugly as his daughter Spring was pretty. He smiled when he saw Ty, no doubt remembering last Thursday night, when he’d won four dollars from him at the weekly poker game. “Well, Doctor, what brings you here? Heard about the Wiggins girl’s trouble, did you? They’ll probably want to talk to you about her tomorrow, since you saw—”

  “Frank says they’ve arrested her,” he cut in.

  “That’s right. There wasn’t much I could do about it. The sheriff’s a hardhead,” he said, lowering his booming voice a trifle, “but in this case I couldn’t much blame him. Why, what’s wrong, Ty? Do you know something about this?”

  “Tell me what happened, Peter. I’ve been out on an emergency all day. I just found out about Carrie.”

  Mueller smoothed the front of his vest with both hands. “Well, she says her stepfather—says, mind you,” he interrupted himself to point out, still amazed; “she can talk now. Must’ve been the shock. Anyway, she says her stepfather knocked her out cold, night before last. Your housekeeper corroborated that, and so did the boy—what’s his name?”

  “Broom,” answered Frank.

  “Broom. She stayed overnight—this is Monday night, now—at your office. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she didn’t leave the next day till six or so—this is according to Mrs. Quick again—when you took her home. Got there about seven, Carrie says, and you left soon after. She says you were worried, but she convinced you there was no need because Artemis was away on a job and wouldn’t be back till late today. That right so far?”

  “Keep going.”

  Mueller glanced once at Frank, but went on obligingly. “Well, then it gets bad.” Reaching inside his coat pocket, he took out a leather-bound notebook. “As near as they can tell right now, Wiggins died between ten and fourteen hours before Sheriff Butts and the deputies first saw the body, which was around noon today. They’ll know more tomorrow, but for now they’re thinking he was killed around midnight, give or take a couple of hours on either side. Now, what Carrie says is that she was fast asleep when she heard him come in last night, and she has no idea what time it was. She says he didn’t even know she was there—she sleeps behind a curtain, evidently, in the main room of their cabin. She says they never argued, they never even spoke, that he went to bed as soon as he got in and that’s the last she saw of him. Till the next morning when she found his dead, fully clothed body by the front door.”

  Mueller pulled on his ear and started thumbing through his notebook. “Not unnaturally, Butts does
n’t find this too convincing, and he starts hammering at her. Did she hear a shot? No. Why not? She went for a walk, she suddenly remembers. A walk, in the middle of a moonless night? Yep. Where did she go? Just a walk, she says, there’s trails up the mountain behind her house, she knows them well even in the dark. How long was she gone? All night.” He looked up from his notes and shook his head, unable to hide his own skepticism at that. “Says she slept in the mule’s stall; says she’s done it before, to get away from Artemis when he’s drunk.

  “Did she hear a shot? Butts asks her again. No. Why not? She’s a sound sleeper, never hears anything once she’s out. Meanwhile, that mule’s stall is all of thirty-forty feet from the house, there’s no way a dead man could’ve missed a shotgun blast.”

  He closed his book with a snap and stuck it back in his pocket. “She’s making it all up—that’s my confidential opinion—and she’s the worst liar I ever heard.”

  “It’s pitiful to listen to her,” Frank agreed, “especially since there’s no way in the world she would’ve done this, and I don’t care how many times the son of a bitch beat her. Carrie wouldn’t hurt a fly. Literally,” he insisted. “I don’t know how many times I’ve seen her carry ’em outside the house so Eppy can’t swat ’em.” He ran his hands through his carrot-colored hair. “Eppy’s fit to be tied. She told me not to come home without her.”

  “Butts thinks Artemis beat her, and she went back and shot him with his own gun,” the lawyer concluded, “and there’s nobody to say she didn’t.” He took out his watch and flicked it open. “Well, gentlemen, it’s late. My wife—”

  “Is Butts in there?” Ty pointed to the door Mueller had just come out of. The lawyer nodded. “Then you two had better come in with me. I’ve got something to tell him.”

  The sheriff’s makeshift office was a tiny room furnished with a desk, two chairs, and a filing cabinet. At the moment both chairs were occupied, one by the sheriff and one by Officer Stonebrake; that meant the two deputies had to stand. When the door opened and three more men came in, the room shrank even further.

  Sheriff Butts scowled at the interruption. Like most elected officials, he had supporters and detractors. The former said he was a proud man; the latter said he was a horse’s ass, and an aptly named one at that. In any case, his dignity meant a lot to him, and he didn’t suffer affronts to it graciously. He didn’t care to be contradicted, and he particularly disliked admitting he was wrong.

  But he had a soft spot in his heart for Dr. Wilkes, who had drained an abscess from Mrs. Butts’s rectum last spring and put an end to her month-long, highly vocal suffering in about half an hour. So his frown disappeared when he looked up to see who had burst into his temporary headquarters in the town hall without so much as knocking. “Doctor!” he exclaimed, standing up to shake hands. “Nice of you to come by this late. I’d have sent a deputy over to see you tomorrow if you hadn’t, just to nail down a few details. You’ve heard all about the Wiggins murder, I take it?” He glanced at Mueller and Odell.

  “Yes, I heard,” Tyler said shortly. “You’ve made a mistake, Sheriff. Carrie Wiggins is innocent, you’ll have to let her go.”

  The two deputies glared at him. Billy Stonebrake’s freckled face turned red. The sheriff let out a hearty, artificial laugh and glanced around at his subordinates with an expression of fatuous tolerance. “Hear that, boys? We’ve got the wrong person! Well, I’ve said it for years—what the sheriff’s department needs is a good doctor to help us put the criminals away.” Forced chuckling greeted his quip.

  Tyler made a terrific effort to relax his combative stance. “Listen to me,” he said more calmly, “she couldn’t have shot her stepfather because she was with me.

  The sheriff stroked his upper lip in an attempt to appear thoughtful. “Well now, how can that be? She told us you took her up the mountain and left her there—she says you were gone by seven last night.”

  “That’s not what happened. I—don’t know why she told you that. The fact is, she stayed at my house last night, all night.”

  “Why did she do that?”

  Tyler didn’t blink. His brain stayed an instant or two ahead of his tongue, no more, and so Butts and the others learned of Carrie’s alibi at almost the same moment he did. “She said she felt dizzy. Her head began to hurt again in the late afternoon, and I was concerned about the possibility of cerebral irritation, a condition which sometimes follows concussion. I wanted to monitor her for fever and nausea in case there was frontal lobe damage that hadn’t been evident earlier.”

  Butts peered at him across his half glasses; Tyler tried, but he couldn’t read the expression in his steel-gray eyes. But the rest of his face looked skeptical.

  “She signed a statement, this one right here—” Butts thumped a paper on his desk with blunt fingertips—”and there’s not a word in it about spending the night at your house. If she was sick, why didn’t she—say so? Why would she make up a story that was bound to get her arrested?”

  Tyler’s creative tongue chose that moment to desert him. He stared back at Butts, toying with the idea of telling him that memory loss sometimes accompanied head trauma. He hadn’t committed perjury yet because he wasn’t under oath, but visions of the revocation of his medical license wouldn’t go away. And how the hell was Carrie going to confirm any of this unless they let him talk to her first? Before he could answer, Peter Mueller spoke up.

  “Why don’t you ask Carrie?”

  Ty didn’t like the sound of Mueller’s voice; it was too quiet, too deliberately expressionless. An instinct told him the lawyer had already guessed the truth, all of it; if he had, the others wouldn’t be far behind. “What difference does it make why she said what she said?” he demanded, trying the offensive again. “I’m telling you what happened. Carrie didn’t kill anybody, and you’re going to have to let her go.”

  The sheriff leaned back in his chair and twined his stubby fingers over his potbelly. Another thing he didn’t like was being told what to do. “Where did Carrie stay in your house last night, Doctor?” he asked mildly. He wasn’t stupid, either.

  “Where?” Ty pretended the question threw him off, took him by surprise. “In my waiting room, same place she stayed the night before. There’s a couch down there, it’s fairly comfor—”

  “What time did she retire for the night?”

  “What time?” He had to stop repeating Butts’s questions. “I’m not sure; I’d say around nine, nine-thirty. No later than ten.”

  “And you stayed upstairs?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What time did you turn in?”

  “Me? Around ten-thirty, I think.”

  “Ten-thirty. Sleep well, did you?”

  “What? Yes, as well as—”

  “Didn’t hear anything in the night?”

  “No. Hear anything? No. Like what?”

  Butts sat up in his seat fast and glared at him. “Like the sound of Miss Wiggins getting up and going out.”

  “Going out? Don’t be ridiculous, she—”

  “I’ve seen your office—the door to your waiting room faces the street. How do you know she didn’t get up and leave by that door while you were upstairs snoring? It would take her about an hour to walk home. She could’ve shot her stepfather and been back on your waiting room sofa by one o’clock, and you’d never have known the difference.” He smiled unpleasantly. “Nothing you’ve said gives her an alibi at all, Dr. Wilkes.”

  He heard the dare in the sheriff’s voice, and understood perfectly what he wanted him to admit next. Instead he asked, “Are you saying you’re not going to let her go?”

  Mueller broke in before Butts could answer. “I’d like to talk to Dr. Wilkes alone for a minute, Lowell.”

  “Fine, talk to him, I’ve got no—”

  “No,” Tyler said flatly. He took two steps toward Butts and planted his fists on the edge of the desk. “Carrie didn’t go anywhere.”

  “And how would you know that?�
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  “For God’s sake, Lowell,” Mueller tried again, “can’t you just let it go now? If Ty says—”

  “No, I can’t just let it go! Damn it, this is a murder investigation. If the doctor’s got evidence that bears on the case, then he can damn well say it, right here and now.”

  Mueller sighed, raised his arms, and dropped them back to his sides. “Say it, then,” he muttered, resigned.

  Besides Tyler, there were six men in the room. If he’d thought it would make any difference, he’d have asked everyone but Butts to leave, so he could ruin Carrie’s reputation on a smaller, less public scale. But the time for discretion had come and gone. He hadn’t chosen it last night or the night before, and it was a little late to start wishing for it now. He took his hands off Butts’s desk, stood up straight, and told the truth.

  “Carrie couldn’t have gone anywhere last night because she was with me. All night. We were together.”

  The pause that ensued was hostile but not shocked, which confirmed his suspicion that he’d only corroborated what they’d all figured out by now anyway. Butts looked profoundly disgusted. Frank Odell, mild-mannered to a fault, muttered a string of obscenities that left everyone on edge. Ty and the sheriff engaged in a brief staring contest.

  The sheriff looked away first. “Get her,” he snapped, jerking his chin toward Officer Stonebrake. The startled policeman mumbled, “Yessir,” squeezed past the others, and left the room.

  Everyone stared at Stonebrake’s empty chair as if it were a unique and fascinating artifact. Motivated more by duty than hope, Ty finally broke the silence by asking, “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of this remaining confidential, is there, Sheriff?”

  Butts didn’t trouble to hide his dislike. “If the girl confirms what you’ve told us, she won’t be charged with a crime. Naturally people will want to know why. There’ll be talk—”