by Jeanne Dams
For once she did as he suggested. She even napped for a little while in the afternoon, after checking on Norah and Fiona, and spent the evening peacefully in front of the fire finishing her Christmas list. The sky clouded over and the temperature rose throughout the day. A light snow was falling by the time Hilda and Patrick went early to bed—but not early to sleep. There were times when Hilda was very, very glad she had not been brought up as a “lady” who was not supposed to enjoy the intimacies of marriage. Hilda enjoyed them very much indeed.
The next morning, still drugged with pleasure, she rolled over and reached out for Patrick, only to find the other side of the bed cold and empty. Oh, yes, Monday. Patrick’s meeting. And much to do.
For despite her attempts to follow Aunt Molly’s suggestion and stop thinking about Sean and the fire, no ideas had come to her open, receptive mind. Hilda was, as she had once heard Mrs. Clem say, completely flummoxed. Perhaps the best thing to do was to go and talk again to Andy. He might have learned some new bits of information that would lead her in a better direction. Or in any direction, she thought, yawning.
She got up, crossed the cold floor quickly, and looked out the window. Snow, but not heavy snow. Just big, pretty flakes falling slowly. She could get around in that easily enough. She might not even take the carriage, though it was nice to know she had one at her disposal if she wanted it. She rang for Eileen and jumped back into bed. What a luxury to wait until the room was warm before she had to dress!
“Eileen,” she said thoughtfully when the little maid came into the room with a tray of coffee and a bucketful of coals, “we have not had time for lessons of late. I do not mean to neglect them, but there has been much to think about.”
“ ’Sall right, ma’am. I’ve been run off me feet, what with that nurse, and the new baby and all. I take that book you gave me up to bed at night, though, and sometimes try to read a little before I go to sleep.”
“Good. After Christmas, when things are maybe quieter, I will start teaching you some arithmetic. I have always been good with numbers.”
Eileen sighed. “Yes, ma’am,” she said despondently, and began to build up the fire.
“Ah, but you must be good at arithmetic if you want to be a cook. There is a great deal of mathematics in cookery. Or so my mama and my sisters tell me.”
“Then you ought to be better at cooking than you are, ma’am, bein’ as you’re so good with numbers,” said Eileen, and then looked a little scared. “If you don’t mind my sayin’ so.”
“You are quite right, Eileen. I should be. And one day I will be, when I can take time for lessons. Now I must have a bath. I will not need your help with dressing, and I will come down for breakfast.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll run your bath, shall I?”
“Please. And Eileen, how is Mrs. O’Neill today?”
“Oh, ma’am, she’s that cheerful and bright-lookin’, nobody’d think her husband was lyin’ there in jail. It’s wonderful how she’s made up her mind to stay lively for the sake of the baby. Who’s cheerin’ up herself, and gainin’ weight. Nurse says she’ll have her fat as a little pink pig before she’s done.”
Hilda went to her bath with mixed feelings about Norah’s improvement. “Staying lively” was all very well, but the next time Mrs. Murphy visited, she was going to know something was up. After breakfast, Hilda decided, she must go and see Norah and talk to her.
Norah apparently thought so, too. When Eileen served Hilda’s breakfast, she brought a message. “That nurse has been down to warm Fiona’s bottle,” the maid said as she put porridge and hot toast on the table, and checked to make sure there was enough coffee and cream and sugar and butter and jam. “She says Mrs. O’Neill wants to see you when you’ve finished your breakfast. Says she’s all excited about somethin’, and Nurse had to be real firm to make her stay in bed.” Eileen snickered. “I’ll bet Mrs. O’Neill’s sorry she got nurse’s back up. I wouldn’t want her bein’ ‘real firm’ with me.”
“The nurse is doing what she needs to do,” said Hilda reprovingly. Privately she agreed with Eileen. It would not be much fun to be on the wrong side of nurse Pickerell’s tongue.
Norah was indeed excited. When Hilda went into the room her friend was sitting up in the rocking chair, wrapped up in shawls and very close to the fire, but out of bed. When Hilda came in she stood up, scattering shawls over the floor.
“Now, now, none of that,” said the nurse, who was folding diapers. “The doctor has said you might sit up for a bit, but he said nothing about standing and running around the room.”
Norah rolled her eyes. “And who said I’m runnin’ around anywhere?” She added something under her breath. Hilda didn’t quite catch it, but she could guess its import.
“You had better sit down,” she said hastily. “You are doing well, and I do not want you to take a turn for the worse.”
“Don’t want me on your hands forever, is that it?” But Norah sat, and the smile playing around her eyes took the sting away from the remark. “You took your time about getting up here.”
“I was eating breakfast. What is so important, that I must hurry?”
“I’ve thought of somethin’, that’s what’s so important. Some-thin’ you never thought of, for all your fancy brains.” Norah tilted her head to one side, an impudent look on her face.
It was a look that Hilda knew well, and hadn’t seen for weeks. “If you are well enough to insult me, you are getting better. See, I will sit and humbly listen to what you have thought with your fancy brain.”
“The day you’re humble is the day we’ll need to take you out of church feet first,” said Norah. The nurse made a tut-tutting noise in the background, but Norah paid no attention. “Now listen. You’ve gone all over the place talkin’ to people about the fire, and askin’ who knows what, and you’ve been gettin’ nowhere, am I right?”
Hilda sighed and nodded. “I have learned things, but I cannot put them together to make a story.”
“Well, if I didn’t know you’d throw me out in the snow, I’d call you a dumb Swede. And me a stupid Irishwoman, as well. For why didn’t we either of us think to talk to the men who were there?”
“I have talked to the firemen,” began Hilda, frowning, but Norah interrupted her.
“Not the firemen, numskull. The men who were with Sean, buildin’ Barry’s cousin’s barn. The Irishmen!”
“But—but—do they know anything? Did they see anything?”
“We don’t know that till we ask, do we? Hilda Johansson, you should have thought to do that a week ago!”
Hilda stood up and began to pace. “Yes! You are right, Norah! oh, it is stupid we have been, stupid, both of us. You I can excuse. You have been ill, and worried, and have a new baby to care for, but I!”
“You with your marv’lous brain,” put in Norah.
“Yes, you may laugh at me. Norah, it is a brilliant idea you have had. I will go now to talk to them.” She headed for the door.
“Mebbe,” said Norah, “you’d want me first to tell you who they are and where to find them?”
When Hilda had thought about it for a little, she realized that the police had almost certainly talked to the men already, but it didn’t matter. They had got no further with their investigation than she had with hers. Therefore they had not asked the right questions. Or else…Hilda was growing more and more uneasy about the police, and particularly the sergeant in charge of the case.
At any rate, she would talk to the men herself. It could do no harm, and she might learn something important.
Fortunately most of the men worked at one of three factories: Birdsell’s, Oliver’s, or Studebaker’s. Of these, the busiest at this time of year would be Studebaker’s. The other two, which made only farm equipment, always had plenty of work for their employees, but the pace was less frantic in December than it would be in a couple of months. Hilda decided to start at Birdsell’s.
There she found the men sympathetic to Sean’
s plight and eager to talk about that day. The foreman, who knew Sean well, agreed that the men could take five minutes off to talk to Hilda. “Not here, though,” he shouted. The uproar on the factory floor was tremendous. “Better go to the lunchroom. Nobody there at this hour. I’ll show you, ma’am.” He escorted her and the four men to the large room where the men ate in inclement weather. “And you tell that Sean O’Neill, when you see him, that he’d have done better to stay on here. We’re not laying off, like some. I’m sorry I can’t hire him back, but when business picks up in the spring, if he’s out of jail and still hasn’t found a job, he can come back here and talk to me. He’s a good worker.”
“He will be out of jail, I promise. And I hope he will find a job before then, but I will tell him what you said.”
“Right. Five minutes, now.”
The men were so eager to tell her all about everything that she couldn’t understand a word. “Please!” she said, holding up her hand. “If we have only five minutes, I must ask questions. First, one of you tell me exactly what happened when you saw the fire at the next farm.”
The biggest of the men spoke up. “Name’s Ryan, ma’am. I’m some kind of cousin to Sean, though I couldn’t tell you just how we’re related. And I can tell you he’s no thief, and no murderer!”
“I believe that, Mr. Ryan. Please tell me what happened.”
They went through it all, telling Hilda nothing new. The smoke, the idea it might be a grass fire, the worry about it going underground. The fast run to the adjacent field, the despair when they realized it was a barn fire. “And well alight, ma’am,” said Ryan. “Seems like it went from almost nothin’ atall to a regular inferno in just no time. We knew there was nothin’ we could do for the barn, so we tried to see if there was animals inside, but we couldn’t see none. We all wish we’d knowed about the hired man.”
The others muttered assent, their heads down.
“And did any of you see Sean pick up the billfold?”
No, none of them had, but they believed his story. And yes, he had asked all of them, once they were back at the other farm, if they were the owner. And if that was all, ma’am, they’d best be gettin’ back to work.
“Thank you. I will leave in just one minute, but I have one more question. Did any of you see anything unusual that day, anything at all? Did you see anyone leave the farm next door, or come to it?”
A man who identified himself as Neely said he’d seen the farmer leave, early in the morning when they were just getting to work. “At least I reckon it was the farmer. Saw somebody, anyway, leave the place in a wagon. Never saw him come back, nor anybody else.”
“So that was a waste of time,” she told O’Rourke as he handed her back into the carriage.
“But it might not have been,” he said, clucking to the horses. Look on the bright side. There’s two more places to try, anyway. Oliver’s now?”
They tried Oliver’s. It was busier there than she had anticipated. She had forgotten that Oliver’s sold plows all over the world. Though it was winter in Indiana, she knew that there were parts of the world that were warm in December and presumably needed plows. The noise at Oliver’s was even more deafening than at Birdsell’s and the information she gathered even less useful. No one had seen anything unusual. Everyone believed forcefully in Sean’s total innocence, but had no idea who, instead, might have started the fire.
“It is just like before,” she said wearily as she climbed into the carriage once more, and if there was a hint of Swedish y in the just, O’Rourke tactfully ignored it. “I learn nothing. No one knows anything.”
“What I say,” said O’Rourke, climbing to his high seat up top, “what I say is, never give up. While there’s life, there’s hope. You just keep at it, ma’am. I was saying to Mrs. O’Rourke, I was saying I wasn’t so set at first on workin’ for a lady as pokes her nose into murders and such-like. But, I says to me wife, I says her heart’s in the right place, and what she’s doin’ for the poor boys in town has needed doin’ for a long time, so if she wants to poke, let her, I says. And there’s the Studebaker noon whistle, ma’am. We’ll catch the men on their lunch break, and that’s a better time to talk.”
Well, thought Hilda in some surprise, at least O’Rourke had unbent. Maybe one day they could all, employers and employees, look at each other as human beings, not just pieces to be moved as on a chess board.
“Yes, Kevin, let us try Studebaker’s. Oh! And Kevin?”
“Yes, ma’am?” he called down.
“When we get there, why do you not try to talk to the men, too? When I have asked all I can think to, maybe. I could go a little way away. They might talk more to you than to me. You are Irish, and a working man. I am Swedish, and no longer a working woman.”
“Seems to me, ma’am, as you’re workin’ hard enough these days. But I’ll talk to ’em if you want.” He slapped the reins against the horses’ flanks and they moved amiably off.
And it was at Studebaker’s that Hilda got, at last, her first piece of solid information, her first hint that there might be a solution to this mystery. Perhaps fittingly, it was O’Rourke who first heard the important new fact.
There were five men here who had worked on the barn with Sean and the others, five Irishmen vociferously proclaiming the innocence of Sean and the idiocy of the police. Hilda asked the same questions, got the same answers, sighed inwardly, and left the field to O’Rourke.
She was sitting a little apart, wearily trying to think what she was to tell Norah on her return, when O’Rourke came over to her. “I think you’d better hear this, ma’am,” he said mysteriously, and led her back to the little group sitting on benches at a large table, their lunch pails nearly empty.
“This here’s Marty Finnegan, and he’s got somethin’ to tell you.” O’Rourke was beaming.
“It’s not much, ma’am,” said Finnegan bashfully. “Not as if I saw who it was, or what they were doin’, or anything like that.”
“But you did see something?” asked Hilda, barely able to contain her impatience.
“Saw someone leavin’. It was when we was all runnin’ over there, and tryin’ to see through the smoke what was happenin’, and that. And I saw a buggy hightailin’ it away from the farm. Movin’ like all the divils in hell was after it, if you’ll pardon the language, ma’am. But that’s what I thought, meself, seein’ it leavin’ all that fire and smoke behind. And I wondered at the time why they were goin’ away from the fire instead of stayin’ to help. And then I figgered maybe they was goin’ for help, and then I forgot all about it when we saw how bad the fire was.”
Hilda took a deep breath. “Mr. Finnegan, did you see the buggy leaving the farm? I mean, driving out the drive, not just on the road?”
“Drove right through the gate, ma’am. And never bothered to close it after them, neither. nobody brought up on a farm’d do a thing like that, so I thought, that must be a city feller. I’d forgot that part.”
“And the buggy went—which way? Toward town or away from it?”
“Oh, back towards South Bend. That’s why I thought maybe they was goin’ for help.”
“Can you tell me anything at all about the buggy? I know it was getting dark at the time, but—”
“Not all that dark, ma’am. There was still light in the sky, and then there was the light from the fire. Not that it did much good, all flickery like it was. But I could see well enough. Couldn’t see the driver, but it was an Izzer buggy. Can’t mistake one of them, not if you work right here where they’re made, let alone livin’ in South Bend where there’s about a million of ’em. And it was pulled by a good horse. Gray, and some stepper.”
Make them to be numbered with thy
Saints, in glory everlasting.
— Te Deum Laudamus
The Book of Common Prayer
31
MRS. MURPHY STOPPED by the house again late that afternoon, breathing fire and ready to turn things upside down again. She wanted her s
on-in-law out of jail. never mind that she rather disliked him when he was free; now that he was a prisoner he was an angel of light, the best husband any daughter could have, and what was she, Hilda, doing to set him free? And as for Norah and the baby, she was taking them home, doctor or no doctor, nurse or no nurse.
Norah screamed that she wouldn’t go, the nurse screamed that she would lock Norah in the room if necessary, the baby screamed on general principles. None of it touched Hilda. She spoke when spoken to, shook her head when Mrs. Murphy threatened the wrath of God and all His saints, smiled at Norah and the nurse.
“I’ll have them out of here if it’s the last thing I do,” the frantic woman roared.
“No, I do not think so, Mrs. Murphy. If you will excuse me, I must…” and Hilda drifted out of the room without finishing the sentence.
Mrs. Murphy, deprived of her chief adversary, finally departed in confusion, so that Patrick came home to a household restored to calm and order, and a wife lost in contemplation.
“Hilda, darlin’, I’ve asked ye three times how your day went,” he said as they sat at supper. “Have ye gone deaf all of a sudden?”
“Mmm? Oh. No. I am fine.”
“So did anything interestin’ happen today? Are ye goin’ to get Sean out of that jail?”
“Yes, soon. Patrick, I am not very hungry. I believe I will go up to bed. I need to think.”
She evidently thought herself to sleep, for she made no response when Patrick came to bed hours later. But she slept only fitfully, and woke very early indeed, her heart pounding.
She wondered what noise had awakened her. no one in the house was yet stirring. even little Eileen wouldn’t get up for another hour. Hilda, having been forced for years to rise at the unholy hour of 5:30, firmly refused to allow her servants to do the same. Mrs. O’Rourke had at first insisted that she could not possibly get breakfast on the table by seven unless she rose at five. “Then we will have breakfast at eight, Mrs. O’Rourke. That will be early enough for Mr. Cavanaugh to be at the store on time. Remember you have a gas range in this house. There is no need to build up a fire before you can cook.”
