The Stills

by Jess Montgomery

  Fiona shivers by the time she reaches the woodshop. No new snow has fallen overnight, but the cold has deepened. It is still dark, before sunrise.

  The door to the woodshop is not one that locks—Uncle Henry had not believed in locks on doors other than the main house. He used to say that no one would make it past the house who he didn’t know.

  Fiona swings the door open, steps in, lets the door slam shut behind her. She takes a moment to let her eyes adjust to the darkness, broken only by the coal-oil lantern that she carries. Then she sets the lantern down on the bench, opens its drawer—nothing in there but a variety of hand tools, a few mousetraps. She holds the lantern up, stares at the shelf over the bench.

  There’s linseed oil, and a bottle of rat poison, and other cans of oil and then—something different. A blue medicinal bottle.

  Fiona stands on tiptoe, reaches up, pulls it down.

  Studies it in the lantern light.

  It has a label, handwritten, with instructions from Dr. Goshen.

  Uncle Henry’s ulcer medicine.

  She opens up the bottle, sniffs, draws back.

  It doesn’t smell odd.

  Fiona’s gaze drifts up, focuses on the box of rat poison. The brand name is Rough on Rats, and it features an almost comical silhouette of a rat, belly up. She’s familiar with the brand, a common one; Martin and she had to use it once at the shoe repair shop. It’s arsenic—tasteless and odorless.

  Fiona’s heart pounds. Elias wouldn’t have had to go to any great lengths to poison Uncle Henry. Dr. Goshen could simply have told him about the stomach medicine, and Elias would only have had to find it and add in a few spoonfuls of the arsenic.

  Woodworking tricks … Dr. Goshen had also said he’d come by with the medicine using Uncle Henry teaching him woodworking tricks as a pretext so Aunt Nell wouldn’t worry about Uncle Henry’s ulcer.…

  Fiona shakes her head. It makes more sense that Elias would have tainted the medicine, at George’s behest, to clear the way for eventual possession of the farm.

  If the arsenic didn’t kill Uncle Henry right away, it would certainly have made him ill enough over a few weeks to eventually kill him—but the fall from the tractor, and the tractor blades running over him, would have finished the job.

  Fiona puts the arsenic back up on the shelf and puts the stopper back in the blue glass bottle. She pockets the bottle, not sure when she’ll confront Elias but knowing that she will.

  She turns and is about to step out when she sees a shape shifting in the far corner of the woodshop. Slowly, she lets her free hand drift back to the workbench. She grasps a hammer, steps forward, holds it high up.

  A man comes forward. He’s wrapped in a filthy blue-and-white-patterned quilt, over his fine suit. The hair on his head is a bloody mat. He smells of sickness and filth. His eyes are bright with fever and fear.

  He manages to take a few steps forward, and Fiona notes his fine, lace-up dress shoes—ridiculous out here in farmland, especially in winter weather. He stumbles forward, lands on his knees on the hard ground.

  But even in his pitiable state, he is studying her. Assessing her.

  Apparently, he decides that, even though she holds a hammer high over his already-injured head and could bring it smashing down on him, she is not a real threat. Oh, she thinks. The way she’s dressed—in Aunt Nell’s too-large rough and dowdy work dress, worn boots, long hand-knit brown scarf covering her stylish short bob, but that could just as easily be covering long, pinned-up hair. And, too, weariness and morning sickness have no doubt added years to her face. He thinks she’s just a simple farmwife.

  “Help, please.” The man’s face is boyish and lean but stretched with the sheen and flush of fever. His voice crackles with thirst and weariness, making him sound like an old man. And his next words make Fiona think he must surely be delirious or insane. “I’m Colter DeHaven. Special agent. Bureau of Prohibition. And I’ve come for Luther Ross.”

  CHAPTER 23

  LILY

  Saturday, November 26, 1927

  5:15 a.m.

  Though Lily stands by the edge of Coal Creek, it’s yet dark enough that she can’t really see the water moving, though she hears its sluggish progress between the narrow banks. For now, the snow has stopped falling and the air has warmed sufficiently to turn snow on the ground to tendrils of mist creeping along the earth. She leans against the Kinship Tree, somewhat irritated with herself for having come down here from the house, in the dark and cold, when she has plenty to do.

  Yet, she’d been awake for an hour, thinking of the unique tree that is well-known in the county, for it is formed of three saplings—maple, sycamore, and beech—conjoining and twining many years ago. A footpath led from Kinship Road across her property down to the Kinship Tree, and she didn’t stop occasional visitors, just as the farm’s previous owner had not.

  Lovers’ initials were carved into the tree. Hers and Daniel’s were not, yet this is where their story began. She’d injured her foot here when she was just a teen, coming over from her grandparents’ farm next door to jump into the creek on a warm day, and her brother had rushed her to the then doctor’s farmhouse across the road—Dr. Elias Ross. That’s where she’d met Daniel the first time. He’d waited a few years to court her.

  So much has changed since then—Daniel, her grandparents, her brother, her friendship with Elias all gone. And yet, new paths had been forged by the Kinship Tree. Lily puts a hand on the bark of the maple side of the tree. She and Marvena had made a major decision here, a few years ago, securing the safety of the county—at least for a time. Hildy, after injuries sustained in a dangerous case the year before, had found sanctuary at the farmhouse and under this tree.

  Lily’s never told anyone that the tree was one reason she’d bought this farmhouse, when it was time to move out of the county-owned sheriff’s house. Now she stares up through the limbs making a latticework against the slowly lighting, opaque sky.

  She’d come down here to think, to contemplate what Daniel would do in her situation about Elias and George and Luther. She’d made herself as still as possible, listening to the wind, the creek, her heart.

  But she hears no imagined whisper from Daniel, cannot conjure advice he’d likely give.

  And yet, rather than sorrow over this, she realizes, to her surprise, she feels relief.

  She is the sheriff. She must untangle the situation. Even if she had a sense of what Daniel would do in her place—it wouldn’t matter. She has to do what she thinks is right, within the rule of law.

  Lily gives the tree a pat, knowing she’ll be back often to seek the counsel of her own thoughts and heart, and then walks up the thin, frozen path.

  She needs to get to the Harkins place—though she’s told Dora the good news about Zebediah and his improved condition, she still wants to see if she can learn anything more from Ruth about Special Agent DeHaven. Could he be hiding out there? Still alive?

  She hopes so. Then she won’t have to track down Luther, grill him about whether or not he was the older man Zebediah had seen shoot the agent. DeHaven can just tell her—and Lily would rather track down someone else than Luther.

  Even if she finds DeHaven easily and he says someone other than Luther shot him, Lily will need to find a way to talk with Fiona about why she’d sought to warn her that George had planned to swap alcohol with methanol—when in fact that hadn’t happened at all.

  That alone means a trip out to the Murphy farm. Could she just pretend she wanted to call on Fiona, as if they were old friends and she was sorry she’d missed her visit?

  As she comes into the clearing of her yard, Lily smiles at the snowman the children built the afternoon before. She hadn’t paid any attention to it when she came out of the house this morning, but now it provides momentary, whimsical distraction from all of her weightier concerns.

  But then she sees a figure coming toward her from the house. It takes her a moment to realize it’s Hildy.

  Lily sm
iles as she approaches her friend, happy to see her even though she has so many tasks to attend to. “I didn’t expect to see you today.…”

  Lily’s voice trails off.

  From the stark, struck look on her friend’s face, Hildy is not stopping by on her way to Kinship to check on her mother—as difficult as their relationship is, Hildy remains faithful in watching out for her—or do her Christmas shopping.

  Hildy’s eyes are wide, worried.

  “It’s Luther Ross,” she says.

  * * *

  Luther’s body has been leaned against the front door of the small main office for Wessex Corporation, the same building where Luther used to reign supreme over his family’s mining operation before he sold it to Wessex. A thin dusting of overnight snow has settled in the crown and on the brim of his fedora, which covers most of his face, and on his pant legs and shoes. Luther’s legs sprawl, his arms fallen to his sides, his palms turned up, as if he’d been pushed or collapsed against the wall, and then slid down.

  Lily squats low to study the body of the man who was her brother-in-law, who had betrayed her husband and hurt her friend Marvena.

  On the drive over, Hildy told her that Luther had been found early this morning at the start of the day’s shift. Some of the miners, recognizing their former tormentor, had whooped upon seeing Luther, thought he was passed out, started throwing rocks at him. But when he didn’t respond, when his hat fell away to reveal the shocking condition of his face, the crowd grew silent. Someone thought to cover his face with his hat. Tom and a few others stood guard around the body so no more damage could be done. Then Hildy went to fetch Lily.

  By the time they got to Rossville, most of the men had gone on to work, while the current manager of the mines allowed Tom and Jurgis and a few others to stand watch over Luther’s body. Now Lily ignores the manager, impatiently looming over her, apparently anxious for the corpse of his predecessor to be moved so he can get in the door and to work. She tunes out the people murmuring behind her, the few remaining onlookers from the town.

  Lily calculates. The snow on his hat and pants means that Luther has been out here for at least a few hours.

  His hands. It’s strange to see them so still. In life, he was always gesturing—pointing, shaking a fist, picking at his nails. Snow has settled into his palms. Why isn’t he wearing gloves? His left hand is blue tinged. The right is red and swollen, a grotesque balloon.

  The redness extends to his partially exposed wrist.

  Lily carefully and slowly pushes up Luther’s right coat sleeve. There, two small punctures, purplish blue around the holes.

  Fang marks.

  Next, Lily reaches slowly for Luther’s hat, lifts it carefully with both hands from his face.

  Oh. His face is beaten, bruised. His eyelids are puffy, nearly swollen closed. But only just nearly. His eyes seem to still be staring out through those slits.

  Though neither sorrow nor relief nor rage rises in Lily at the sight of Luther like this, some emotion wrestles to break free. Dammit, she wants to feel nothing for this man who’d been so cruel to her husband, to so many others in the past.

  Lily swallows hard, once. Twice. Forcing the bile running up in her throat back down, forcing herself to observe dispassionately. She’ll need to make careful, detailed notes later.

  Luther’s death, Lily thinks, does not make sense, at least not in the mechanics of it. Oh, there were plenty of people who would have motivation for wanting Luther dead. Marvena, Jurgis, Tom. Any number of past employees. If he had frustrated George one too many times, George would not hesitate to have him killed—though of course he wouldn’t have sullied his own hands. And what of the agent Colter DeHaven? Luther had been looking for him just last night; Colter had been shot, left for dead. What if Luther was his attacker and Colter sought revenge? What of, for that matter, Arlie Whitcomb, whom Lily had seen the evening before with Luther?

  Knowing Luther, there were undoubtedly plenty of other possible suspects.

  So that someone would want to kill Luther Ross, and be pushed to do so, is unsurprising.

  The mechanics of his death—that rouses curiosity and questions.

  Luther appears to have been beaten to death and dumped outside his old mining office, cruel yet fitting given that his greed as mining manager had condemned so many men to die.

  But what of those fang marks?

  They draw her gaze, and she wonders if he’d been bitten before or after being beaten. If the bite or the beating, or both, had led to his death. Where and when he might have been bitten.

  She looks at his bruised, swollen face. How odd—even in this grotesque condition, his face is easier to contemplate than it had ever been in life. He’d always looked so angry, so ready to strike himself—like a snake. Now, at least, beneath the mottling and lacerations, there’s a hint of peacefulness. Lily sees his once-superior attitude, so often acted out in cruel and petty ways, as what it really was—a mask for his own emptiness.

  At last, the emotion she’d been struggling to push down breaks free.

  Pity. She feels pity for Luther.

  Luther had had every advantage afforded to a person in this neck of the woods, and he’d still, for whatever reason, wrestled his demons and lost. Or maybe, at some point, like Brother Stiles might say, he chose to stop wrestling and embrace his demons as comrades.

  Why had he been like that? She’ll probably never know. And death has robbed him of any chance for contemplation, for remorse, for peace. At least in this life. Maybe, even for one like Luther, there’s hope for it in the next.

  Lily shakes her head at herself. Luther himself would be unmoved by such sentiment, would surely laugh at her for feeling it on his behalf.

  But then, Lily wonders, isn’t what we think of, and how we treat, our foes really as much for saving our own humanity as judging theirs?

  Lily stands slowly, turns toward the people behind her. She sees, in the corner of her eye, the grim, taut expressions of Jurgis and Tom. If she asks them to do what she needs, she has no doubt they’ll comply, just to help her. Given how cruelly Luther had treated Tom and Jurgis a few years ago as unionization leaders, she can’t bring herself to ask them. So she looks beyond them to the other people.

  “I’ll need two men to help load the body in Hildy’s automobile, and follow after us to Kinship,” Lily says. She plans ahead quickly: they’ll have to get Luther into the Kinship funeral home, then fetch Dr. Goshen, who serves as the county coroner. “And if anyone knows where I might find Arlie Whitcomb, please speak up. I need to bring him in for questioning.”

  CHAPTER 24

  FIONA

  Saturday, November 26, 1927

  5:30 a.m.

  “C’mon, just a little farther now.” Fiona’s doing her best to sound encouraging, even sweet, but the man keeps stopping every few steps.

  Colter DeHaven, he’d said. Special agent.

  Sure, he’s dressed well enough—slick coat, nice lace-up shoes, suit pants, like a businessman or banker or special agent would dress. But he doesn’t, as far as she can tell, carry a weapon. Or a badge. No hat, but a mass of hair with dried blood. He’s been shot.

  Yet he was hiding out, on her aunt’s property—her property—asking for Luther Ross.

  So what could he be, other than a special agent as he claims?

  He stops again, panting from the effort of walking up the rise. “How much?”

  “It’s not a far piece,” Fiona says.

  She startles at her own turn of phrase, hearing herself as if from a distance. In Cincinnati and Chicago, she’d cleared her voice of her accent she didn’t know she had until that encounter with Eugenia at her wedding. But she’s lapsing back into it now, easy enough. Good. At least she’ll be convincing as a farmwife. On their trek so far, she’s already worked out the story she’ll give him, pulling in as many elements of truth as possible, so it’s easier to keep from crossing herself up. In case at some point DeHaven had seen or even met Aun
t Nell—the latter notion is doubtful, but after all, her aunt had kept back other information—she’ll claim to be Fiona Vogel’s cousin, and say she’s visiting her relatives at the farm for the holiday. Say she is a widow and lives on another much smaller farm. But she’ll only mete out her story as needed.

  The man starts up again but skids on the slick leaves and snow. She catches his elbow, and he keeps from falling. His glance her way mixes chagrin and gratitude. She offers a smile. Thinks: Hurry!

  She’s been gone too long. George will be asking questions—where she had been, why she had been outside so long. Especially if she’s spied coming back to the farm from this direction. She’ll have to go the long way back to the other side of the farm, come down from the cemetery, concoct some excuse about visiting Uncle Henry’s graveside.

  Fiona and the man walk up the final rise and there it is.

  The cabin.

  Now it’s Fiona who comes to a sudden stop.

  Colter stumbles, almost falls to his knees again, but Fiona holds him steady as she stares.

  It’s so much smaller than she recollects. Just one room, a chimney, no porch, just the one door and a paned window, the cabin’s most elegant feature. There’s only one other window, in the back by the cast-iron stove.

  The front window is shattered. Mama’s lace curtains, once pristine and white, hang in tatters, the dingy gray of old snow. Mama had set aside coins, here and there, saving for them.

  Won’t Daddy be angry? Fiona asked. Her father had been fearsome about controlling money, saying women didn’t know anything about it. As far as Fiona could tell, he didn’t know much about managing money, either, spending what little he made from odd jobs now and again mostly on booze.

  Of course, she hadn’t said that. She’d kept mum, wondering what glorious joy Mama must be saving for, dreaming about possibilities like hats in impractical colors—pale blue or yellow—and topped with confections of feathers and silk flowers and lace. Or maybe a fine lamp, its glass shade and oil bowl made fancy with a painted swirl of pink roses and mossy green leaves. She’d seen pictures of such in a Sears, Roebuck catalogue someone had brought to the school she’d attended for a few years, up through the third grade, where she’d been better at her numbers than her letters—unusual for a girl, the schoolmarm had said.