Two men, one on either side of the lane, emerge just in front of the large limb, rifles aimed at her.
CHAPTER 26
FIONA
Saturday, November 26, 1927
2:00 p.m.
Fiona enters Elias’s room, again toting a tray. With her hip, she pushes the bedroom door nearly shut. She brings the tray to the side table, ignoring Elias’s worried gaze as she arranges the food—a bowl of turkey noodle soup, some biscuits, a glass of buttermilk—on the table. She puts the tray on his lap.
“Any word on Luther?” Elias’s voice is fearful.
Fiona returns the tray to the side table. “Why, yes, I’ll be glad to help you eat your soup, Elias,” she says loudly. Then she cuts her eyes to the door.
No one is out in the hallway at the moment—all the men are gathered in the parlor, endlessly reviewing every detail of George’s plans with him—but let Elias think differently. Anything to stoke his fear and paranoia, keep him reliant on her.
Elias nods to show he takes in her meaning.
But he whispers, “Luther,” his voice breaking on his nephew’s name.
Fiona isn’t quite ready to tell him what she’s learned from the revenuer Colter, who is—she hopes—still in the old cabin. She’d gone back to the main house, gathered food, a spare quilt, and hurried back, mostly certain that she hadn’t been seen. She has a story ready in case she has—she’d become sentimental, doing those last chores, and wanted to spend some time in her childhood haunts.
Haunts.
Such a perfect word.
Ever since tending to Colter—bringing him the food, dressing his head wound, bringing him cold water, settling him in, getting a small fire going in the old fireplace—she’d felt nothing but haunted. She’d paused on her trek back to the house, stared back to check to see if smoke from the fireplace was obvious. Thankfully, it is a cloudy, gray day, so any smoke quickly blends into the sky, and a sharp, cutting wind from the northwest whisks away lingering tendrils. The wind also portends worse storms to come in the next few days.
She’d made sure to tell Colter about the coming bad weather, prattling on about signs and portents from nature—some she’d learned from Aunt Nell, others that she just made up to sound authentic enough to this city fellow—to scare him into staying put.
When she got back to the house, she’d stuffed her aunt’s dress at the bottom of her trunk, underneath some of her own clothes. So far, Colter hasn’t questioned that she’s anything other than what she’s playacting. But George will quickly have questions if she’s not neat, clean, dressed in the modern fashions that she prefers—so fetching in Cincinnati or Chicago at their fine dinners, but ridiculously impractical here.
Even so, by the time she shook George awake this morning from his fitful sleep she was dressed as he expected.
Her sleek, sleeveless dress made carrying the blue bottle difficult, but she’d found one of Aunt Nell’s bulky sweaters and put it on, complaining that the house was cold, implying to George that this was just a symptom of being pregnant. She’d transferred the bottle from the bottom of her trunk and into the sweater pockets a few minutes ago.
Now she shakes her head. “No word on Luther yet.” Other than from the injured man in the old cabin, who swears Luther shot him, left him for dead.
She pulls out the blue bottle. “But I found this.”
Elias’s expression turns solidly passive.
Fiona looks at the bottle, reads the label aloud as if for the first time. “Two tablespoons each morning and evening. For ulcerative stomach disorder. Dispense for Henry Murphy only.”
She clicks her gaze to Elias. “You surely have stomach pains, with the stress of working for my husband.” She drops her voice to a sly whisper. “I should put some in your soup.”
Elias swallows hard, gives his head a little shake. “I—I don’t think—”
“Oh, you don’t want it?” Fiona pops the cork. “Well, I’m certainly having stomach pains. Probably sore from morning sickness. This would be even more effective on an empty stomach, don’t you think?”
She puts it up to her lips as if to take a sip, and Elias grabs her arm so suddenly that some of the medicine sloshes out, dotting the quilt. Elias looks at the wet spot of the medicine in horror, as if it will sizzle right through Aunt Nell’s handiwork and onto him.
“I found this in the woodshop,” Fiona says. “Next to the rat poison. Arsenic. I’m guessing you mixed it into the medicine, on your and George’s visit here.”
“It was Dr. Goshen’s idea,” Elias says.
He’s so defensive—as if the doctor’s idea was what tainted the medicine, and not his own action—that he doesn’t seem to note the quick flash of surprise across Fiona’s face. Dr. Goshen? Of course—that fancy ring Mrs. Goshen wore. The doctor’s solicitousness toward her and Abe. Goshen’s proximity in town to the speakeasy. Of course George would have gotten to him, pulled him in.
She should have put that together earlier.
“He’d been treating your uncle for months anyway, before we came to him to propose he work with us,” Elias goes on. “If Henry had just agreed to sell the farm, as your aunt Nell wanted him to—oh yes, she encouraged him to take the very generous offer, said she wanted to leave here, go to Florida, said it right in front of us—then I wouldn’t have had to poison him. But, in the end, your aunt loved your uncle more than the thought of Florida, and your uncle loved this land more than her. So I did what I had to do.”
“But you didn’t have to do it.”
Fiona puts the stopper in the blue bottle. “Instead, my uncle’s stomach pains only got worse as he kept taking more medicine—more poisoned medicine—thinking he was treating the problem. He’d have died in a few weeks if he hadn’t gotten so weak he fell off the tractor and the blades hadn’t sliced his head open.”
Elias winces at the graphic description. Apparently, Fiona thinks bitterly, he prefers murdering from a distance.
“If it helps, he might have truly died from a cardiac event, triggered by the tachycardia the arsenic could have caused, before he fell from the tractor. That could be why he fell, might have been dead before he hit the ground—”
“Helps?” Fiona’s voice grows loud, and now Elias gives a warning glance toward the door. She drops her tone back to a whisper. “I’m surprised you’re admitting all this so easily.”
Elias’s smile is small but sufficient to alarm Fiona. “What are you going to do? Tell George?”
Of course not. Then Elias could reveal that she’d tried to stop the plan to poison drinkers at the Kinship speakeasy. As furious as he’d be with Elias, he’d be even more so with her, and while she didn’t think he’d hurt her while she was pregnant with his child, he’d certainly never trust her again. He’d likely reverse the paperwork putting his property in her name. And there would be the time after she’d had the child.
“I could tell Sheriff Ross—”
“You could. But even if you could get to her, even if she believed you, how would you keep it from George?” Elias’s smile broadens, stretching his dry lips taut and thin. “And how would either of you prove it? Everyone keeps rat poison on hand.”
“Why?” Fiona hates that she sounds weak. Pitiable. “Why are you so bent on working for George, just because Luther wants to?”
“Luther is like a son to me. Both my nephews were, but Luther is all I have left. All I have of the family I once had—once wanted to have.” Elias’s eyes grow watery, and he looks at her as if she is, after all, nothing more than a nursemaid whose role is to be sympathetic. “And Luther wants, more than anything, to reestablish himself in Bronwyn County, in Rossville. I’m sorry, Fiona.”
She forces her gaze to soften as she studies him. But he’s not sorry he killed her uncle. He’s sorry it was necessary, and that she’s sussed it out.
The only way to make her uncle’s death not a waste is to carry on with her plan to outwit George. She’ll deal with Elias in time.
Fiona stills, even as her heart thuds in her chest. Oh God. What if the revenuer was right? What if Lily was not to be trusted? She needs to buy time, to grab a few things—just her coat and hat, sturdy boots—and she can go down the back stairs, out the kitchen, run after all.
“Oh well, just give me a minute to finish helping Elias with his meal.”
“She’s not here for you,” Klara says. She looks at Elias. “She needs to speak to you.”
* * *
As Fiona helps Elias walk into the parlor, holding him by the elbow, she barely notices Elias’s sharp intake of breath as he spots Lily, sitting on the edge of a parlor chair.
There’s that look in Lily’s face again—pity mixed with revulsion, though now it’s turned on Elias. And there’s an extra measure of revulsion.
Lily does not seem to notice, or doesn’t care about, all the others staring at her: George on the couch gazing at her with a mix of amusement and respect; Abe in a side chair, wary; Klara, hovering in the entry to the dining area, affronted. Well, of course. What else would Klara think of a delicate, petite woman who is, of all things, a county sheriff?
And then there’s a stranger, a handsome man who’d apparently come with Lily. He doesn’t wear a badge, doesn’t have an air of law enforcement about him. He looks intelligent, wry, a bit bookish. But he, too, is staring at Lily with—something. Fiona can’t quite name it.
As Fiona helps Elias to a chair, she recollects how she and Lily had never gotten along well when they’d both been simple housewives. Lily had worked as the jail matron, and Fiona occasionally helped if it got very busy in Martin’s shoe shop, and they both attended the Presbyterian church and Woman’s Club. So much alike, on the surface.
Fiona keeps her expression pleasingly placid as she sits down next to George on the sofa. She studies Lily, taking in how delicate she appears, in spite of her heavy work boots and old-fashioned navy blue cotton dress, long sleeved and mid-calf length. Even with those boots, Lily crosses her ankles like a lady, makes herself seem taller by holding her posture even and tall, though one shoulder seems slightly bowed, as if weighted by a great burden. Her hair is swept up in a prim bun, with a few rogue strands flying loose.
But, up close now, Fiona sees that Lily has aged. Oh, she’s still blessed with a smooth, porcelain complexion. But there’s a wariness, a darkness, about her that Fiona couldn’t have noted as she hovered in the bank’s doorway yesterday and Lily stood at the top of the courthouse steps.
And Lily’s eyes glint with hardness, betraying no emotion, as she locks her gaze on Elias.
Interesting. At one time, Fiona thought, Lily had adored her uncle-by-marriage. But not a glimmer of that adoration remains.
“I’m here because Mrs. Vogel and Mr. Miller came to my house yesterday afternoon,” Lily says, measured and unemotional. “They were concerned about Luther having gone missing, while out to collect heart medicine for you.”
“Yes,” Elias says, though his wobbly tone belies his affirmation.
And in Elias’s expression, Fiona sees several emotions besides worry over Luther or his own health. Sorrow. Longing. And, oh—even more interesting than Lily’s flat affect. Fear.
Fiona presses her lips together to mimic concern and to disguise a smile at a realization: How Elias and Lily feel toward each other can be another tool for her to use somehow. She doesn’t need to understand the why of their feelings.
“I’m better, thank you,” Elias says, though Lily hasn’t asked. “What have you learned about Luther? Is he in lockup? He struggles sometimes with his habits, so if he needs bail—”
“I know from Dr. Goshen and his wife that after Abe and Luther got the medicine on Thursday night they left quickly,” Lily says. She looks at Abe. “And I know, from your and Mrs. Vogel’s visit to my house on Friday afternoon, that you all were concerned that he hadn’t shown back up here. Has he been back here at all?”
Abe studies her, carefully assessing. Even Abe, Fiona notes with fascination, looks a little rattled under Lily’s gaze. “He has not,” Abe says finally.
“Any idea where he might have been all this time, since Thursday night?”
Abe shakes his head.
“Odd, him running off, entrusting Elias’s medicine with you,” Lily says. “Not that you can’t be trusted, of course. It’s just that I know how close Elias and Luther are.” She looks at Elias, and he flinches. “Like father and son.”
“Sheriff Ross,” George says, “this is all quite—fascinating, I’m sure. But I have work to do, and I’m hoping you’ll get to your point sooner rather than later?”
“Lily, please, if you know anything—” Elias stops, his voice knotting up in a pitiful strangling sound as Lily holds up a hand to hush him. God, Fiona had no idea Lily could be so cold. “Do you know why Luther might be away so long, after being so worried about his uncle?” Lily presses George.
George chuckles. “No, I don’t. Luther is a bit—unpredictable at times. You know that.”
Lily gives a cold smile. “No, I’d say he is predictable. I spotted Luther at a speakeasy at the Kinship Inn. I got a tip that led to a raid.”
Fiona’s heart pounds. What if Lily betrays that Fiona tucked a note inside one of her gloves?
But Lily shrugs. “Nothing unusual. It seems that no matter how often we raid the Kinship Inn, the speakeasy is back a few weeks later. I spotted Luther at the inn—along with Arlie Whitcomb. A cousin of Marvena Whitcomb Sacovech’s. Does anyone know how Luther might have come to be connected with Arlie—especially given that Luther and Marvena haven’t been on friendly terms, to put it mildly?”
George and Abe just stare back flatly. It seems clear that they don’t know what’s going on with Luther, at least since Thursday night.
“When did Luther arrive here?” Lily asks.
“Thursday, with us,” Abe says.
“‘Us’ meaning?”
“Myself, George, Elias, security guard who drove us.”
“But not Fiona, or—” Lily looks at Klara, who flinches. Fiona bites back a smile. “Who are you?”
“Mrs. Klara Schneider,” Klara says primly. “I work for Mr. Vogel, have for a long time. Mrs. Vogel, myself, and another driver came on Tuesday. To help Mrs. Murphy prepare for Thanksgiving.”
“Another driver—but not Luther.”
“He came as they say. Thursday,” Klara says smoothly.
How easily she lies, Fiona thinks with some admiration—but also makes a mental note.
“I see.” Lily turns to Fiona so rapidly that Fiona almost startles. “I’d like to speak with your aunt Nell. Where might she be?”
The question catches Fiona off-guard. She’s nearly forgotten about Aunt Nell, with all that’s happened. George squeezes her hand, too hard. The message is clear: Answer carefully.
Fiona’s face reddens. A flash of worry crosses Lily’s expression. But Fiona can use the flush of fear flooding her cheeks to her advantage. “Well, you see, I—I am in the family way. And I’ve been corresponding with Aunt Nell about that, and since this farm is overwhelming to her without dear Uncle Henry, she wondered about selling it to me. As a place to get away. A country retreat, if you will. And I agreed! Isn’t that good news, Lily?”
“Delightful,” Lily says flatly. “I’d still like to speak with her.”
“I’m afraid she left Friday on the train, Lily,” Fiona says. “She’s moving to Florida.”
At that, Lily finally looks shaken. “Just like that? She didn’t want to say good-bye to anyone in town?”
“She didn’t have many friends. Most have passed, or moved away. She just wanted a fresh start after losing her husband.” Fiona tightens her tone, drives home the point. “I’m sure you can understand, Lily.”
But Lily is not so easily rattled. She keeps her gaze tightly clasped o
n Fiona, who dares not look away. “I do,” Lily says. “Well then, if I could speak to Leon. Surely he is here?”
Oh. Fiona’s heart clenches. It was one thing to not give a passing thought to Aunt Nell over the past hectic hours. But Leon—oh. She hadn’t thought of him all day, either. “He is back at his private school.” Her voice sounds wispy, and she clears her throat. “Philadelphia. Short holiday, and all—”
George interrupts, “What is the point, Lily?”
To Fiona’s relief, Lily’s gaze clicks back over to George. Fiona forces herself to inhale slowly. Suddenly the room, with its overstuffed furniture and so many people, feels suffocating.
“Just making sure Luther truly came on Thursday,” Lily says. “To eliminate the possibility he had time to go into town, stir things up as he tends to do, and get in trouble.”
Lily turns back to Elias and fixes her stark gaze on him for a few seconds, long enough for the room to still again. “Luther is dead. He was found this morning in Rossville,” Lily says, each word hard as a slap. “He’d been beaten, but also, it appears, bitten by a snake.”
Elias falls back in his chair, hands clasping at his heart. For a moment, he’s so silent, so shocked, that Fiona fears he’s expired instantly from the shock of losing his beloved nephew. But then a long, thin wail rises from him.
Fiona checks George and Abe. They look surprised but not shocked—it’s not shocking that death would come to a man like Luther, who made enemies more easily than friends and blustered with bravado at every turn. It’s more shocking that he’s lived this long. But the surprise tells Fiona that her husband and his right-hand man had nothing to do with it.
She glances at Lily, who has looked away from Elias, not because of his pained bereavement, but to also study George and Abe. She, too, sees the surprise on their faces.
The Stills Page 24
