Bell Weather (42 page)

Chapter Twenty-Six

Tom and Pitt amazed William Shepherd and his guests with news of the Maimers’ demise, but when they asked to see the survivor of the day’s first attack, they were told the man was dead.

“I expected him to live,” William Shepherd said. “The shot went through, clean as you could ask, and he was comfortable enough. Left him sleeping ’round one and he was dead at one thirty. Must’ve bled worse than any of us realized.”

The victim hadn’t spoken since arriving at the inn, and so their last remaining hope was to send his body back to Grayport, where someone might identify him and have some answers. Tom and Pitt doubted it. The trail had gone cold, and if any Maimers remained, losing four of their number would likely scare them off until the spring. Shortly after dawn, Tom and Pitt rode back with the horses and collected the frozen bodies from the road; they made it home just as Root was fully abuzz with news of Davey Mun and Benjamin’s severed hand.

Tom dismounted Bones and walked toward the Orange, where he was almost knocked down by Molly’s running hug. A group of townspeople watched but he held her back tight, absorbing her warmth and smell and feeling he could cry if he were not so hardened and benumbed from the cold. Bess stood close and looked relieved to see him home again. Ichabod waved from just inside the door, opening his mouth and drawing in a breath as if to summon up his long-lost voice and say hello.

“Your hair!” Molly said, fingering the place where his ponytail had burned.

Tom sensed the nearest man considering a joke—
Never knew your hair was fine enough to steal
—but felt it dissipate quickly when the Maimers’ bodies were laid on the ground. They had stiffened into arcs, having spent the cold night propped against trees. Now the corpses sat together near the tavern’s outer wall in a grim, frozen row for everyone to see.

Tom had seen them plenty and looked instead at Molly, feeling that he knew her, inside and out, as well as he knew the tavern’s secret nooks and scars. She studied the corpses with a deep-cut crease between her eyes, then with softness at their faces—at their dead, common faces.

Some of the crowd began to speak.

“Hope they suffered.”

“Fucking vermin.”

“May the devil have his way and cut ’em into bits.”

But a hush came upon them when Davey Mun’s body was carried into the tavern, the nature of his wound impossible to hide with so much blood frozen into his breeches.

Many more people were converging on the tavern, bundled up tight but seeming not to recognize the cold in their excitement. A farmer noticed Abigail Knox and said her name. Tom and Molly turned to look. Sheriff Pitt did, too. She walked up the road and underneath the sycamore, icicle straight and spectral from the sunlight glaring off the Antler. She was gravely underslept and raccooned around the eyes, but her stride showed the balanced self-possession of a pastor.

She had come to see the bodies. She had called for the Maimers’ deaths, and she was not afraid to witness what her vengefulness had wrought. People stood aside so she could walk directly up, and she examined the row of corpses, pausing over each. Tom and Pitt approached her.

“This is all of them?” she asked.

“We think so,” Tom said. “How’s Benjamin?”

“Feverish and weak. Did you recover his hand?”

The men exchanged a sidelong glance above her head. Pitt faltered. Tom replied, “We haven’t checked their bags.”

“He wants it if you find it,” Abigail said.

She held Tom for support and he escorted her inside, where he entrusted her to Bess as townspeople flooded through the taproom door. Tom and Pitt were soon surrounded and besieged with endless questions. Why had they ridden out alone? How had each Maimer died? What would happen to the bodies and the dead men’s belongings?

Abigail was equally beset but she appeared, for once in her life, appreciative of so much unsolicited attention. Bess had led her to a chair and brought her a glass of sherry, and she accepted many hesitant but heartfelt assurances. Benjamin would live, she repeated several times, bolstered by the fortified wine. She had left him in the care of her neighbor, Mrs. Kale, and in spite of her insistence that she must hurry back, she drank another sherry in her seat beside the fire.

Tom could not escape the crowd, which thickened every minute—was it possible that all of Root had crammed inside the tavern? There were others here, too—men from Shepherd’s Inn, late-season travelers, everyone united by the fall of common foes. Tom told versions of the story to the crowd, each iteration shorter than the last, until he ultimately snapped at a well-meaning farmer:

“They’re ruddy fucking dead. Go outside and have a look.”

All he wanted was to get away and sit alone with Molly, preferably upstairs with a fire and a drink, but when he looked around the room, she was nowhere in sight. Bess had vanished, too, leaving Ichabod alone to work behind the bar. Tom lingered for a minute, avoiding additional questions by feigning interest in Pitt, who had warmed himself up with free drinks and started telling his own versions of events—each one longer than the last—to a captivated group so tightly massed together that Pitt was standing on a chair in order to be seen.

Tom squeezed away and made it to the kitchen. Nabby faced him from the hearth with a wrought-iron flesh fork and approached him so directly, he expected her to hug him.

“The storeroom hams are out of reach behind crates,” she said, as if he had merely just returned from a stroll around town. “Ichabod has tried a quarter hour to retrieve them.”

“Any trouble while I was gone?”

“Someone hexed my right hand—I haven’t determined who—and I could not make a fist until I finally guessed the healing word and scrawled it down with ash. Otherwise, no. It’s good you lived,” Nabby said, returning to the fire. “As for those out front, their belongings must be burned. All they carried has a blood curse, especially the coins.”

“I’m glad I was missed,” Tom said, nonetheless soothed by his cook’s familiarity. “Where are Molly and Bess?”

“I haven’t seen Molly. She’s as hard to pin as Scratch. Bess is in the parlor, speaking to her father.”

Tom slouched against the wall, too raw and worn out for yet another fight. He didn’t resist the vision of his uncle as a corpse, rigid as the bodies of the Maimers outside, nor the wish—the near prayer—that Lem would drink himself to death. Before he had a chance to cross the kitchen into the parlor, his uncle started shouting from the tavern’s front door. Molly and Bess were there, too, and all the crowd turned to listen. Tom’s powder burns stung as if his body were aflame again. He shoved into the taproom and forced his way to Lem.

“And what of the hams?” Nabby said.

He was mad enough to kill.

*   *   *

Molly had been standing in the front of the taproom, listening as Tom and Pitt talked about the Maimers, when she spotted Bess and her father. Lem had arrived through the kitchen, and would surely have been jabbed by Nabby’s iron fork if Bess hadn’t immediately dragged him into the parlor, a rarely used room on the opposite side of the tavern. It was smaller than the taproom, long but very narrow, with sharp gray light coming from the windows. Molly moved fast, entering through the front just as Lem and Bess entered from the back.

Lem was oddly dapper in a waistcoat and unstained sleeves. He’d combed his greasy hair, or slapped it down flat, and he had bathed and trimmed his beard and didn’t look drunk. In spite of his enormousness, he shrank in front of Bess, although he hardened some and frowned when Molly stood beside her.

“Are you going to be nice?” Molly asked.

“If I’m given leave to talk,” he said, speaking with a voice more righteous than abusive.

“Talk,” Bess said. “I have things to say, too.”

“I come to say the tannery’s been doing good without you. I hired the Button boys for extra help. We have skins in all the pits and enough hides to keep busy through the winter. And I ain’t had more than two drinks a meal for half a fortnight.”

Bess took a breath and shook her hair behind her, looking spirited and young and vigorously flushed. Molly fought a nervous and irrational urge to laugh.

“I ain’t been myself since the pox took your mother,” Lem said. “She had a softness and a easiness, a look full of comfort. We was sick and she was dying but she quieted the fear. I haven’t felt that since, ’cept with you. You’re all I got.”

He was teary, Molly thought, or else perspiring into his eyes. Was it love that made him cry, or something else that made him sweat so profusely in the cold? Molly looked at Bess and sensed beneath her confidence a pint-sized girl who wished she had a parent. She remembered how it felt to embrace her own father and to feel, through his bones, how he faltered underneath.

“I regret the way I left,” Bess told Lem. “You should have known about it first. I wanted to hurt you and I shouldn’t have, however much you earned it. You’re my father and I don’t want us fighting anymore.”

Lem smiled with relief and raised his arms to hug her.

“I’m staying at the Orange,” Bess said. Lem dropped his arms. “I won’t change my mind, not if you drag me off, or beg and plead, or storm around the tavern breaking fiddles with your head.”

Lem’s smile grew deformed, tangling in his beard. “We can make it like it was, clean the vats come spring—”

“But you won’t!” Bess yelled with a sudden step forward. “You’ll drink and blame luck and freeze to death by Lumen Night. I want you to fix the house and work for more than a month. I saved my earnings all summer—you could have it, every pound, if you showed real effort and convinced me I was wrong.”

Lem scrunched his face and seemed to honestly consider it, the way a man of doubt might regard a glimpse of God. “And then you’d come home?”

Bess shut her eyes. “I want to choose my own way. I want you to respect that.”

“And where is your respect for your own bloody father? Coming home cold to nobody and nothing, not a friend or kind relation caring I’m alone. I’ll be buried in a hide pit, moldering in shit, without a soul upon the earth noticing I’m gone. Poor and pocked, cruelly widowed—so I drink, aye, and rant, and curse what I’ve become. But here I am, in spite of hardship, with rights to what is mine.”

“Doesn’t Tom have a right to live without your foolery?”

“Tom,” Lem said, hunching at the name. “He disrespects his own blood. People listen and believe him. I only ever asked for respect.”

“You haven’t earned it!”

“Neither’s he,” Lem said, turning now to Molly as a stand-in for Tom. “He ain’t above rolling in the dirt, now, is he?”

Molly answered in a single, unhesitating outburst and felt a rush of clarity and dizziness together. “Say whatever you like. Tell the whole town. Nobody will listen to a tar-hearted brute who doesn’t fix his house, or comb his raggedy beard, and acts a menace in the tavern and a scoundrel in his home until his daughter offers money just to let her be.”

Bess gawked, either startled or confused by Molly’s vehemence.

Lem quivered like a beast newly branded, at the instant when the sizzle hasn’t yet burned. He swung his forearm and shoved Molly hard against the wall, and then he left the front of the parlor and continued to the taproom. Molly and Bess pursued him, squeezing around his bulk and blocking his way in front of the crowd, just as Lem began to shout at everybody present.

“My nephew’s done it again!” he said. “Made himself a hero! Now he’s back, safe and cozy in his ready-made home, with a pair of young women cleaning up his messes. I’ll tell you why I don’t want my daughter in his house.” He looked at Abigail and pointed, causing her to redden. “You were right,” he said. “Abigail was right with her suspicions!”

Tom entered from the kitchen and began shoving through. Molly stopped him in the middle of the room as people watched. Her lungs were in her gullet. Tom was solid as a bomb.

“I seen ’em!” Lem said. “Tom and Molly like bog toads flopping on the ground, right out back where anyone could watch. So I did. I stood and watched while she rode him in a sweat.”

Bess’s mortified tears were scalding and aggressive. “Get out!” she said and pushed him, hard enough to stagger Lem halfway out the room. His bloodpox scars turned scarlet on his brow.

“There’s your hero,” Lem said. “Left his mother on her own—left her here to die. Then he came back home and took what wasn’t his and now he’s master of the house! Captain of the troops! I wish the cannon would have done more than broke his fucking wall. I wish I made it blow the whole tavern into bits.”

Lem stomped out and slammed the door behind him, letting in a momentary gust of frigid air. Bess watched him go and then refused to turn around, but everybody else looked at Tom and Molly. No one spoke, no one sniffed. Hardly anybody shuffled.

Tom approached Pitt, leaving Molly on her own, and said, “I didn’t instigate that. I didn’t fight or drag him out. Forget you and me and think about Bess. He isn’t going to stop. You have to understand that.”

Pitt took it in, aware of being watched. His head looked as solidly preserved as Nabby’s hams.

“Please,” Tom said. “I’m coming to you for help.”

Respect was not the angle Pitt had seen coming and it dumbed him for a second. He sighed and pinched his eyes. “I haven’t slept in two days. I’ll talk to Lem tomorrow.”

“Talk,” Tom said.

“Family squabbles aren’t a matter for the law,” Pitt said. “I’d think a man like you, with all your storied history, would rather keep the public and the private cut clean.”

“He sabotaged the cannon.”

“Said he
wished
he had. It’s not the same thing.”

Molly’s concentrated vision gave Tom a rippling aura. She couldn’t see his face and wanted to approach him but she didn’t dare move, not with everybody watching—not when any quick touch might trigger an explosion.

“Lock him up or quell him or I will make it private.”

“Take it easy,” Pitt replied.

“I mean it,” Tom said. “I won’t be held accountable if things go bad.”

He walked toward the stairs and people cleared a lane. Bess let him pass and Molly watched him go, and then he climbed until the shadows swallowed up his head and said, “I’m going up to sleep,” to no one in particular. “Anybody knocks, I’m shooting at the door.”