Judgment of the Grave (12 page)

It was a brilliantly sunny fall morning, the kind of day that Quinn always wanted to squander, use to go fishing or to sit on the beach with a beer and a radio. It had been a long time since he’d done anything like that, and he had a moment of guilt for the thought that had flashed into his mind. If he didn’t have Megan, he could do it. He could do a few interviews and then take off, maybe even drive to the Berkshires. He hadn’t done that in years, since before he and Maura had gotten married. He remembered the smell of pine needles, the way the light had filtered through the trees.

But if he didn’t have Megan, he wouldn’t even be there. He’d be working, he’d be…Maura would be…He panicked suddenly, feeling awful for having wished Megan away, even for a second. He leaned down and kissed the top of her head as she sat in her stroller.

The three of them had left the inn about nine and driven out to the field on the outskirts of town where they were holding the battle reenactment and encampment. As they’d walked with the tide of people from the parking lot, he’d started to notice that nearly half of them were dressed up in Colonial costumes, the men dressed as Minutemen or in dark blue uniforms, the women in long dresses and bonnets, even the kids wearing little skirts and knickers. It was weird, he thought to himself, all these people wanting to pretend that they lived in a time when there were no bathrooms, no medicine, no electricity. It was because they got to go back to their real houses at the end of the weekend, he decided. That was the only reason they liked it.

He looked over at Sweeney. It had been so strange, seeing her again last night. If he was honest, he had felt a sudden urge to turn away, walk out of the inn, and stay somewhere else. It was ridiculous, of course. He had to stay there. It was where Kenneth Churchill had stayed. It was where he would follow Churchill’s steps on the last weekend he’d been seen. But when he’d seen Sweeney, he’d had the urge to run, because it had brought him back to the last time he’d seen her and her bright red hair and those strange green eyes, with their flecks of dark brown and amber, those eyes that seemed to look right into you and see you somewhere you hadn’t thought anyone could see, seeing her had almost made him throw up, remembering racing up the stairs to get Megan, knowing what was behind the bathroom door.

She was wearing khaki pants and a green sweater that made her hair look even brighter than usual. And over the sweater, she had put on a tweed jacket that reminded Quinn of something from an old movie. It made her look like she was going hunting or something and he didn’t get why she’d wear something like that. He realized he had forgotten how tall she was, nearly his height, which made him feel shorter by comparison. He wasn’t used to feeling short. It had been a fact of his life since he had had his first growth spurt at fourteen that he usually had a good few inches on most of the people he knew, especially women. But Sweeney made him feel not that tall after all, and he didn’t like it.

Now, looking at her smiling around at the day, at the people dressed in Colonial outfits, he was annoyed at her for forcing him to bring her along. It was just like on the Putnam thing. She would force her way into the investigation and he wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

She broke his train of thought. “I’ll take Megan. You go and talk to whoever you need to talk to.”

He hesitated, but Megan seemed happy and he’d be nearby if anything happened. He felt his annoyance shift a bit. It was nice of her to offer. “It would be faster,” he said. “You sure you don’t mind?”

“Not at all.”

“And you’ll be okay?”

“Yeah. I’m good with babies.” She grinned. “I didn’t date much in high school. Did a lot of babysitting instead. A lot.”

He smiled. “Okay. I’ve got my cell phone if you need me. Just give a call.”

“We’ll be fine.” She smiled confidently and Quinn felt much better.

“Thanks. Let’s meet up around one. Over by those tents.” He pointed, and she said that was fine.

He had decided to start by casually asking the participants if any of them knew Kenneth Churchill. There had been an article in the newspaper that morning asking for any information about his whereabouts the weekend of October 2 and 3, so some of the people at the reenactment were going to know that he was missing, but Quinn was betting that there were quite a few who didn’t.

The field was the width of a good-size football field, with the food at the end near the entrance. A local Boy Scout troop was setting up to sell hot dogs and hamburgers out of one tent and another one offered pancakes and eggs. Quinn ignored the pangs of hunger in his stomach—he’d completely skipped breakfast, what with getting Megan up and ready to go—and headed across the field toward a sea of white canvas tents. There were three neat rows of smaller tents—where the reenactors slept, he assumed—and then a line of larger, open tents displaying Colonial clothes and fake wooden rifles and toys. Other tents had signs out front that proclaimed the owner was a “Toymaker” or “Surgeon.” He decided to start with the first tent, which had a sign reading,
JESS HARROW. GUNSMITH
.

The tall bearded man behind the counter was showing a long musket to a young guy in militia clothes. Quinn wandered around, looking at his wares—various muskets and rifles, a whole wall of hunting knives, a table of leather bags.

When the other guy had gone, he went up to the proprietor. “I’m Detective Tim Quinn, Cambridge police.” He forced himself to say “police” rather than “homicide” so as not to scare the guy off. “I’m investigating—”

“The guy found in the woods, I know. The Concord police have been here all morning. I’ll tell you what I told them. I don’t have any idea who it could be.”

Quinn watched his face. He was obviously annoyed.

“Actually,” he said. “I just wanted to ask you if you know someone named Kenneth Churchill.”

“Kenneth? A bit. He’s in the Concord Minutemen. Professor or something, right? He’s not from around here. I think he lives in Cambridge. Oh.”

“Yeah. When was the last time you saw him?”

“Why are you asking questions about Kenneth?” the guy asked, suddenly suspicious.

Quinn did a quick assessment. This guy wasn’t going to tell him much if he didn’t level with him about what had happened. He’d keep it simple. See what he could get.

“His wife reported him missing earlier this week. He never came home after the last encampment the weekend of October second. She thought he was down here doing research for his book, so she didn’t get in touch with us immediately. But it seems now that he’s disappeared.”

That wiped the annoyed look off of Jess Harrow’s face. “God. That body they found in the woods near the Old North Bridge…No, but that was a British uniform.”

“Wasn’t him,” Quinn said. “So he’s still missing. Do you remember seeing him that weekend. Of the second?”

“I do. On Saturday.”

“Why?”

“Excuse me?”

“Why do you remember seeing him that weekend? How do you know it was Saturday?”

Jess Harrow smiled in a self-satisfied way. “Because he bought a musket from me. He wrote me a check for eight hundred dollars. That I remember.”

Quinn sat up at that. There hadn’t been a weapon found with the body in the woods, but if the wounds were identified as bayonet wounds, he might have found the weapon. “Yeah? What did it look like?”

“It was a reproduction of the Brown Bess flintlock musket. That was the gun most of our guys carried against the Redcoats. I’d done some special little things for him, though. Etched his initials on the plates, stuff like that.”

“Did it have a bayonet on it?”

“Yeah. I can draw you a sketch if you want.”

“Okay, that’d be great. Can you give me the exact measurements too?” They ought to be able to match the specs on the bayonet with the wounds on the John Doe.

“Sure.” He jotted some figures down on a piece of paper and handed it over.

“Do you remember what time that was? That you saw him.”

“It was later in the day. They’d done a weapons demonstration and I’d gone up to look at that. He caught up with me up in the field and asked if he could come down and get the musket. He was really excited about it. Couldn’t wait to try it out.”

“And that was the last time you saw him that weekend?”

“Yeah.”

“That seems odd to me. I mean, there aren’t that many people here, really. Wouldn’t you be likely to see him if he was around Saturday night or Sunday?”

“This is a small encampment. The one that weekend was much bigger. There were regiments from all over the Northeast.”

Quinn thought for a moment. “You said you don’t have any idea who the body might be. Is that because it was wearing a British uniform?”

“Maybe, if he was a newer guy. But the thing is, we all pretty much know each other. On the battlefield, it’s all Brits and Yanks, but as soon as the shooting stops, we’re all pretty buddy-buddy. Most of us, anyway. There are a couple of guys I know who don’t like consorting with the enemy. But they’re in the minority.”

Quinn took down a dark wood and silver musket that was hanging on the wall. The barrel felt smooth and warm in his hands. The bright bayonet glinted in the sun. “This is beautiful,” he said. “Did you make this?”

“Yup. That’s another Brown Bess. Pretty similar to the one I made for Kenneth, actually.”

“So, they just used muskets in the Revolution?”

“For the most part. They used rifles too, but the thing is, rifles took longer to load. On the battlefield, that made a big difference. But rifles had longer range.”

Jess Harrow warmed to his subject. “Those over there are the cartridge boxes.” He crossed the tent and opened up one of the leather bags, showing Quinn the wooden compartments inside. “This is where you kept your cartridges. They were made by girls, you know. It was very dangerous work, and girls were expendable. You needed boys to farm or to play the fifes and drums—that was how they communicated on the battlefield—and you needed women to cook and men to fight. So they let the girls work with the gunpowder.”

“Interesting. Well, thanks for your help. I really appreciate it.”

“No problem. Hope they figure out who that guy is in the woods. It’s kind of awful to think of him being out there and no one knowing who he is. And I hope you find Kenneth too.”

Quinn was about to go when he turned around and asked, “What was he like? As a, you know, as a person?”

“He was an okay guy,” Harrow said after a moment. “The thing about him was, he really believed in all this stuff. Really believed in the importance of keeping the history alive. He liked war too. I mean…he’d been in Desert Storm and sometimes I got the feeling that it was his way of keeping things alive, if you know what I mean. He still got to be a soldier when he was here. There are other guys like that too. Or guys who wanted to serve and couldn’t.”

“Thanks.”

Quinn wandered around the tent next door, which had been set up as a kind of old-fashioned mercantile shop, looking at Colonial clothes and tin cups and lanterns. He bought Megan a little Colonial bonnet that would be good for keeping the sun off her face, and as he paid, he casually asked the teenage girl behind the counter if she knew Kenneth Churchill. She didn’t, but she explained that she only helped her mother out sometimes and didn’t come to most of the encampments. At the next tent, where a group of women were sitting around, sewing and talking, the story was much the same. The women knew Churchill’s name, but they didn’t remember seeing him the weekend of the encampment on Whiting’s land.

Outside, he thought about what to do next. There were a couple more tents, including one that seemed to have more clothes, and ones belonging to the toymaker and the surgeon, but he had the feeling he’d be similarly unlucky there.

At the other end of the field, a line of militiamen, dressed in white leggings, dark-colored coats, and dark hats, were standing in a row and practicing what looked like military maneuvers. It couldn’t hurt…. They might be more likely to remember seeing Churchill than the people who had the shops.

He crossed the field and stood watching them for a few minutes. They held their muskets at their sides, barrels pointed in the air, as a man dressed in the formal uniform of a general called out commands. The men dropped their weapons, then raised them again, ready to fire.

When they’d finished, Quinn approached a small group of them and introduced himself.

“Is this about that body up in Whiting’s woods?” one of them asked. “We’ve been talking to the cops about that all morning. Nobody knows who the guy is. It’s like he just dropped out of the sky.”

“No,” Quinn said. “It’s about Kenneth Churchill.” He decided to go for it. “We don’t know where he is. I was wondering if you might be able to help.”

“Kenneth?” one of the men said. “I was wondering about him. What do you mean, you don’t know where he is?”

“His wife reported him missing this week,” Quinn said. “He hasn’t been seen since Saturday, October second, the weekend of the encampment up on George Whiting’s land.”

“But that’s when the…when the guy in the woods must have been killed,” another of the guys said. “You think it’s related?”

“We don’t know. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. Do you all remember seeing him that weekend?”

“Yeah, sure. I was next to him during the demonstration,” one of the guys said. Quinn took down his name.

“I had a talk with him Saturday night,” another guy said. “We were all up around the fire that night and I chatted with him for a while. Just about this stuff.” He gestured around at the encampment.

“Hey, you know what,” one of the guys said, “You should talk to Chris. He knew Churchill better than we did. Hang on.” He stepped away and yelled to another little group of men. “Hey, Chris. Come on over here.”

A tall, youngish guy with thinning red hair and bad teeth that made him look even more authentically Colonial than he would have otherwise came over and was introduced to Quinn as Chris Wright.

“He hadn’t been with us that long,” he said when Quinn told him why he was there and asked him how well he’d known Churchill. “Just since last year. He loved the reenactments. His uniforms and weapons were always impeccable, and we liked having someone who was such an expert, you know, on account of him being a historian and writing books and everything. But he wasn’t that sociable. He would do the battles, but then he wasn’t around a lot, if you know what I mean. He seemed to kind of go his own way. Jeez, I hope he’s okay.”