On the Head of a Pin (26 page)

“Mr. Lewis! Good to see you again, sir.”

“And you, Willett. How goes it with you?”

A grin split his face. “I don't know if you've heard, but I've been married this twelvemonth. It goes very well, indeed. We're expecting a little gift from heaven in a few weeks.”

“Congratulations! And your brother?”

“Oh, he's married as well. We married the two Tobey sisters. Ben and Fanny have no children yet, though, nor any sign of one.”

For once Willett had bested his brother, then.

“Are you still painting?”

“Oh, no. This place is too busy for that anymore, and I've a household to support. No, I'm afraid Ben and I are homebodies now. Father has more or less retired now that we've “settled down” as he would put it. We don't even have time to paint those little pins that everybody liked. It's too bad. We made a little money from them. But this business comes first.”

This confirmed what Mrs. Varney had said.

“I thought you might still be at it. I keep seeing them everywhere I go.”

“That must be Simms. We actually stopped making them a couple of years ago, but he kept pestering us to paint him one last batch and he took them all. He'll be running out again soon, I expect, and want us to do some more, but I don't think we will.”

Everything Willet said squared up with what others had told him and he seemed unconcerned about any of the questions he was being asked. Lewis decided to push the inquiry a little further. “Do you remember Rachel Jessup?”

The young man's face clouded. “Oh, aye, how could you forget Rachel?”

“I thought, at one time, that you might have had feelings for her.”

“I did. We all did. Any one of us would have married her in a minute, but she wouldn't have anything to do with any of us except for Levi White. I don't know that you'd know him. He's a Quaker lad.”

He had forgotten about the Quaker boy who had mooched around the church looking as though he didn't belong. Was this who Rachel had been meeting on the sly? Why she had ducked around the corner of the barn that day after the meeting?

“Poor Levi's heart was broken when she died,” Willett went on, “although there would have been an almighty uproar if they'd gone ahead and wed like they'd planned. Levi would have been disowned. That's what the Quakers do when one of them marries out. And he had no money of his own. I don't know what he and Rachel thought they were going to do.”

So Betsy had it right from the first. She'd said that Rachel had already made her choice and just wasn't ready to admit it yet. As it turned out, she had good reason for staying mum, and now he was beginning to understand his last conversation with her. She had said that she needed to be quite certain in her mind, that she knew she must settle soon. She realized then the enormity of what she was asking of the Quaker boy; he would have to leave behind his faith and his family in order to be with her. It was no decision to make on an impulse, and she must have thought long and hard on the consequences.

So the question was this: What had she decided? Had she backed out of the arrangement at the last moment and been killed by her spurned suitor? If that was the case, then her death was unrelated to the other murders, all evidence to the contrary. Or was the Quaker boy the madman he was looking for? It seemed unlikely, but then he had no experience with what, exactly, a mad murderer was supposed to look like, did he? Or had Seth Jessup learned of the relationship and intervened? Was that the explanation for his absence on the night of his son's birth? Was he a suspect after all?

“Where is Levi now? What did he do after Rachel died?”

“Oh, he moped around for a few months, but then he settled down and took over most of the work on his father's farm. He married Phoebe Parker last year.

She's a good Quaker girl and they're in fine standing with the Society. His father even added a wing onto the farmhouse for them.”

So, Levi White could not have been in Prescott or Millcreek, nor, probably, anywhere near Sarah's cabin. If the murders were related then the Quaker boy was suspected and summarily dismissed as a suspect within a few sentences. If they weren't, the information he had gleaned took him no farther along the path of inquiry. He asked Willett to convey his best wishes to his brother and their families and set off to return to the Jessup's.

He walked slowly while he collected his thoughts. Francis Renwell, of course, had been exonerated long since. The Caddick brothers had been on hand for really only one of the murders, the one in Demorestville. One of them might have had the opportunity to kill Sarah — they had been travelling during that time —but it appeared that they were indisputably accounted for at the time of the subsequent deaths. Morgan Spicer could have been present for three of them, but had been chiselling away at granite tombstones when the first had taken place. He had seen him with a Book of Proverbs in his hand, but there was nothing to connect him to the prayer pins. Seth Jessup could be suspected in Rachel's death, maybe even Sarah's at a stretch, but certainly none of the others, although Lewis vowed to discover where he had disappeared to on the night of the second murder.

There was only one man left who had the opportunity to kill in all four cases, and who had an ample supply of pins and miniature bible books: Isaac Simms. It was either Simms, or Lewis was seeing a pattern that didn't exist. He truly wanted to believe that the murders were the work of some villain who had not yet come to his attention, some desperate and depraved soul who travelled for the sole purpose of wrenching the life from young women. But it would have made more sense for someone like that to wander the newly settled areas to the west. There were many isolated cabins there, the clearings were full of young women left alone while their men worked in the woods or went to market. It would have been easy pickings for someone with the intent to kill.

Again he came back to Isaac Simms. But how could he prove it? There seemed to be no authority he could conveniently defer to, no enforcement he could call upon. It was up to him.

From now on, he vowed, he would keep a very close eye on Simms.

III

L
ewis returned to an uproarious welcome at the Jessup's. Betsy was feeling much better, and was able to hobble between the stove and the table without help. Minta's Henry was a serious little boy who didn't quite know what to make of the boisterous Martha, but she was determined to entertain him, and had him giggling and laughing as his mother watched approvingly.

“He seems to have inherited his father's temperament,” she said. “It's so good for him to have another child to play with. He needs to learn that life isn't all seriousness.”

Martha had constructed a tent of sorts out of two chairs and the quilt from the daybed, and she was pretending to be an ogre who lived inside. Every time Henry approached the makeshift cave, Martha would roar and try to grab him. He would then run away squealing and laughing. Betsy and Minta both got into the spirit of the game and roared at him in their turn, and when Lewis rose from his chair with the intention of fetching some firewood, Martha shouted, “Oh, no, it's a really big monster coming to get you!”

Henry was unsure of where to run, so he stood still, his eyes huge. Lewis strode across the floor, grabbed the little boy, turned him upside down and began to tickle him while the others laughed and shouted encouragement. This was the scene that greeted Seth Jessup after his day's work was over and he came in looking for his supper.

“My goodness me,” he said mildly. “This looks like fun.” He stood, as uncertain as his son had been. Lewis took the small, struggling boy and thrust him into his father's arms.

“More, Daddy, more!” Henry shouted, and after a moment's hesitation Seth began to spin the child around, all the time dipping and raising him until he ended by plunking him on his shoulders while Henry clutched his hair, his face red and happy.

“Supper's ready,” Minta said, and Seth swung Henry down, depositing him at the table. “Martha, tidy away the quilt, dear, and bring the chairs to the table.”

Later, after the children said their prayers and were put to bed, Minta finally asked the question that she had probably been dying to ask ever since they'd arrived. “So, what brought you down this way, Mr. Lewis?”

“It's Thaddeus, please, and that is exactly what I wanted to talk to you about tonight.” He hesitated for a moment, a little unsure what reaction his next statement would produce. “It's partly about Rachel.”

He turned to Seth. “Please don't be upset. Just bear with me for a bit and then I'll explain, but I need to know the answer to one question. Where did you go the night Henry was born?”

The blacksmith looked sheepish. “Minta told you about that?”

“She told me you'd been gone, but I've never known why.”

Seth heaved a great sigh and stared at the table as he struggled for the words.

“I have always been a driven man,” he said finally. “I always felt that my fortunes depended on me and me alone. You can make something of yourself in this place if you're willing to work and you're careful with the fruits of your labours. I'd always worked hard until I could work no more, never spent a penny more than was needed.” He cleared his throat and looked at Minta. “And sometimes not even when it was.”

Lewis nodded. This was what Rachel had implied when he asked why Seth didn't attend the class meetings.

“I love my wife dearly, Mr. Lewis, and I always have, but sometimes my attitude made life difficult for her. I told myself that I was doing it all for her, that I would end up being somebody in this life, and that at some future time she would be a lady of leisure, she and Rachel as well, with other people hired to look after all the hard tasks. That's who I worked for, you see, for them. I was scared to death that I was going to lose Minta when the baby was born, but it was all selfish — I didn't know what I would do if that happened. And then when she gave me a fine, healthy boy and it appeared that she was out of danger, I did something very silly.”

He stopped, and Lewis waited, knowing that it would take this man of few words a moment to compose his confession.

“I went and bought a bottle of whiskey. Oh, I had no wish to consort with the drunks at the tavern — they're a foolish lot — but I wanted to celebrate what I thought I had done. Here I was, with a wonderful wife and a new son, a good job and money saved. I was on top of the world, you see, but I thought it was all my doing. I felt I deserved it all, and that I would darn well spend a shilling and have a good time for once.”

“Oh, Seth …” Minta began, but Lewis silenced her with a glance. There was much more to come, and silence was the way to coax it into the open air.

“I woke up in the woods the next morning and was sick as a dog,” Seth said. “I felt stupid over the whole thing — money wasted, and it wasn't such a nice pastime after all. Why do people drink like they do?” he asked. “I felt terrible, and I never want to feel that way again.”

Lewis thought for a moment. “But one of the first times I ever laid eyes on you, you were coming out of a tavern.”

It was Seth's turn to think back. “I don't know why, unless I'd gone to tell a customer his horse was shod. I never went there otherwise.” He wrinkled his nose in disgust. “A bunch of wasters in there, that's what they are — knaves and braggarts. Nay, Preacher, I'd have nothing to do with them.”

Again Lewis took himself to task for jumping to conclusions. “Go on,” he said, “what happened then?”

“And then I went home and found Rachel dead, and I knew my foolishness for what it was. My good fortune had little to do with me. It was Providence alone that had brought me my blessings, and I realized that it didn't matter what I did, it could all be taken away in the flash of an eye. How stupid I was to think that hard work alone would get me what I wanted. And then I realized that what I really wanted had nothing to do with riches. I wanted Minta and Henry to cherish, and I wanted my lovely sister to get up off the bed and live and breathe again, and she could tease me all she wanted, for I loved her, too.”

His voice grew husky with emotion. “I vowed then to turn over a new leaf. Oh, I would still work my fingers to the bone, and gladly, for my family, but I would take time to be with them, too, and do my best to make life easier for them — not at some far-off time in the future, but now. And I would open up my soul and give thanks for what I'd been blessed with.”

Lewis's heart went out to the man. Poor dour Seth: a good man, whose goodness had to be ferreted out and cosseted before it could find the light of day. He reached over and squeezed the man's hand.

“I'm happy that you realize how fortunate you are,” he said. “I'm just sorry about what it took to make you realize it.”

Seth nodded. “You said you'd explain why you were asking.”

“I have reason to believe that Rachel was murdered.”

Minta gasped, and her hand flew up to her mouth, but Seth had a thoughtful look on his face. “I'd wondered,” he said. “All this time, I've wondered.”

Lewis told them of the other deaths, and a little of the strange details that anointed the bodies, the details that dovetailed with what Seth had discovered at his house that night. He omitted his theory of who had done it; it was not yet time to make his suspicions public.

“I was almost certain Rachel had been strangled,” Seth said, “but I couldn't make head nor tail out of the other stuff. I thought maybe it was the Quaker boy she'd been seeing on the sly; his father was pretty upset at the notion of him marrying out. You know how they are — it's their way or no way. I thought maybe something had happened between the two — they'd had an argument or something — and the boy flew into a rage and killed her.”