The Giver of Stars

19

Men expected women to be calm, collected, cooperative, and chaste. Eccentric conduct was frowned upon, and any female who got too far out of line could be in serious trouble.

Virginia Culin Roberts, ‘The Women Was Too Tough’

Van Cleve, his belly full of pork rinds and a fine film of excitement glistening on his brow, walked into the sheriff’s office. He brought with him a wooden box of cigars and a beaming smile, not that he would have admitted any particular reason for either. No, but the discovery of McCullough’s body meant that the breached dam and the slurry clean-up were suddenly old news. Van Cleve and his son could walk down the street again and, for the first time in weeks as he emerged from his car, he experienced something like a spring in his step.

‘Well, Bob, I can’t say I’m surprised. You know she’s been causing trouble the whole year, destabilizing our community, spreading wickedness.’ He leaned forward and lit the sheriff’s cigar with a click of his brass lighter.

The sheriff sat back in his chair. ‘I’m not entirely sure I’m with you, Geoff.’

‘Well, you’ll be arresting the O’Hare girl, won’t you?’

‘What makes you think it has anything to do with her?’

‘Bob … Bob … We’ve been friends a long time. You know as well as I do the beef the McCulloughs had with the O’Hares. Goes back as far as any of us can remember. And who else would be riding all the way up there?’

The sheriff said nothing.

‘And, more pertinently, a little birdie tells me there was a library book found by the body. Well, that just about settles it, I’d say. Case closed.’ He took a long drag of his cigar.

‘Wish my boys was as efficient at solving crime as you, Geoff.’ The sheriff’s eyes crinkled with amusement.

‘Why, you know she was responsible for persuading my Bennett’s wife away from him, though we’ve tried to keep that on the low-down, to save him embarrassment. They were happily married until she came along! No, she puts wicked ideas in girls’ heads and causes mayhem wherever she goes. I for one will sleep better knowing she’s locked up tonight.’

‘Is that right?’ said the sheriff, who had known about the Van Cleve girl’s movements for months. There was little in this county that escaped him.

‘That family, Bob.’ Van Cleve blew smoke to the ceiling. ‘There’s bad blood, shot all the way through the O’Hare line. Why, do you remember her uncle Vincent? Now there was a rogue …’

‘Can’t say as the evidence is conclusive, Geoff. Between us, as it stands, we can’t prove beyond doubt she was on that route, and our one witness is now saying she can’t be sure whose voice it was she heard.’

‘Of course it was her! You know darn well that the little polio girl wouldn’t do it and nor would our Alice. That leaves the farm girl and the coloured. And I’d put money on it she don’t ride.’

The sheriff turned down the corners of his mouth in a way that suggested he was not convinced.

Van Cleve jabbed a finger on the desk. ‘She’s a malign influence, Bob. Ask Governor Hatch. He knows. The way she was spreading salacious material under the guise of a family library – oh, you didn’t know about that? She’s been fomenting discord up on North Ridge so they wouldn’t allow the mine to go about its legal business. Every bit of trouble around here for the past year you can pretty much trace back to Margery O’Hare. This library has given her ideas above her station. The longer she’s locked up the better.’

‘You know she’s with child.’

‘Well, there you go! No moral compass whatsoever. Is that how a decent woman behaves? Is that really someone you want going into houses where there are young and impressionable people?’

‘I guess not.’

Van Cleve mapped it out with his fingers in the air, looking at some distant horizon. ‘She took her route, crossed paths with poor old McCullough on his way home, and when she saw he was drunk, she had an opportunity to avenge her no-good father, and killed him with the nearest thing she had to hand, knowing full well he would be buried under the snow. She probably thought the animals would eat him and nobody would ever find the body. It’s only luck and the grace of God Almighty that somebody did. Cold-blooded, that’s what she is! Contravening the laws of nature in every possible regard.’

He took a deep draw of his cigar and shook his head. ‘I tell you, Bob, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she did it again.’ He waited a moment, then added, ‘That’s why I’m glad there’s a man like you in charge around here. A man who will stop the spread of lawlessness. A man who is not afraid to make the law count.’

Van Cleve reached for his cigar box. ‘Why don’t you take a couple of these home for later? Tell you what, take the whole box.’

‘Most generous of you, Geoff.’

The sheriff said nothing more. But he took a long, appreciative drag on his cigar.

Margery O’Hare was arrested at the library on the evening they moved the last of the books back to their shelves. The sheriff arrived with his deputy and at first Fred greeted them warmly, thinking they’d come to examine his newly replaced floorboards and relined shelves, as townspeople had been doing all week; checking on the progress of everyone else’s repairs had added a new dimension to the daily passing of time in Baileyville. But the sheriff’s face was long and cold as a tombstone. As he planted his boots in the centre of the room and gazed around him, something in Margery plummeted, a heavy stone in a bottomless well.

‘Which one of youse takes the route up to the mountains above Red Lick?’

Their eyes slid towards each other.

‘What’s the matter, Sheriff? Someone late returning their books?’ said Beth, but nobody laughed.

‘The body of Clem McCullough was found on Arnott’s Ridge two days ago. Looks like the murder weapon came from your library.’

‘Murder weapon?’ said Beth. ‘We don’t have no murder weapons here. Murder stories, we got those.’

Margery’s face drained of colour. She blinked hard, put out a hand to steady herself. The sheriff caught it.

‘She’s in the family way,’ Alice said, taking her arm. ‘She gets a little light-headed.’

‘And that’s dramatic news for a woman in the family way to have to hear straight out,’ Izzy added.

But the sheriff was staring at Margery. ‘You take that route, Miss O’Hare?’

‘We share the routes, Sheriff,’ Kathleen interjected. ‘It really depends on who’s working that day and how each horse is doing. Some ain’t so good on those longer, rougher routes.’

‘You keep records of who goes where?’ he said to Sophia, who stood up behind her desk, her knuckles tight on the edge.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I want to see every route taken by every librarian over the past six months.’

‘Six months?’

‘Mr McCullough’s body is in a state of … some decay. It’s unclear how long he has lain there. And his family don’t seem to have reported him missing, according to our records, so we need all the information we can gather.’

‘That’s – that’s a lot of ledgers, sir. And we’re still in a little disarray here because of the floods. It may take me a while to locate them among these books.’ Only Alice was positioned so that she could see Sophia slowly nudge the ledger on the floor firmly under her desk with her foot.

‘To be frank, Mr Sheriff, we lost a good many of them,’ Alice added. ‘It’s entirely possible the relevant entries have suffered catastrophic water damage. Some were even washed away.’ She said it in her most clipped English accent, which had been known to sway sterner men than him, but the sheriff didn’t appear to have heard her.

He had moved around to Margery and stood in front of her, his head tilted to one side. ‘The O’Hares had a long feud with the McCulloughs, am I right?’

Margery picked at a scuff on her boot. ‘I guess.’

‘My own daddy remembers your daddy coming after Clem McCullough’s brother. Tom? Tam? Shot him in the stomach Christmas 1913 … 1914, if I remember right. I bet if I asked around there’d be other bad blood could be recalled between your two families.’

‘Far as I’m concerned, Sheriff, any feud died with the last of my brothers.’

‘Be the first blood feud around here just melted away with the snows,’ he said, and put a matchstick between his teeth, which he waggled up and down. ‘Mighty unusual.’

‘Well, I’ve never been what you might call conventional.’ She appeared to have composed herself.

‘So you would know nothing about how Clem McCullough happened to be brought down?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Tricky for you that you’re the only living person might have had a grudge against him.’

‘Ah, come on, Sheriff Archer,’ Beth protested. ‘You know well as I do that family is proper hillbilly trash. They probably got enemies halfway to Nashville, Tennessee.’

That was true, they all agreed. Even Sophia felt safe enough to nod.

It was at that point they heard the engine. A car drew up, and the sheriff walked slow and stiff-legged to the door, as if he had all the time in the world. Another deputy appeared, and he murmured something in his ear. The sheriff looked up and behind him at Margery, then leaned in for further information.

The deputy entered the library so that there were three of them. Alice caught Fred’s eye, and saw he was as nonplussed as she felt. The sheriff turned and when he spoke again, it was, Alice thought, with a kind of grim satisfaction.

‘Officer Dalton here has just been speaking with old Nancy Stone. She says you was making your way to her back in December when she heard a gunshot and some kind of a commotion. Says you never arrived and that, rain or shine, you had never once missed a book delivery before that day. Says you were known for it.’

‘I recall I couldn’t get past the ridge. The snow was too deep.’ Margery’s voice, Alice realized, had taken on a slight tremor.

‘Not what Nancy says. She said the snow had eased two days past and that you was by the upper levels of the creek and that she heard you talking right up until minutes before the gun went off. Says she was mighty worried about you for a while.’

‘Not me.’ She shook her head.

‘No?’ He pondered this, his lower lip pushed out in exaggerated thought. ‘She seems pretty sure there was a packhorse librarian up there. You telling me then it was one of these other ladies that day, Miss O’Hare?’

She gazed around her then, a trapped animal.

‘You think maybe I should be talking to one of these girls instead? Think maybe one of them is capable of murder? How about you, Kathleen Bligh? Or maybe this nice English lady? Van Cleve Junior’s wife, yes?’

Alice lifted her chin.

‘Or you – what’s your name, girl?’

‘Sophia Kenworth.’

‘Soph-i-a Ken-worth.’ He said nothing about the colour of her skin, but rolled the syllables around extra slowly so that they felt loaded.

The room had grown very still. Sophia stared at the edge of her desk, her jaw tight, unblinking.

‘No,’ Margery said, into the silence. ‘I know for a fact it was none of these women. I think maybe it was a robber. Or a ’shiner. You know how it can be up there on the mountains. All sorts going on.’

‘All sorts going on. That’s true enough. But, you know, seems mighty odd that in a county stacked full of knives and guns, axes and coshes, that the weapon of choice for your neighbourhood hillbilly robber would be …’ he paused, as if to recall it properly ‘… a fabric-bound first edition of Little Women.’

At the dismay that flickered, unchecked, across her face. something in the sheriff relaxed, like a man sighing with pleasure after a big meal. He squared his shoulders, pushed his neck back into his collar. ‘Margery O’Hare, I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Clem McCullough. Men, take her in.’

After that, Sophia told William that evening, all hell broke loose. Alice flew at the man like a woman possessed, shouting and hollering, hurling books at him until the officer threatened to arrest her, too, and Frederick Guisler had to wrap both his arms around her to stop her fighting. Beth was yelling at them that they had it all wrong, that they didn’t know what they were talking about. Kathleen just looked silent and shocked, shaking her head, and little Izzy burst into tears, kept crying, ‘But you can’t do this! She’s having a baby!’ Fred had run for his car and driven fast as he could to tell Sven Gustavsson, and Sven had come back white as a sheet, trying to get them to tell him what the heck was going on. And all the while Margery O’Hare had been silent as a ghost, allowing herself to be led past the crowd of onlookers, into the back of the police Buick, her head down and one hand over her belly.

William digested this and shook his head. His overalls were thick with black dirt where he was still trying to clean up the house, and when he ran his hand over the back of his head he left an oily black trace of it on his skin.

‘What you think?’ he asked his sister. ‘You think she did murder someone?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I know Margery ain’t a murderer but … there was something off, something she wasn’t saying.’ She looked up at him. ‘I do know one thing, though. If Van Cleve has any say in this, he’s going to make her chances of getting out of it a whole lot smaller.’

Sven sat that night in Margery’s kitchen and told Alice and Fred the whole story. The incident on the mountain ridge, how she had believed McCullough would come after her in revenge, how he had sat out on the porch for two long, cold nights with the rifle across his knees and Bluey at his feet until both were reassured that McCullough had surely slunk back to his falling-down cabin, probably with a sore head and too drunk to remember what the hell he had even done.

‘But you have to tell the sheriff!’ Alice said. ‘That means it was self-defence!’

‘You think that’s going to help her?’ said Fred. ‘The moment she says she slammed that book into him, they’ll treat it as a confession. She’ll get manslaughter at best. The smartest thing she can do just now is sit tight and hope they don’t have enough evidence to keep her in jail.’

Bail had been set at $25,000 – a sum nobody around there could get close to. ‘It’s the same sum they posted for Henry H. Denhardt, and he point-blank shot his own fiancée.’

‘Yup, except being a man, he had friends in high places who could post it for him.’

Nancy Stone had apparently wept when she heard what the sheriff’s men had done with her testimony. She had made her way down the mountain that evening – the first time she had done so in two years – banged on the door of the sheriff’s office and demanded that they let her retell her story. ‘I said it all wrong!’ she said, and cursed, through her missing teeth. ‘I didn’t know you was gonna arrest Margery! Why, that girl has done nothing but good for me and my sister – for this town, hang you, and that’s how you’re going to repay her?’

There had indeed been a murmur of unease around town at the news of the arrest. But murder was murder, and the McCulloughs and the O’Hares had been the death of each other for generations so far back that nobody could even remember how it all started, just like the Cahills and the Rogersons, and the two branches of the Campbell family. No, Margery O’Hare had always been an odd one, contrary since she could walk, and that was just the way these things went sometimes. She could certainly be cold-hearted too – why, didn’t she sit stone-faced at her own daddy’s funeral without shedding a tear? It didn’t take long for the endless seesaw of public opinion to begin to wonder whether maybe there was something of the devil in her after all.

Down in the low-lying little town of Baileyville, deep in the south-eastern reaches of Kentucky, the light disappeared slowly behind the hills and not long after, in little houses along Main Street and dotted among the mountains and hollers, the oil lamps flickered and went out, one by one. Dogs called to each other, their howls bouncing off the hillsides, to be scolded by exhausted owners. Babies cried and were, sometimes, comforted. Old people lost themselves in memories of better times and younger ones in the comforts of each other’s bodies, hummed along to the wireless or the distant playing of somebody else’s fiddle.

Kathleen Bligh, high in her cabin, pulled her sleeping children close, their soft, yeasty heads like bookmarks on each side of her, and thought of a husband with shoulders like a bison and a touch so tender it could make her weep happy tears.

Three miles north-west in a big house on a manicured lawn, Mrs Brady tried to read another chapter of her book while her daughter sang muffled scales in her bedroom. She put the book down with a sigh, saddened by the way life never quite turned out how you hoped it would, and wondered how she was going to explain this one to Mrs Nofcier.

Across from the church, Beth Pinker sat reading an atlas on her family’s back porch and smoking her grandmother’s pipe, thinking about all the people she would like to hurt, Geoffrey Van Cleve being high on that particular list.

In a cabin that should have had Margery O’Hare in the heart of it, two people sat sleepless on each side of a rough-hewn door, trying to work out a route to a different outcome, their thoughts like a Chinese puzzle, and a solid knot of anxiety too huge and weighty pressing down upon each of them.

And a few miles away, Margery sat on the floor with her back against the wall of the cell and tried to fight the rising panic that kept pushing up from her chest, like a choking tide. Across the hall two men – a drunk from out of state and a habitual thief whose face she could recall but not name – called obscenities at her, and the deputy, a fair man who was troubled that there were no segregated facilities for women (he could barely remember the last time a woman was kept overnight in Baileyville Jail, let alone a pregnant one), had strung up a sheet across half the bars to shield her a little. But she could still hear them, and smell the sour scents of urine and sweat, and all the while they knew she was there, and this lent the confines of the little jail an intimacy that was disturbing and discomfiting to the point where, exhausted as she was, she knew no sleep would come.

She would have been more comfortable on the mattress, especially as the baby was now of a size where it seemed to press down on unexpected parts of her, but the mattress was stained and full of chiggers and she had sat there for a full five minutes before she had started to itch.

You want to peel back that curtain there, girl? I’ll show you something that will get you to sleep.

You cut it out, Dwayne Froggatt.

Just having a little fun, Deputy. You know she likes it. Written all over her waistline, ain’t it?

McCullough had come for her after all, his loaded weapon his own bloodied body, her library book a written confession on his chest. He had followed her back down that mountain as surely as if he’d done it with a loaded gun in his hand.

She tried to think of what she could say in mitigation; she hadn’t known she had hurt him. She had been afraid. She had simply been trying to do her job. She was a woman, just minding her business. But she wasn’t stupid. She knew how it looked. Nancy, without knowing it, had sealed her fate by placing her up there, library book in hand.

Margery O’Hare pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes and let out a long, shuddering breath, feeling the panic begin to rise again. Through the bars she could see the blue-mauve of encroaching night, hear the distant birdcall that marked the dying embers of the day. And as the dark fell she felt the walls press in on her, the ceiling lowering, and she screwed her eyes shut.

‘I can’t stay here. I can’t,’ she said softly. ‘I can’t be in here.’

You whispering to me, girl? Want me to sing you a lullaby?

Pull back that curtain. Go on. Just for Daddy.

A burst of drunken laughter.

‘I can’t stay in here.’ Her breath bunched and gathered in her chest, her knuckles whitened and the cell began to swim, the floor rising as the panic built.

And then the baby shifted inside her, once, twice, as if telling her that she was not alone, that nothing was to be gained from this, and Margery let out a half-sob, placed her hands on her belly and closed her eyes and let out a long, slow breath, waiting until the terror had passed.