PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF DOROTHY SALISBURY DAVIS

“Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Josephine Tey … Dorothy Salisbury Davis belongs in the same company. She writes with great insight into the psychological motivations of all her characters.” —The Denver Post

“Dorothy Salisbury Davis may very well be the best mystery novelist around.” —The Miami Herald

“Davis has few equals in setting up a puzzle, complete with misdirection and surprises.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Davis is one of the truly distinguished writers in the medium; what may be more important, she is one of the few who can build suspense to a sonic peak.” —Dorothy B. Hughes, Los Angeles Times

“A joyous and unqualified success.” —The New York Times on Death of an Old Sinner

“An intelligent, well-written thriller.” —Daily Mirror (London) on Death of an Old Sinner

“At once gentle and suspenseful, warmly humorous and tensely perplexing.” —The New York Times on A Gentleman Called

“Superbly developed, gruesomely upsetting.” —Chicago Tribune on A Gentleman Called

“An excellent, well-controlled piece of work.” —The New Yorker on The Judas Cat

“A book to be long remembered.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch on A Town of Masks

“Mrs. Davis has belied the old publishing saying that an author’s second novel is usually less good than the first. Since her first ranked among last year’s best, what more need be said?” —The New York Times on The Clay Hand

“Ingeniously plotted … A story of a young woman discovering what is real in life and in herself.” —The New York Times on A Death in the Life

“Davis brings together all the elements needed for a good suspense story to make this, her fourth Julie Hayes, her best.” —Library Journal on The Habit of Fear

“Mrs. Davis is one of the admired writers of American mystery fiction, and Shock Wave is up to her best. She has a cultured style, handles dialogue with a sure ear, and understands people better than most of her colleagues.” —The New York Times Book Review on Shock Wave

The Clay Hand

Dorothy Salisbury Davis

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

About the Author

Chapter 1

IT WAS TEN-THIRTY WHEN the basketball finals let out. Phil guided her through the jostling, noisy crowd into the street. A youngster, plunging for a bus, brushed against her. It was stinging cold out, but he paused long enough, seeing her, to tip his hat and say, “Excuse me, lady.” That would only happen to Margaret Coffee, Phil thought. She could move with grace even among a pummeling crowd. Her head would be high if she were ankle-deep in mud, and anybody seeing her face would say she was walking on velvet. Dick Coffee was a very fortunate guy. But it was not the first time Phil had thought that.

In the cab she put her hand in his, and leaned against him—for warmth, of course. And he was warm enough, that was certain. Without turning his head, he could see the fullness of her mouth, the light sparkling on the moistened lips.

“If Dick had been here tonight, it would have been like old times,” he said, leaning away from her and scratching the frost from the cab window.

“Yes, old times,” she repeated. “But I’m glad you thought of me even if Dick wasn’t here. I thought you’d forgotten me.”

How often he had thought of her, and then forgotten her by dint of determination. Then, when he would see her, it would start all over again. But never a word of it said between them, never a sign. He leaned back in the seat, not quite touching her. “I wonder what he’s doing now.”

She, too, drew herself a little away. “Asleep probably. He always liked his sleep. Do you know Winston at all, Phil?”

“A little. I’ve driven through it a couple of times. It’s a dismal town. The whole country down there is dismal. The black from the mines lies over it like a dirty, bumpy blanket. You wouldn’t like it, Margaret.”

“With Dick there, I’d like it.”

That would hold him a while, he thought. “Funny he didn’t stop on his way. My home’s not a hundred miles from there.”

“Maybe he plans stopping on his way back. He was funny about this trip. He was gone nearly two weeks before I knew where he was.”

“I wonder if he has another Naperville by the tail.”

She shivered and drew near him again. “I hope not. This waiting is maddening.”

He wondered if one ever got used to waiting. If anyone should have been used to it, it was Margaret Coffee. Her husband was one of the best known journalists in the country, a free lance now for several years. He had a nose for trouble, and somehow always managed to be on the scene when it came. Since the war he had covered two revolutions and had been kicked out of both countries, but he had done a job on the boot that kicked him. He always wrote with a point of view. He looked first, but having looked, he told the truth without mercy. Naperville, of which they had just spoken, was the scene of a coal mine disaster. The series Dick did on it, baring the political corruption behind a blast that might have been prevented, won him a Pulitzer prize. That was the high point in Dick’s career, although every one of his domestic stories marked a turning point in some phase of American endeavor—prison reforms, a seamen’s strike, combustible exports, a shirt organization. Everything he touched was explosive, in fact. He went in quietly, but all hell broke loose when he came out. And through it all, Margaret waited, always as near her husband as he felt it safe to take her—but waiting, always waiting.

“Why didn’t you go to Winston with him?” Phil asked.

“Because I wasn’t asked. May I have a cigaret?”

He reached into his pocket for one and gave it to her, lighting it then. Her face showed a little annoyance at his direct question. “Sometimes I wish he’d settle down, Phil. In a small town, maybe. I think I’d be perfectly happy if he were sports editor for the Rockland Dispatch.”

Her words irritated him, coming on top of his thoughts on Dick’s achievements. There was condescension in them, a pat on the head for a good little boy, who returned from the wars to his home-town job with the complacency of a caterpillar that didn’t give a damn if it ever became a butterfly.

“I’ll take that for a compliment,” he said, although he had taken it for quite something else.

“Do you ever hear from Eleanor?”

She was fingering his career as he had gone over Dick’s. “No. Never again.”

“It was such a cruel thing to do to you. But maybe it was all for the best, Phil.”

“Look, Margaret. Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m all over it.”

“But you haven’t married, Phil. You’re missing so much.”

“Am I?” he said, looking at her.

He had meant it as no more than a slight irony, and one turned against himself. The cold rigidity of her face as she inhaled the cigaret deeply, therefore startled him. It might have been illusion in the faint and transient street light, but the tightness of her hands, folded together when he reached to touch them, was no illusion. Nor were her words: “Dick and I would be lost without one another. He worships me, and I him.”

He had no answer to that, having seen no call for it. The cab turned up Michigan Avenue, and at the bridge he rolled down the window a moment to glimpse the lights to the west. At any time of the day or night, that was the best view of Chicago, he thought, that and coming up from the south on the Outer Drive. It belied the hovels that crouched along the tracks of any train that came into the sprawling city.

The cab driver waited while Phil walked to the apartment door with her.

“We seem to have hit a sour note, Phil,” she said in the hallway. “Will you come up?”

“Thank you, Margaret. But I’d better hammer out my piece while it’s fresh in my mind.”

She gave him her hand. “Thank you for thinking of me, Phil.”

“Give my best to that guy of yours when you write. Tell him I expect to see him in Rockland when he’s through. A day at least.”

“I will.” She smiled and started inside. Then she turned back. “Phil, why don’t you write to him? Invite us both to Rockland. You did once, you know.”

“More than once. I’ll try again. Goodnight, Margaret. Tell him to give them hell down there.”

He started down the walk. “General Delivery, Winston,” she called after him.

Returning to the cab, he gave the driver the address of the Chicago Press Club. “General Delivery, Winston.” The words kept recurring to him. There was something desperate about the way she had come up with the idea. Several times he had extended such an invitation. It was always Margaret who declined, not Dick. His mother had said bluntly, “We’re too plain for the likes of her,” and he had let it go, thinking Margaret wiser than himself.

The doorman at the Press Club looked at his Dispatch card suspiciously. “Columbus Dispatch?” he asked.

“That’s good enough.” He pushed on, having discussed Rockland enough for the night.

The lounge was deserted except for a bridge game in the far corner of the room. Four old-timers—deans, he thought they might be called—turned when he entered, and turned back to their cards immediately and altogether, like a chorus of pantomimists, and just as silent. The bar, however, was cluttered with all variety of newspaper men, columnist and rewrite, city desk and criminal court. Phil recognized some of them from previous trips, and spoke a moment with them in passing.

He ordered a drink and took it to the fringe of a group around Randy Nichols, ruddy-cheeked, white-haired veteran AP man. He was in the middle of a story on the so-called Lipstick Murder, when he noticed Phil.

“Hello, McGovern.” He waved a chubby hand toward him, and Phil was pleased at being remembered. Dick had introduced him to Nichols over a year before.

“Well, McGohey picked up the hat,” Nichols continued his story, “and Lord, it was like any of a hundred hats you’ve seen in a check room. He put it up to his nose. ‘Smell that,’ he says to me. I smelled it. ‘Sweat,’ I said. ‘There’s more than sweat,’ he says. ‘It’s been in a room with cooking, strong cooking. Cabbage, I’d say.’ Well, we went back to the rooming place, and I swear he went along the hallways like a hound dog after a rabbit…. ‘Garlic, Prince Albert tobacco, ten cent incense, or worse—that bears checking,’ he says. ‘There’s been a lot of smoking in there…’”

Phil heard a telephone ring through the last few words, and behind him, the muffled voice of the bartender. He called out then: “Randy Nichols.”

“Tell her I’ve got my hat on.”

“Nope. It’s a man. The boss I think.”

The men parted to let Nichols through, and Phil noticed several of them empty their glasses and lay out money. They were ready to take off, straining to hear Nichols’ conversation. Phil watched him. Nichols’ tongue was between his teeth, and the only sound he made was the occasional grunt of understanding. When he hung up, he stood at the bar thoughtfully for a moment. Everyone was waiting. “Ever hear of a town called Winston?” he asked.

It was a few seconds before Phil could get the words out. “It’s in the coal mines near the borders of West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio. Dick Coffee is down there.”

Nichols nodded. “He sure is. He was found dead at the bottom of a cliff there a few hours ago.”

Chapter 2

MARGARET OPENED THE DOOR to him, and he knew instantly that she had received word of Dick’s death. There were no tears on her face, only a stark muteness. She led him into the living room, walking ahead straight and mechanically. An open telegram lay on the table. He picked it up.

PLEASE CALL SHERIFF SAM FIELDS WINSTON 347 IMMEDIATELY

“You’ve called?” Phil said.

She nodded. Her voice broke through then. “Will you go down with me, Phil?”

“Of course. When do you want to go?”

“Now. It was last night. And here we were at a basketball game tonight, and last night I was sitting in a movie…”

“Don’t think about that now, Margaret. Try to get ready. I’ll make the earliest arrangements I can.”

As soon as she left him, he called the airport. Waiting, he looked about the room. In all the years he had known Dick, this was the first time he had ever been in his house. It was a large, splendid room, with souvenirs of Dick’s overseas travel. Margaret had met him abroad and they were married there just before the war. The strange thing about the room was that it felt more like a museum than a home. All Dick’s things were there, but they were arranged as they might have been had he already been gone many years. A Swiss steeple clock was on the mantle, its hands stopped at seven-thirty, a pair of bronze candelabra were shining, laden with unburned candles; a sword hung above the fireplace, well dusted. It reminded him of the living room at home the day of his return from the army: so much like the way he had left it, he suspected his mother had not lived there in his absence.

He made arrangements for their flight, and went to the door of the bedroom where Margaret was packing. “We can get a plane for Columbus at two,” he said. “I’m going to call home and arrange for someone to bring my car there to meet us.”

She did not answer him. Then after a moment: “Phil, they’re holding an inquest. They asked my permission for an autopsy. What does that mean?”

“It means he died under unusual circumstances.”

“Does it mean he could have taken his own life?”

The question shocked him, more, almost, than had the first word of Dick’s death. “I don’t know, Margaret. I’m going to the hotel and pack now. I’ll be back in an hour. Will you be all right?”

“I’ll be all right.”

She was sitting primly waiting for him in the foyer when he returned. Her black coat and black felt hat made her look smaller than she was, for she was actually a tall woman. Her luggage was beside her, and the house darkened except for the overhead light.

“Is there someone we should call, Margaret? Family?”

“I’ve attended to it,” she said. “Can we go?” They rode through the night and boarded the plane silently, Phil going over in his mind the few remote hours in the past that he had spent with her…. “General Delivery, Winston” … “Does it mean he could have taken his own life?” There was nothing in what he knew of Dick—and he had known him since they were in college together—to suggest such a possibility. He had not seen him in almost a year, but he could not imagine Dick defeated, much less quitting.

Beside him in the plane Margaret sat, her head leaned back, her eyes closed. But she was not asleep. Every few moments she moistened her lips. How well, really, did he know her? He was stationed not far from New York when she and Dick had returned from Europe. He had met them in New York, getting a three-day pass. It was a hilarious three days in an ominous sort of way, with the war almost on them. “A pickup, an honest-to-God pickup,” Dick would say, winking at him. He could scarcely take his eyes off his wife. Nor could Phil. She was radiant then. The glow deepened through the years. He had always recognized it as a danger signal to himself. There was something about her that made him want to touch her, not intimately necessarily, although that too, but just some casual thing to make her respond. For there was something lightning-like in the way she made people aware of her. He had seen her no more than a dozen times since, but at every meeting he had known the same taut quickening of his senses.

They reached Columbus shortly after four o’clock, the other passengers stirring grumpily, many of them expecting sunlight and the warmth of Miami instead of the cold glare of frost still on the windows. Jimmie Gannon, the night garage man where Phil left his car, was waiting for them at the airport. As soon as they were clear of it, the plane started down the runway and roared off overhead. Phil climbed into the back seat of the car after Margaret, and pulled a robe over their knees. He reached for her hand, the need to offer comfort greater than her need for it, apparently, for she drew away and sat apart, colder than the night.

Jimmie was whistling softly in the front, a tuneless reminder of wakefulness. Phil tried to sleep. He would be taking over the wheel in a half hour. But there was no sleep in him now, only the aching awareness of the empty pain beside him that robbed him of his own grief. A resentment of that overtook him then. Dick was his well-loved friend, Margaret, the stranger whose presence had always broken the companionship between them. It was not that way with other friends—their wives were part of the friendship. You didn’t accept Margaret as part of something, he realized then. She was distinct. You turned your back on her or you opened your arms.

“Want me to call your mother, Phil?” Jimmie said over his shoulder.

He recognized the lights of Rockland then. “Would you, Jimmie? Tell her to call the office. I’ll get in touch with them later today.”

They drew up to the Rockland garage, and Phil got out while Jimmie filled the gas tank. An overland truck passed, the driver dimming and raising his lights. Phil waved, and watched him up the deserted street.

“Okay, kid,” Jimmie said. “Good luck.” Phil opened the back door. “You’ll be warmer in the front seat, Margaret.”

Without a word she got out and permitted him to fold the blanket about her there. As he rounded the car, the wind picked up a circle of dust and danced it down the road ahead of them.

On the highway, he kept the speedometer between fifty-five and sixty until they got into the hills. The sky was still a murky black, with no stars showing, and the wind sloughed along the side of the car, a lonely, monotonous cry. The turns on the blackened highway were treacherous. He slowed down, glancing now and then at the dreary progress of the mileage register.

Presently an even band of gray showed beyond the hills to the east. Along the road, lights began to flicker on in the farm houses. An occasional lantern bobbed along in the stride of a farmer between house and barn. Weariness began to overtake him in the tantalizing half-light between dawn and sunrise.

“I’m getting groggy, Margaret. We’ve got to talk or something.”

“Sing,” she said, without looking at him.

He gave no thought to the song he started until he realized the association. All his life he would remember this night drive, singing when his stomach was knotted. And for that song to have come to him then…

“Why do you stop?” Margaret asked.

“It’s queer I should have picked that one. I met Dick in Italy during the war when it was popular. Half the U.S. army seemed to be picking it out on broken-down pianos. I remember one place all bombed out except the damn piano, and there was a G.I. sitting in the middle of the rubble playing that.”

“How far now, Phil?”

He glanced at the speedometer. “Forty miles maybe. Watch for Route 17.”

“Route 17,” she repeated.

“What was Dick doing in Winston, Margaret?”

“I don’t know.”

Route 17 was a gravel road. A gray dawn came slowly over the grayer hills and rolled down them like lazy smoke. They passed an occasional group of men trudging along the roads with dinner pails, others checking in at mine gates. Sweatered women were hanging up Monday washes already, the wind catching the wet clothes and twisting them around the lines. The women hurried into houses that seemed scant protection from the weather, hot or cold—fragile frame buildings that looked to be standing by the grace of God.

“I wonder if Dick was working on these,” he said, nodding at a group of the shabby houses.

She did not answer. Presently she read aloud: “Winston Colliery Number Two.”

Rounding a curve they saw the town in the valley below them, like card houses lined up on a barrel stave, Phil thought, thinning out at either end where the first rises of the hills began. There were two church steeples, the nearest with a cross atop it and alongside it a wide white-dotted cemetery.

“Phil,” Margaret said, her voice almost harsh with the effort, “I’d better tell you now. I don’t think Dick was coming back to me, even if he had lived. I think he was leaving me.”

Chapter 3

HE STOPPED AT AN intersection in the town, parked and went into Lavery’s General Store. The storekeeper was firing the stove in the middle of the room, his coat collar turned up. A bundle of newspapers lay just inside the door.

“Where can I find the sheriff?” Phil asked.

Lavery wiped the coal dust from his hands on to his overalls and went out on the veranda with him. He pointed through the town.

“Yonder. Krancow’s Funeral Parlor.” He glanced at the license plate on Phil’s car, and then into the car itself. “That Coffee’s wife?” he asked bluntly.

“Yes.”

Lavery shook his head and went back into the store.

They drove up the main street past the fire house, with a single garage door, a drug store, a Penny variety store, a movie house where Buck Rogers was riding still, a grocery…There were a couple of farm trucks parked on the street, and a few cars, all of them dusty but quite new.

“When you live in a hovel,” Phil said, “I guess you make your Studebaker your castle.”

They stopped in front of the funeral parlor, a large house with one great window, the fernery scratching the dusty glass. Two other cars were parked there. He rang the doorbell and walked in, holding the door for Margaret.

The parlor itself was a long, drab room despite its over-furnishing—upholstered chairs, carpeting, and the walls hung with tinted reproductions of holy pictures… The Christ Child in the temple…the garden of Gethsemane… Christ weeping over Jerusalem…. It was a few seconds before anyone came. A delicate-looking little man looked out from a door at the rear of the room. He stepped back to say something and then came in with two other men, one of whom introduced himself.

“I’m Maurice Handy, coroner of Corteau County.”

Phil gave his own name and introduced Margaret, and they in turn met Joseph Krancow, undertaker and constable of Winston, and Sheriff Sam Fields. The Winston men offered Margaret their solicitude.

“We’ll hold the inquest as soon as we can,” the coroner said, “as soon as the sheriff has lined up his witnesses and the medical examiner is ready. We’ve taken the precautions of having an expert.”

There was not much solicitude in him, Phil thought. Perhaps it was good in his job. He gave the impression of knowing that job, at least.

“Am I to be told how my husband died?” Margaret said coldly.

“We’re holding an inquest to determine that, ma’am,” the coroner said. He turned to the sheriff. “Sam, you want to talk to Mrs. Coffee?”

Fields nodded. “First I have to ask you to identify the deceased, Mrs. Coffee. He wasn’t carrying much identification.”

For an instant the wild hope occurred to Phil that it might be someone else who had died in Winston. Margaret dispelled it. “I want to see my husband.”

In the rear room, it was the state medical examiner who guided their viewing of the body. Somewhere in his subconscious, Phil realized that the expert had already begun his work. There was no doubt that the distorted face was Dick Coffee’s. Margaret bit her lip hard, seeing it, but she refused the arm he offered her.

In the parlor again, Fields motioned them into chairs.

“May I stay?” Phil asked.

“I don’t see why not,” the sheriff said, “for the time being, anyway. Sit where you’ll be comfortable, Mrs. Coffee. You’ve had a long trip.”

He was a rangy, hard-bitten man of about fifty. His face had the look of weather about it, and his voice the ring of the hills. He took off his hat and laid it on the table, smoothing down his thin hair. He looked at both of them carefully with an open curiosity that had not a trace of self-consciousness. Then, having taken their measure apparently, he pulled up a straight chair and sat down opposite them.

“You’re a family friend?” He nodded to Phil.

“Yes.”

The sheriff waited, and for some reason Phil felt it necessary to explain further. “I offered to come with Margaret. My home is in Rockland, some miles north of here…” Having started the explanation he didn’t seem to be able to stop. It was as though he was trying to extricate himself from a guiltiness that came of being there with her.

“I know the town,” the sheriff said easily. “Mrs. Coffee, can you tell me why your husband came to Winston?”

“No. I didn’t even know he was coming here when he left.”

“I see. How long were you married?”

“Nine years.”

“Any children?”

“No.”

“You were home this Saturday night past?”

“I was in Chicago. I went to a movie.”

“By yourself?”

“Yes. I often do. Sheriff, for the love of heaven tell me what happened.”

“I’ll tell you what I can in a minute, Mrs. Coffee. First I got to ask you some questions.” He turned abruptly to Phil. “Where were you Saturday night?”

“I was in Chicago covering the basketball tournament for my newspaper.”

“When did you last see your husband, Mrs. Coffee?”

“The last week of January. It was a Thursday night. He left in the morning without waking me.”

“And didn’t say where he was going?”

“That’s right.”

“When did you hear from him then?”

“Two weeks later. He wrote that he was in Winston.”

“Do you have that letter?”

“It was only a card. I don’t know if I have it or not.”

“Weren’t you worried at not hearing from him?”

“I was worried. I have always worried about Dick. His work was dangerous.”

The sheriff studied the knuckle of his thumb a moment. “He was identified from a letter you wrote to him, you know, Mrs. Coffee. He wasn’t carrying any other identification at all.”

Margaret waited. She was about to say something, Phil thought, but changed her mind.

Fields went on quietly. “It wasn’t mailed in Chicago.”

“I know. After I learned he was in Winston, I wrote to him—that I would go to Cincinnati. I wrote to him again from there. I thought he might come. But he didn’t. I returned to Chicago.”

Margaret told it, her head up, her voice a little choked. It was the first Phil had known of such a trip.

“There’s a calendar there on the wall.” Fields pointed. “I wonder if you’d give me the exact dates you were in Cincinnati.”

“Why?”

“Routine information,” Fields said, explaining nothing.

Without looking at the calendar, Margaret said, “March third, fourth and fifth.”

“All right,” the sheriff said. “Just one or two more questions. Did you and your husband quarrel before he left?”

“We didn’t quarrel, really. The last couple of months at home Dick acted very strangely. He was depressed, almost morose, I’d say. He seldom spoke to me. He was away a great deal, and before he left he cleared out all his papers. He was drinking a great deal…”

“Dick wasn’t much of a drinker,” Phil said before he realized that he was contradicting her.

“You didn’t see him for a year,” she said. “How do you know the changes that might have come over him?”

“Have you any idea what made him that way?” the sheriff asked, ignoring their exchange.

“None.”

“Didn’t you try to find out, ma’am?”

“Yes, I tried. Over and over again. Whatever was wrong with him was beyond my power of healing.”

They were talking about someone he had never known, Phil thought. Dick Coffee was a healthy, aggressive guy, a good fellow with a fine mind and a keen wit. He was a crusader with a level head, something not altogether common.

The sheriff straightened up from where he had tilted his chair against the table. “All right, Mrs. Coffee. We don’t know much more about what your husband was doing here than you seem to. He got to know just about everybody in the town. He was here just short of six weeks. It takes a pretty good sort of person to get liked in that much time. In less time, in fact. Because in the last week or so, it turned out just the opposite. He did a lot of drinking, and you’re going to hear it come out at the inquest, so’s I might as well get you ready for it now: there was a lot of talk about him and a woman here. It may come out to be just talk. I hope that’s so.”

“How did he die?” Margaret said. “That’s what I want to know.”

“He died in a fall from a cliff out at the edge of town. He could have jumped, he could have been pushed, the way we figured it till now. Or it could just have been an accident. That happened some time Saturday night. The last person we know to of seen him was about three o’clock Saturday afternoon. A boy found him there early yesterday morning.”

The sheriff got up. Margaret sat a moment, tense and pale, her teeth cutting into her underlip. She looked up then, meeting Fields’ eyes. “What was the woman like?”

Fields’ mouth tightened downward a little. “You’ll see her at the inquest. Now Mrs. Krancow has fixed a room for you upstairs where you’ll be comfortable while you’re here. I’ll want to talk to you again later.”

“Where did Dick stay? I’d rather stay there, Sheriff.”

“I don’t think you better, ma’am.”

“Why not?”

“Well,” Fields said, putting his chair back, “to put it in the raw, the old lady doesn’t want you.”

Chapter 4

AS SOON AS HE had taken Margaret’s luggage up to the room prepared for her, Phil went outdoors. Away from her, he might escape the nightmare feeling. He could smell the coal dust in the wind, and feel its grit against his skin. A few townspeople were on the street, huddled deeply in their overcoats and peering at him curiously as he passed….a barber shop and a hardware store, opening for the day, a frame house with two youngsters peeking at him through the picket railing. He called “hello!” to them, passing. Behind him, he heard them scramble into the house and slam the door.

He paused at McNamara’s Tavern. Looking over the half curtain, he saw Randy Nichols talking with the bartender. The reporter noticed him and waved him in.

“Pour another one, Mac,” Nichols said as Phil joined him.

The large red-faced man behind the bar was pouring a brand Phil had never heard of. His face was hard, although its flesh was soft, and when he looked up, his small blue eyes were needle-like. “There’s a terrible raw day out,” he said, rubbing away with his finger the solitary drop of whiskey he had spilled.

“It is,” Phil said. “What time did you get in, Randy?”

“With the dirty dawn. I got a midnight flight to Cincinnati. I caught the milk train over from there. How did she take it?”

“His death? How would anybody take it?”

“I didn’t mean that,” Nichols said. “Does she know what was going on down here?”

“Do you?” Phil asked irritably. He sipped the raw liquor and felt his empty stomach contract with it.

“I know what I hear,” Nichols said. “Doesn’t mean I like it. But I can listen.”

A card game was going on at a table in the back. Phil looked at his watch—nine o’clock in the morning. It was a part of the unreality that five men should sit in a silent card game, giving no recognition of time or man. “I’ve got to get something to eat,” he said. “I feel like I haven’t touched ground in a month.”

“You’ve just got one foot on the merry-go-round,” Nichols said. “Wait till the music starts!”

There was a mirror the length of the bar, reflecting the meager line of bottles, a cigar box, and the broad back of McNamara, his ears lopping away from his head like daffodils. It also caught the two men at the bar, an upright piano against the wall behind them, and above it, the bare-chested, arm-folded physique of John L. Sullivan.

“Just what have you heard?” Phil said.

“That the sheriff is grilling her husband on it,” Nichols said. “They’re trying to break down his alibi. He works on the Cleveland and Mobile, a brakeman. He checked in for work at four-forty-five that afternoon—claims he was on his way to Cleveland by five-thirty. The coal train gets sidetracked about twenty miles north, while the passenger goes through. They figure he could have clocked in all right, then dropped off and caught a ride on the passenger train as far as the switch a while later, getting on the job again without being missed.”

“Randy, does this business sound like Dick to you? You knew him pretty well.”

Nichols shook his head. “No. It doesn’t. But I’ll tell you, McGovern. I saw Coffee last Christmas, and he was a mess, a hell of a mess. Him and his wife came round to the Press Club. You couldn’t say a word, he didn’t flare up. One of the fellows made kind of a play for her—kidding, you know, a few drinks. And holy Joseph, I thought Dick was going to knock his teeth out.”

“How did she react?”

“The smile of Gioconda—all mother, and no wife, I thought. Just my impression, of course. She isn’t the motherly type.”

Phil emptied his glass, and McNamara had it refilled before he could stop him. “I hear he was drinking, too,” Phil said. “That’s out of character for him.”

McNamara picked that up. “Drinking?” he said. “That boy could lay a dozen in the aisle, and walk out with his hat straight.”

Phil looked at him, wondering if there was any reason to exaggerate. “Here?”

“Here where you’re standing till last week,” the barkeep said. “I flung him out when he came round with the old man on Friday night.” He leaned across the bar confidentially. “I’ve my reputation, you know. And me after recommending him to the widow, and her taking him in, the dear soul.”

The two children Phil had seen next door were nudging the window where the curtain parted. McNamara noticed them. “Get home out of here,” he roared, waving his big red fist at them. “It’s no place for children.” They fled. His bellowing could have been heard in the next county.

“Will you cut the palaver and bring us a drink, Mac,” one of the men shouted from the card table.

“Come and fetch it yourself. You’ve got me flat-footed with carting it to you.”

There was reality to it, after all, Phil thought. He looked at the tray McNamara set on the bar and watched him cover, glass by glass, a stenciled nude.

Nichols looked up at the picture of John L. Sullivan. “There seems to be an Irish element in the town.”

“Where isn’t there an Irish element?” Phil said.

“Well,” said Nichols, “they say it’s a little rare in Dublin these days.”

“Who’s the old man he said Dick was drinking with?” Phil asked.

Nichols turned his back on the bar and leaned his elbows on it. “Henry Clauson, an old-time magician, from what I’ve collected. It’s his daughter…”

His words were cut off with McNamara’s shout: “Are you coming for this or no? You’ll be belly-aching there’s no head on it.”

One of the men shuffled up and got the tray. Phil noticed his hand was seamed with black, but the flesh itself looked clean. “This one’s on Billy,” he said.

McNamara nodded. He took a pencil and notebook from the backbar, and wet the pencil on his tongue before making the entry. “That’s your last on the tab, Billy, till you go back,” he called. “The old woman’ll be in after me if I let you over it.”

“Have they been out long?” Phil asked.

“They’ve been out at Number Three for two weeks. They’re scheduled to go back at twelve tonight, but I don’t think they’re going.”

“A strike?”

The barkeep smiled, his face a ruddy affability, but his sharp little eyes giving the lie to the smile. “A convenience,” he drawled.

Phil emptied his glass and went out in search of a restaurant.

Chapter 5

AN HOUR LATER HE walked the length of the town, a gray, listless town, where things seemed to come in pairs—two churches, two bars, McNamara’s and the Sunnyside, so ironically named, and two populations, one of Slavic origin and the other Irish. Surrounding the town, the slag heaps blended into the hills until one seemed like another, and all of them like the humped backs of a hundred men who never looked to where the sun was. He stood at the railway station and stared down the solitary track to the south where it disappeared into the hills, and then to the north where the tracks splayed out into many sidings, some of them occupied now with empty coal cars. The smoke of an approaching engine heralded its coming around the side of a hill. He watched it bring a train of loaded cars, and switch then to the empties, backing them out of sight. He wondered if one of the men he saw at work there was the brakeman now under suspicion for the murder of Dick Coffee.

Ahead of him to the east, one white house lay by itself on a long plateau. Behind it lay the greatest hill of them all. It seemed as though it had been cleft in two, this side of it having been rolled away into the plateau. The remainder of it was like a giant wave still-photographed at the height of its rise. He was still looking at it when the sheriff drove up to the platform and got out of the car.

“That’s the place, all right,” Fields said.

Phil merely looked at him.

“McGovern. That’s the name, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“What did you say you do for a living?”

“I’m sports editor for the Rockland Dispatch.”

“I got a sister living in Rockland. A nice town. Come in the station here a minute. I’d like to talk to you.”

Phil followed him along the brick walk into the frame building. The minute they opened the door, the cheepings of a hundred baby chicks greeted them. The sheriff stood a moment, and then saw the boxes lined up against the wall behind the stove, the little beaks pecking at the air holes. Fields grinned broadly, his hard grim face dissolving in the sudden pleasure. He strode across the room and examined the boxes, holding a knuckle against an opening until one of the birds went to work on it.

Phil went to the stove and warmed his hands. The station master came out of his office, pulling on his coat. “Hello, Sam. They’re going to be pullets if Mike doesn’t come and get ʼem soon. Damn it, they need water.”

“Well, water them then,” the sheriff said.

“What do you want me to do, spit? We got no water here.”

“It’s a crying shame,” Fields said, straightening up.

“I just called him. He’ll be around.”

“Got anything for me?”

“Yeah. He bought his ticket through from Naperville.”

“Naperville,” Fields repeated, glancing toward Phil.

“Naperville to Cleveland to Winston,” the station master said.

“How long would it take him?”

“Day and a half, coming straight through.”

“Straight through is still a long way round, ain’t it?” Fields said. “All right, Ted. Much obliged.” He moved to Phil beside the stove.

“You know Coffee did a story on the Naperville disaster, don’t you?” Phil said.

Fields nodded. “Got a prize for it, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“McGovern, tell me something. Are you a friend of the wife’s or Coffee himself?”

“I’ve seen Margaret Coffee less than a dozen times. I went to school with Dick. We roomed together. We’ve been friends since.”

Fields touched a piece of coal with his toe, edging it under the stove. “Kind of convenient, you being in Chicago that way though.”

“I’ve told you what I was doing there.”

“In other words, you don’t care about her just for her sake?”

Phil took a cigaret from his pocket. “That wouldn’t be in the God’s truth either,” he said. “I’ve always found her very—exciting. I’ve probably been a little jealous of Dick. In a way, I’ve been jealous of her at times, too. Something happened to Dick when she was there—or maybe it was just that when she was with us, she was the center of interest. I never minded it then. But afterwards, I’d get the feeling of not having seen Dick at all.”

After a moment, Fields said: “The Cleveland and Mobile goes through Rockland.”

“I know. I wondered why he didn’t stop at our place, too.”

“He didn’t seem to be in such a hurry when he got here.”

Phil said nothing. He lit his cigaret and flicked the dead match into the coal bucket.

Fields went over to the wall bench and sat down, stretching his long legs in front of him. He wore boots laced up to the knees. “Tell me something about Coffee, about him, about his work, anything comes to your mind about him.”

“He was the sort of guy who calculated his risks,” Phil said thoughtfully. “He wasn’t reckless. He wasn’t afraid to take a risk, but he measured the worth of what he was to get out of it. It’s just today I’ve heard he was drinking a lot. He never used to take anything but a glass of beer once in a while. As far as I can find out, he started drinking some time before Christmas. He began acting jealous of anyone Margaret paid any attention to then, too. Randy Nichols, the reporter covering this, told me that this morning.”

“Any chance he might have been jealous of his wife?”

“How do you mean?”

Fields shrugged. “She looks like a woman who’d go over big in a crowd. Like you said, she’d take the center of things.”

Phil shook his head. “The whole business about jealousy isn’t like Dick. He had too much on the ball himself. He had too much to do. There was nothing petty about him. He hadn’t the time or the nature for it.”

“Did he do his work at home?”

“Sometimes,” Phil said. He remembered the feeling he had in the living room when Margaret left him to pack, the sense of Dick’s already having been gone a long time. “I think the last work he did was a series called ‘What’s in a Book?’ It appeared in three installments in a magazine called The Scribe. It was an analysis of college textbooks. He did research for it on the West Coast last summer. I imagine he finished writing it along November sometime.”

Fields took a notebook and pencil from the breast pocket of his leather jacket. “Give me the name of the place out West.”

Phil gave it to him.

“Was his wife out there with him?”

“I imagine she was. She went most places with him.”

“What else did he do?”

“Before that, I think a piece on private investigators, then one on combustible exports down in Louisiana, then the disaster at Naperville, and a series on prison reforms—he was on the West Coast for that, too.”

“Tell you what I wish you’d do,” Fields said. “Write ʼem all down for me, dates and all, if you can. I might never need it. But it always seems to me one thing in your life brings you to the next, and sometimes, something happening away back when you were a kid has the makings in it of how you’re going to die.” He got up and buttoned his jacket. “Was Coffee the kind of man—well, free and easy with women, would you say?”

“No. I know that for a fact.”

Fields pulled on his gloves and worked at the seams of them thoughtfully. “That’s the impression I got, too. I never saw him till he was gone. I’m up at Corteau, the county seat. But I know the people down here pretty well. I used to work in the mines till my lungs got bad. Been asking around about him—I just get the feeling there’s something wrong in this story.”

“The girl involved,” Phil said. “What’s her story?”

“You mean about her and him? She says it’s a lie. You see, Coffee used to do a lot of hiking through the hills over there. She has some goats she takes out grazing, and they’d meet there. Then he’d be down at the house a lot visiting the old man and her. The husband ain’t home much.”

He started for the door, Phil following him. Fields looked back at the chicks. “If they don’t show up for them chickens, Ted, let me know,” he called to the station master. He held the door till Phil caught it. “Want to go see where he was killed? I got a half-hour.”

Phil got into the car beside him. The sheriff started the motor by letting the car roll down an incline and then letting in the clutch. “Battery’s weak,” he explained. After a moment he added, “No it ain’t either. That’s just a doggone habit of mine.”

As they drove along the highway, he gestured toward the white house Phil had seen from the station. It sat some distance back from the road. “That’s Clauson’s. He used to be a magician. Now he makes a living manufacturing all sorts of gadgets he sells to other magicians. They come from all over. You got no idea how many magicians there are in the country.

“He’s a nice enough old coot, but he always stood out in the town like a wart on a little nose. Never comes into church, and maybe ten years back, when his wife died, he sent her up to Columbus to be cremated. That didn’t set well with the people here. What they don’t understand, they don’t like.”

“How about the girl? Did she grow up here?”

“I don’t think you’ll call her a girl after you see her. They came here when she was in high school. She was twice as smart as anybody. Tried to hide it, but she couldn’t hide that no more than she could hide the way she was growing—so doggoned tall and skinny she had to stand twice in the same place to see her shadow. Terrible shy. Got so she wouldn’t come into town without the old man. Just setting up in the hills there with the damned goats.

“She was give up for an old maid before she got out of high school. Then a couple of years ago, she ups and marries this railroad fellow. Glasgow’s his name. He took a room there to be near his work—and I guess it just happened.”

He turned off the road then and bumped a few feet over the rough field before stopping. “I guess we better walk it from here.”

“What’s the husband like?” Phil asked.

“He’s not the sociable kind either. But he comes around town once in a while. Has a drink of a Saturday night. He’s got a heavy kind of good looks, if you know what I mean—the kind women swallow a nitwit with. I ain’t saying he’s a nitwit. I don’t know. Like as not, he feels out of place with the old man and her. Best way I can describe them to you—they’re book people. And I don’t think the husband ever opened a book in his life except maybe a bank book.”

“Do the Clausons have money?”

“Well, they have their own house. I don’t think they got real money. I didn’t mean he married her for that.”

“He married her,” Phil repeated.

Fields smiled a little. “I guess the old man would put it the other way around—her marrying him. You can get a point of view in spite of all kinds of resolutions, can’t you?”

“Without half trying,” Phil said.

They got out of the car and started across the rough terrain on foot. All around the hills rose and fell like large carbuncles on the earth, one after another until one was lost in the low-hanging clouds. They passed an abandoned mine tipple, the timber about it gray-black and decaying. Phil noticed that the immediate hills were slag heaps from ancient diggings. Patches of frozen moss showed where nature had tried to reclaim them. In another hundred years, she would succeed.

As they picked their way among them, the giant cliff was rising abruptly to their right. The wall receded in the middle so that the upper part was no more than a shelf. The sheriff stopped and squinted up at the ledge. Phil followed his eyes. They were almost beneath the crest several hundred feet above them. The wind whistled forlornly through the cavern, and Phil shivered. Without seeming to see him, the sheriff took a flask from his pocket and offered it.

“Thanks, but I don’t think I need it.”

“Here’s where he was found,” Fields said. He pointed to an area marked off with chalk. “We’ll have the medical examiner’s word for sure at the inquest on whether he died in the fall.”

“Have you any reason to doubt it?”

“No, I guess not, except I’m a suspicious man. If you wanted to make it look like a man died in a fall, this’d be the place to leave him. The hell of it is, when the youngster found him and got word to Krancow—he’s the constable here, too, you know—well, when he got word, he came out here with Doc Turpel, and when they were sure he was dead, they took him back to the parlor. They went up to Mrs. O’Grady’s then, and she near killed them with abuse. It wasn’t till along in the afternoon they called me and the coroner. I had to put my gun in her face to get in and up to his room. I got the letter from his wife there, and with the help of the Cincinnati police, got word to her.”

“Didn’t they know enough to call you before moving him?”

“Well, the fact is, he’d been seen out here in the hills so much—and he was warned about this cliff—they should have called me, but they didn’t.”

A crow was cawing above them. Phil looked up to see it swoop over the top of the ledge and down out of sight beyond them in the cavern. The sudden ceasing of its cry brought a vast stillness.

“What about the men out at one of the mines?” Phil said. “Is there a connection?”

“There’s a connection. How strong, I don’t know. A fellow died from gas poisoning in the abandoned diggings two weeks ago. He had no business there. But it was Coffee suspected the gas, and reported it. When the inspectors went through to check, Laughlin was dead.”

“Was Dick ever in the mines here?”

“Not that I know of yet. He tried to get work in them once, though.”

“What kind of work?”

“As a laborer. He wasn’t here long, then. Nobody knew who he was. I mean nobody knew about that Naperville story of his then. It was one of the inspectors recognized him.”

The crow flew up again, silent, for it was carrying something white in its beak.

“What do you suppose that bird picked up?” Fields said, watching it disappear into the hills. They started toward the end of the cavern from which it had flown. “This Number Three Colliery is one of the oldest mines in the country. There’s miles of roads down there, two levels. There’s just one section working now. Them blasting in it’s supposed to have kicked the gas back in the old diggings. They’ve got good ventilation where they’re working now. But when word got round who Coffee was, and Laughlin and all, the men went out just to be sure. The big boys were sore as hell.”

“Sore enough to do something about it?”

“I don’t know. We haven’t had anything like that around here for a long time.”

Near the end of the cavern the face of the cliff seemed hollowed out, somewhat like a large shell. On the floor they discovered what it was the bird had flown off with—a cigaret butt. Several of them had been stomped out there. Fields squatted down and touched them with his pencil. “Homemade ones,” he said. He scooped them into an envelope and put them in his pocket.

When he straightened up he asked: “When did you have your first cigaret, McGovern?”

“When I was about twelve.”

“Where did you go to do it?”

“Out by the river at home.”

Fields nodded. “Well, one thing. I think we know what Nat Watkins was doing out here when he found Coffee.” He looked at his watch. “They’ll be letting out school for recess soon. I think I’ll stop by and see the boy. The way I figure it, he swiped cigarets from his father and came out here to smoke them. Coming often enough, he might have seen something.” As they walked back through the shadow of the crag, Phil looked up at it once more. “Any foot marks or the like up there?”

“No more than if only a bird’s wing touched it. The ground’s hard as nails.”

On the way back to town, Fields asked where he intended staying while he was in Winston.

“I’d like to get in where Dick stayed,” Phil said.

“She’s a terrible woman, McGovern—like an old eagle that can’t fly with its wings crippled. She’s full of arthritis and venom. But I got the best picture of Coffee from her. It’d be the place for you if you can get in.”

“Did she like Dick?”

“As much as she’s going to like anybody in this world.”

“But not his wife.”

“I’ll take you up there now if you like. I’ve got to gather his things… No, not his wife. But if there’s anything she likes less than men, it’s women. I don’t think you’ll meet her like in a long time again.”

Chapter 6

TURNING LEFT AT LAVERY’S General Store and passing a few buildings they were outside Winston proper again. The sheriff nodded ahead. “There’s the place yonder.”

The house, a half-mile’s distance from them, was a Toonerville sort of place, Phil thought—a rambling building of two stories that had been added onto at least twice after the original building had been put up. It was halfway up a hill, and the yard was scattered with outbuildings, all of them connected with the house by board walks, those, he imagined, for the convenience of a woman who made the rounds of them with difficulty. The grass had been uncut in the summer, or for many summers, and was now flattened with frost. In the front yard, the apple trees were bleak and arthritic-looking themselves.

The sheriff parked the car on the embankment in front, the side drive being occupied by the Winston taxi.

A little bell jingled on the iron gate when they pushed it open, and Phil was not likely to forget his first glimpse of the Widow O’Grady, a withered, angry face further distorted behind an imperfect windowpane. He thought from the distance that her hair was a yellowish-white wig. She knocked viciously on the glass with the knob of her cane and gestured them around to the back.

“All right,” Fields shouted. “You don’t have to break your window.”

The shaggy spears of dead tiger lilies caught at their pant legs along the walk. They had to go through another gate, although the fence on both sides of it was broken down. Many years ago this had been a delightful place, built to the detail of someone who had no notion of how incongruous it was in the middle of a wasteland. It was built as one might have laid out a cottage on a shore road. Whoever did it, Phil thought, was reminding himself of a homeland a far ways from Winston.

Four blue-denim shirts hung on a line between two of the shacks, a dirty Leghorn chicken pecking at the cuff buttons. Before the men were at the back steps, Mrs. O’Grady had made the distance from her window.

“What is it you want, Sam Fields? Stay where you are till you tell me.” Her voice was high-pitched, indelible with the Irish that had survived maybe fifty years away from its nativity.

The sheriff did not slacken his stride. “I want a few words with you,” he said, going up the steps. “And I don’t want to shout them to the world.”

She retreated through the back kitchen, Fields and Phil following her. A scrawny girl was working over a washtub in the unheated room, the steam from the tub and her breath mingling. “Morning, Anna,” the sheriff said. He had his hand on the knob of the kitchen door before the old woman could close it behind her.

“I don’t want any nonsense. I’m giving you credit for being a sensible woman, Mrs. O’Grady.”

“It’s taking advantage of my sensibilities you are,” she said. “Who’s that one?”

“Philip McGovern,” Fields said. “He was a friend of your Mr. Coffee’s.”

“What kind of a friend to be letting him die down here in his desolation?” she said. But she did not refuse her hand when Phil extended his. It was like the bark of a tree, but firm though not yielding in his clasp. Looking at it, he saw that it could not yield. The joints were stiff and knotted. Her face was puckered with wrinkles, but fantastically powdered and rouged. The watery eyes had been very blue once, and the nose, now the shape and near the color of a radish, would have been called pert when she was young. But that was long, long ago.

Fields had crossed the room and sat down opposite a shaggy, red-faced man, forty maybe, though he might look the same at sixty, and not much different from when he was thirty. The spittle came away from his mouth with an old pipe when he removed it to acknowledge an introduction to Phil.

“Jerry Whelan,” Fields said. “He’s the only taxi in town.”

Phil stood where he was beside the widow, for she was leaning, a dead weight, on his arm. “He told me about you,” she said, looking at him sharply. She turned her back on him then, and made a tortuous way across the room to a chair. Her hair was bobbed short, and curled a bit above her scrawny neck. It showed gray near the roots, although it was plastered yellow on the top of her head. Phil watched the movement of her shoulders beneath the sweater as she thrust the weight of her body on the cane at each step. The kitchen was very hot, and smelled heavily of bread and boiling clothes.

“Have you no home, Jerry, you sitting here the whole morning?”

“I’m entranced with your company,” Jerry said thickly.

“Then get untranced, and make room for the man to sit down.”

Jerry stayed where he was. She turned around and leaned on the table. “We had grand talks, him and me, of an evening. Take your coats off, the two of yous, and don’t stand there like idjuts. Anna! Come in and pump a kettle of water!” The edge of the table beneath one hand, and her cane in the other, she lowered herself into the chair, letting her weight go the last few inches. She struck the chair with a jolt that must have wracked every bone in her body.

The only acknowledgment of pain was a faint hissing sound between her teeth. “I’m crippled with the rheumatism and arthritis,” she explained, and Phil realized that she thought that, with the dyed hair and rouged face, she was disguising her misery in some measure from the world.

“You were better off without that one,” she said with an abruptness that startled him, “the one leaving you at the church.”

“We hadn’t gotten quite as far as the church,” he said, after a second. Strange that Margaret had spoken of this the night before and Dick had told the old woman of it.

She cackled at his discomfiture, and “cackling” was the only word for it. “On the way to the church or at it, what odds? You were a sight better off than him got the one standing there waiting for him.”

Phil shrugged.

“Not that he was one for complaining, mind you. He was the soul of good nature. Anna, come in this minute.”

Whelan roared out at the girl, already in the doorway. “Do you hear the woman talking to you? Do as you’re bidden, girl.” To Phil he explained, as though an explanation was all it required, “That one’s my daughter.”

“I thought you were calling your dog,” Phil said.

“A dog’d come sooner. Did you hear the woman say to put on the kettle?—It’s a fine world we’ll have when the children of today take it over.”

The sheriff took out a pipe and filled it. He was quite content to listen. The girl wiped the suds from her arms onto her apron, and pumped the water at the kitchen sink. She was thin and spindle-legged, her eyes and her smile as furtive as a bird at the window. An early maturity was singing from her, a music she could neither understand nor express, Phil thought. He watched her flee from the house when she had put the kettle on the range.

Fields got up and went to the stove for a match. He lighted it with his thumb nail, and held it up to his pipe. “Mrs. O’Grady, I wonder if you’d tell McGovern here the things you told me about Coffee, about how you and him came to be friends and all?”

“What’s the good of it?” she snapped.

“Well,” Phil said, thinking of Margaret, “there’s some who think he might have taken his own life, and I don’t believe it.”

“They’re filthy-tongued liars.” The spittle flew from her mouth.

She turned on the sheriff. “I thought you were working on the husband of that one?”

“Questioning him ain’t taking him for murder, Mrs. O’Grady. We got to try and find out first how the man died. That’s why there’s an inquest.”

She made a noise of impatience, and cocked her head around again at Phil. “Tell me what he was like with you, Mrs. O’Grady,” he said quietly.

“He was the soul of consideration,” she said. “And he wasn’t afraid to do an odd job around the house. I don’t know what I’ll do without him at all.”

“Did he ever speak of when he’d be leaving Winston?”

“I was all the time asking him that, and he’d just pat my hand and say ‘Don’t worry old lady, I’ll be around a while with you yet.’” She drew a deep quivering breath. “The curse of hell on them he took up with to be leading him to his death. They were fine days we had till he took up with them. We’d sit over a cup of tea or a drop, and talk for hours. I told him the history of Winston, inside and out, and I tell you, I’m the one who knows it, here almost sixty years of my life. Though he made me sit up and think once. He says to me, when I’m telling him about this one and that: ‘Be careful, old lady. There’s people you know for a lifetime, and never know at all.’

“He’d go out of here in the morning after his breakfast and maybe not come home until dark. I’d ask him where he’s been, and he’d say, ‘Walking. Just walking and talking.’ Then he took up with the Clausons, as black a day as ever came over me, for there was nights he never came home at all, and me sick with the worry. And there was nights he told me he was with Father Joyce.” She leaned across the table. “What kind of one spends his nights with the priest?”

She looked from one to the other of them, getting no answer, and then put her own to it. “He wasn’t pulling the wool over my eyes with that story.”

“The queer thing about him,” Whelan put in then, “was taking up the likes of that windmill. He was the kind of man you’d think could have any woman he’d lift his hat to.”

Phil expected the widow to blister him for the remark. Instead, she grinned. “He was that fond of the underdog,” she said. Then she added viciously: “But it’s the underdog has the snap of a cur when you do it a kindness.”

“And then there were nights toward the end,” she went on, “when he’d come roaring drunk from McNamara’s, and the jackass not the sense to refuse him the drink. He’d come into my room there under the stair, and press on me a drop he’d brought me in the medicine bottle—It eases the pain, you know. He’d lean in the doorway and look at me, and he’d look out at the picture of my Tim hanging there in the living room, and he’d say: ‘So you were faithful to him all of your life, old lady? And do you think he’d thank you for it?’ It was to make me mad, he said it. And then he’d roar with laughing.”

Dear Lord, Phil thought, what crazy story was this? The weariness of a sleepless night was befuddling him, and her high rough voice was coming to him as through an echo chamber. There were touches of Dick in the person she described, but it was like seeing him through a distorted glass.

Fields got up. “I wonder if I could gather his things up while I’m here, Mrs. O’Grady?”

“Go up and gather them. You know the room. ʼTwas you put the lock on it.”

“I had to do that, ma’am. It’s the law.”

“It’s the law,” she mimicked.

As Fields went through the house, she turned to Phil. “Where are you staying?”

“I don’t know yet,” Phil said. “I was going to ask you if you have a room.”

“You don’t now, do you?” Whelan put in to the widow.

“What do you know whether I do or no? There’s the one now vacant, isn’t there? And I’ve my traveling men’s room. I’m not expecting them for awhile.”

“All right, do as you will. You’re moaning to me all morning with the trouble you had taking him in, and now you’re taking another.”

“Get the hell out of my kitchen, Jerry Whelan. Sitting here as though you’re its lord and master. Scat.”

She lifted her cane at him, and Jerry lumbered to his feet. “Aren’t you offering me a cup of tea itself, and the kettle on?”

“I’ll scald you with the kettle if you don’t get out.”

“Then hire yourself a delivery man after this,” Whelan said. The dishes rattled as he pounded out of the house and slammed the door behind him.

“You can have the room he left behind him if you’re not over-sensitive.”

“I’ll take it,” Phil said.

“Bring us the teapot there from the cupboard, and I’ll wet us a sup.”

Phil obeyed her directions, and presently found himself making the tea, and laying the table for it. He wondered how many times Dick had done this very thing. He was aware of the widow’s taking his measure. “You’re a fine size of a man,” she said. “And you’ve a good mouth. A bit soft maybe, but it’ll toughen up. I can always tell a man and a horse by its mouth.”

He looked at her and grinned a little.

“You’re about thirty,” she said.

“Did you tell that by my teeth? I’m thirty-three.”

“Then you’re an only child and your mother still thinks you’re an infant.”

“I’m one of four children. All of the others grown and married.”

“Then you live alone with your old ma?”

“I do.”

“Ha,” she said. “Tell me I don’t know human nature. Where’s your things?”

“In my car down in the town.”

“Oh, you’ve a car,” she said. “He used to borrow the priest’s and take me out for a spin. It’s a wonderful thing—I’m stiff as an old stone hedge on the ground. But the minute a car motor starts and me in it, I’ve the full power of my limbs.”

The day she would have full power of them, Phil thought, would be the day of the great miracle. “We shall have a drive then,” he said.

“As long as you’re up, pour us the tea there.”

He poured three cups and sat down at the table opposite her.

“The wife’s here, isn’t she?” The manner of her words was meant to ingratiate.

“Yes. I brought her down from Chicago,” he said with matter-of-factness.

“What’s she like?”

His eyes must have conveyed his thought, for he was thinking: Don’t try your wiles on me, old lady.

“You needn’t trouble yourself over it,” she said then. “I listened to him often enough, keening over her beauty. ‘The stars for eyes—a mouth that would make you blush, looking at it—teeth of morning dew and hair the color of summer wheat.’” The widow’s mouth curled with scorn. She spat, and then sipped her tea with a great show of elegance as she lifted the cup with her twisted fingers.

Fields came down the stairs, and laid Dick’s one suitcase near the door—all he had taken from Chicago when he left it almost two months before.

“Take the tea he’s poured for you there, Sam,” the widow commanded.

Fields sat down and buttered himself a slice of the fresh bread she had bidden Phil lay out. “You’ll have to straighten your mind about what you’ll tell the coroner, Mrs. O’Grady,” the sheriff said. “I’ll be calling you maybe tomorrow, and he’ll ask straight questions of you.”

“Straight questions be damned. I’ve nothing to say to him. I’ll not be telling things on that poor boy, and him dead.”

“Well, think about it. When last did you see him Saturday?”

“I gave him his dinner at one o’clock. Chicken and dumplings. Them was his favorites.”

“And he went out after that?”

She nodded.

“Did he tell you where he was going?”

“He didn’t account his every movement to me. He went out singing ‘The Minstrel Boy’—he had a grand voice—I knew as I’m sitting here he’d of been back for his supper if he was able.”

“Did he say he’d be back?”

“He didn’t say he wouldn’t, and he’d of told me that.”

“And the date he first came here, Mrs. O’Grady. Do you remember that?”

She twisted around and looked at the calendar over her shoulder. “There’s a circle round it there on the calendar. His rent started from February tenth.”

“Did he owe you any rent, Mrs. O’Grady?” Phil began.

He thought she was going to strike him. “There’s no one could pay me his rent.”

“Forgive me,” Phil said, “but I think his wife will insist upon it.”

“She’s not coming here.” Her voice rose to deafening shrillness. “I’ll see her in hell before I let her cross that threshold. Do you hear that, the both of you? I’ve a butcher knife there in the drawer, and I’ll take off her proud head if she as much as shows it around here. I’ve knocked a man down and beat him to a pulp, and you know it, Sam Fields. And you know I’ve no fear of damnation, with the hell I’m enjoying here.”

“All right,” the sheriff said, getting up. “Rest yourself there. We’re taking his things out with us, and I see no cause for her coming here.”

He pulled on his coat, as Phil did, and they went out together.

Chapter 7

“SHE’S A CONTRARY WOMAN,” Fields said as they drove down the hill. “But like all contrary women, what she says one day isn’t to be taken for gospel. She may harp on a different tune tomorrow.” He drew to a stop at Lavery’s store. “Not that I’m an authority on women. I’m a bachelor, myself. And the more I have to do with them, the more likely I am to stay one. I’ve got to go to the school now and see the boy who found him. If you’ll come back to the parlor in an hour, I’d appreciate your going over his things with me.”

The street running south from Lavery’s corner was the most prosperous looking he had seen in Winston. Within a block of the corner the huddled stores and frame houses ended, and on either side of the street, the respectable stone houses were leisurely spaced and well attended. There were no more than a dozen of them all together. At their end, Winston also ended. Phil walked as far as the roadside sign and read it:

WINSTON

UNINCORPORATED

POPULATION 1092

The oiled road ended as abruptly as the town, its gravel continuation running into the great hills to the south. He turned back and went into Lavery’s.

He caught his first close glimpse of the women of Winston, for eight or ten of them were hovering about the shelves and counters. A couple of men were hugging the stove. All of them turned and gave him a cold appraisal, returning immediately to their own business. They were plain women, for the most part, with the look of middle age on all of them although there might have been a variation of twenty years between the oldest and the youngest. There was a trace of Irish on the tongues of most who traded there, an Irish mixed with the twang of the hill country that made of it a separate dialect.

“I’m not letting my Jimmie go down now, certification or no,” he overheard. “There’s many a certification no more than a piece of paper made up over a pint of whiskey.”

Phil slipped into the one phone booth in the store and pulled the door almost closed.

“Mind your tongue, woman,” Lavery said. “There’s a whole new ventilation system gone into the mine.”

“After they stayed out three weeks till it went in?” the woman said. “It’s you’d like to see them go back, safe or no, for your business.”

“Och, that’s no way to talk to the man, Sally. He’s all the time carrying us, it seems.”

“Doesn’t he get his money out of the first envelope comes into the house?”

“He does. I’ve often thought to myself, if I had in a lump sum the accumulation of Lavery’s bills, my worries would be over.”

The storekeeper himself added a word to that. “If you went without Lavery’s grub a week or two, your worries would be over also. You’d be lying on the hill up yonder, close to the church.”

Phil put through his call to the Rockland Dispatch and arranged a few days’ leave from the office. He saw a customer leave, and another enter while he talked, and at every demand of the operator for another coin, and the tinkle of it into the phone box, he saw the eyes of those nearest to him turn at the wonder of his extravagance. His call finished, he waited a moment in the booth.

“…Such a nice-seeming man. I danced with him myself that night at the church hall, and nothing put on about him.”

“Whatever did he want taking up with that one?”

“What did the one she got want?”

“A face to frighten the children into behaving themselves…”

“And him with a wife…”

“Did you ever notice the resemblance between her and the goats?…”

“They say the wife came in the town with him…” Phil caught the reflection of a thumb in his direction in the glass. He took off the receiver and waited to call his mother.

“It’s been my observation, people living intimate with animals get to look like them. I’d an uncle once with an old bull terrier, and when he got all but his eye teeth pulled out…”

The operator took the number.

“…Talking to Mrs. Krancow, and the wife, she says, is the spitting image of the Holy Virgin…”

“Them holy ones…”

His mother answered the phone then and Phil lost the rest of the conversation on sanctity. The town was full of it, he thought.

Returning to the funeral parlor, he learned from Mrs. Krancow that Margaret was sleeping. “The poor lamb,” she explained. “I gave her a glass of warm milk with a bit of whiskey, and she just wandered off.”

Phil nodded.

“This was a terrible shock to her,” she added when Phil had not seemed sufficiently sympathetic. “Not only learning about him dying…but that other.” She added the last phrase with a hopeless opening of her hands. “I’ve never liked them Clausons and that’s the truth of it.”

“Don’t let me interrupt your work, Mrs. Krancow. I’ll just sit here, if I may, and wait for the sheriff.”

“Do. There’s some nice comforting magazines there on the table.” She went to the door, catching wisps of her hair into the braid crowning her head. She turned back to him at the door. “It’s not that I’m prejudiced, him not burying his wife decent, mind you.”

She waited hopefully to be asked to explain. Phil said merely: “I understand.” Let alone then, he picked up a magazine and waited for the sheriff.

Fields came in a few minutes, and Phil went into one of the back rooms with him. The sheriff put the suitcase on a table and opened it. Dick’s linen had been neatly laundered and pressed, and Phil noticed how carefully Fields had packed it. Outside of clothes, there were only a few toilet articles, a cheap edition of Shakespeare, and a few pieces of note paper, some of them covered with Dick’s round, solid handwriting.

“He did a little writing,” Fields said. “No dates or nothing. But I’d like you to take a look at it. See what you can make of it. They’re in the order he had them.”

Phil picked up the papers and read:

Mrs. O’Grady has taken me in—

Or did I take in Mrs. O’Grady?

She growled at my credentials,

And howled at my essentials,

And examined me only for—fleas.

The second page:

Out early examining the landmarks, I was seen in the cemetery by Father Joyce, and beckoned into the church. What other appointment can a man have at that hour? There is a frightening angel in the vestibule, mildewed green. I was reminded of Red Roses…I fancied myself as Brennan while I sat there and watched Father Joyce light the two candles by the tabernacle. I thought of the colors I might use to restore it. Blue for heaven? White for purity? Who would expect even an angel to keep its color here? Foolish men of faith? Or am I the fool—to have lost my faith in angels, when keeping it in men is so much harder? I have promised myself that I shall not write while I am here. But I have only words to warm myself with. And for what shall I save them, if striking them is a comfort now?

The third page:

I am growing cold here, even as the days grow warmer. What did I expect? The widow pursues me with her kindness, and it pours over me like ice water. I hate myself for the revulsion because I know she is a very lonely woman, and loneliness makes desperate wooers of us. Christ!

The fourth page:

A letter from Margaret today—a hundred bounties she will bestow on me. The voice of my beloved, behold it cometh leaping upon mountains, skipping over hills.

The fifth page:

A night with Mr. Clauson among old splendors, the reading of scriptures and long talk. All the while two candles burning softly warm, starting up at a strange sound and quieting at a kindly word, a benediction on the house. The smell of spiced tea, old wine, and the goddamn goats.

The sixth page:

It began raining in the night, a hammering, wind-ridden rain that tormented my sleep. I dreamed of Laughlin’s coffin tumbling down the hill, washed free of the dirt I packed too loosely. I was out of the house at dawn to look, expecting a ghoulish search for it. But it was only I the storm disturbed. The earth had pressed more tightly on him. The few poor wreaths were washed away, and as well. What does the dead want of flowers, who had no more of them alive than a rented lily for a Holy Thursday procession and a boutonniere for his wedding?

The last page written on, and the writing there less regular, but as though it had been done with great effort at correctness—perhaps, Phil thought, the effort of a man dulled with drink:

The wind crawls through the cracked window at night and lies down beside me, sapping the warmth from my body. I turn to it and spread my arms.

Phil gave the papers back to the sheriff and lit a cigaret, his fingers trembling a little as he held the match. “There was something wrong. That’s certain.”

“He lost his faith,” Fields said. “That’s a terrible thing for a man.” He hoisted himself up on the table and accepted the cigaret Phil offered him. “I’ll give them to his wife now. But I think I’ll take them back again till we find out more.”

“The letter from her,” Phil said, “what was in that?”

“All about waiting in Cincinnati for him. How she’d wait forever if he’d come.”

“And he didn’t go,” Phil said.

“I guess not.”

“Laughlin was the man killed in the mine. Did Dick dig his grave?”

“Yes,” Fields said. “He went up and offered…. Funny thing about what you said up at the widow’s this morning, about him taking his own life maybe. I didn’t even mention that.”

“I know. Margaret asked me if it was possible when she learned there was to be an inquest.”

Fields nodded. “There’s somebody else takes that point of view, and Coffee spent some time with him—Father Joyce.”

Chapter 8

MAURICE HANDY, THE COUNTY coroner, came in then. He nodded to Phil and sat down on the extra chair in the room. “You’ll be ready in the morning, Sam?” It was more of an order than a question.

“I’ll be able to round up my witnesses, if that’s what you mean, Maurice. What I won’t be able to do by morning is know if they’re telling you the truth.”

“I don’t like rushing you, but there’s a delicate situation here, Sam. I was just talking with Lempke and some of the mine people. I think you and I better go over it.”

Phil made his excuses and left them. At the front of the building, Mrs. Krancow was watering the ferns in the parlor window. “She was asking for you just now,” she said. “She’s feeling better, poor thing. It’ll be all right for you to go up. The room’s just ahead of you at the top of the stairs.”

“Thank you. They’re beautiful ferns.” And they were, great languid branches of them, spilling down to the floor.

“Aren’t they nice? Do you know, I tried all my life growing them, and it wasn’t till I married Joseph I succeeded. But maybe it’s where they sit here in the sun.”

Phil wondered if there was that much sun in Winston. “I’ll go up now.”

“Do. Are you her brother?”

“No. A family friend.”

“Oh.” Mrs. Krancow returned to her fernery, and he could hear her humming tunelessly as he climbed the stairs.

He tapped on the door, and Margaret’s voice came to him out of a deep melancholy when she inquired who it was. It quickened into welcome at the sound of his voice answering.

“What a dear sight you are, Phil. Come in and close the door. These people do nothing but stare at me.”

He closed it, although aware of the possible implications. Or was that in his mind only? He stood inside the room like a gawking schoolboy. She was a pale loveliness, he thought. The flower-papered room was loud, gaudy, the furniture rough, cleanliness its only virtue. And that thought annoyed him. He was not critical of other people’s houses… He went to the window. “How do you feel, Margaret?”

“Better now. But still lost.” She followed him. “Is this happening, Phil? Is that dirty street out there something I saw once and have held all this time in my subconscious? Is it something I was afraid of, that’s coming back to me now because I never wanted to see it again?” She laid her hand on his arm and forced him to look at her. “Is it really Dick lying down there? My imagination couldn’t have conjured him up that way. I’m not cruel, Phil.”

“No, my dear, you’re not. Some things are cruel. But you are not.”

Her hand slipped down his arm and clung to his a moment. “You’re a very comforting person.”

It reminded him of Mrs. Krancow’s parlor literature. “Margaret, this morning you said you thought Dick was leaving you. Why?”

She returned to the one armchair in the room and slumped into it. “I don’t know, Phil. I don’t know what happened to him at all. Or maybe it happened to me. I’m not ugly. I haven’t grown old all of a sudden. I suppose you grow old and don’t know it. Looking in your mirror day to day, you don’t get the truth from it.”

“You’re not growing old, Margaret. You haven’t changed from the day I met the two of you in New York. Do you remember?”

“I do. Your uniform was two sizes too small for you.”

“You noticed that? I didn’t even know you saw me at all—the kid from the country town…”

“With eyes that hungered for the world. Satisfied yet, Phil?”

“No. I’ve been nauseated with some of it I’ve seen since then. But I wouldn’t say that I’m satisfied.”

“I know what you mean,” she said.

“Do you?”

Her eyes flared a quick anger. She looked away. “You have a nasty way of making a person feel small.”

“I didn’t intend it.” He was aware of the exchange as something that had happened to him before—his mind, his emotion playing tricks on him. He was aware, also, of a certain pleasure in it, and an immediate disgust with himself.

It was Margaret who took him out of contemplation of it. “Did these people like Dick?”

For the moment, he had completely forgotten Dick. “I think they did. Some of them certainly. They’re not very fond of outsiders in Winston.”

“Are you trying to tell me they won’t like me? I know it already.”

“They have great sympathy for you, Margaret.”

“Why?”

“In the death of your husband.”

“And not because of what the sheriff told us?”

“That, too. I don’t value that sympathy. It’s given out of too much curiosity—or worse. And I don’t believe that’s the truth, anyway. Dick wasn’t that kind of a guy.”

“You see things very black and white, don’t you, Phil?”

“I was never much of a sophisticate,” he said. “Have you had lunch?”

“She’s bringing it to me on a tray. But I’d love to go out. I feel all choked in here. I seem to be growing into the wallpaper.”

“Come then.”

“They’ll talk if I don’t behave as they expect a widow to.”

“How is a widow supposed to behave, except as a widow feels?”

Two little spots of color rose in her cheeks. “Spare me your moralizing, Phil. This is quite enough of an ordeal without it.”

“Forgive me. I don’t want to hurt you.”

She got up and took her coat from a hanger behind the door. “You do want to hurt me. You think I’m responsible in some way for Dick’s death. Be honest with yourself at least, Phil. Now will you drive me out to where he was killed?”

He held her coat for her, and followed her down the stairs. Mrs. Krancow smiled sympathetically when Margaret told her where they were going. “You mustn’t dwell on it, Mrs. Coffee. There’s some things we aren’t meant to understand. Like Father Joyce said just last Sunday: ‘If man was to understand all the ways of God, God would be hard put to understand the ways of man.’ That’s a lovely thought. Isn’t it?”

“Lovely,” Phil repeated.

“Lord, what a desolate place to die,” Margaret said, as they drove through the town. “Look at those houses.”

“Or to live,” he added.

“Have you found a place to stay?”

“Mrs. O’Grady has taken me in,” he said, repeating the phrase from Dick’s notes.

“What’s she like?”

“A ferocious old parrot. Or maybe an eagle. Fields called her that. She was very fond of Dick.”

“Old people always were. Old people and children.”

They crossed the railroad tracks, and Phil pointed out the cliff.

“Drive close to it,” Margaret said.

He drove past the Clauson house, set far back from the road.

“Was it the people who live there found him?” she asked.

“No. A youngster from town.”

“They didn’t hear anything that might have been associated with his death?”

“I don’t know, Margaret. The girl lives there with her husband and father.”

“Oh. Naturally they wouldn’t have heard anything then.”

It was an unwarranted conclusion, but he was not going to argue the point with her. He pulled off the road before the face of the cliff. “I think this is close enough. He fell from the highest point there. Can we go back now?”

“Wait, Phil.”

Among the slag heaps several goats were grazing on the frozen moss and dead grass. Even as Phil and Margaret watched them, a tall, gangling woman came from behind one of the heaps near them and looked at the car. It was not possible to see the detail of her face, but from the distance they could discern enormous eyes in an extraordinarily long and somber face. She turned quickly, seeing them, and herded the animals to the end of the valley and up the far slope out of sight.

“Phil, is that the woman?”

“I think it is.”

Margaret’s face became contorted; into tears or laughter he could not tell for a moment. Then it was laughter, unmistakably, a laughter she could not control. He put his arm around her and drew her close to him. She stopped abruptly and looked up at him, her face so close that their breath mingled. He kissed her on the mouth for the first time.

Chapter 9

THEY DROVE BACK TO the town silently, the road before them and behind them empty. He went to the door of Krancow’s with her. “Forgive me, Margaret.”

“Skip it.” She started into the house. “Don’t leave me alone on account of it, Phil. I don’t need you any the less now than I did before.”

“You’ll be all right. I’ll see you in the morning.”

He left the car where it was, and walked the block to McNamara’s. It was a hell of a time to get involved in a feeling of guilt himself. But there it was: he couldn’t think of Dick Coffee, dead or alive, when Margaret entered into it. “How is a widow supposed to behave?” He could hear himself saying the words. The sweat broke out on him with the thought.

Randy Nichols was at the bar alone with McNamara. They nodded to him as he came in, but continued their conversation. It was McNamara talking: “‘Whee, look at me,’ everybody’s saying. ‘I’m going to hell on a bicycle.’”

Nichols interrupted him. “Listen to this, McGovern. It’s Coffee talking with a mine inspector here one night. Go on, Mac.”

“‘Then why don’t you get off, you damn fool?’ … ‘I can’t. Nobody showed me how’ … ‘How did you get on then?’ … ‘I was just sitting, getting the feel of it and somebody gave me a push.’” McNamara leaned across the bar. “They were both on the leeward side of sobriety by then, and the inspector gives him a poke in the ribs. ‘Wouldn’t you like to get hold of the bastard giving him the push?’ he says. ‘Hell, no,’ says Coffee. ‘The guy I’d like to get is the little one riding the bicycle, the one doesn’t take himself seriously, the one doesn’t know his own worth, and the world depending on it.’”

“There,” Nichols said as the barkeep straightened up. “Doesn’t that sound more like the man you knew, McGovern? They were talking about the state inspector at Naperville: a good man, incorruptible. He reported every safety violation, nearly got himself fired for refusing to go along on state election-fund-raising from the operators. But the explosion occurred all the same. Coffee said he felt cleansed, confessed, having written his report. He didn’t know his own strength, his own worth.”

“I read the article,” Phil said. He ordered a drink. He remembered then Dick’s notes which the sheriff had shown him. Dick had intended to do no writing while there. Why? Out of this same reasoning—that setting it down on paper might dull his conscience? Phil found it all too subtle for the confusion now upon him. He emptied the glass as soon as McNamara set it before him, and shoved it across the bar for a refill.

“If you’re going in for that kind of drinking,” Nichols said, “save some of the capacity for the other side of town. That’s where Coffee and Clauson went from here Friday night. I’ve an ulcer, myself, but I’d like to go in the company of a drinking man, at least.”

“Okay,” Phil said. “Let’s go.”

He finished his drink and laid fifty cents on the bar. Nichols took his overcoat from the piano stool where he had dumped it. “See you later, Mac.”

The barkeep nodded, and set the bottle on the backbar.

“Do you know that guy’s story?” Nichols said while they were walking, “He was in the I.R.A. in the old country. Escaped over here after Easter Week, and then went back. He still had a price on his head. Somebody informed on him, and the whole family he was staying with was massacred. He ran down the informer himself and shot him, then got out of the country…. Now what I want to know is how a guy like that winds up in Winston, running a pub.”

“I’m not going to say he was lucky,” Phil said.

“Furthermore, he has a soft spot in his heart for Mrs. O’Grady. That’s where Coffee stayed, isn’t it?”

“It is. I’m staying there now.”

“Do you know where I’ve found a room? In the loft over the fire station. Wait till I put that in on the expense sheet.” Nichols rambled on. “The constable’s rounding up a jury for the coroner’s inquest in the morning, by the way. They’re going to make a real show of it, by all the signs. The coroner collared me a few minutes ago. He as much as told me to keep my nose clean. And when somebody says that to me, I’ve got a damn good notion to stick it where they don’t want it. All right, McGovern, what’s eating you?”

Phil was scarcely listening, but the last words broke through his thinking. “I don’t know. Kind of knocked out, I guess. The shock and all.”

“Lady Bountiful’s got her claws in you.”

Phil looked at him.

“Yes, I mean the one in mourning up to two inches below the knee. And that isn’t dirty, on my part at least. I’m referring to style, manners and decorum. Is there anything in Emily Post about how to act at your husband’s funeral? If there isn’t, she can ghost that chapter for her.”

“What the devil’s gotten into you, Randy?”

Nichols puffed out his cheeks and then burst his breath into the frosty air. “Then you are in love with her. I suspected that first thing this morning.”

Was he? In all honesty, Phil could not answer that himself. He said as much to Nichols.

“All right. I’m going to say something I’ve said before, kidding. I mean it now. A woman’s most dangerous when she seems the most helpless. Call that cynical, but like all cynicisms, there’s a strong element of truth in it.”

“For the person expounding it, at least,” Phil said. “Look, Randy. I don’t want to talk about Margaret. That’s my problem. What else have you picked up about Dick?”

“Not much. More about the Clausons—that magician and his daughter. The townspeople hold them in very low affection.”

“Why?”

“They’re different. That’s all. See this section of town—the names? There’s a bill of fare there on the restaurant—goulash. We’re in Slav Town. Have you any notion what these people went through when they migrated to Winston? The old priest that used to be here threatened half his parish with excommunication because they wouldn’t attend the same services with the Slavs. Bread and butter, McGovern. When it’s threatened, look out. The lambs eat the goats.”

“What kind of security do the Clausons threaten?”

“I don’t know. But it’s one of the things I want to find out. If Coffee was working on a social problem here, I’ll wager he wanted to find it out, too.”

“Possible,” Phil said.

“Mind, I’m not saying he was working on a social problem. From what I’ve heard, I’d say he was his own problem…. And here we are at the Sunnyside.”

They stopped a moment and looked at the dust-clad building. “Aptly named,” Nichols said. “It reminds me of an old watchman at the Tribune. He didn’t know night from day except that he could read the racing form by one of them. They called him ‘Sunny.’”

The Sunnyside had a family entrance. There was a restaurant at the back of the tavern, and the smell of onions all through it. It was deserted when they entered, the oilclothed tables like so many mushrooms at the rear of the room. On the backbar mirror, the words ACCORDIONIST SATURDAY NIGHT were waxed. “We must remember that,” Nichols said. Where the piano stood at McNamara’s there was a juke box here. When no one came, Nichols took a nickel from his pocket and went over to it. He got a flying polka. “I’ll bet if I played it blindfold, I’d get the same thing.”

A man came from the kitchen, wiping his hands on an apron, at the sound of the music. “Yes, gentlemen? That sounds too bad, don’t it? Do you mind if I turn it down?”

“Turn it off. We just wanted to get your attention.”

The proprietor disconnected the machine. “It’s so peaceful in the afternoon. What can I do for you?”

“I’d like milk,” Nichols said. “Whiskey, McGovern?”

“Make it two milks if you don’t mind.”

“Why should I mind?” If they had ordered a Stump-lifter, which was also advertised on the bar mirror, the proprietor could not have been more pleasant. “I will get it from the kitchen. I don’t have ice here.”

They watched him amble to the rear of the building, drawing his finger along a table, looking at it, and wiping the dust on his apron. He seemed very tired, but it was probably the way about him all the time.

“I wonder what’s wrong with him,” Nichols said. “Most tradespeople here have been in the mines at one time or another, and had to leave them. I suspect in the long run there’s more money to be made in them than there is in business.”

“Not to hear the women talking up at Lavery’s this morning,” Phil said.

“Maybe. I guess one hand washes the other. There’s only one of the three collieries in the town digging now, I understand. The population’s been dropping off here, too. During the war it was about twice what it is now. The new migration. Where do they go from here?”

Phil shrugged.

The tavern-keeper returned with the milk. “Fresh,” he said. “You are strangers in Winston?”

“Good milk,” Nichols said. “Yes. We’re friends of Dick Coffee, the man who…”

“I know the man. I did know him, that is. You are here for the inquest?”

Nichols nodded.

“I have just been told to appear at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. The sheriff. It disturbs me. I do not like to be called on by the sheriff.”

“Routine questioning probably,” Nichols said.

The man shook his head. “I maybe shouldn’t have served him liquor that night. It’s hard not to serve when people are friendly. I am a friendly man. My wife is friendly. We like people who laugh to come here. We like it, the way our children like to play.” He motioned with his hands to illustrate the naturalness of it.

“They were on good terms then, the old man and Coffee?”

“They were very congenial.”

“I wonder why McNamara kicked them out then,” Nichols said to lead him on.

“My friend, this town is full of superstitions. The Irish, you know, are very superstitious people. Then there is the Number Three Colliery. Most of our people work in Number Two. Number Three is very old. There are people in town whose grandfathers worked in it. They feel it…” he fumbled for the words, “…it has life.”

“But Clauson,” Nichols persisted, “he’s never had anything to do with the mines?”

“No. But he is a magician. Maybe they think they have caught him in a trick.” The man spread his hands on the bar, the cleanest hands Phil had seen in Winston. “My friend, people do not seem to care if they are tricked a hundred times a day, if once in a while they can catch someone in a trick. Maybe it’s human nature. Maybe they think they have caught him in a trick…. I talk too much.”

“You talk sense,” Phil said then. “What kind of a mood was Coffee in Friday night? Did you know him before then?”

“He was in a couple of times before that. A nice man. A little sad, maybe, but nice. Friday night, he was…” again he fumbled for the words. He made a gesture with both hands indicating high spirits. “He was trying to convince Mr. Clauson his daughter was the most beautiful woman in the world.”

“Quite a trick, from what I’ve heard,” Nichols said.

“Not with a father, my friend. He agreed with him, but seemed to disagree—just to lead him on.”

“And this is the testimony you’ll be called on to give tomorrow morning,” Phil said.

“I will be asked to tell what I have heard, and I will tell it. But I don’t like it.”

Chapter 10

IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, Phil drove back to Mrs. O’Grady’s with his luggage. Two men, obviously coal miners, were washing in the back kitchen, stripped to the waist. They neither looked at him nor spoke as he went through to the kitchen. There, the widow was clattering the lids of pots, and the pots themselves, on the range. She liked noise, Phil thought. In a way it was a symbol of activity, and the symbol was as close as she came to it. She put a big spoon into the girl Anna’s hand when she saw him, and bade her baste the meat until she returned.

She hobbled into the living room ahead of him. “It’s the room at the front of the house,” she said. “Right over our heads here. Warm yourself there at the stove before you go up.”

He set his suitcase down and took off his overcoat. It was a cosy hodgepodge of a living room—oak furniture, leather-seated with hand embroidered pillows flung about, lace curtains, a pendulum clock. A large bay window was piled high with ferns, African violets, delphinium, and plants he had no notion the names of, a jungle of hanging, creeping vines and stalwart blades.

“Whatever’s bad in them, there’s a bit of kindness in all gardeners,” she said. “You’ll find that about me.”

He smiled and moved to the stove, its glass door glowing. She was following his eyes to take in every item they rested on. He looked up then to a picture that hung over the sofa. This was the instant in his observation she had been waiting for.

“There’s not been a man like that one walk the earth since he left it,” she said, gesturing with her cane. The mild-faced O’Grady looked down upon them from the faded picture, a little uneasy about the eyes. It might have been the first picture he ever posed for. Or the uneasiness might have come from the tightness of his high celluloid collar.

“A fine looking man,” Phil said.

“You’re wondering how an old hag like me could ever engage a man like that.”

Indeed he had been wondering the other way about. O’Grady hung there without a line of worry in his placid face. Phil turned and met the dimming eyes of O’Grady’s wife—fifty years later. “I imagine you were a very beautiful girl,” he said, meaning it.

“You’ve a fine imagination then,” she said. “Sit down there a minute. She’ll put their supper up to them.”

She lowered herself into a rocker. Instinct told him not to attempt to help her. The little peh of pain escaped her. Then she smiled, showing good teeth for an old woman. “Tim was killed in the great cave-in in nineteen-one, and us married three weeks. There was seventy-one men lost that time. The farmers brought their wagons from all around, and you could hear the hammers on the coffins all night long.”

These were the stories told in Winston, Phil thought. They were sung out by the firesides like sad songs, or told like the beads of a rosary, over and over again.

“We laid them out ourselves in them days. And if you could have heard the sermon Father Duffy preached, God rest his soul! He was a fine man, and not like the one we have now who wouldn’t bend over to brush a fly from a baby’s face… I can still hear Father Duffy that morning.” Her own voice rose, but the harshness was gone out of it, and the sound was like keening:

“‘Their faces are blackened and their eyes streaming red tears, but their souls are white as the morning…and at last they go marching, hand in hand. Would God they walked that way on earth…’”

She rocked to and fro, an old childless woman, approaching childhood herself again.

“There’s a long and bloody history to Number Three,” she continued more naturally. “They say there’s near the size of the streets of New York down there, and some of them not traveled for fifty years.”

“And there’s trouble there again,” Phil said.

“Trouble, and maybe no trouble at all. Kevin Laughlin, the poor soul. We all knew he was a bit daft, but nobody had the notion where he’d go wandering through the mine. It was the safety men going through found him. He was away off in a part hasn’t been worked for years.”

“Was he a miner?”

“Once he was, and he knew the diggings from a long time back. They say he went in an entry hadn’t been used for years, and there’s some say he went in thinking to die. The things you can remember at my age. I remember when he was married, the girl just coming off the boat. They were kids, the both of them, and they had one of their own in no time at all, and before that one was crawling, another was on the way. Well, the baby took terrible sick one day, and the wife went down to look for Kevin. The foreman wouldn’t send down for him, for his shift was due up in an hour. Well, the girl hadn’t the sense she was born with. She went round to another entry. Nobody knows how she got in, but to make an unfortunate story short, she was crushed by one of the loading cars.

“Kevin was never the same after that, and the baby died of the flu. That’s the time it was—the epidemic after the first war. He worked around for a while, but he began ailing and the doctor said he was tubercular. So he went off one day. A few years later he came back, and stayed a while working, but he wasn’t up to it. He drifted off again.

“We never heard a word of him for another ten years, and then one morning this old tramp, and that he was, showed up at the parish house asking for Father Duffy. Father Duffy was gone himself then. Father Joyce took him in, I’ll say that for him, and gave him an odd job around the church to keep body and soul together. But his mind was wandering, and he was always talking about the mines.”

She sighed. “It wasn’t much of a shock to us, him going that way, with the gas backing in there from the new blasting.”

She pulled herself up then. “Well, you’ll be wanting your supper.”

“No, thank you, Mrs. O’Grady. I’ve work to do for the office. I’ve got to finish the story I was doing in Chicago, and get it off on the night train.”

“Then you better get a move on,” she said. “The night train leaves at seven-thirty, and it’s five now. I’ll put something on the back of the stove for you.”

Later that evening he was sitting in the living room, sleep heavy upon him. To fight it off, he smoked incessantly. The two regular boarders were listening to the radio—solid, contented-looking men who reminded him of the farmhands on his grandmother’s place, except for their complexions, the pallid faces of men who spend their days underground.

Mrs. O’Grady sat among them, crocheting. For a while, Phil watched her, marveling at the dexterity with which she maneuvered the thread over her stiffened fingers, but the monotony of the movement made him even drowsier. When their eyes met occasionally, the old woman would wink at him, and he would shift positions and hang on. As well as sleep, he was fighting his thoughts of Margaret, and the desire to see her.

Now and then one of the men would grunt at some amusing word from the radio, and exchanged looks with the other to see if he also enjoyed it. Phil’s presence was no more to them than a cat’s on the sofa. At nine o’clock they got up, and while one turned off the radio, the other knocked his pipe out into the coal bucket. Night in, night out, this was their routine. This and a Sunday movie, and good, solid food were their pleasures, and the world go hang, for they were not unhappy men.

“You’ll hear the big fellow snoring in five minutes,” Mrs. O’Grady said when the men had gone upstairs. “It’s the most penetrating sound you ever heard in your life.”

Phil went to the stove and flicked his cigaret into it.

“You burn the coal up that way, opening the door for nothing,” the widow said.

“Sorry.”

“You’ll know the next time. You’ve the need of something to put a stick in your back. Go in my bedroom there and look in the cubby behind the basin. I’ve a drop I keep for colds and the like. Bring it and a glass.”

Phil did as he was told. Finding the bottle, he went to the kitchen and brought two glasses from the cupboard. How many times had Dick done this very thing, he wondered.

“Pour it,” the widow said. “And as long as you brought the extra glass you can give me a drop.”

She watched him like a parrot from its perch. “Put enough so’s we’ll taste it, itself.”

Phil poured them each a stiff drink.

“What’s she doing tonight?”

“Margaret? Resting, I guess. The inquest is set for nine in the morning.”

“Wasn’t I given a summons?”

Phil sipped his drink. Mrs. O’Grady emptied hers in one pull. “I have to take it down for I can’t stand the taste,” she explained.

“Mrs. O’Grady, what was bothering Dick while he was here in Winston? He wasn’t much of a drinker, and yet drinking seems to have been the only pleasure he had here.”

“Oh, he had other pleasures,” the widow said, drawing her lips tightly over her teeth. “Off gamboling in the hills with that goatherd, and her with a husband. But I’d not blame him for that. I don’t blame the man.” She leaned toward him. “I blame the one sleeping up there in the room above him tonight. She’s come now when he’s gone.”

“There was no place for her to stay in Winston, even if she’d been asked to come with him.”

“Tu, tu, tu,” the widow said. “Go ahead. Stick up for her. He did too. You’re all alike. You’ll see. It’ll all come out in the wash.”

He lifted his glass and studied her over the rim of it, trying to determine whether she was enjoying the gossip. “Put it to me straight, Mrs. O’Grady. Do you mean Dick was having an affair with this woman?”

“An affair,” she mimicked. “There’s a fancy word, isn’t it? I mean he was carrying on with her and sleeping over there nights, and the father of her, the old devil, encouraging it.”

“That’s serious stuff you’re saying. I wouldn’t repeat it unless I was damned sure of it.”

“Do you take me for a fool? Wasn’t I laying in there tossing, listening for him, and him coming home to me in the light of morning, moaning and crooning about her. ‘Oh, the two brown eyes,’ he’d say, as though there was some of us with three. ‘The two brown eyes with the little candles burning in them.’”

“But you can’t prove it,” he said doggedly.

The widow rocked back in her chair. “Proof, poof. You’ll see. I’m not the only one knows it.”

He got up and went to her chair and stilled its rocking. “I thought you were a friend of Dick’s. I thought you were fond of him.”

She looked up at him, a faded rag doll, its head still cocky. “I was. You can’t say I wasn’t.”

“Then if I were you, I’d never let that filthy scandal out of my mouth.”

He set the bottle down hard on the table beside her and went up to his room. He had had quite enough for one day.

Chapter 11

HE AWAKENED TO SOUNDS in the house and to utter darkness. He lay a few minutes feeling the edges of the narrow bed, gradually recalling where he was, and the circumstances which had brought him there. The sound of wind along the side of the house was a high-pitched whistle that broke off at times, and slid through the rough-hewn window frame and whispered about his head…. “The wind…at night…lies down beside me,” Dick had written.

Phil threw off his blankets and groped for the light cord. It was five-thirty, and the other boarders were going downstairs to their breakfast. He dressed and made up his own bed. Downstairs, Mrs. O’Grady was making sandwiches, two lunch buckets open before her. A bumpy handkerchief covered her hair, done up in curls, no doubt.

“There’s no warm water yet,” she said, seeing him.

“I’ll wash in cold then.”

“Get the bucket and take it out. Don’t leave the door open.”

The men nodded and continued eating when he said good morning to them. Their leather jackets and mining caps were laid out on the kindling box by the stove to warm them after having hung in the back kitchen all night. Phil drew his bucket of water and took it out. He stripped to the waist and washed quickly. Once dressed again, he felt alert and more awake than he could remember having been for some time. He went out on the porch and emptied the tub with the wind. Below him, the early lights in a hundred kitchens dotted Winston. There were no stars, and still no shade of dawn. Down the hill and up another, the church bell tolled an early Mass. The miners came out of the house and thumped down the steps, one of them carrying a flashlight. Phil heard the tinkle of the bell on the outside gate presently, and then watched their circle of light rise and fall along the road until it was lost among the first stores. A minute later the siren sounded once. Six o’clock.

“Do you want your breakfast or no?” the widow called.

He went into the house. “Just coffee, Mrs. O’Grady.”

“You’ll not go long on coffee. You better let me fix you a couple of eggs. They’re just out of the nest, you might say.”

“Just coffee, thank you.”

She rattled the cup in the saucer as she poured it. He took it from her hand to the table. The spoons were in a glass on the table, and in another glass were paper napkins.

“Fill it up with cream there. If I heat some biscuits will you eat them? I’ve a jar of honey.”

“No thanks. I’m not used to eating this early.”

“Then what did you get up for?”

Having no particular answer for it, he gave none. She gathered the used breakfast dishes in a stack and hobbled across to the sink with them. She returned, bringing a half-filled cup of coffee with her. “You’re sore at me for what I said about him last night, aren’t you?”

“No,” he said. “I’m disturbed by it. That’s all.”

She leaned close to him, the smell of sleep and liniment still on her. “Do you think that one up there is disturbed about it? No sir. Not her.”

He nearly scalded himself getting the coffee down. He got his overcoat and went out. The chickens were coming alive in the coop, and although the sky still seemed dark, a light haze was shimmering along the ground. He would not lessen her venom by escaping it himself. And God knows, he thought, how hard it is for the mind to stand up straight when the body is bent in two. He went back and asked her if there was anything he could do before he left.

“Will you open the door of the chicken coop, the way I can feed them over the rail?”

“Anything else? Can I feed them for you?”

“No. I’ll want a mouthful of air. It’ll be daylight soon, and that simple one’ll come up to help me.” She reached her hand toward him. “You mustn’t think I want to be hard on Dickie, for I was a long time fond of him.”

“He was just here six weeks,” Phil said.

“There’s three weeks longer than I had a husband.”

At the corner of Lavery’s he turned up, and climbed the long slope to the church. He had seen many a city cemetery smaller than the one there, with so many of its markers identical except for the names on them. In the little distance they were like white sheaves stacked side by side in a long, smooth field. The great harvest.

He entered the church, startled by the huge angel in the vestibule. Dick had written of it. As the door closed behind him, the flames of the candles on the altar quivered. Only the priest himself was present. He moved the missal and then turned, speaking aloud, his rich voice reverberating through the empty church. “You may turn on the light if you wish. The switch is in the vestibule behind the statue.” He returned to the missal and bowed his head.

Phil stayed the Mass out in the semi-darkness. The first light of dawn was caught in the stained glass windows. As it heightened, he read the in memoriams inscribed on each window…. Burke, Halitski, and the foremost, IN BELOVED MEMORY OF FATHER JAMES DUFFY. For him Christ multiplied the loaves and fishes, and Phil thought, perhaps in His wondrous way He did, for surely the good priest had need of them.

As Father Joyce turned for the last blessing, Phil got his first good look at him, a handsome ascetic-looking man—far from home in Winston? Who was he to say that, having seen him only at the climax of his devotion? Phil left the church before the priest came down from the altar, passing again the great angel, and seeing in the growing light a greenish cast to it where the paint had chipped away.

He drove to the cliff from which Dick had fallen. This time he started up the hill at its nearest slope to the road, keeping a few feet from its edge. The ground itself was matted with weeds and a sort of knotty quag-grass. There were a few scraggy trees, but beyond that nothing to break the monotony of an untilled land whose only life was the dead deposit of centuries, the coal yield far beneath its surface.

From the height of the hill he saw the whole town of Winston—the churches, the railroad station, the tracks, a web of them running out of vision, all looking like miniatures on a simulated setting. The nearest building was the Clauson house. Four goats were lined up at the back gate, their soft bleating rising to him.

Phil started down the hill, intending to cover it, as if a fan might have been spread over it, by following each rib to its apex on top. The first few trips yielded him nothing except pain in the calves of his legs from the climbing. Then he came upon another abandoned mine shaft, this one freshly boarded up. About it the ground had been trampled recently, probably by many feet. It might have been the entry Kevin Laughlin had taken, and all the scuffling and tramping had come after his body was found. If that was so, it was in this area Dick had first detected the gas. He wondered if Dick knew mines and mining that well.

Ranging the vicinity of the entry, Phil saw the weed-overgrown markings of a former railway bed. It ran through the valley around the hill and joined the main line. A flight of sparrows was the only movement along it now. He climbed the hill once more. A train whistle whined in the distance, and seemed to come up to him in an eddy of sound, bouncing from one valley to another until, at moments, it seemed within a few feet of him. He lit a cigaret and waited, presently seeing the little curls of smoke rising from among the southern hills. At the station, the mail truck turned in and backed up to the platform. Another truck was standing there, and a few men gathered around it, waiting. The train crept past the tool sheds, the engineer waving to the men working there. Phil watched it slowly take the hair-pin turn through the hills into town. When it pulled into the station, he went down the hill.

Chapter 12

MARGARET WAS HAVING BREAKFAST when he knocked on her door. She was wearing a trim black suit, with a white blouse that was almost clerical in the severity with which its collar circled her neck. He remembered Randy Nichols’ words immediately, and as quickly thrust them from his mind.

“It was very kind of you to spend last evening with me, Phil,” she said coldly.

“I thought you wanted to rest.”

“Be honest, at least, Phil.”

“I was ashamed to come, Margaret. I know now that was petty vanity on my part, indulging my shame. I’ll stay with you now, and do everything I can to help you.”

She smiled up at him. “You sound like a child who knows he’s been naughty. Come and have a cup of coffee. Mrs. Krancow expected you. She brought an extra cup. I’ve made the arrangements for the train tonight for Dick’s remains. I hope to leave then, too. The sheriff has been very kind. I’m not sure the coroner will be as considerate.”

“I think he wants a quick verdict,” Phil said.

“Why?”

“The men are still out at one of the mines as a result of the death of a man there. Dick reported the gas in the mine by which he died. You’ll hear it all at the inquest.”

“No doubt. But will it bring them any nearer to the cause of Dick’s death?”

“I don’t know, Margaret. I doubt that anything will until they find out what he was doing here in the first place.”

“And no leads on that?”

“None that I know of.”

Phil went to the window. People had gathered outside the funeral parlor, most of them in their Sunday clothes. They were talking together in small groups. He noticed Randy Nichols moving among them, asking a question here and there. The Winston taxi drove up. Mrs. O’Grady was sitting in the front seat with Whelan.

“Margaret, here’s Mrs. O’Grady, if you’d like to get a look at her.”

She went to the window beside him and drew the curtain away. As the car stopped, Anna got out of the back seat with a little stool, and set it on the ground beneath the running board. The Widow O’Grady got out backside first. Anna held her cane for her. When the old lady got her footing, she put one hand on the girl’s shoulder and turned around. Her first look was at the window. It was a long look, her hand freezing Anna in a crouching position. Phil’s impulse was to draw away, but he resisted it, Margaret standing where she was. Other eyes followed the widow’s and it seemed that the whole of Winston was gaping up at them.

Margaret turned away abruptly. “What terrible people, Phil! That old woman makes my blood run cold.”

“Their manners may not be much,” he said. “But they’re perfectly normal people. We’re the strange ones to them.”

“Chains wouldn’t hold me here another night,” she said. “I’d be afraid, Phil. I really would.”

“We’d better go down now,” he said, taking a last drink of the thick black coffee.

“It’s a wonder they didn’t hire the movie house,” Margaret said on the stairs. The parlor had been cleared of furniture, rugs and fernery, and was lined with folding chairs. Two young men wearing deputy-sheriff badges were stationed inside the front door. One of them opened it at that moment to help Mrs. O’Grady up the steps and in. A stream of people were following her.

“The witnesses take the front seats, please,” the other deputy said. “The side seats are for the jurors. If you’ve just come to look, you got to stand in back.”

Mrs. O’Grady made her entrance without looking up the stairs, already concerned with the seat that was provided for her. She complained of it immediately, and the deputy brought her a more comfortable one, and made the mistake of offering to help her into it. He fled from the abuse, red-faced. Fields and the coroner were at a large table in the back of the room, a clerk beside them.

One by one, the witnesses were directed to their seats: Lavery, McNamara, starch-collared, his tavern closed tight, Father Joyce, the man following him leaving a chair of respect between himself and the priest, a boy Phil took to be the one who had found Dick. The curious and the volunteers of miscellaneous acquaintance soon filled the back rows.

Margaret pulled at Phil’s sleeve. “Shouldn’t we go in?”

He nodded and led the way to the two vacant chairs near the center of the room. The jurors were filing in from the back room at the same time. They sat down in flushed and quiet self-consciousness, three men and three women, the women tugging at their skirts, the men at their collars, and all given to sudden smiling and as sudden sobering. Their hands were red and swollen from the work they rested from this day, Phil noticed—the laundry tub or the baker’s oven.

The murmur of hushed conversation stopped, the only sound in the room the crackle of the folding chairs as people turned to look. Three witnesses entered and withstood the stare of a hundred pairs of eyes as they found the seats reserved for them. A little noise of hissing came from the back of the room. Maurice Handy was on his feet immediately. “The sheriff will remove anybody who makes a disturbance.”

The witnesses were Clauson, his daughter, and her husband. Margaret had turned with the others on their entrance. Phil was aware then that her whole body had gone tense at the sight of them. She paled first and then flushed.

Rebecca Clauson Glasgow. She sat between the two men, as tall as the younger one and a head above her father. Her face was sallow, her lips, without lipstick, failing to break the long mask. Her eyes seemed the only living part of it.

Under the pretense of speaking to Nichols, Phil moved away from Margaret and stood in the hallway a moment with the reporter. It gave him a better view of the witnesses.

“There’s a mating of opposites if I ever saw one,” Nichols said into his ear. “I’ll bet the only thing they got in common is a long bed.”

“Yeah,” Phil said, scarcely hearing him. Glasgow was studying Margaret Coffee, a half smile on his face. Phil knew what the sheriff had meant when he described him. A lot of women would call him good-looking, and there was a slouching casualness about him that indicated his awareness of it and a tendency to let it carry him. He was about forty, and wore a large mustache that disguised in some measure the first lines of age.

“And I wonder if they got that in common,” Nichols added. He, too, watched Glasgow take the measure of Margaret Coffee. “I’d call him an insolent bastard for that, if I liked her any better.”

Phil wondered if Glasgow was comparing her with the wife beside him. Probably. Nichols was right—it wasn’t their intellects he was measuring… For all her plainness, there was something attractive about Rebecca Glasgow. Clean-cut would have been the word, if he were to choose it instantly…and that, in afterthought, was a hell of a description for a woman.

The old magician himself was a dapper-looking man, probably always with the look and air of the stage about him—a briskness of movement, a nervous quickness of the hands. Only his eyes were quick this morning, however, moving over the faces in his view. He, above all others here, would know the bitterness of unfriendly people who thought they had found the hoax in his magic.

The coroner looked at his watch, as did everyone else in the room who had one. A stillness settled upon the expectant crowd, in which the flow of the clerk’s pen could be heard as he prepared to enter the morning proceedings. Handy pocketed his watch and got up. “I’ve found it fitting in this inquest to ask for the help and advice of a jury.” He addressed himself to them directly then. “You have viewed the body of the deceased. Will you please rise?”

The members of the jury got up.

“Do you solemnly swear that you will diligently inquire into the time, cause, manner and circumstances of the death of the person whose body you have viewed, and will make presentment of the truth as it comes to your knowledge, so help you, God?”

They affirmed their promise and sat down.

The first witness called was Constable Joseph Krancow, who described the first exploration of the scene where Coffee was found. His testimony was corroborated by Doctor Turpel, the Winston physician who had accompanied him, and Nat Watkins, the boy who had found Coffee Sunday morning. They were then excused temporarily in order that the testimony of the state medical examiner might be heard.

Doctor Edward Phalon sat before them easily, listening to the coroner explain why he had been called in. Handy turned to him. “Doctor, will you now tell us, please, in language we can understand, the findings of your postmortem examination?”

“I found that the deceased died between six and twelve on the night of March 19, last Saturday. That was at least forty hours before my examination. That lapse of time makes it impossible for me to give exact information in some instances.”

The coroner nodded.

“The cause of death was the snapping of the spinal cord, near the base of the neck. Death would have been practically instantaneous.”

“Could death have been caused by anything except a fall, in your opinion, Doctor?”

“I doubt it in this case, because of the abrasions in the area of the fatal injury. However, I am not prepared to say that the fall causing death occurred where the body was found. My examination was too long after death for me to determine whether the deceased was moved after death before rigor mortis was advanced.”

One of the jurors moved uneasily, and the coroner, seeing him, said: “You may ask any questions you like, you know.”

“If you please, sir,” the juror said, “the doctor is saying just that he died in a fall.”

“That’s my understanding,” Handy said.

“What I mean, sir, is the way I heard of him being round where Laughlin died and there’s some awful deep shafts in Number Three. Well, could he of died there, and then been carted out to where you found him?”

“That boy doesn’t work in the mines, to suggest that,” Nichols whispered to Phil.

“Theoretically I’d say that was possible,” Doctor Phalon said. “You might ask Doctor Turpel his opinion. There was no unusual amount of dirt on his clothes, however, and I should be inclined to doubt the validity of that conjecture in view of other findings I shall give you presently. I would put the time of his last meal at approximately noon of the day he died.”

“One o’clock,” Mrs. O’Grady called out from her chair.

“You will be called on by and by, Mrs. O’Grady,” the coroner said.

“The deceased died at the height of some violent activity—emotional or physical,” the medical examiner continued. “I am not in a position to say which. However, the deceased’s right ankle had been badly twisted not long before. It had just begun to swell when the natural processes were suspended.”

“The activity could have been running?” Handy asked.

“It could.”

Phil had been intent on the examiner’s testimony. He had intended to watch the reaction of the various witnesses to it. Scanning their faces now, he saw that only Clauson seemed to respond to it. He was sitting forward, his eyes blinking rapidly.

An exchange of words between the sheriff and the coroner brought the request for an opinion on the state of health of the deceased.

“A bit run down, but nothing organically wrong with him.”

The medical examiner was excused then, and after a moment of consultation, the sheriff described his investigation of the scene. Toward the conclusion of his testimony, he said: “Now regards there being no sign of that ledge crumbling at all, I’ll tell you what we did yesterday. One of the deputies, the coroner and me took a hundred-seventy-pound weight of sand up there in a sack and shoved it off. The important thing that happened, there was quite a little cave-in of the ledge. It gave when the weight got about a foot from the edge.”

The jurors listened intently, but they showed no signs of comprehending his meaning. “Better tell us how you interpret that finding, Sheriff,” Handy said.

“Well, as I see it, that proves Coffee didn’t go right to the edge and jump.”

“You mean he didn’t commit suicide?” one of the jurors asked.

“I’m not saying that. I’m saying if he was running hard, he could of stepped clear of that ledge. It could of been an accident.”

“And yet we have witnesses who will show that he should have known that terrain inside and out,” Handy said.

“It could have been dark,” Fields said doggedly. “Even when it’s half dark, and kind of misty, those hills are deceiving. I’ve seen clouds up there I’d swear I could sit down on.”

“And yet your report shows Saturday to have been a clear, cold day,” the coroner said. “Thank you, Sheriff.” He looked at the jury. “Do you have any questions?”

A woman raised her hand. “Couldn’t he have been pushed off or thrown off?”

Fields shook his head. “Only a giant could have done it from a distance safe enough not to go off with him.”

At the word “giant” several people looked at Rebecca Glasgow. She raised her chin slightly, and Phil thought it was her first acknowledgment of the proceedings. Fields, seeing the look, added in some confusion: “A very strong person, maybe.” But he had planted the prejudice in spite of himself.

What was strange, Phil thought, was that the prejudice was against her and not her husband, who was at least her equal physically.

Handy slapped his hand on the table. “I want to remind the jury that you and I must be guided by what’s said here in this chair under oath, and not by hearsay outside the inquest. Mrs. Coffee, will you please come up?”

Margaret moved past Phil, and walked to the witness chair with an easy grace. She was very pale, and had been sparing in her use of lipstick. As Nichols would have put it, she looked the perfect widow. Mrs. O’Grady did not take her eyes from her. Glasgow watched her, too, showing his first real interest in the questioning. But then, as Phil looked around the room, he saw that all the men expressed more than casual interest.

“I realize this won’t be easy for you, Mrs. Coffee,” Handy said. “But you realize the need for it?”

“I want to help in any way I can.”

“Thank you. Will you tell us now the circumstances when your husband left Chicago?”

Margaret repeated the story substantially as she had given it to the sheriff.

“And you didn’t hear from him for two weeks?”

“That is correct.”

“Weren’t you worried?”

“Yes. Very worried. That was why I went to Cincinnati as soon as I got word. On some of his other assignments, if I were in a near-by town, he often came in to spend a few hours with me.”

“But this time he didn’t?”

“He did not answer my letters. If you had not found one of them, I should not even have been sure he received them.”

“Mrs. Coffee, why didn’t you come directly to Winston?”

“I wanted to leave him some choice in the matter of seeing me. Sometimes my oversolicitude embarrassed him.”

“I see,” Handy said. The expressions of the jurors indicated that they did not see at all. However, they nodded—to take the blame for their own ignorance, Phil thought. There was still no mention from Margaret that she thought Dick was leaving her. That had come out only in the unguarded moment with him the morning of their arrival.

“Now, Mrs. Coffee,” Handy continued, “I know you told the sheriff your husband did not tell you why he was in Winston. But knowing him and his work, you must have reached some idea of your own on why he was down here. Did you?”

Something about the question bothered Phil. Glancing at Nichols, he saw the reporter frown a little as he made a note.

Margaret reminded the coroner that she had nothing to base the surmise on except her own feeling. Then she said: “My husband always felt the greatest work he could do was among the coal miners. He felt that Naperville was only a beginning…”

“You were with him at Naperville?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if you’d tell us something about how he went about that story.”

Margaret ran a finger over the buckle of her pocket-book. “He spent about four months on it. He went there himself as soon as word of the disaster came over the radio. He followed the rescue operations, and got to know some of the miners. He was there perhaps a week, talking to storekeepers, police, railway people, ministers. He came home for a while then, and worked there on the reports that had gone in on conditions in the mine, union reports, state and federal reports… Then he talked with the operators. After that I went back to Naperville with him, and we lived there for over a month. Again he talked with the townspeople. He would hang around the taverns where the men went. I went to a church benefit for the families… Does that answer your question?”

“Real well,” the coroner said. “Unless the jurors have any questions, you are excused.”

The jurors had no questions, and the next witness called was Howard Lempke, superintendent of the Number Three Colliery. He testified to having met Coffee twice.

“Suppose you tell us about it in your own words, Mr. Lempke.”

“The first time I met him was along about the middle of February. He’d been hanging around the tipple and the wash-shacks, talking to the men. One of the men reported it to me, and I had him brought up to the office. He asked for a job. You know we’ve been cutting down, and I had no work for him even if he was qualified. So I told him. That was all there was to it then. I didn’t even know who he was.”

Lempke shifted in the chair so that he was looking directly at one of the jurors. He spoke to him, pointing. “I think it was you asked if he might have fallen down a shaft in the mine and then been carried out. There’s no shafts over in that section. All surface work when they were working.”

“The second time you met Coffee?” Handy prompted.

“That was about two weeks ago. Two weeks Saturday. He came up to the house after supper and told me he thought there was gas in the mine. I told him that was ridiculous. We just got through putting in a whole new ventilation system. If there was gas at all, it was getting carried out before it had a chance to collect. I wasn’t thinking of the abandoned diggings then, of course. We’d have to shut down tomorrow if we was to try to keep them clear. I’m not sure we won’t have to shut down now if the men don’t go back…”

“Yes,” Handy interrupted. “But to get back to the deceased, did he give you the location of the gas?”

“No.”

“Did he give you any reason for his suspicion of it?”

“No. He just advised a check on it. If I wasn’t a cautious person, I’d have said right then he was a crackpot and let it go at that. But to be on the safe side, I called Fred Atkinson and asked him to come over and give us a clean bill on it. It was him decided we ought to go all the way through.”

“Meanwhile, Laughlin was dead, wasn’t he?” Handy said.

“That’s not our fault, Handy. He had no business there. We’re just responsible for the safety of the men on our payrolls.”

“All right,” the coroner said. “But it strikes me as queer, a death in the mines is out of my jurisdiction, but now you tell me it wasn’t your fault Laughlin died there.”

“That’s another issue entirely,” Lempke said. “I’m not the man to answer it, and I don’t think this is the place to discuss it.”

Handy looked at him a moment, and then excused him. It was, no doubt, an old and bitter issue between the county authorities and the mine operators. The next witness called was Fred Atkinson, state inspector of mines. He told of meeting Coffee at McNamara’s, and of talking with him. “He felt very bad about the old fellow who got lost down there. He blamed himself for his death. It seems he suspected the gas a day or two before he reported it, and felt that if he’d gone to Lempke right away, he might have prevented it.”

“Did he say why he hadn’t?”

Atkinson thought for a moment. “No, he didn’t. The way I figure it, maybe he saw the old man hanging around that old entry, and then maybe when he didn’t see him, he began to think about it. The funny thing is, I don’t know how he could have detected the gas without being down in the mine himself.”

There was a stir then among the men at the front of the room. This was the delicate ground of which Handy had spoken to the sheriff, Phil thought—strangers in the mines. Handy by-passed it immediately. “Mr. Atkinson, how did you happen to find out who the deceased was?”

“We got to talking about mine inspection, and inspectors who didn’t take their reports seriously themselves. He said that writing things down took the edge off it. Here it was on paper and nothing happened. You see, Coroner, that’s what happened in Naperville. The federal and state inspectors reported safety violations. They were duly noted at headquarters, and referred to the operators and union, but nothing was done about some of them. That disaster could have been prevented. Coffee’s point was that if one of the inspectors had taken his report to mean exactly what it said, he would have closed the mine up immediately, and let them open it up against his protest even if it meant his job. Listening to him talk about it, I knew who he was.”

Lempke was on his feet. “Mr. Handy, I don’t think this is the place for a discussion of Naperville. This is not Naperville. This is Winston. All you’re accomplishing here is making more trouble for us at Number Three. The men have been out two weeks now. Another week and they won’t be going back at all….”

“That’s twice you’ve intimidated us with that remark,” Handy said quietly. “We happen to know Mr. Coffee came here after stopping at Naperville again. Go on, Mr. Atkinson. Did you ask Coffee what he was doing here?”

“I asked him if he was doing a job on the mines here. ‘A fine job I’d be doing with Laughlin dead,’ he said. In other words, he didn’t tell me outright. But if you want an opinion I’ll give it to you.”

“Please do.”

“When Coffee did a job, he covered it from all angles. I’ve been particularly careful before certifying Number Three again, knowing he was here. I’ve talked to all parties involved, foremen, union reps, and the operators. Coffee didn’t once approach the operators, and he never took one side of a story without getting the other.”

The jury nodded an understanding of his logic. Then Handy prompted: “However, Mr. Atkinson, Mrs. Coffee has just told us her husband spent four months on his Naperville story. He was in Winston less than six weeks. It’s quite possible he was doing just one part of a job here when he died. Isn’t it?”

The jury nodded an understanding of that logic, too.

Atkinson agreed, and was then excused. Tom Lavery was called. He testified to Coffee’s many visits to the store. “He’d just sit around for hours, half nodding, maybe, but looking and listening. ‘Who’s that fellow?’ he’d say of a man coming in. ‘How long’s he been in the mines? Has he a family? How’s his health?’ He was a great one on health. And if you ladies excuse me,” Lavery nodded at the women jurors, “he was all the time watching the spittoon.”

The sheriff leaned across to Handy and spoke with him. Meanwhile at the back of the room, the few miners who had come among the curious were nodding and whispering among themselves. That part of Coffee’s behavior had an obvious explanation to them. Handy banged his hand on the table. “If you’ve something to say back there, boys, come up and say it where we can all hear it.”

One of them shuffled forward a few steps, and then getting a look from Lempke, halted.

“Come on, man,” Handy said impatiently. He turned to Lavery. “You’re excused temporarily. I’ll want you back in a minute.”

When the miner reached the table, he identified himself. “I’m Billy Riordon, sir—motorman in Number Three. All us boys were saying, sir, when it’s too long between sprinklings and the dust is rising, we’re all the time coughing up chunks that’d choke a horse. Mind sir, I’m not saying there’s the way it is now. But we take that as the meaning of Tom’s story.”

“Thank you, Riordon,” Handy said with more patience. “Did you ever talk with Coffee yourself?”

“I had a word or two with him, when he was out by the wash-house once, and a few more now and then by Mac’s place. He was a good sort of man, but sorely led on, the way…”

Handy interrupted. “What did you talk about with him?”

“The Number Three and the men working there, nothing special I remember.”

“Thank you, Riordon. You may go now.” He looked to the jury for confirmation of his dismissal.

The sheriff indicated that he wanted Lavery recalled.

“When was the last time you saw the deceased?” Handy asked.

Lavery hesitated in his answer. “I can’t rightly say. It was a day or two before his death. He no more than stopped for a package of tobacco, and scarcely a word to say. He wasn’t round much after Laughlin’s death, and no more sitting by the stove then. I thought to myself, hearing one thing and another, the heart was gone out of the man along with his reason, taking up with…”

Again Handy interrupted. “Was he in your place when he heard of Laughlin’s death?”

“No. But it was in my place Jerry Whelan suggested to him he dig the grave for the old man.”

A little noise escaped Mrs. O’Grady, drawing Phil’s as well as everyone else’s attention to her. The girl, Anna, could crouch no lower in her chair. Phil looked about for her father. He was not at the inquest. An exchange of glances between the sheriff and the coroner confirmed his suspicion that Lavery had just volunteered a bit of information Fields had not turned up in his preliminary questioning. The sheriff shook his head and then got up to send a deputy in search of Whelan. Meanwhile Lavery was excused and Donel McNamara summoned to the witness chair.

He told of the first time Coffee had come into the tavern. “We talked of this and that, the mines some, and the kind of employment there is for a man in Winston. I’d the notion then he was looking for a job. He asked me where I’d recommend him looking for a room, and where else would I send him but to the fairest of them all?”

The “fairest of them all” at that moment looked like a witch ready to spring upon him, for she was leaning far out of her chair, her weight on her cane. What strange attraction could the old woman have for this man, Phil wondered, that without embarrassment he could praise her in public, and in spite of the contempt in which she obviously held his praise?

Handy cleared his throat “You recommended Mrs. O’Grady’s?”

“Where else?”

“That was the first time you saw the deceased. When was the last?”

McNamara’s affability left him. “Friday last, about seven o’clock in the evening.”

“Will you tell us the circumstances?”

Phil glanced at the old magician. He bent his head, the folds of age gathering about his jowls.

“He came in the door with the black magician, and I invited him out the way he came.”

The observers murmured. Handy pounded on the table. “When this inquest wants an opinion, Mr. McNamara, we’ll ask for it. Give us the people’s names you talk about, and not your opinion of them till it’s asked for.”

McNamara’s eyes narrowed. “He came in with Clauson, and I told him to leave.”

“In all the time the deceased was in Winston, can you tell us approximately how many times he was in your tavern?”

“I’d say three or four nights a week.”

“Before Friday night, when was he there last?”

“Wednesday. There was services at the church.”

“And you served him then?”

“I did. And I gave him a piece of advice about the company he was keeping.”

“What did he say to that?”

“He says to me straight: ‘Mac, I’d keep company with the devil if there was something in hell I wanted.’”

McNamara was excused and the inquest adjourned for the dinner hour.

Chapter 13

PHIL LINGERED IN THE room until it was cleared and the deputies were putting it in order. He could hear fragments of arguments between the sheriff and the coroner in the back room. “All right then, Maurice,” he heard Fields say. “Call this off till I have more time. I’m not the magician, remember.”

He moved to the window and saw the townspeople in little clusters outside. There, too, was argument, full of gesture and oratory. Far down the street the Clausons and Glasgow were walking across the town to take their noonday meal in peace. Whelan had brought the taxi for the widow. Phil remembered his bulbous face when he had first met him in Mrs. O’Grady’s kitchen, a slobbery man who tried to insinuate that she did not have a room for him. And he it was, Phil thought, who suggested that Dick go up to the churchyard and dig the grave for Kevin Laughlin.

Margaret called to him from the stairs, and he went up to her room. She scarcely waited for him to close the door. “Phil, tell me the truth. What do you think Dick was doing here?”

“I think he was working, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s exactly what I mean. I’ve made up my mind I’m not leaving until it’s settled. I’ve been feeling sorry for myself, Phil, and forgetting how important Dick’s work was. Will you stay if I do?”

“I intended to stay in any event. No matter what the coroner’s verdict, I don’t think the sheriff will give up on it.”

“That’s what I thought. He’s a good man, isn’t he?”

“An honest man, at any rate.”

She smiled then, for the first time that day, he thought, and extended both hands to him. “If they think they’ll frighten us off, they’re wrong. Aren’t they?”

He took her hands although her exuberance left him untouched. Had her confidence in Dick fallen off so much that the mere suggestion of his work, in the morning proceedings, buoyed her up this way? In a way her own testimony had set the temper of it.

A knock at the door separated them, and Mrs. Krancow brought a tureen of stewed chicken—and two plates.

Chapter 14

THE FIRST WITNESS CALLED WHEN the inquest reconvened was Jerry Whelan. He slouched in the chair as he had over Mrs. O’Grady’s table.

“Pull yourself in a piece, man,” the coroner said shortly.

“Excuse me, your honor. It’s all the driving doubles me up this way.”

“There isn’t driving enough in the county for that,” Handy said.

The spectators tittered, and Whelan looked deeply offended. He brushed the ashes from his coat front, and pulled his legs together. They sprawled apart again after a few seconds.

“Were you acquainted with the deceased, Mr. Whelan?”

“Not intimate,” Whelan said obsequiously. “I saw him in the lady’s house a few times when I brought her things up from the town—an awful nice man, you might say, and giving my Anna a dollar now and then to bring home to her da and the rest of the children.”

Her “da” had need of it, Phil thought—the lazy hulk of a man.

“Were you acquainted with Laughlin?”

“No more than the rest of youse here. I saw the poor soul now and then.”

“Where?”

“Passing the church when he’d be turning a bit of sod.”

“Why did you suggest to the deceased that he dig the grave for Laughlin?”

“Well, I tell you, your honor, it was something got into me when I heard about poor old Laughlin. I was thinking maybe if Coffee had minded his business instead of carrying on, he’d of saved the unfortunate man.”

There was a murmur of approval from the spectators, and Handy demanded silence. “That was a lot of thinking for you, Whelan,” he said acidly.

“You’re bullying me, your honor, and all I’m doing is sticking up for one of our own.”

Fields leaned across to the coroner, and then, bidden to, put the question himself. “Jerry, somebody didn’t put you up to telling Coffee he should dig the grave?”

“I don’t rightly understand your meaning, Sheriff.”

“My meaning is this: Did somebody pay you for taking that message to Coffee?”

Whelan scratched the back of his neck. “I don’t know, unless it was the devil, and if it was, he pays awful little.”

Even the jurors were amused, and Whelan was dismissed.

“Mrs. Norah O’Grady.”

“It’s about time,” she said, getting to her feet. “You’re impoverishing me with the price of transportation to and fro.” She shook her cane at anyone who offered her help, and when she was in the witness chair, her eyes darted from one face to another in the room defiantly. Her turned-up nose was higher than ever, and her cheeks redder than ever a rose dared to be. She told her story with a fine restraint, however, and there was not a word mentioned of the wild nights she had described to Phil. She glanced at him for approval where he was standing at the door. The omission was as bad as the exaggeration, he thought, both showing a fine contempt for the truth.

Handy tapped a pencil on his hand a moment, and then said quietly: “Mrs. O’Grady, I think you’d better trust us with the facts. Now the truth is he came home drunk several nights, isn’t it?”

“A little unsteady maybe.”

“And there were some nights he did not come home at all?”

“He was terrible restless.”

“You were very fond of the deceased, weren’t you, Mrs. O’Grady?”

“I was.”

“And you felt that he had an affection for you?”

“He was awful good to me.”

“He must have told you many things about himself.”

Phil, watching Margaret, saw a little constriction about her mouth, and although her hands lay palm upward in her lap, every finger was stiffened with tension.

“Did he discuss his marriage with you?”

The widow looked at Margaret, and then twisted around in her chair to face the coroner. “He did.”

“You are under oath, Mrs. O’Grady,” he reminded her.

“I know what an oath is,” she snapped. “I’ve taken one or two in my life.”

The remark amused those who knew her vocabulary, and Handy had to pound for order. Someone else in the room was unusually alert to the widow’s testimony. Glasgow, although leaning back in his chair, was tense, and when his wife moved toward him to say something, he was startled out of his concentration. He snapped something at her that Phil took to be as rough as “Shut up,” for Mrs. Glasgow’s mouth tightened, and a little color rose to her face. Glasgow glanced up then and caught Phil’s eyes on them. He stretched his hand across to touch his wife’s, but her hands were locked together.

“Will you tell us, then, what he said, Mrs. O’Grady?”

The widow made a mouth at him. “He said she was the most beautiful woman he ever knew, and he worshipped her.”

Mrs. O’Grady was excused after being questioned about the last meal Coffee had taken in her house. Margaret’s tension slipped off gradually, but Phil could see the rise and fall of her breast from the quickened breathing. While the next witness was making his way to the table, Margaret took a handkerchief from her purse and dabbed the moisture from her upper lip.

Father Joyce testified next. He had met Coffee three or four times. On their first meeting they had discussed the people of Winston, especially the miners and their families. He could recall no specific questions except on health.

Their second meeting was the night of the parish dance. The priest’s testimony was interrupted at that point, while the coroner inquired generally if anyone had invited Coffee to that dance. He received no answer. Coffee had apparently gone there on his own.

Father Joyce resumed his testimony. They had met again on the day Coffee came to the parish house and volunteered to dig Laughlin’s grave. “I suggested then that he might like to take over Laughlin’s work about the church grounds.”

“He wasn’t exactly the kind of man to do odd jobs,” Handy said uneasily, “if you see what I’m getting at, Father.”

“I see exactly what you’re getting at. But there are times when hard, physical work is good for a man if you can see what I’m getting at.”

Handy looked at the floor. The weary flesh does not yield easily to its temptations, Phil thought. He wondered how many among these people had been so advised. “How did Coffee take your suggestion, Father?”

“He laughed, and said that if ever he needed the consolation of work he would take it. I did not take his laughter lightly, and told him so. He sobered immediately, and agreed that there was no humor in it.”

The full surge of color had risen to Rebecca Glasgow’s face. She swallowed hard. Her husband, no longer interested in the witnesses, was giving her his full attention, the trace of a malicious smile on his lips.

“I saw him two or three times after Laughlin’s death,” the priest continued. “But I could not help him at all. He was a very troubled man.”

“How do you mean, troubled?”

“He was in despair at Laughlin’s death, blaming himself for it. I loaned him the car a couple of times when he asked it to take Mrs. O’Grady for a drive, and the last time I saw him, he said: ‘You know, Father, there’s one wrong precept in the Bible.’

“‘It depends on who’s doing the interpreting,’ I said. ‘Which one is troubling you?’

“‘Charity does not cover a multitude of sins, Father,’ he said. ‘It does not even cover one.’

“I reminded him that if the sin was despair, he was certainly right.” The priest opened his hands. “That was the extent of our acquaintance.”

The jurors were offered the opportunity of questions, but they sat in pious apathy. If they were to sit facing the priest a hundred days, Phil thought, they would ask him no more than the time of day.

Father Joyce was excused, and he left the room immediately. It was hushed until after his departure, and even then there was no more sound than little moaning noises from the women. The priest had refused Dick absolution before them, Phil thought, and they were grieving after a lost soul.

Nat Watkins was called back before the coroner. He came up timidly and sat on the edge of the witness chair. His feet not quite reaching the floor, he tucked them far under the chair and clung to it with his hands, too, as though he were sitting on a fence.

“How old are you, Nat?” Handy began.

“Twelve.”

“You spend a lot of time out there east of town, don’t you?”

“Some.”

Phil followed his eyes as they darted furtively at his father. Watkins was a burly man, standing at the rear of the room frowning, his arms folded, his legs spread apart. Remembering the accumulation of cigaret butts in the hollow of the cliff, Phil thought this was, to date, probably the most miserable moment in the boy’s life.

“What do you do out there, Nat?”

“Hang around just.”

Handy picked up the envelope from the table. It was the one containing the cigaret butts. He handed it to the boy. “Would this be the reason, Nat?”

The youngster went pale. He nodded that it was. The spectators strained to see the envelope.

“Well,” Handy said with exaggerated casualness, “I guess most of us tried a cigaret at your age, back of the barn or some place like that. I had a weakness for pipes, myself. I used to burn clover in them. Horrible mixture. Now when you were on your walks out there, Nat, did you ever meet Mr. Coffee?”

“Sometimes.”

“Did you ever talk to him?”

“I used to hide so he wouldn’t see me.”

“Why?”

“A game I was playing with myself. I was practicing.”

“I see. But you could see him, couldn’t you?”

“Most of the times. Sometimes I’d follow him.”

“Was he doing anything out of the ordinary?” The boy did not understand. Handy added: “Was he just walking, or did he seem to be going some place or looking for something?”

Nat bit his underlip while he thought about it. “Most off, he was walking. Sometimes he stopped and looked.”

“Could you tell what he was looking at?”

“No. He’d just stand and look around.”

“Did you ever see him with anyone, Nat?”

The boy nodded. “The woman and her goats, a couple of times.”

“What were they doing?”

“Talking.”

“Did you ever overhear their conversation?”

“Once.”

“What were they saying?”

The boy hunched in the chair. “They were talking about love. I ran away.”

It was a few seconds before the room quieted. “Nat,” Handy said quietly, “you just heard the word ‘love.’ They might have been talking about a youngster, a father, a boy’s love for a dog. Isn’t that so?”

“I guess so,” the boy said. “But I wouldn’t of run away if they were talking about a dog.”

Handy nodded. Certainly the boy had scored with his logic. “Now,” the coroner continued, “did you ever see him with anyone else?”

“Once I did. I saw him with a woman with green wings, only the sheriff don’t believe me.”

Handy showed no surprise. “Green wings,” he repeated. “I don’t recollect ever seeing a woman like that myself. But sometimes I’ve seen a person put on their coat in the wind, and it looked for all the world like wings. Could that have been what you saw?”

“No, she had wings.”

“You didn’t see her flying, though,” Handy said.

“People can’t fly.”

“That’s a fact,” the coroner said. “Did you see her face, Nat?”

“No. It was getting dark, and she was moving close along with him.”

Fields laid his hand on the coroner’s arm. Handy nodded for him to go ahead. “Nat,” the sheriff said, “Sunday morning when you were out there, that was around seven o’clock, wasn’t it?”

The boy nodded.

“Were you skipping Mass, lad?”

“I got to Mass,” the boy said in quick defense.

“But you didn’t always make it when you were sent, did you, lad?”

Phil, watching the elder Watkins, wondered if this was not unnecessarily cruel to the boy.

“Maybe I missed a time or two.”

“Nat, you know that angel just inside the church door?”

The boy’s eyes bulged. “Yes sir.”

“Did your lady with green wings look anything like that?”

“Just like it. I dreamed of it once, too. Only it was flying.”

“Chasing you?”

“I don’t know. I fell out of bed so I guess it was chasing me.”

A nervous titter of laughter escaped one of the jurors, and the witnesses and spectators joined it. Nat grinned with relief himself until his father caught his eye. The boy was dismissed and Watkins took him out of the room immediately. Before the next witness was sworn in, the father returned. Phil thought that with luck Nat might escape punishment in the prestige he had brought upon the family as a witness.

Archie Freebach came before the coroner and his jury. Phil recognized him as the owner of the Sunnyside tavern. He described the evening Mr. Clauson and Coffee had spent in his place the night before Coffee died. He told of the discussion between the deceased and the old man of the beauty and virtues of his daughter.

The deputy standing next to Phil answered: “That guy must of been blind of one eye.” His own eyes were shifting from Margaret to Rebecca Glasgow.

“Was it a friendly discussion?” Handy asked the witness.

“Oh, they were very congenial.” Freebach fidgeted in the chair. “I thought to myself, and I said to my wife when I went upstairs to her afterwards, they sounded like they were making a marriage. They were very merry.”

His last words were lost in a burst of comment among the spectators. Handy pounded for quiet, and Freebach looked miserable. He would talk on in his nervousness, scarcely aware of his words.

“Mr. Freebach,” the coroner said, “did they mention names? Did you know who they were talking about?”

“I told you, his daughter, and I took for granted the second party…”

“You took for granted,” Handy interrupted.

“Well, I know, I imagine …” Freebach flustered, “only a man in love is so excited.”

Clauson, for the first time, reacted to the testimony. He shook his head and murmured, “No, no, no.”

“Stay with what you heard, Mr. Freebach,” the coroner said curtly.

Glasgow looked at his father-in-law contemptuously. Freebach, seeing the old man, became more excited. He looked from him to the coroner helplessly. “But I’m telling only what I thought. I’m not saying it was so. I see now the young man had a wife, a lovely wife he loved, as Mrs. O’Grady told us—I don’t know. I’m mixed up.” His voice trailed off.

Handy reached over and laid his hand on the witness’s arm. “Quiet down, Mr. Freebach. It doesn’t matter here whether you understand it or not. The important thing is what you heard. It is for the jury and me to decide what it means.”

“Thank you very much,” Freebach said. He drew a handkerchief from his pocket and rubbed his hands vigorously.

“You did know that Mr. Clauson’s daughter had a husband, didn’t you?” Handy pursued.

“I heard. I thought I might be mistaken. I remember how long… I remember her in school… I asked my wife about that, too. Then I was more mixed up.”

And this was the man, Phil thought, who spoke so lucidly in his tavern, of superstition and of the opiate the discovery of one hoax might be upon a crowd.

“Does it always seem so important to you to know what your customers are talking about when they are drinking?” Handy asked.

“I have ears. I like to listen, if it’s interesting.”

“Why was this interesting, Mr. Freebach?”

“When a man describes a beautiful woman—it is interesting.”

“Thank you, Mr. Freebach. If the jury has no questions, you are excused.”

He called Henry Clauson.

Handy announced that there would be a fifteen-minute recess after the testimony of the witness, and asked for patience and quiet. It was an unnecessary request. As Clauson reached the table, Phil could hear the breathing of the deputy next to him. The old magician raised his hand as though it were a warning. “I will not take the customary oath,” he said. “I give you my solemn promise to tell the truth.”

In a few seconds the townspeople realized that he had deviated from the procedure, and there was grumbling.

Handy silenced it. “He is within his rights. Please sit down, Mr. Clauson. Will you tell us the circumstances under which you met the deceased?”

“My daughter met him among the hills about five weeks ago. She invited him to call. Or perhaps it was that he asked to call. He was a well-traveled man, and we had many things to talk about.” He chose his words carefully, and made some effort to speak more loudly than was his custom, Phil thought. He looked above the people as he spoke.

“Just what did you talk about, Mr. Clauson?”

“What does one man talk to another about of a quiet evening and a drink? We spoke of the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, and two revolutions in Latin America which Mr. Coffee had witnessed. We spoke of Polish mines and African diamonds, and of the new state of Israel. We spoke of people and money and bread. We spoke of scriptures and detective stories.” He looked at the coroner then. “There was nothing sinister in our conversations, even in Mr. Freebach’s tavern, Friday night.”

“Suppose you tell us what was said there, then.”

“I drank more that night than I am accustomed to drinking,” Clauson said simply. “I think my young friend did, too. The discussion was rather a flight of fancy. Mr. Freebach told you that Mr. Coffee was trying to persuade me that my daughter was the most beautiful person in the world. Obviously, my daughter is not, although she is many things to me. It is not a kind thing to her for me to tell now; but there have been, and will be, greater unkindnesses done her than one by her father. So to illustrate, I will tell you a story told me by Mr. Coffee that evening.

“He told me of an Irish legend about an ugly old lady who sat by a village well. Within sight of her, an old man was telling a child about the beautiful woman he had once courted in Spain. She had refused his true love, and accepted instead the marriage offer of a prince without honor even among his own people. But on her wedding day, she disappeared. The child asked, naturally, what had become of her. The story teller pointed to the old one sitting by the well. ‘The good people caught her up and brought her to my own village, setting her down where you see her, as ugly as she is today.’ ‘That old witch?’ the child said. ‘She’s enchanted,’ the old man explained. ‘If I were to propose marriage again to her this minute, it would break the enchantment, and you would see how beautiful she really is.’ The child demanded that he do it. ‘Oh no. If she were that beautiful again, do you think she’d give a bundle of bones like myself a second look?’”

Clauson folded his hands. “Forgive me if this has taken up your time, but that is the kind of talk there was between Richard Coffee and me.”

“Ha! Glory to God,” Mrs. O’Grady said aloud, and although Handy slapped the desk, he was not frowning. Either Clauson was an absolutely guileless man, Phil thought, or he was touched with genius. He had taken the only possible entry to the hearts of these people, giving them back one of their own stories.

“You are a magician by trade, Mr. Clauson?” Handy said with some irony.

“I was in my youth. Now I manufacture pieces for hands more nimble than my own.”

“Did the deceased ever speak to you of his reasons for being in Winston?”

“No, he did not, although it seemed to me he was looking for something, something he could find only here. There were times I thought all he was seeking was peace of mind, for there were times he seemed on fire. Hearing Father Joyce’s testimony this morning, I was more convinced of that than ever.”

“Was there anything he said or did, Friday night, that would lead you to think he intended to take his own life?”

“Nothing.”

“When you were asked to leave McNamara’s, Friday night, Mr. Clauson, you knew the reason?”

The old man looked down at his hands. “I knew it.”

“Why didn’t you try to stop it?”

“I have learned long ago, Mr. Coroner, you do not put out a fire with spit.”

The witness was excused then, and the inquest adjourned for fifteen minutes.

Chapter 15

THE TEMPER OF THE people now was milder than at any time since Phil had been in Winston. How often it had changed that day, he thought. As he stood on the porch with Randy Nichols, he could hear bits of their comment as little groups of them huddled together against the wind.

“Funny,” Nichols said, “they’re all pretending to be thinking this out. And all they’re doing is trying to justify a change in their feelings.”

“Are we doing any differently, Randy?”

“Of course not, though we think we are. I hope that either the sheriff or the coroner is. But I doubt it. There is nothing so rare as a thinking man—unless it’s a thinking woman. I wonder if there isn’t one here.”

“Do you make anything out of the inquest yet?”

The older man pulled at his cigar. “My guess is that it’s two stories, one he was intending to write and one he was living. It’s a tossup which one he died of.”

Phil threw away a half-smoked cigaret and went indoors. The only people in the room at the moment were Mrs. O’Grady and Margaret Coffee. Margaret was standing beside the widow and they were talking easily, Mrs. O’Grady’s teeth showing in a smile. She saw him then and motioned to him to join them. “Philip! I’ve asked Mrs. Coffee to stay with me while she’s in Winston. Will you bring her things up?”

There was no trace in Margaret’s face of her knowledge of the widow’s early and fierce antagonism. “I want to stay where Dick did,” she said serenely.

“I’ll be glad to let you have his room,” Phil said, “the one where the wind lay down beside him at night.”

For a moment there was real hatred for him in her eyes. His own eyes fell away from hers. The impulse to hurt her seemed to grow stronger, and his control over it weaker.

The widow watched them, grinning. “Well, will you bring her up or no?”

“Of course.”

The jurors filed back into the room, one of the men wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. They had been served refreshments. Presently the witnesses returned, and the sheriff, the coroner and the clerk took their places. Margaret sat down beside Mrs. O’Grady, and the girl, Anna, came in and sat at her cane side, the stick clattering to the floor and the widow cursing at her clumsiness. Phil moved back to the hall where Nichols stood.

“Pals, huh?” the reporter said.

“Bosom.”

“Hmmm. What you can’t pull into the dance, playing the tarantella!”

Handy checked his watch and looked up. “Mrs. Norman Glasgow, please.”

The tall, gawky woman made a painfully self-conscious journey to the coroner’s table. She wore a brown tailored suit and a white blouse open at the throat, accentuating the length of her neck and face. Many times, Phil thought, the children must have called her “horse face.” He found himself pulling desperately for her. Even her father had said before all of them that she was not beautiful. But seeing her eyes move from one hostile face to the other of the jurors, and flash across the witnesses then to meet his own for a long second, he sensed a deep beauty in the woman. He would not have needed to be drunk to take Dick’s side in that extraordinary discussion. He waited to hear her voice, and hoped that in some way his eyes conveyed to her his wish to give her courage.

“Mrs. Glasgow, will you please tell us the circumstances when you met the deceased?”

“I often graze my goats among the hills,” she said. Her voice had all the color her face lacked, Phil thought, low, a little tremulous now, but richer as she gained confidence. “It was five weeks ago. I don’t remember the day, except that it was windy. But most days are, in Winston. He called out to me, and I waited where I was until he came. He said that he’d been watching me for several days. He wondered what I thought about day in, day out. We talked. I’ve forgotten what about. The clouds, perhaps. They hang very low up there, and sometimes we talked about them. I told him of my father and he asked if he might visit us.”

“You met him several times after that?”

“Yes.”

“Did your husband know of these meetings?”

“Perhaps he did. I did not tell him. I saw no reason to.”

“Your husband is away a good part of the time?”

“Yes. He is home only two or three times a week.”

“Did anything…” Handy himself groped for a word… “improper happen between you and the deceased?”

“Nothing.” She looked at him directly as she said the word. “You would be surprised, Mr. Handy, how often the word ‘love’ occurs in very ordinary conversations.”

“Maybe I would,” Handy said, but without sarcasm.

Phil looked at Glasgow. He was sulky now, as though he resented the possibility of anyone being interested in this plain wife of his.

“You know the talk that’s been going around,” the coroner said.

“I know the talk there has been about my father and me since we came to live here. I know that it was said that I would never get a husband, and after I had married, that I would never keep him. Yes, I know the talk that’s been going round very well.”

“It’s unfortunate,” Handy said, “that talk doesn’t come out in the open except at a time like this. But the truth is, Mrs. Glasgow, all we can be concerned about here, now, is the talk about you and Coffee. Do you know how it started?”

“I can only tell you the people who saw us,” she said, “the boy who hides in the hills for purposes of his own. It was he who found Dick…” She said the name very softly. “The man who died two weeks ago, Mr. Laughlin, saw us. He stopped and talked with us a couple of times, and the girl with Mrs. O’Grady.”

All eyes turned to Anna Whelan, and she looked about the room like a trapped animal. “She sent me. She made me do it,” Anna cried out.

Mrs. O’Grady’s cane caught her across the leg. “Simpleton,” the old lady hissed at her. “What are you frightened of? Nobody’s touching you.”

A sickening realization of the old woman’s jealousy came to Phil. He had sensed it before, but now the whole impact of it hit him. Dick had realized it and been revolted by it. He had mentioned it, writing, and hated himself for the revulsion…. “…because I know she is a very lonely woman, and loneliness makes desperate wooers of us.”

Handy was banging for quiet, and Phil saw the sheriff pick up Dick’s notes from the table and thumb through them, following the same line of thought he had.

“Did the deceased talk to you about what he was doing in Winston, Mrs. Glasgow?”

“We did not talk of it,” she said, and Phil wondered if that was not an evasion of the truth.

If the thought occurred to Handy, he did not pursue it. “Did you ever go with Mr. Coffee to that abandoned entry to the Number Three mine?”

“Yes. We had seen Mr. Laughlin about there, and we went over to it.”

“Did you enter the mine?”

“No. But I watched while Mr. Coffee did. He was gone about half an hour. When he returned he told me he thought there was gas in it. He said that it was probably fugitive from the blasting at another point. I know that he talked to Laughlin that night, and the old man promised to report it.”

“But Laughlin didn’t work in the mines, Mrs. Glasgow. Why didn’t Coffee report it directly to those in authority?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could it have been that it would have spoiled a rendezvous spot for you if he had?”

Her fierce “No!” was lost in the medley of shocked exclamations.

“I’ll clear the room if this keeps up,” Handy shouted. Looking back to Rebecca Glasgow, he asked: “When did you last see the deceased?”

“Saturday afternoon between three and four. I saw him passing the house.”

“Did you speak with him?”

“No.”

“Had you quarreled?”

“No.”

“Or was it that your husband was home?”

The old magician got to his feet. “Mr. Handy, you have not treated the other witnesses…”

His son-in-law reached across the vacant chair between them and pulled him back to his seat. “You old fool. She can take care of herself.”

When quiet was restored, Handy asked: “Do you know why he did not stop, Mrs. Glasgow?”

“Because I asked him not to come any more.” The words came with difficulty.

“Why?”

She did not answer, and Handy prompted: “Were you in love with him?”

“I liked him very much,” she admitted.

“You knew he was married?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you spend last Saturday evening, Mrs. Glasgow?”

“Working with my father in the house, except for the few minutes I went out to attend the animals.”

“How long were you gone?”

“Twenty minutes, perhaps.”

“That’s a lot of attention. Where were they?”

“They had wandered a ways from the house. Not as far as the cliff,” she added without being asked. “I herded them in and watered them.”

“In the dark?”

“It was about six-thirty. I had a flashlight.”

“Did you hear or see anything unusual?”

“Nothing. All I heard was the train whistle.”

“Questions?” Handy asked the jury.

A woman juror raised her hand. She smiled as she put the question: “Are you in love with your husband, Mrs. Glasgow?”

“Are you with yours?” the witness snapped back at her.

Again the murmur in the room which Handy had to quiet. It was a good question, Phil thought, seeing the indignant fluster of the juror. How rarely these people spoke of love, having spent its first sweet fortune. The question had come from the movie house or the pages of a magazine.

The coroner did not press for an answer, and Rebecca Glasgow was excused. She returned to her seat, and moved it back for her husband to pass, for he was called next. He trod on the old man’s foot in his haste. It was Clauson who apologized after him, unacknowledged.

“You work for the Cleveland and Mobile Railway. Is that right, Mr. Glasgow?” Handy began.

“I do.”

“How long have you worked for them?”

“Two and a half years. Since I got out of the army.”

“Were you acquainted with the deceased?”

“I met him a couple of times.”

“When was the last time you saw him, Mr. Glasgow?”

Glasgow looked at him, half squinting as though in greater effort to understand the simple question. It was only to heighten attention to his answer, Phil decided, hearing it. It was an almost verbatim repetition of his wife’s answer. “Between three and four last Saturday afternoon when he passed the house.”

“Did you or your wife comment on him at the time?”

“I told her to go on out after him if she wanted to.”

“You knew of their relationship then?” Handy asked.

“I knew, your honor.” There was more sarcasm than respect in his voice. Whelan had used that address, your honor, too, Phil thought.

“Were you jealous?”

“No. Why should I be jealous? You just heard—Coffee was in love with his wife. Rebecca knew it. What was I going to get worked up over?”

He nodded toward his wife in speaking. Phil glanced at her. Her eyes were closed, her head down.

“Then you talked about Coffee with her?”

“There was talk of nothing else in the house between her and the old man. Lord, how he would of liked a man like him in the house, somebody smart like him and her, and not a lousy working man.”

Glasgow’s venom spilled over into the onlookers. It was several seconds before Handy restored quiet. Through it all, the magician and his daughter sat like two gray animals determined not to be flushed into a hasty flight.

“Will you tell us, please, where you were from four o’clock last Saturday, Mr. Glasgow?”

“At four o’clock I sat down to my supper. Quarter to five I clocked in at the yards. By six I was on my way to Cleveland.”

“Is there someone who saw you leave Winston?”

“I signaled the engineer myself. There was nobody in the cab, if that’s what you’re asking. We picked a couple of fellows up in Rockland, but that was near ten o’clock. If it’s an alibi you’re looking for I can’t give anything more than I just told you.”

The jurors had no questions. Weariness was beginning to overtake them. The men had sprawled their legs, and the women’s hair was straggling from beneath their hats, unheeded. Handy rubbed his face down with his handkerchief. He consulted with the sheriff, and Fields shook his head. He did not want adjournment without one more witness. Handy straightened up wearily.

“Miss Anna Whelan.”

Anna was startled by the call. She moved forward only when Mrs. O’Grady gave her a shove. At the coroner’s desk she plucked at her nails until bidden to sit down.

“How old are you, Anna?”

“Fifteen, sir.”

“How long have you been with Mrs. O’Grady?”

“Since I was thirteen.”

“You knew Mr. Coffee?”

“Yes sir.”

“Your father told us this morning that Mr. Coffee gave you money. How much money?”

“A dollar a week. Sometimes two.”

“Why did he give it to you?”

“He said I ironed his shirts real nice.”

“I see,” Handy said. “Now, Anna, have you been walking in the hills east of town lately?”

“Yes sir.”

“Did you see anything unusual there?”

“I saw Mr. Coffee and that Mrs. Glasgow.”

“That isn’t so unusual, is it, Anna?”

“I saw them holding hands and lying together.”

A sound of shock escaped the women. It was soon hushed in their fear of missing a word.

“Real close together, Anna?” Handy asked evenly.

The girl flushed to the roots of her hair. “No sir.”

“Did you tell anyone of what you’d seen?”

“I told Mrs. O’Grady.”

“Told me!” the old lady shouted. “She brought up a tale that’d raise your hair. The details the little strut gave me.”

“That’s enough, ma’am,” Handy said. “You were mild enough with your comments before us. Be so good as to keep your peace now.”

“My peace! There’ll be a hell of a lot of peace now with the tales coming out of her.”

“You liked them,” Anna said in an instant’s rebellion. “That’s why I told them. He was good to me…”

“Bah!”

“Anna, talk to me and the jury,” the coroner said. “Did you make up the stories yourself?”

Deserted and cornered, Anna began to fight back. “No sir. I just told what I saw, and I saw plenty.”

“Did you tell it at home, too, Anna?”

“Yes.”

They both would be fond of a lecherous tale, Phil thought—her father and the widow. It accounted for their camaraderie, and was indulged in spite of her affection for Dick Coffee. When Dick was carried home, and only the smoke and dirt remained in Winston, they would sit at the kitchen table with a bottle and wait for the devil to pluck them out of it.

“Anna,” Handy said, “tell us the truth now, and mind, this is very important. Did you ever see Mr. Coffee and Mrs. Glasgow at the mouth of the mine over there—the entry that’s closed up now?”

“I saw them go into it,” the girl said, and then as the clamor rose in the room, she shouted, “Yes. I saw them move the boards and go in there!”

Rebecca Glasgow bit hard upon her underlip, as though to dull another, deeper pain than that of her teeth upon her flesh. At the coroner’s desk the sheriff had taken over the questioning of Anna, trying to place the date on which the girl had seen them. It was small wonder that he failed. What was one day from another to one who went to the Widow O’Grady’s house with daylight and left it only in time to go to her bed?

A long shiver seemed to run through Margaret Coffee. The widow had observed it, too, for she reached her horny hand across and patted Margaret’s where it lay upon her lap. Margaret smiled at the consoling gesture. Phil turned his back on them and stepped deeper into the hallway. From there he heard the sheriff say: “Maurice, I’d like you to adjourn the inquest till one week from today when…”

He was interrupted by Howard Lempke, the mine superintendent, who was on his feet among the witnesses. “What kind of shenanigans is this?” he shouted. “I demand you bring a verdict. You’ve heard the witnesses. If the men don’t go back in Number Three…”

Handy banged him down, his big fist almost shattering the table. “You are not coroner of Corteau County, Mr. Lempke. Not yet, anyway. And you aren’t going to stampede us with your threats.”

“No,” Lempke said. “But you can stampede the men out of the mines, can’t you?”

“This inquest doesn’t give a damn about the mines,” Handy said. His face was flushed and sweating.

“That’s pretty obvious. Maybe you don’t give a damn about the people who get bread and butter out of them, either.”

The sheriff laid his hand on the coroner’s shoulder. “Let me say a few words, Maurice.”

Handy waved him ahead impatiently. Fields moved between the witnesses and the coroner’s desk. Sit down a minute, Mr. Lempke, please. We’ve heard contradictory evidence here. It’s my job to find out what’s the truth and what isn’t. I can’t snap my fingers and have it shake out like numbers on a pair of dice. I know what two weeks’ loss in production means these days. I know there isn’t the demand for coal there used to be. I know what that means to you. I know what two weeks out means to the men, too. It means bills they’ll be paying on months later. Now the truth of all this is, it’d be a lot easier for me, too, if the men was to go back, and everything in Winston was to go on like normal.

“So I’m on your side there, Lempke. I’d like the men to go back in the morning, and with the Number Three recertified, I don’t see no reason they shouldn’t. But that isn’t my business. My job is investigating Richard Coffee’s death, and I’m going to do it no matter what happens.”

He turned and faced the coroner. “Do I get the week, Maurice?”

The inquest was adjourned for one week.

Chapter 16

THE ROOM CLEARED QUICKLY of weary and disgruntled people. Mrs. O’Grady was waiting for Margaret to pack her things, and Phil realized that he was expected to take them both to the widow’s house. He had no desire to be with either of them at the moment, and went to the back room to offer Fields any help he might be able to give him. There he walked in on another argument.

“I can’t give you that authorization, Fields,” Lempke was saying. “I’ll have to get in touch with the main office. That’s not the state fair grounds out there, you know.”

“You don’t have to get any authorization, Mr. Lempke. I’ll have a court order in the morning. I’m trying to cooperate in every way I can with you. I purposely didn’t mention this out there. I’ll do it as quiet as I can. But I’m going over that whole section of Number Three tomorrow.”

“All right, Sheriff. But the bill goes in to the county.” Fields saw Phil then. “Come in, McGovern.” He was introduced to Lempke, who left immediately. Fields accepted the cigaret Phil offered him. “I see you got the two widows together. How’d you manage it?”

“Their own doing completely,” Phil said. “I came in from the recess and found them there—holding hands almost. Margaret’s staying on for a while.”

“It can’t be she likes our company.” Fields studied the end of his cigaret. “Some interesting things came out in the light in there, even if they go back in hiding.”

From the next room came the sound of hammering—Dick’s remains being prepared for a final journey home.

Fields looked about the room. “I’m going to have this fixed up for temporary headquarters. One thing about being a bachelor, your home’s where you take your shoes off.” He got up. “You know, I’d like a play-by-play account of what Coffee did the last two months in Chicago—and the two weeks before he got here after leaving there. I don’t see any reason the Chicago police shouldn’t give us a hand in it. Do you?”

A knock at the door covered Phil’s answer. It was Margaret. “Mrs. O’Grady said you were here, Phil. Excuse me, Sheriff.”

Fields nodded. “Sit down, ma’am.”

“No thanks… Phil, I’ve decided to have Dick interred in Winston. I think it’s appropriate, with the work he was doing among the people here.”

“What work was he doing, Mrs. Coffee?” the sheriff asked.

Margaret looked at him. “Isn’t it pretty obvious that he was concerned with the health and conditions here?”

“Concerned, maybe,” Fields said. “I’m concerned, too. But I haven’t seen anything concrete he was doing about it.”

Margaret bridled. “If you don’t want him buried here…”

“I’m not saying that, Mrs. Coffee. It just seems to me you’re kind of anxious to put the label on the package. It ain’t wrapped up yet. Now I’ll be glad to help in any way I can, making arrangements for his funeral. But I’m going right on trying to find out how he died.”

“Thank you, Sheriff,” Margaret said coldly. “Phil, will you talk with the priest? Dick was born a Catholic.”

“I’ll talk with him,” Phil said.

Fields pinched out his cigaret. “I’ll go up with you, McGovern. I’ve got a notion it’ll take some talking to convince him he died one.”

Father Joyce surprised them, however. He readily acceded to the burial, and offered to perform the service before they asked him. The burial was to be directly from the funeral parlor.

“In view of the circumstances, I think that advisable,” he explained.

Neither Phil nor the sheriff pursued his views of the circumstances. The hour for the funeral was set for nine-thirty the following morning, and the three men went out in the gathering darkness to select a plot in the cemetery. Somewhere among the many rows of headstones was a new marker, above the grave Dick had dug for Kevin Laughlin.

“Father, just what did Coffee say to you about Laughlin?” Fields asked.

The priest pulled at the gate where it was stiffened in the frosty ground. Phil added his weight to it, and together they swung it open.

“‘I could have saved the man’s life. I could have given it to him, and I could have taken it away from him. I took it away.’ That was the gist of it. We talked a bit about Laughlin then, for the poor old man was much given to talking about the mines himself.”

“Did Coffee know Laughlin’s story,” Fields asked, “about losing his wife there, and all?”

“I told him about it when we selected a burial place for Laughlin. ‘Poor little man,’ was all he said, that and ‘mea culpa.’”

They selected a space at the far end of the cemetery. A single, stunted bush stood between it and the long, gray sweep of wasteland, that was gathered now into a darkened wisp at the first rise of the hills. Phil wondered who would turn the crusted sod. But he had not the heart to ask.

Chapter 17

WHEN THE ARRANGEMENTS WITH Krancow were completed, Phil walked down the street to McNamara’s, reopened for the evening business. The only customer was Randy Nichols, there certainly for the company more than for a drink. “File your story, Randy?”

“I did. I’d no idea his wife was such a sentimentalist, McGovern.”

Phil ordered a drink.

“It takes a lot of sentiment to bury him out on the lone prairie,” Nichols drawled. “A bucket of it. Or a bucket of something else.”

“You don’t like it?”

“Oh, I’m touched. Deeply touched. And I know the whole town of Winston’s going to be touched the same way. Maybe they’ll make a crown of coal for their martyr. Look, McGovern. I’ve been around a long time. I know a good reporter when I see one, even when he’s called a journalist. That’s what Coffee was, a good reporter. No more, no less, in his work. What he was in his private life I don’t know. I’ve a notion he was a right guy. That’s beside the point. But when she sits up there like the world’s holy mother and says: ‘Dick always felt his most important work was in the coal mines,’ I got a dirty word for it. Dick felt his most important work was where there was a good story. Mark my words, that’s what brought him to Winston.”

Nichols finished off his drink and almost choked on it. “Why the devil can’t you carry a bottle of milk, Mac?”

“You bring the cow and I’ll milk it for you.” McNamara looked at Phil. “She’s staying with the widow, is she?”

“She is. They make a fine pair.”

“She’ll meet her match there, I’ll wager that, my boyo.”

“Where are the customers, Mac?”

“They’re by the union hall in a meeting. They’ll be busting in here any minute now, crying or singing. I’m sending next door for my supper. Do you want them to bring you in something?”

Within an hour the men began drifting down the street from the union hall. Billy Riordon, who, at the inquest, had told of the coal dust in the spittle of miners, danced into the tavern. “Let me have one little one more on the book, Mac, this for the celebration. We’re hoisting in the morning.”

McNamara emptied his coffee cup before going behind the bar, and Riordon danced to the piano. He played a weird tremolo with the thumb and little finger of his right hand. “If I’d the rest of my fingers I’d play a fandango.” He turned to Phil and Nichols. “Is there one of youse play at all?”

“Here’s your drink, Billy,” McNamara said. “It’s on the house and not on the books. Your wife’s too good an auditor of them. Was it a unanimous vote, Billy?”

Riordon lifted his glass to those present and emptied it. “Aw now, Mac, you’re not the one to be asking that. Did you ever hear of a unanimous vote from a bunch of Irishmen in your life? Well. I’ll go home with the news and it may be the old lady’ll parcel me out a nickel in cash for the evening. My thanks to you, Mac. You’re a darling rebel. The best of evenings to all of youse!”

He raised his hat along with his voice in a song and bounced jauntily out of the tavern.

As the evening wore on the men wandered into the tavern from their suppers. A card game was resumed. There was laughter, and a bit of song, although through it all Phil sensed an uneasy gaiety. Above all he felt a stranger to it himself. He looked at the yellowing-keyed piano and wondered where the youngsters of the town hung out, and if they had a juke box. Was the only such machine at the Sunnyside, the only music tunes that came to the town in an early migration? He put on his coat and went out, walking as far as the theatre…the Majestic Theatre…how unmajestically majestic… You paid your money and went in…no tickets, no waiting…Tarzan now, The Frozen North tomorrow … Next door, Nick’s confectionery. Half a dozen teen-agers, and the varicolored juke box, a thin peal of jive weaving through the closed door to him.

Here at least were the symbols of normalcy in Winston. But somewhere in the town, things were far from normal…the alliance at the widow’s, which he was reluctant to face yet…and the Clausons. He walked across the town and past the railway station, in semi-darkness now. A murky half-moon was rising above the giant cliff. He cut across the field to the Clauson house.

Even as he stood a few seconds at their door, glimpsing the cluttered living room, he could believe that here Dick found a happy companionship in the barrenness of Winston. The old magician was reading in front of a coal-burning grate, a shawl about his shoulders. He laid down his book at the sound of Phil’s knock, threw off the shawl and came to the door.

He looked up at Phil as though trying to place him. “Ah yes,” he said in sudden recollection. “I saw you this afternoon.”

“My name is Phil McGovern. I was a friend of Dick Coffee’s.”

“Come in then, by all means.”

It was the room which held him first—a mass, indeed, he thought, almost a mess of color, but not quite—gaudy paintings that, on being looked twice upon, took definition, and invited study, books in ancient bindings piled on the table, with naked shelves in the case from which they had been taken, woven Indian rugs on the floor, and bits of statuary without order of style or position on the mantle, on the shelves, even on the floor. In a bay window at the side of the room a large worktable was cluttered with bits of wood, cloth and tin sheeting.

“Your coat, Mr. McGovern.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Clauson.” He had been staring about the room.

“You find it interesting?”

“I haven’t seen this much color in the whole of Winston.”

“There are colors in the town all the same. Wherever there are people there are colors. Sit down, please.” He hung the coat on a hall tree near the door.

A staircase ran along the inside wall. From the back of the house came the sound of dishes, and as Phil went near the fire he could see a light beneath the dining-room door. The dining room itself had long since ceased seating diners. It, too, was a workroom. A table against the wall held many tubes of paint. A green smock hung over the back of a chair.

“My daughter will come in presently unless you wish me to call her now?”

“No,” Phil said. “I only want to talk.”

“Only?”

“My semantics are bad. I wanted to talk with you about Dick, Mr. Clauson.”

The old man nodded. He brushed the thinning hair at his temples with nervous fingers. He seemed then to pull himself up to the task, but he smiled. “Dick only wanted to talk, too. There was no end to the things he wanted to talk about.”

Phil could believe that, having known Dick from his early curiosities, the nights at school, overseas, in bars, restaurants, parks. “He was the sort of guy would stop a farmer in the field and ask him the depth he was ploughing. He would end up knowing the rotation of his crops, how many cows he had milking, and about the time the pig got struck by lightning.”

Clauson folded the long hands. “And it was never quite idle curiosity, was it?”

“Sometimes it was. I remember his talking twenty minutes to a park attendant once. Nonsensical stuff. It turned out the man had just one tooth left in his head, and Dick was fascinated with the things he could do with it.”

Clauson smiled. “Even that takes a special kind of curiosity, or, at least of patience.”

“Yes,” Phil said. “Dick was long on patience.”

The old man did not answer. He sat, his mouth a little pursed, his eyes upon the coals in the grate. Phil, conscious of the books strewn about the room, the paintings, a writing portfolio on the table with a pen beside it, experienced a strange sensation. He was eager for Rebecca to come from the kitchen, for the old man to tell him about the books, about the work that was obviously done in this house. He could not ask it. He did not have the easy, casual manner that would permit him to say: “That’s nice work there above the fireplace. Who did it?” It was strange to be jealous of the dead, but in this house he was jealous of Dick. It would never be open to him as it was to Dick. He would ask his questions and receive a polite answer. He might even have a cup of tea here some day. But he would have to probe for each thing he learned from it. It would never unfold itself to him.

Clauson got up from his chair. “I will call my daughter.” He went to the kitchen door and said a few words Phil did not hear.

He looked at the painting above the mantle. It was like a large tumbleweed, upright, a tawny yellow, yet with fragments of blue and green and a thin sliver of red. It was the color of twilight with the last stings of sun. At the core of the whorled thing he named tumbleweed for want of better definition, there were the solid lines of a human shape. A candelabra sat on the mantle below the picture, the candles in it half burned. He wanted very much to see them lighted, their softness playing among the colors of the picture… He was standing beneath the picture when Clauson and his daughter returned.

“Forgive me,” he said, hoping to be told about the painting.

The old man merely nodded. “Mr. McGovern, Rebecca…. My daughter, Mrs. Glasgow.”

Rebecca, too, only nodded, her eyes frank upon him.

Phil groped in his pocket for a cigaret. “This visit may be presumptuous,” he started awkwardly.

“If you are a friend of Dick’s it is not presumptuous,” Clauson said.

“There is an uncompleted job here in Winston that Dick was doing. I should like to find out what it was and finish it, if I can.”

They sat down then. “I shall give you every help in my power, Mr. McGovern. I’m sure my daughter feels the same.”

If she did, Phil thought, she would have to know him a lot better before so committing herself. She waited without comment.

“I know the general tenor of your conversations, as you described them today,” Phil said. “But perhaps the little things…the way you would meet a friend and say: ‘Well, what did you do today?’ That sort of thing might give us a clue to his reason for being here. When did he first come to the house?”

“He came the first night after we spoke,” Rebecca said. “Do you remember the date, Papa?”

“I can tell you that in a moment. Martin Shaw was here from Zanesville that day for his pagoda.” As he went to the desk he explained that the pagoda was a magic illusion. He had made it on order for a practicing magician. Its sale would be entered in the account book. “February 13,” he said. “Five weeks ago. It seems as though we knew him all of our lives. That is the way sometimes.”

Phil took a notebook and pencil from his pocket and wrote down the date. “How did he introduce himself? Dick could make friends in a minute where I need a formal introduction.”

Clauson smiled at his self-deprecation. “I remember the first words he said to me: ‘I am finding it hard to make friends in Winston. Perhaps you will loan me a little magic.’ I told him that all my magic had not brought me friends in the town. ‘But it brought you to the town?’ he said. And very shortly I was telling him how I had come to Winston.”

“So soon, and he had you telling him all about yourself.”

“You are quite right. He had that faculty. I can see you, too, are curious about that.”

“I am.”

“This house belonged to Rebecca’s mother—to her grandparents, really. Her grandfather was one of the first doctors in this part of the country—that is, the first to set up private practice. In those days Winston was a company town, and the company provided whatever medical care was given. Private practice was very private.”

“But you’ve been treated as a stranger here, Mr. Clauson.”

“Quite so. The doctor abandoned Winston. He intended to come back. But it was not to be. He passed away before he could accomplish it, and his wife shortly after him. My wife’s inheritance was this house. It was fortunate, as things turned out. My career as a practicing magician was over with the end of vaudeville. Besides, I was never a very good magician, always a bit slow and thoughtful. I enjoyed seeing the illusion develop, and that of course is fatal. A good magician believes only in his own skill. He is contemptuous of his tools. Nevertheless, he buys them constantly, but only to prove his conquest of them. Look. I will show you one that a master will take a week to manipulate. But having mastered it, he will have something unusual.”

He took Phil to the table in the bay window, and pulled a ceiling light on. Taking a cloth from over its top, he displayed a miniature stage with dancing figures on it. “Those will vanish, and the practicer will be able to have his audience examine the box, and not find them. Yet they will be there. I have a gentleman coming from Baltimore in a few days who will pay handsomely for the secret.” He threw the cloth over the device and pulled off the ceiling light. “You see how easily I can be engaged in the discussion of my trade?”

“Yes, I can see it,” Phil said.

Rebecca had put on the smock that hung in the dining room and had gone to work there.

“My daughter paints my pieces for me,” Clauson said. “I am more interested in illusion than in gadgets for sleight of hand. She has a wonderful feeling for transparency, for silken, weblike work.”

Phil looked at the painting over the mantle. Clauson nodded that it was hers. It was a woman wrapped in the woof of her dreams, Phil decided, a veritable tumbleweed. The old man drew a match from his pocket, struck it on the fireplace and held it to one of the candles.

Before he touched the other, his daughter had swung around from her work. “Please don’t, Papa. Please put it out.”

Phil caught a brief glimpse of the lucid coloring in the painting before the old man blew the candle out. The reds were blood, he thought, the blues and greens tearlike.

“As you wish, my dear.” He returned to his chair. Date by date, they put together Dick’s visits to the house.

Finally, Phil turned to the daughter. “Miss…” he started. He had almost said Miss Clauson. And there was reason. In this house, he had seen no trace of Glasgow and no place for the kind of man he seemed to be. “Mrs. Glasgow,” he corrected himself, “when you and Dick were together, and you talked to Laughlin, did Dick lead him to talk of himself, also?”

She laid down the brush with which she was working and came to the door. “Yes. He told us of knowing the mines like the back of his hand. He told us of the first time his father had taken him for work in them when he was twelve.”

“Do you remember the first time you saw him?”

“Laughlin? I had seen him many times. The first time Dick saw him—I can’t be sure, of course, but I think it was only two or three days before Laughlin died.”

“Did Dick speak of him to you at all?”

“No. The second time we saw him, Laughlin told us about that entry being his special job. I think that was what made Dick curious about him—that no one else approached the entry. It was that day I went with him to the mouth of it, and waited while he went down there. It is not true that I went in with him, Mr. McGovern.”

“And when he came out?” Phil prompted, ignoring the last remark.

“He said only that he suspected there was gas down there.”

“But nothing about Laughlin?”

“Only that he intended to warn him.”

Phil nodded. “You know Laughlin’s story, don’t you? That his wife was killed in that area?”

“Dick told me after he was found.”

“Mrs. Glasgow, what did Dick tell you of his own wife? I know Margaret pretty well.”

“Do you? He told me no more than what I said at the inquest.”

“Without being impertinent, may I ask how it came about that he should tell you that?”

She looked at him. “We were speaking of my husband, and how I came to marry him.”

The old man shook his head. “Dick was very, very fond of Rebecca. If only they had…”

His daughter whirled on him and cut off his words. “Stop that, Papa! For the love of heaven will you get it out of your mind? He loved his wife. You could see why, looking at her today, couldn’t you?”

“No, my dear,” he said painfully. “When I look at you, I cannot see it at all.”

A great, strained weariness came over the woman. She sat down, slumped in the chair as though she would hide in it. “When the blind describe their visions,” she said bitterly, “God help those of us with eyes.”

The old man roused himself then. “Will you have a cup of tea, Mr. McGovern?”

He had tried, Phil thought, but his heart was not in the invitation. “Thank you, but maybe I may come for it another time. Dick is to be buried in Winston now—tomorrow morning at nine-thirty from the funeral parlor.”

Something very near to joy came into Rebecca’s face when she heard the words. To hide it, she got up and returned to her work in the other room.

Phil took a last look at the painting, and put on the coat the old man was holding for him.

Chapter 18

BEFORE HE WAS INSIDE THE iron gate at Mrs. O’Grady’s he could hear the sound of laughter and an occasional flute of off-pitch music. The lights were on upstairs in the regular boarder’s rooms, and Whelan’s taxi was in the driveway. As Phil rounded the house and mounted the back steps the anger rose in him. Among the lights in the town below were those burned by strangers at the coffin.

He stood on the porch a moment, breathing deeply of the raw air. Anger would blind him. It would hang like a veil between his perception and his understanding. The laughter inside was real, and Margaret’s among it—the beloved wife…the town was real, and the hard board railing he clung to on the porch was solid beneath his hands…the stale taste of tobacco in his mouth and the wind sluicing the sweat that had broken out on his face…. The inquest was unreal—the hundred gaping faces, the crowing and the crooning of the old lady inside, the smirking face of Whelan, the contemptuous Glasgow, the hard steel eyes of McNamara, the sound of the hammer on the coffin, the two-fingered reveille of Billy Riordon on the piano, the swirling, whorled color in the Clauson home…the blind describing their vision…

“Dear Lord in heaven,” he whispered, loosening his hands from the railing and digging his nails into the palms to feel the reality of pain. He went through the two doors then as though they were one, and the revelry stopped abruptly, the smiles stiffening on the flushed faces at the sight of him.

Margaret had taken off the demure black suit and wore a rose red housecoat. She sat proudly at the kitchen table like an imprisoned queen, the widow across from her, and Whelan nodding foolishly between them. Phil forced himself to smile.

“There,” Whelan said, “the man’s human. For a minute I thought he was a ghostie.”

“Were you expecting one?” Phil said, taking off his coat and flinging it over the kindling box. “May I bring a glass?”

“Bring a bucket if you like,” the widow said, “as long as you bring a smile with it.”

“It’s good to see you without the scowl, Phil,” Margaret said.

He pulled out the chair beside her and sat down, pouring himself a glass of beer from the gallon bottle. “It’s good to see you without the mourning traps.” He touched the lapel of the housecoat.

“A scowling man and a roaring bull,” Whelan said, “they’re two of the most disturbing things in the world. While you’re at it, put a head on mine here for me. I must go down soon to my loving family.”

“You’ve been saying that for an hour, Jerry,” the widow said, “and the only move you make is the hand to your face with a glass in it. Do you sing, Philip?”

“I was a choirboy.”

“Give us a sacred tune then,” Whelan said. “I always say there’s no music like the old hymns.”

“Hymns be damned,” said the widow. “Give us a fighting tune. Did you ever hear him sing ‘The Minstrel Boy’? Ah, he had the voice of John McCormack.”

“I thought he was a baritone,” Phil said.

“What’s the odds, he could carry a tune.”

“I fell in love with his voice first,” Margaret said.

“Where?” Phil asked.

“A restaurant in Paris where the newspaper people used to hang out.”

“Were you with a newspaper, Margaret?”

“Just with a newspaper man,” she said mildly.

Phil emptied his glass, and Whelan slopped the beer in refilling it, his sleeve trailing in the mess. “I thought you met on a park bench,” Phil said.

“We did. Many times.”

“Ask a foolish question, you’ll get a foolish answer,” the widow said. “I hear there’s a whole Irish settlement in Paris.”

“Och,” said Whelan, “we’re the kind of people never have the sense to go home.”

“How long are you in this country, Jerry?” Phil asked.

“I came over steerage in 1919. There was more Irish in the hold of the ship than cattle, and a bloody Scotsman steward or whatever. My poor old mother fortified me with a bottle of whiskey at the dock, and me too sick to reach my hand under the pillow after it. Do you know the little Scots runt never had his hand free of it? I swear to God he didn’t sleep a wink on the passage for fear of missing a drop.”

“My only regret in living as long as I have,” the widow said, “is the number of times I’ve had to listen to that story. Where were you tonight, Philip?”

“I went to visit the Clausons.”

He was aware of the eyes of all of them on him.

“Well,” said Whelan, “there’s nothing much gay over there tonight, I’ll wager. My Anna had the word for them now, didn’t she?”

“Close your gab, Jerry,” Mrs. O’Grady said.

“Don’t be all the time shutting me. I’m not your slavey, woman.”

“Shut, I said, or get out of the house.” She turned on Phil. “So they’re wheedling round you already, are they? After taking him over…”

“And leaving him dead,” Whelan finished.

“You like the thought of that,” Phil said. “You all like it. Why? What have you got against them? You, Whelan, what have you got against them?”

“They’re bloody heathens…”

“That’s not enough, Jerry. You wouldn’t know a heathen from a saint if he was sitting next to you in church.”

Whelan got to his feet, jarring the table. “I’ll not stay here and be insulted by an outsider, a bloody smart foreigner. You can fetch your beer for yourself, old woman, as long as they’re in the house. You’re seeing his true colors now, are you? Or are you color-blind, as well as deaf to a word of warning? You like your chances, do you? Well, you’re taking one now.”

“If you made as much sense as noise, Jerry, they’d compile an almanac of your sayings. Go, if you’re going.”

She watched him out of the house. “Peh! He hasn’t the guts to match his brain, and there’s little enough of that. Is there candles burning down there for him?” She poked Phil with her stick.

He flung the cane away from him. “He has no need of candles where there isn’t a person to look at his face the last blessed time.”

The tears came to Margaret’s face.

He turned on her fiercely. “And no need for tears. Pour yourself another drink there, and you’ll sing a song for us in a minute.”

She stifled back the tears and got up from the table. “I won’t forget this, Phil. Believe me, I won’t forget it. You think flailing your fists in the air makes you a hero. You think crying in public makes you a mourner. Don’t be so goddamn righteous.”

She left him then, and the widow prodded him again with her cane. “Bring a rag there from the sink and clean up the mess on the table.”

Chapter 19

THE MORNING OF THE funeral was murky and cold, and two of the Winston collieries were working. A few women followed the hearse through the town, and came to stand in shivering huddles within the cemetery. Phil drove Margaret and Mrs. O’Grady, and Father Joyce permitted him to drive over the frozen ground where there were no headstones until he was within a few feet of the open grave. In that way the widow might participate in the service without leaving the car.

Those present never missed a funeral, Phil thought. They were the town’s keeners, and they would weep for a dog as well as a friend—women all, upon which the burden of death fell so heavily they were inclined to pick it up whether or not it belonged to them. They moved closer with the tolling of the church bell, thirty-five in summary for the years in the life of the departed.

Randy Nichols and McNamara had joined the two deputy sheriffs as pall bearers. They stood bareheaded, waiting for Father Joyce. At the close of the bell’s tolling, the priest came from the church in his cassock. His rich voice intoning the Latin rubric was muffled in the wind, and his cassock billowed out as though he would be lifted from the ground.

Margaret wept silently beside Phil, and he could see the flicker of Mrs. O’Grady’s handkerchief now and then as she wept alone in the car. The Clausons had not come, nor had any other of the witnesses. As the priest reached for a handful of soil, the Winston taxi drove up behind the hearse. Jerry Whelan climbed from it, and took two wreaths of flowers from the back seat and brought them to the grave. Phil remembered the words Dick had written of Laughlin: “What does the dead want of flowers, who had no more of them alive than a rented lily for a Holy Thursday procession and a boutonniere for his wedding?”

Dick had had more of them than that certainly, and he had had Margaret… Of her also he had written… “The voice of my beloved, behold it cometh leaping upon mountains, skipping over hills” …a paraphrase of the Song of Songs…

Dust to dust…

Phil waited at Krancow’s for the sheriff’s return from Corteau, the county seat. Krancow was supervising the installation of a telephone in the small room off the parlor. It was fitted now with a desk, several chairs and an army cot. Fields would stay there until this investigation was finished.

Fields came in, then, and nodded around. He looked at the telephone man. “Can I use that thing soon?”

“About five minutes. Can you wait?”

“I’d be interested seeing what would happen if I couldn’t.” He drew Phil to the window. “Is the wife still up there?”

“Yes.”

“At the kitchen pump, I’ll bet.” He took an envelope from his pocket. “I got the warrant for searching the Number Three. But they really put the heat on me. Did the men go back this morning, Joe?”

“Most of them did,” Krancow called.

“I hope to the Lord they stay there. If we flush them out again and don’t get something, we’re in trouble. McGovern, did you mention to anyone I was going down there?”

Phil thought for a moment. “No, I didn’t.”

“Good.”

“All right, Sheriff,” the phone man called. “Take it away.”

Fields waited until he and Phil were alone in the room. He put through his call then and asked for Howard Lempke. “Any time you’re ready. I got the search warrant, and I’d like to get it over just as soon as I can.”

He listened to what must have been considerable objections from the other end. “Mr. Lempke, I don’t want them out no more than you do. Matter of fact, I’ve got a notion your people don’t care much, and I don’t want to be your scapegoat. Now I’ll be over there in fifteen minutes, and I’ll go down alone if you don’t take me.”

He hung up the phone and rubbed his nose viciously. “A hell of a lot we’d find going down there alone.” He looked at Phil. “What makes this so doggoned tender—it’s just a matter of time till they close up Number Three for good and all. But they got a contract with the men, and they’d be within their rights if that was breached by the men refusing to dig…” He broke off. “I got no business saying what I can’t prove. That’s just what it looks like to me. You can come out there with me if you want to, McGovern. But just keep quiet about it.”

Lempke and Fred Atkinson, the state inspector, were waiting for them at the abandoned entry. “This is what you call a drift mouth,” Fields explained to Phil. “All the first diggings here were near the surface. There aren’t many entries like this, are there, Mr. Lempke?”

The superintendent was ripping the boards from the frame. “One or two over on Number One that I know of. The old plans show more here, but I never heard of them.” He straightened up, then, and adjusted his lamp. “Fields, I’d be real careful before repeating what you said to me over the phone. I’m going to give you every cooperation I can. I got orders from headquarters to do that. We’re trying to make this old horse pull its load. As long as it does that, it stays hitched. We’re in business, but Winston Collieries got a pretty good reputation in the last few years for being square, and we don’t aim to lose it now.”

“Okay,” Fields said. “Let’s go.”

“You understand what I’m saying, Fields?”

“I understand. I’m not out to make trouble, especially for myself.”

“All right. Outside of Laughlin and this other pair, I don’t know of anybody’s gone in here in twenty-five years. You’re going to find a lot of rooms down in, damp and raw. I don’t know what. Just remember Laughlin. It may be all cleared out, but we don’t want to get separated. Don’t let the fellow ahead of you get where you can’t touch him. I’m dead serious about that. I’m going to mark our way with chalk.”

Phil and the sheriff were provided with lamps, and they followed Lempke and Atkinson without a word. As soon as they passed beyond daylight, a dankness fouled the air. Under foot, the ground was like hard, rough clay that scuffled beneath their shoes. The lamps playing along the walls of the tunnel caught weird shaggy growths, crusted stuff that looked like green snow. As they moved in, the passage grew narrower, so that at times they stooped almost double to make their way.

There was looseness now, under foot, where the walls had crumbled. Lempke threw his lamp across the entrance to a room. It was clogged almost to the top of the opening. He lay across the debris and threw the light inside. Little white nubs the size of half-snowballs clung to the green-black ceiling. “There’s rats down here,” Lempke said. “You can smell ʼem.”

Moving along the passage again, they stumbled over tracks that had not been taken up. Phil dropped his light on them. They, too, were almost covered with a thick black moss. The men had to squeeze past a car that lay on the track where it had been abandoned. Even the shovel had been left in it, only the handle showing above the accumulated moss and dirt. As he realized what it was, Phil wondered if this might be the car that, loosed from its coupling nearly thirty years before, had killed Laughlin’s wife.

Crawling now, they moved from one abandoned room to another. At one place Lempke stopped. He had dropped the chalk. Atkinson gave him another.

“Hold it a minute,” the inspector said. He pushed inside a room, the dust he stirred up choking them. They threw their lights on him. He lit a match and touched it to one of the fluffy lumps on the wall. It gave off tiny sparks, and the room was suddenly filled with a horrible screeching as the lump plopped to the floor. Phil caught the back of his head tightly in his hand to deaden a quick pain the noise had started.

Atkinson crushed the lump beneath his foot. “A bat,” he explained. “They can cling there for years with life in them.”

“Where did they find Laughlin?” Fields asked.

Lempke focused his lamp on a survey map. “We’ll be coming there soon if this plan is accurate.”

They passed into a widening passage soon. The air seemed fresher. An air circuit had been opened from another entry, giving it a crosscut with some outlet in the present diggings. There was a white cross mark on the wall. “Right in here,” Lempke said.

Fields threw the light of his own lamp on the chalk mark. He moved very close to it and studied the wall. Phil, behind him, saw him run his finger along a carved marking; the movement of his finger described the letter G. Fields dropped the light and stood a moment.

“Are you going in or not?” Lempke said impatiently.

“Mr. Lempke, when you people found Laughlin, did you know where to look for him?”

“Hell, no. We didn’t know he was here. We were testing for gas. It was Atkinson here made sure we came all the way.”

“Did you know where to look for it?”

“No. That kind of gas doesn’t spell itself out, you know. We just knew pretty well if there was gas down here, it came from the point nearest the section working now. We moved in here from the nearest drift entry to the tipple where we’re hoisting.”

“Then Coffee didn’t tell you he’d marked the room?”

Phil could see Lempke’s face above the pale light. The mine superintendent had no notion of what Fields was talking about. The sheriff threw his light on the wall again, and pointed to the letter. “Any other explanation you can think of for this mark?”

Lempke and Atkinson examined it. Lempke shook his head. “You’d need to be a bat to see it.”

“That was grooved out with a knife,” Fields said. “No reason your people would do it?”

“No. We wouldn’t do it that way.”

“How long would a man have to be in there for the gas to get him?”

“Hard to say. A few minutes might do it. You just drop off to sleep.”

Fields nodded. “Let’s see the room.”

The sooted floor was streaked with trailing footprints.

“What in the name of heaven was he doing here?” Atkinson said.

“Got lost, probably,” Lempke said. “Why he was here, I don’t know. They say he was daft. He lost his wife in this section maybe thirty years ago when she was trying to find him and got in the way of a car. They always say a woman in a mine’s a bad omen. It was here. Seemed like every vein in the place ran thin just after that. What with that, and the men leery of coming down, it was closed up.”

“I remember,” Fields said.

“That’s right. You were digging yourself then, weren’t you? Before my time. Now we can go back the other side or go on to the Pinewood entry. The air’s a lot better.”

“We’ll go the other side of the way we came,” Fields said. “But first I want to go over this room.”

The light moved over the walls and floor as the sheriff examined the blackness foot by foot, the three men watching him from the opening. He bent down now and then, examining the floor carefully.

“Sherlock Holmes,” Lempke said. Then he called out: “I wouldn’t lean on any of them beams, Sheriff. There’s places down here wouldn’t take much to cave in.” His voice came back at them as though he had spoken against a wall. The room was as dead as the man found in it.

“I’m not doing any leaning,” Fields said. He stooped down and picked something up, a straight trail of dust rising from where he shook it loose.

“Got something?”

“A piece of string,” Fields said, testing it for age.

“One thing,” Atkinson said, hawking the dust from his throat, “nobody was flying a kite down here.”

Fields rejoined them. “That’s as foul a pit as I ever smelled. Let’s go.”

Lempke led the way once more, and presently the air clogged up on them again. Its dampness was painful in the nostrils. The rooms on the other side were higher vaulted, and seemed cleaner, consequently. Atkinson delayed them.

“Just look at these pillars.” He ran his hand down one of them as he spoke. “These were done by pick miners. No machines. The human back, eye, arms. Straight as a beam.”

“I knew a picksman once could strike fifty a minute and have it come out that straight,” Lempke said. “There aren’t craftsmen like that around anymore.”

“For a dollar a day, too,” Fields said.

Lempke started on. “You never got over having to quit, did you, Fields?”

“I got over it the day I got elected sheriff. I was lucky. How many guys get to be sheriff?”

They passed once more into dingy, suffocating rooms. Fields would not leave one of them without casting a light about it. Finally, his search was rewarded. Lempke’s lamp beam caught a round object that, from where they stood, looked like a nail keg. The men approached it without speaking. Beside it several lanterns were lined up, a thin film of dust covering them. There was an army cot and a blanket in a folded heap. There were other kegs, and as they approached them, an acid, silage-like smell was noticeable. The light further caught a row of medicine bottles and old whiskey bottles, and a length of small hose lying over them.

“I’ll be a little catfish,” Fields said. “The old coot was making moonshine down here.”

Chapter 20

WITHIN TEN MINUTES OF leaving the room, they reached the mouth of the mine. Phil and the sheriff left the mine people to board it up and returned to the car. “I don’t like this a bit,” Fields said.

He sat a moment, running his hand around and around the steering wheel. “Not a little bit,” he repeated.

“If Dick found that still, it accounts for his warning Laughlin before going to Lempke.”

“It accounts. It don’t account,” Fields said. “For a guy who spent so much time talking, there’s doggone little Coffee talked about you can lay your finger on.”

“At least the way you’re hearing it now.”

Fields looked at him. “That’s so. Either he stopped short in letting on what he was after, or somebody’s stopping short in telling us.”

“Is there a market for that stuff? I thought it went out with prohibition.”

“There’s quite a bit of it around. Especially where the state holds the only license for selling. When times are bad it flows pretty thick. You find this stuff floating when the men are out. I’ve come on a few stills the last year or so.”

“Where did Laughlin live?”

“In the church basement. He had a cot down there and a bag of old clothes. He left sixty-eight dollars.”

“And a still,” Phil added.

“And a still—if it was his. The more I think about it….” Fields started the car and turned it around. “If it was his, where did he get the makings? No car. No friends that we know about.”

“And yet nobody else has been seen around there,” Phil said.

“Who was there to see them?”

Rebecca Glasgow, Nat Watkins, Dick, and Anna Whelan. Phil named them. He repeated the girl’s name.

“Yes,” Fields said. “I’ve thought about Whelan. It was Anna gave us the story of seeing Coffee and Mrs. Glasgow go in there. If her father was mixed up in it, I don’t see why she’d tell that at all.”

“Because it was coming out and they wanted to implicate the Clausons?”

Fields shook his head. “That’s quite a bit of thinking for either one of them.” He passed Clauson’s and then swung the car along the tracks on a path that took them back of the hills to the loading area. He parked near the railroad shacks and got out. “I won’t be gone long.”

Phil saw him go into an office and come out presently with someone he took to be a foreman. Together the two men moved on down the tracks and spoke to various workers along the way. Ten minutes later Fields returned. “That seemed like one good spot to peddle the stuff. Too simple. Things don’t fall in place for me like that.”

As they drove past the railway station, they saw Whelan’s cab. Fields pulled up beside it. Whelan came out of the station.

“Hello, Jerry,” Fields said, getting out of the car. “How’s business?”

“Keeping body and soul together. That’s about all.”

“Is it all the trips up to Corteau that make you a living?”

Whelan screwed up his face. “I’m to Corteau no more than a time or two in a month.”

“What for?”

“Taking them in the big houses up there for a lark,” he nodded toward the one prosperous street in Winston. “The things I could tell you on them if I was loose in the mouth.” Fields showed scant interest. “And I’m sent up for a wreath of flowers when there’s a funeral.”

“What gave you the notion of having Coffee dig Laughlin’s grave, Jerry?”

“I told you that yesterday. It just come to me seeing him standing around. I says to myself: it’s a shame to see him idle when it takes so little to keep him busy. So I says to him, ‘There’s a gravedigger’s grave to be dug at the parish.’ It was him took me up on it. He could as leave let it lay as a joke. I don’t know what you’re persecuting me for, Sheriff. I’m an easy man, free with my tongue some of the time. But there’s no harm in me at all.”

Fields heard him out, and it seemed to Phil that Whelan could go on for hours making talk about nothing. The sheriff was looking over the taxi as though appraising its worth. “Jerry, how did you ever gather enough money in a piece to buy the cab?”

“I’ve had it three years and it wasn’t new then,” Whelan said. He was surly now. He jerked his head in Phil’s direction. “He’s put you up to this, sucking in with the old woman.”

Fields did not look at him. He squatted down and examined the tires. “Is Anna paying it off to her in wages?”

“What if she is? Isn’t a daughter meant to be helping out her poor da, and him with a string of others to bring up behind her?”

Fields touched the car wheel with his toe. “You don’t take much better care of it than you do of them, do you, Jerry? Did Anna tell you about Coffee and Mrs. Glasgow?”

“She told the mother, and the mother told me.”

She would not be very likely to tell him anything, Phil thought.

“Did you know Kevin at all, Jerry?”

“Laughlin?” Whelan shrugged, although there was no easiness in his face. “The way you get to know most of the people when you’re a sociable sort. From seeing him round.”

“Around where?”

“I told you all this. The church. And I often seen him roaming around the tracks over to back of the hills. I’d see him go by when I was sitting here at the station.”

Fields nodded. “Do you know Glasgow?”

“To pass the time of day with. I seen him of a Saturday night around town, and coming and going from his work there by the tracks. He’s not a bad sort. A queer duck to get mixed up with the likes of them, though.” He glanced at Phil then, remembering probably their words on the subject in the widow’s kitchen. “Not that I’ve anything against them,” he added.

“I’m glad to hear that, Jerry,” the sheriff said. “I hope you’ll keep playing that tune for as long as we’ve the trouble around us here.”

He got into the car and Whelan came to the window. “I’ll play it as if it was a flute. And Mr. Fields, Sheriff—if there’s any traveling to be done between here and the county seat—I’ve a reliable service. And there must be an allowance for that in the county budget. You shouldn’t be running yourself all the time and me sitting here expanding my backside.”

“I’ll remember it, Jerry,” he said, starting the motor. As they drove away from the station, he glanced at him through the rear-view mirror. They went on to Krancow’s in silence.

In his office there, Fields took the piece of string he had picked up in the mine from his pocket and tested it again. He reached for the phone then and called Doctor Turpel. From their conversation, Phil gathered that Turpel was on a retainer for the mines and had examined Laughlin. Fields made an appointment to see him a few minutes later. When he hung up, he swung around in the chair. “You see, McGovern, him marking that room—well, whatever he intended that for, it was marking off the place a man could die. Why didn’t he tell Lempke he marked it?”

“Two thoughts come to me on that,” Phil said. “Either somebody else marked it, or Dick marked it for Laughlin. Nobody would see that unless he was looking for it.”

“That’s a fact,” Fields said. “When they marked the room with that chalk cross they didn’t see it.” He took the phone again and dictated a telegram to the Cleveland and Mobile Railway office, asking complete information on Norman Glasgow. Listening to Fields, Phil recalled his visit of the night before to the Clausons, and the magician’s telling him of the devices he made and sold. Could that not be a blind? That Clauson should be mixed up in any way in bootlegging seemed incredible. But if it were so, that was how it was meant to look. The more he thought about it, the more of a point Clauson seemed to have made of showing him the product of his work. He described the incident to the sheriff.

“That fits as well as anything else,” Fields said. “Maybe a little better. I ain’t seen any evidence of the bootleg stuff here—not that I’ve done much looking so far—but people drinking it do crazy things. It comes out. It’d be a lot safer to sell it a ways from where it’s made…” He shrugged. “It’s possible.”

“Clauson mentioned someone by the name of Martin Shaw being there from Zanesville the day Dick first called.”

Fields wrote down the name. “I don’t think there’s a question of him being a magician…but that’d be a nice sideline.” He squinted up at him from the notebook. “Not that I believe it any more than you do. But it can’t hurt to check.”

“How long ago was the still used?”

“There’s nothing down there now. But that hose is in pretty good shape. I’d say a month, put or take a week.” Fields got up and looked at his watch. “Did you ever write down Coffee’s history for me?”

“No. I’ll do it now.”

“What I’d rather you did—go up to Corteau. They’d have them things in the library, wouldn’t they?”

Phil nodded.

“I’ll give you a note to the librarian so you can take them out. I want everything he wrote. And as long as the wife’s here, you might get her to help you. I want to know how long he stayed places, if she was with him …anything you think might be interesting.”

“How much shall I tell Margaret?”

“Don’t you trust her? How much can you tell her, anyway?”

“Not much,” Phil admitted. “She wanted to go home before the inquest. In the middle of it she changed her mind. She made friends with Mrs. O’Grady. Why?”

Fields leaned toward him, his face almost in his. “For the same reason maybe she was making such good friends with you that morning you took her out by the cliff?”

Phil met his eyes, but he could feel the color rising to his face. “That was my fault, Sheriff.”

Fields leaned back and picked up the transcript of the inquest proceedings. “Maybe I couldn’t see so good, but I’ve always had the notion a kiss takes cooperation. You might think about you being the reason she’s hanging around Winston.”

Chapter 21

PHIL THOUGHT ABOUT IT. But somehow he could not make it fit the situation. And yet Margaret always bridled at his censure. If she did not give a damn she might well have let it pass. She had slapped him down the night before for it. That had been the trouble between them even before Dick’s death. They had been baiting one another—resisting one another—that was what it amounted to in his case at least. And Fields was right. The kiss was—a kiss.

While he waited for her to dress to go to Corteau with him, he thought back over these days with her, and began to speculate on what might have happened had he not been sent to Chicago to cover the basketball tournament. Would she have come to Winston alone? Or would she have called on someone else? Who?

As they drove to Corteau, he asked her.

“I’d have come alone,” she said. “I might have wired you or called you.”

“Why?”

“Because I needed you.”

“I haven’t been much help.”

“That’s because you’re afraid of me, Phil. You’ve always been afraid of me from the day we first shook hands in New York.”

“You know the reason for that, Margaret.” He did not take his eyes from the road.

“Because I was Dick’s wife?”

“That usually means hands off, you know.”

“Don’t try to be funny, Phil. It doesn’t fit.”

“A lot of things don’t fit, Margaret. I’ve told you before, I’m no sophisticate. Something happened to me the first time I saw you. I’ve told myself a thousand times since that I’m a damned fool. But there it is. I’ve never gotten over it. I thought I was cured once. I made the mistake of introducing Eleanor to you. She was smarter than I was, because she knew immediately. I think that was why she called it off although she didn’t say so.”

“Do you still feel that way, Phil?”

“I don’t know.”

Although he did not look at her, he saw her chin go up and he imagined the color flaming in her face.

“Shall I tell you something about yourself, Phil McGovern? You’re a coward. I’ve always thought it was the fine moral stuff in you. The discretion. I admired it. I was wrong. You got a nice, narrow bringing up, and you’re afraid to stray out of the lane.”

It was strange, he thought, that her words did not anger him. If they were the truth it would have angered him. There was an element of truth in them. “Perhaps it’s that,” he said. “But maybe it’s my instinct toward self-preservation.”

“You think I destroyed Dick. Is that it?”

“I don’t know. Something did. Why did you change your mind about leaving Winston, Margaret?”

“You’re a fool as well as a coward, Phil.”

He glanced at her then, and found the full wide beauty of her eyes on him. The car wavered on the highway, the right wheels slipping off the macadam onto the gravel. He pulled it back.

“Park the car, Phil, and let’s talk this out.”

“No, Margaret. Not now. There’ll be a time for it, but not now. First, there’s Dick.”

“First, there’s Dick, dead or alive,” she said. After a moment she added: “That was a horrible thing to say.”

Reason began to return to him. “When he left home this time he was through; wasn’t he? I could tell by the house. You didn’t expect him back. Do you remember suggesting that I invite you and him to Rockland that night? Why, Margaret?”

“I thought you might do something for him. He was changed, Phil. You know that now. You could see it in those fragments that he wrote.”

“What changed him? What happened between him and you?”

“Has it ever occurred to you that it happened between him and someone else?”

“No. That did not occur to me.”

“Between him and God, Phil, when it comes right down to it. The last four months of his life he was at war with himself, and I had no place in it. I had no place in his life at all.”

“Is that why you thought he had committed suicide?”

“That’s why I hoped he was in Winston,” she said not hearing him. “I hoped he was trying to find himself. Maybe he was. I don’t know if we’ll ever know that.”

Phil pulled himself up from where he had hunched over the steering wheel. He was suddenly tired beyond any weariness he could remember. Margaret and the priest—suicide. Mrs. O’Grady and himself—not suicide. The sheriff—murder?

“Why are we going to Corteau, Phil?”

He opened the car window for a moment. “To get copies of Dick’s work for the sheriff. He wants to read them.”

“Why?”

“Because he wants to know Dick as well as we do. And I’ll tell you, Margaret, before he’s through, he will. And he’ll span the difference between my friend and your husband.”

“If he does, Phil, you’re in for a great shock. It was my husband who died in Winston.”

At the librarian’s desk at Corteau, one after another of the publications in which Coffee’s articles appeared was brought to them. Margaret prompted where his memory failed him. Even so, he checked the Readers’ Guide back year by year to the first story on which Dick received a by-line. “It’s like living over a lifetime,” she whispered. Her fingers trembled as she touched the pages.

Phil signed for the magazines, and watched the librarian attach the slip to the sheriff’s order. In the car again, he took a pad and pencil from his pocket. “Fields wants to know on which of these stories you were with him,” he said.

“Why? There was nothing wrong with Dick when he was doing these.”

“He doesn’t think there was anything wrong with Dick in Winston. You were in Naperville…” He checked it and wrote down the date.

“I’m cold, Phil. Will you roll up the window, please?”

“Sorry. ‘I am growing cold here, even as the days grow warmer….’” He thought of the words and repeated them aloud. “Do you remember that in the notes, Margaret? How did it end? ‘…and loneliness makes desperate wooers of us?’ Why was he lonely, I wonder, when the voice of his beloved was always near him, skipping over hills?” He saw her grow pale and taut beside him. He continued talking quietly, as though it were to himself more than to her. “He wasn’t lonely in New Orleans, was he? That was on combustible exports. You were with him, weren’t you?” He laid the magazine aside.

“Yes.” Her voice was small and choked.

“And San Francisco. That was the bloody strike, the seamen. He wasn’t alone there either.”

“No.”

“And Los Angeles last summer? You were with him on the campuses?”

She nodded.

He checked it. “And three years ago, doing the prison story. Prisons are lonely places. But you were there beside him, weren’t you, Margaret?”

“Yes. I was there.”

“And in Detroit, the shirt organization.”

“I stayed at Ann Arbor. We were afraid.”

“Are you afraid now, Margaret?”

“What are you trying to do to me, Phil? Are you out of your mind?”

“No. Not at all. I’m just trying to figure out why Dick chose to be alone in Winston. New York on ‘How Private, Private Detectives?’ … That must have been nostalgic for you, Margaret. Dick couldn’t have been lonely there.”

“It doesn’t occur to you, Phil, to ask if I was ever lonely, does it? You don’t ask what it was like to sit in Ann Arbor and wait, to walk the floors of a hotel room, to see a hundred movies, scarcely caring whether it was one I had seen before—to sit in the same house with him those last weeks in Chicago, and be more alone than if he were in China.” She drew a long, shivering breath. “You’re as blind as they come, Phil. You’re like all the rest of the do-gooders. You canonize the dead and persecute the living. It makes the great average man of you.”

He laid the last magazine on the seat between them. “I am a fool, blind, and a coward, by your own description, Margaret. How could you ever have found it worth your while to stay in Winston, in Mrs. O’Grady’s house, to be near me?”

“Go to hell,” she said, and coming from her, it sounded particularly ugly.

Chapter 22

FIELDS WAS NOT AT Krancow’s when Phil returned. He had been gone the whole afternoon, and Krancow did not know when he would return. Lempke was looking for him. He had called several times. There was unrest in Number Three again. Even as the constable strung out his worries, the phone rang again, and Krancow complained bitterly. At best, he had no use for the telephone. In his business, his wife always attended it.

Phil watched the men moving down the street from their work. The daytime shift was up. They walked, most of them with a tired stoop. The first day back from a layoff was probably the longest, and the first glass of beer the best. Several of them lingered at McNamara’s door, coaxing their fellows who were inclined to go home first.

Krancow returned from the office. “That was that reporter, Nichols. He wants a confirmation from the sheriff on him exploring the abandoned section. I can’t give it to him. He didn’t tell me itself.”

It was strange, hearing that phraseology from Krancow. The Irish spilling over… Phil snapped out of his contemplation of it. “Where’s Nichols now?”

“On his way over here. He says it goes, confirmation or not, in an hour. It won’t do him any good to threaten me. You can’t cut hair from an onion.”

Phil went outdoors and waited on the steps for Nichols. He saw him coming from the railroad station, and met him halfway. “Where did you get your information, Randy?”

“Not from you, that’s a cinch.”

“He swore me to secrecy on it. There were just four people knew it, the four of us down there.”

“That’s a lot of people on one secret,” Nichols said. “The most fragrant little man I ever met told me. I’d swear he was an unwashed leprechaun.”

“Jerry Whelan, the taxi man?” said Phil.

“That’s the one.”

“What else did he tell you, Randy?”

“That was all, but I wasn’t the only one he told. He was carrying it round the town like news of a wedding.”

“Where did he get it?”

“Ask him. What did you find down there?”

“Work on the sheriff for it, will you, Randy? It may be worth the working.”

“I’ll tune in next week and find out.”

It was almost eight o’clock when Fields returned. He was dirty, tired and discouraged. He beckoned Phil and Krancow into the office with him, and then listened to the constable’s accounts of his calls without a word. Occasionally, he scratched a word on a piece of paper on the desk.

“And all that got out, then, was us being down there?”

“That’s all I heard. There’s an envelope came there for you on the night train.”

Fields picked it up, and Phil saw the letterhead of the Cleveland and Mobile Railway. “All right, Joe. I’ll take over for the night. Get some rest.”

He opened the envelope and read its contents. “This is Glasgow’s record with the railway,” he said presently. “It looks clean as a whistle without a toot.”

He handed it to Phil. On the back of the questionnaire a photostat of Glasgow’s army discharge was attached. Phil read the form through and then looked at the discharge. “I wonder why the army when he was in the Merchant Marine at one time?”

“Draft probably,” Fields said. He took a pipe from his pocket and filled it. “One thing, he don’t work as much as he seems to be away from home. He must have a lot of layovers some place.” He took back the papers and went over them again. “He don’t earn much money either. But you can’t accuse a man on account of that.”

“Accuse him of what?”

“Bootlegging. I spent the whole blessed day tracing that stuff. I’ve been in the next county on all sides. Nothing. Nobody ever heard of Whelan or Laughlin…or Glasgow or Clauson. I checked on the magician he mentioned being here. He’s legitimate. Does a lot of Legion shows.”

“What about Whelan giving out information on our being in there this morning?” Phil asked. “Where did he get it?”

“Lempke’s the only source I know. But with no word about the still, it may be somebody saw us. I didn’t really expect to keep it quiet. I just wanted Lempke to know we were trying.” He lit his pipe. “Have you got anything for me?”

Phil pointed to the stack of magazines on top of the desk. “Margaret was very cooperative,” he said. “She even confirmed your suspicions on why she was staying on in Winston.”

The sheriff grinned. “You don’t know your own strength, lad.”

“But I do. I know my weakness, too.”

Fields walked through the parlor to the porch with him. They could see the shadowy traffic about McNamara’s from where they stood for a moment. “I don’t like them all in there,” Fields said. “I hope Mac’s got the sense not to serve them much. They’ll get up groggy and sore in the morning and they’ll be sulking about going down. We’ll get the blame for it. Well, goodnight to you, lad. And thank you for your help.”

Phil went down the street. He looked back before reaching McNamara’s. The sheriff had turned back into the parlor. Beneath the porch light, his worn coat shone green, the rounded slump of his shoulders exaggerated in the play of shadow over them the instant before he passed out of sight.

From where he stood, Phil could hear the hard, cold music of a pounded piano. The rhythm was there, and the skeleton of a tune, but it was not melody. He paused and peered above the half curtains into the smoky room. Several men were slouching around tables and the bar in their heavy shirts, their jackets hung in a row on the wall beyond the piano. At the piano itself, a tall, melancholy looking man was beating the keys, his head bobbing just off the jig-time rhythm. Above him, John L. Sullivan was shivering naked in his picture frame. Nichols glanced up from his usual place at the bar, saw Phil, and waved him in. The reporter held up a glass of milk. “Mac bought the cow for me. He figured it’ll pay off in the long run.”

The rumble of talk among the men had died down with his entrance, leaving the pianist cruelly alone with his playing. They knew he had been in the mine, Phil thought. McNamara looked uneasily from him to the men. He shoved a glass and a bottle before him without speaking.

“I’d be better off with a cow myself,” Phil said, pouring the whiskey.

“Or maybe a goat,” the man next to him said.

Phil glanced in the mirror. The men were all looking at him.

“Will you lay off the murdering of that unfortunate instrument, Frankie,” one of them called out.

In the mirror, Phil saw Frankie quit his playing, the muscles of his back relaxing beneath the wool shirt. Presently he reached for a glass of beer on top of the piano.

“And how’s the dear lady of the boarding house?” McNamara said to him then with a loud, false heartiness.

“Holding her own,” Phil said.

“It isn’t her own she’s holding,” somebody called. Phil recognized the voice and spotted Jerry Whelan then. He was sore at being banished from the widow’s.

“Mind your knitting there, Jerry,” the barkeep said.

“You’d defend her, Mac, and her housing a viper.”

McNamara ignored the remark and looked at Phil. “You better go home, McGovern.”

“I’ll finish my drink.”

He watched Whelan say something to the man next to him and that one get up and go over to the pianist. Frankie nodded and set his glass down. He played a few chords, and the one who had prompted him started singing in a high, lilting voice…

As I went a-walking one morning in spring,

To hear the birds whistle, and nightingales sing,

I heard a fair lady a-making great moan,

Saying I’m a poor stranger, and far from my own.

Nichols was studying the film that had formed on his milk. Phil emptied his glass and poured a second drink.

And as I drew nigh her I made a low jee,

I asked her for pardon for making so free;

My heart, it relented to hear her moan

Saying I’m a poor stranger and far from my home.

The eyes upon him were not cruel. In most of them there was no more than mischief. But they were daring him to stay. He sipped his drink and stayed.

Then gently I asked her if she would be mine,

And help me to tend to my goats and my kine;

She blushed as she answered in sorrowful tone,

Be kind to the stranger, so far from her own.

Even McNamara was looking at him now, the sharp blue eyes prodding him. He lit a cigaret.

I’ll build my love a cottage at the end of this town,

Where the lords, dukes and earls shall not pull it down;

If the boys they should ask you why you live alone,

You can tell them you’re a stranger, and far from your own.

The singer repeated the last chorus, all the men joining in. Phil emptied his drink and turned to face them, leaning his elbow on the bar. When the last chord was struck he laid fifty cents on the bar, pulled up his coat collar and went out.

He was past Lavery’s corner before the sound of the singing left him, and even then it seemed to play on in his head—the warnings of restless men being stirred to further unrest. Dick had been kicked out of McNamara’s the last night of his life. He kept forgetting that. Was it only a matter of time until it happened to all strangers, whatever the provocation or excuse?… “Tell them you’re a stranger and far from your home.”

He could see the lights of the widow’s house above the weblike mist along the ground, and he could hear his own footsteps crunching in the gravel, and the sound of the song still in his head, suddenly thrust out with the wild jangling of the bell on Mrs. O’Grady’s gate. It was a moment before he recognized it. Then he started running. The bell persisted. When he was almost there, he made out that it was Anna. The ringing stopped and the girl hurried down the road toward him. He caught her arm. “Why all the noise, Anna?”

“The gate was stuck. Let go of me.”

“Were you warning them I was coming?”

“You’re nuts,” she said. “Let go of me or I’ll get my father after you.”

He let her go and she ran down the road from him. He hurried through the gate, which gave easily beneath his hand, and into the house.

Only Mrs. O’Grady was in the living room, but it was heavy with hanging cigaret smoke. The old lady looked up from her crochet work. “What’s the matter with you?”

He looked at his watch. The boarders had been in bed for more than an hour. “Since when do you smoke, Mrs. O’Grady?”

“She smokes, doesn’t she? She’s gone up the stairs five minutes ago. Sitting here the night through, smoking like a bad flue.”

“Who was with you?”

“What are you talking, who was with us? Anna went down the hill a minute ago. Come here to me, Philip.”

She looked up into his face. “You’re not jealous on account of that one upstairs, are you?” She jerked her head with the question.

“When I was coming up the hill I heard that bell ringing out there like she was tolling it. She was letting you know I was coming.”

“You’re daft, man. That giddy one puts me out of my mind with her swinging on the gate like an infant.”

“At ten o’clock at night?”

“Go upstairs and ask her then. She’s pining to see you, sitting here listening the night for the sound of your step on the back porch. Go up!”

Phil took off his coat and sat down on the sofa opposite her. He lit a cigaret. The old lady fanned the smoke of it from between them. “I never mind a good pipe, but them things smell like the back of a barn. My unfortunate plants’ll be choked with them.”

“That African violet has a new flower,” he said. “It looks to be thriving.”

“Did you notice that? My, you’re the observing one. It came out this morning when we were all out of the house to the funeral. Do you know, I think they like to be left to themselves now and then. They’re almost like people.”

Phil studied the end of his cigaret and then brushed the ash into the coal bucket. “Why did you ask Margaret here, Mrs. O’Grady?”

“Och, the poor, lorn creature. I felt sorry for her, seeing her up there yesterday. And trying so hard to make him out doing some good in the world.” She snapped the crochet thread between her teeth.

“The poor lorn creature can take care of herself and you know it,” Phil said. “Tell me the truth.”

The old lady’s eyes narrowed to the size of two little pearls. “I’ll tell it to you when I know it. Now go and fetch us the medicine bottle from the cubby. My bones are rusted with the chill of the night.”

Chapter 23

ONCE MORE PHIL AWAKENED to the sound of the regular boarders rising. They got up like thunder, he thought, and turned his face toward the window. The bed creaked beneath his weight. It was strange to lie there and hear the sound of the wind, the shaking of the kitchen grate, the rattle of the pump, the heavy steps of the men in the hall, and the gruff voice of one as he called for the other. Sleep would not return, but the warmth of the bed held him, and he thought a moment of his room at home—the dash he would make to the thermostat in the hall, and the quick rush of heat through the ventilators. No thermostats in Winston.

The men were downstairs now at their silent breakfast of porridge with syrup, eggs and salt pork—dispensed from the Lenten fasts. They went into Number Two. He wondered if the men were going down in Number Three that morning. A sound, like the branch of a tree brushing against the window, disturbed the quiet, so acute when the heavy footsteps had gone down the stairs. There was no tree that high outside the window—mice probably. They would be in the walls of this old house and in the attic. O’Grady had built it fifty years before, thinking to raise a family in it, and all that had ever grown in it were flowers and mice, and the wife he left three weeks after taking her growing old.

He groped for the string to the ceiling light fixture. Catching it, he was reminded of the string Fields had picked up in the mine room where Laughlin died. What had he made of it? He was not saying that. There were many things he did not say until the well chosen moment. He thought of Margaret Coffee then—for the first time since waking—and with detachment, or at least, without the sting of wanting, of knowing that she lay in the room next to his. He got out of bed and dressed, feeling extraordinarily good. The closest comparison he could find for the feeling was a good confession, or the further vigor he would enjoy having sluiced himself with water in the widow’s back kitchen.

The men were leaving when he went downstairs, and he got a civil greeting from them—because he had put heart into his greeting, he realized. The widow watched him through the first decent meal he had eaten in her house.

“There,” she said, pulling a napkin from the glass and giving it to him, “that’ll stay the morning with you. I never knew a one could put a decent face on him with an empty stomach.”

Phil emptied his coffee cup and permitted her to fill it. She half refilled her own. “I’ve often thought to myself, the reason we get hell and chastisement of a Sunday morning is the unfortunate priest having to preach without a morsel between him and salvation. You don’t hear the Protestants preaching hell and damnation in the morning, do you now?”

“I haven’t listened very often,” Phil said.

She shook her head. “I remember my mother saying at home, it’s the easy religion to live in, but the hard one to die in.” She thought about that a moment. “They’ve the queer sayings, for my own notion is when you’re ready to die, it’s small matter the one seeing you out. It’s the one seeing you in that counts. Do you know I was thinking of my Tim the whole night?”

She rubbed at the marks left by dirty sleeves on the oilcloth, and then looked up at him. “Do you think when my time’s come he’ll recognize me at all?”

“You’ll stand out in a hundred million souls, old lady,” he said, getting up.

She grinned at him gratefully. “I’ve done a few good things in my day along with the bad, although there’s times I’m hard put to account them. Where are you off to?”

He got his coat from the living room. “I don’t know for sure. I’m going back up that hill first—just to look again, and to think.”

She pulled herself up and followed him to the door. “And listen, Philip. Just listen. There’s things you hear listening, you’d never hear talking.”

“Speaking of hearing things, you’ve mice in the attic. I heard them this morning.”

“What?”

“Mice,” he repeated. “I think they’re in the attic.”

“Will you stop by Lavery’s then and have him save me a kitten? He’s having them round the store every week or so. And throw open the door to the chicken coop there on your way out.”

He stopped first at Lavery’s. On the porch, the milk cans were lined up, and beside them a wired bundle of newspapers. Through the front window he could see Lavery stoking the stove. He picked up the papers and carried them in. “Can I have one of these?”

“Help yourself. There’s a clipper there on the counter for the wire.”

Phil opened the bundle and then paged the Cincinnati paper. Nichols’ wire story was on page two. Tomorrow, page sixteen, he thought.

Lavery wiped his hands on his trousers and took one of the papers himself.

“Page two,” Phil said. “‘Sheriff orders search of inactive coal mine in journalist’s death.’”

“Bad business,” Lavery said. “The men are nervous as wild birds in a cage. Fields ought not have done that.”

“Even if it means solving Coffee’s death?”

“I’ll lay you ten to one it don’t solve it. And I say: even so, if it means the men are going out again and the closing of the whole mine in the end. There’s people who’ll starve over that, and all it is is a slower way of dying. It’s all very well for outsiders like yourself to come down here crying for justice over a man. There’s some of them down here crying for justice fifty years or more, and they’re miserable when they’ve got it in their hands.” Lavery folded the paper and put it back with the stack. “Life ain’t so damned expensive around here as it is some places.”

“What the devil kind of logic is that?” Phil said. “If Coffee was doing a job down here it was for the men’s good. He wasn’t the sort to come here to exploit them.”

Lavery aimed at the spittoon, missed it, and rubbed his foot viciously on the floor. “Didn’t he? Don’t tell me about Naperville. I know all about it. He went in there when the explosion was done. He did up a fine story on it and got a medal for it. Congressmen went down and shook their heads over it, John L. Lewis shouted himself hoarse and proclaimed a mourning. A hundred high mucky-mucks beat their breasts in front of the world, and donated enough money to keep the families alive for the year. There were seventy-seven men died. Four hundred and seventy-seven lived. What happened to them? Did they go back to a better, safer place to work? They did not. The mine was closed. So don’t talk to me about Naperville.”

“It was you who brought it up,” Phil said. “Give me a package of cigarets.”

Lavery went round the counter and gave him the brand he pointed to. “Do you see the sense of what I’m saying, man?”

“The sense but not the solution,” Phil said. It was the old two-headed monster: progress and obsoleteness. Men didn’t change skills the way they changed shirts. Nor did industries convert themselves, although their chance was better. He opened the cigaret package. “Mrs. O’Grady wants a kitten from your next batch.”

“I can give her choice now of five generations.”

Chapter 24

HE SAT ATOP THE CLIFF a long time, watching the rise of smoke above Number Two and along the tracks. He heard the trains rattle as cars coupled and uncoupled, and the occasional shouts of men. All the sounds seemed to come to him in twos. The sun was trying to break through a barrage of clouds. He saw Rebecca Glasgow come out of the house far below him, and flattened himself to the ground lest she look up and see him, and decide not to graze the goats that day. He heard the thin bleat of the animals at the sight of her, and saw them prance around her as she threw the gate open. She herded them out toward the valley. Waiting, he rolled over on his back on the hard frosty ground. A flight of sparrows rose into the sky, moving soundlessly above him.

Listen, the widow had told him. He had listened and watched for over an hour. He closed his eyes. Sound was a little different when sight did not locate it. He heard a crow, two crows, and mentally traced their flight. Opening his eyes, he was amazed not to see them where he expected. There was only one crow flying, and it was at the opposite end of the valley from where he had expected it to be.

He stood up then and called out to Rebecca Glasgow. His voice rode round the hills. She looked at him, her hand flying up to wave and then falling away. He had startled her. Dick had called to her in this fashion, perhaps. He called again, sending the words “Answer me,” after her name.

She cupped her hands and called “Hello.” Her voice came, thin and strident, without echo.

He waved her toward him between the end of the cliff and the low slope that ran to the railroad sidings. Catching something of his excitement, she hurried the goats before her. One of them leaped over the first rise of the rocks and fled toward the track. Rebecca followed him and turned him back.

“Call me from there,” Phil shouted.

He heard his own voice coming back, apparently before she heard it at all. Then she called out, “Hello, up there.”

He saw her cup her hands, but it was several seconds before her voice reached him. He turned to the direction from which it seemed to come—the hill opposite the mine drift mouth. The experience was like seeing a sound film that was inaccurately synchronized. A moment’s wariness froze him where he stood. No one could have known these hills, the sound, the smell and the feel of them better than Rebecca Glasgow. But seeing her eager haste that he had awakened, he ran down the hill to meet her. The goats eyed him a moment and then skipped off.

“Let them go,” she said. “What is it?”

“Have you ever heard the echoes up there?”

“Many times.”

“Your voice came from the hill over there, not from where you were at all. I want to find out if the same thing happens calling out from there.”

“I’ll go,” she said. “Tell me where you want me to call from.”

“We’ll try it several places, both of us.”

He watched her long, sure strides down the slope. The goats bleated and trotted after her a way, and then settled in the valley near the drift mouth to munch their meager grazings. The echoes of their exchanges from different points varied in intensity. They moved along the hills, parallel to each other, and then zigzag. Several times he saw her draw a sight on him, lining him up with some familiar object. He did not know the landscape that well. It would only add confusion if he were to try it. Finally they met near the abandoned mouth. Her eyes upon him were intense. He wondered if his own were as wild.

“Could there be another entry to this section, Rebecca?”

“More than one. There’s one between our place and the face of the cliff.”

“That wouldn’t do. There’s no echo reaches the top there from your place. They’re all back here.”

Without speaking, she led the way through the valley. For a time Phil traced in his mind the mine entry beneath him. That, too, was confusion. He could not begin to be accurate in his recollection of the course they had taken underground. After several hundred yards, they came upon another entry, this one almost obscured by the shaggy overgrowth. A rabbit darted out from it. Phil jumped. For an instant a quick, nervous smile played across the woman’s face. It was the first time he had seen a trace of one in her.

“Did you ever see Laughlin around here?”

“No. Your friend was never here, either, that I know of. I had forgotten about it.”

Phil examined the rotting boards without touching them. They looked to have been undisturbed for many years. It was Rebecca who hunted through the scrub around it and broke off a good-sized stick. She brought it back and pried it between one of the boards and the frame. The board gave before the stick did.

Phil nodded. “It’s been used lately, all right. I don’t think we’d better go any further without the sheriff.”

Already the dankness from within the mine escaped to them. “Will you go up toward the cliff… No, I’ll go. You stay here and listen.”

“I’ll go,” she said. “I’m used to climbing.”

No word had passed between them yet as to the meaning of their exploration. But Phil was well aware of it the moment he heard her voice bounce back from the opposite hill, where she was standing near the cliff from which Dick had fallen. He waved with both hands, a signal of satisfaction, and went to meet her.

He offered her a cigaret. “Do you smoke, Rebecca?” He realized then he had used her first name before without thinking about it.

“I’d like a cigaret now, if you please.” The fingers in which she took it trembled.

As he cupped the match for her and held it, he saw that she was crying. She could not cry easily, he thought. Nor would her tears come from some transient emotion…because she would not permit herself such emotional indulgence in his presence. He did not meet her eyes when they rose to his above the match. He lighted his own cigaret and then pointed to the hill opposite the cliff. “What’s over behind there, Rebecca?”

“Another hill.”

“But between them are the railroad tracks?”

“Yes.”

“Does this hill have as abrupt a drop as the one Dick fell from?”

“No. The rise is about the same, but the decline is more gradual. Only near the tracks there’s a drop of about twelve feet.”

Phil nodded. “Then if Dick came out this entry—say he came out in a hurry, thinking it was the one at the other end of the valley—if he had come out here and it was dark, he might have run up the hill toward your place, thinking he was going in the opposite direction.”

“Yes. That could very well have happened,” she said. “He was probably guiding himself by the sound of the train, and was actually following the echo.”

“It isn’t too farfetched to suppose that he was following someone, is it?” Phil said evenly, although he felt the tension straightening every fiber of him.

“No. It’s not farfetched. Dick knew these hills well. He must have been rather desperate to take the chance.”

“The person he was following must have known the deception of the hills, too.”

“I don’t know that,” Rebecca said.

“You know it as well as I do,” Phil said. “We’re both trying to get at the truth by looking at all the possibilities. Aren’t we?”

She did not answer him.

How great was her loyalty to Glasgow, he wondered. Before he and Margaret had come to Winston, it was common knowledge that Fields had started on that tack, Glasgow’s having killed him, using the time alibi of his work. Randy Nichols had picked it up within an hour of getting into town. His next question was abrupt, but he hoped that her thinking might parallel his own and make it seem a natural part of their combined exploration.

“Why did you marry Glasgow?”

“Because he asked me. Because I was sick of my father’s solicitude and the town’s contempt. I thought a husband—I don’t know what I thought a husband was. Happiness, I guess.”

“Have you been happy with him?”

She looked at him then, her long face old and homely in its bitterness. She brushed the tears away without shame. “Dick asked me that, too. I’ll tell you the truth, Mr. McGovern. I’d like to see him hang for Dick’s murder.” She turned her back on him and hurried through the valley. Nor would she wait when he called to her. Instead, she began running, and he could imagine the tears falling freely. He walked in the opposite direction, past the newly found entry, coming presently to the highway. There he hitched a ride into town in the first farm truck passing.

Chapter 25

THE SHERIFF WAS AT his desk when Phil reached Krancow’s. He listened to Phil’s story without interruption, but his face showed no enthusiasm for it. “I thought about that some,” he said finally. “I didn’t get it worked out like you did, of course. But the truth is, I’ve been afraid of it coming out that way.”

“Why?”

Fields rubbed his chin with the flat of his hand. “How do you think you can bring an indictment for murder against an echo?”

“At least we can prove it wasn’t suicide,” Phil said.

Fields looked at him. “Would you settle for that?”

“Not if it was murder.”

Fields shrugged. “Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe before we’re done we’ll both be glad to settle for it. Now I’ll give you some more information on your friend. He did a lot of traveling between the sixth of December and coming down here. Last night I checked it with the stories you brought me of his. He flew to Los Angeles December eighth, and from there to New Orleans, December fifteenth. Between then and January eleventh, he covered every doggone town on your list except Detroit. Everyone since after the war, that is.”

“What did he do in them?”

“I don’t know that yet. I got this information from the Chicago police. And I still don’t know where he was the two weeks before he got here.”

“You know that he came by way of Naperville,” Phil reminded him.

“Yes. I know that. I’ve been reminded plenty of it. Too much, maybe. And I know he had a five-hour stopover at Cleveland.” Fields got up and locked his desk. “Any notion why he wouldn’t go back to Detroit when he was going all the other places?”

“Yes,” Phil said. “Margaret wasn’t with him in Detroit.”

Margaret was on the back porch when they drove up, throwing feed over the railing to the chickens.

“Looks real domestic, don’t she?” Fields said. “I never seen her kind outside the movies. And they weren’t feeding chickens.”

She waited for them, apparently hoping to talk outdoors, Phil thought. Fields motioned her into the house.

“Brush your feet there,” the widow called out. “Anna’s after scrubbing the floor, and I can’t spare her doing it again.”

Anna couldn’t spare it either, Phil thought.

Inside the house, Margaret turned and waited, only mildly curious.

“I wanted to ask you, Mrs. Coffee,” Fields started, “was your husband home much the last couple of months before he came down here?”

“I already told you that, Sheriff. He was away a great deal of the time.”

“Any notion where he was?”

“Yes. He was revisiting the places he had done his work on.”

“Why didn’t you tell us that till now?”

“It didn’t seem pertinent.”

“Maybe you’d like to tell me some other things now didn’t seem pertinent.”

Margaret did not answer, but her face was defiant. Mrs. O’Grady rattled the pump, but she, too, was waiting.

“Do you know what he was doing there?” Fields said finally.

“I know what he learned there. In every place he went, he found the grass as thick as before he had taken the scythe to it. He found the same corruption, the same bigotry, the same stupidity. Naperville was closed down entirely. That was part of his despair.”

Fields did not take his eyes from her face. “And Detroit, Mrs. Coffee—why didn’t he go back there?”

“That was where he did a story on fascism,” she said evenly.

It was the sheriff who gave ground, or seemed to. The word, and not her implication, backed him up to recalculate. It came too readily, an intended shocker, true or false. But Lavery’s account that morning of the closing down of Naperville fit so perfectly into her story of Dick’s disillusionment that Phil, too, felt the need to recapitulate.

Mrs. O’Grady came from the pump and caught his arm. She pressed her fingers into the muscle. “There’s a sight of difference between a word and a deed, and the devil a man ever turned a deed was afraid of the name of it.”

She moved between him and the sheriff, and sat down at the table opposite Margaret.

Phil caught her meaning the instant he saw Margaret’s eyes on the old woman. Whatever allegiance was between them, it was not bound in love. “Margaret,” he said, “would it be that Dick went to Ann Arbor instead of Detroit?”

“I don’t know,” she said placidly. “In those days he did not confide in me. But why should he have gone to Ann Arbor?”

“Because that’s where you were waiting for him while he did the job on the shirt organization.”

She smiled. “Believe me, Phil, these last trips were not sentimental journeys.”

Fields joined them at the table. “I wonder if you have the letter your husband sent, telling you that he was in Winston, Mrs. Coffee?”

“No. I destroyed it.”

“Why?”

She spread her hands. “There was no reason to keep it. It was a letter he might as well have sent to the post office.”

“You didn’t keep it for the address?”

“General Delivery, Winston, is not hard to remember, Sheriff.”

“And you didn’t hear from him again?”

“I told you that.”

Fields nodded. “How often did you write to him?”

“Twice. Once from home, and once from Cincinnati.”

“I wonder what he did with the first letter,” Fields said.

Margaret shrugged.

“Do you mind telling me what you said in it, Mrs. Coffee?”

“You read the second letter, didn’t you?”

Fields admitted that he had.

“It was very much the same. Only then I asked him to write to me. I went to Cincinnati because he did not answer.”

Phil, watching Mrs. O’Grady, saw her face pucker, almost as though something was tickling her nose.

“When you were in Cincinnati,” Fields persisted, “what did you do?”

Margaret got up impatiently. “Wait. What did I ever do all my life with Dick Coffee but wait.”

Fields, too, got up. “So much, it’s gotten to be a habit with you. Is that it, Mrs. Coffee?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Are you doing anything here in Winston, besides waiting?”

Margaret shook her head, but the widow answered for her. “She’s keeping me from my loneliness,” the old lady said. “We’re the consolation of one another in our misery.”

Chapter 26

THE SHERIFF LET THE car slide into gear turning out of the widow’s driveway.

“Did Mrs. O’Grady have the opportunity of going over Dick’s things before you put the lock on the door?” Phil asked.

“She’d have a tough time getting up the stairs, but I guess it’s possible. Why?”

“I got the impression she might have seen that letter you asked Margaret about, the one she’s supposed to have written from Chicago.”

Fields reached inside his jacket and drew a letter from his pocket. He gave it to Phil. It was the letter Margaret Coffee had written her husband from Cincinnati. Phil read:

“Dearest,

This silence is more than I deserve. I shall wait here until Friday in the hope that you will come. Or, if you say the word, I shall wait here forever.

Margaret.”

Phil returned it to the sheriff.

“When you saw her there in Chicago, McGovern, do you remember her telling you if she’d heard from her husband?”

Phil thought about it a moment. “Yes. She said he was gone two weeks before she knew where he was, even.”

“But did she say he’d written to her?”

“Not explicitly,” Phil said after a moment. “But she told me I could write him here, General Delivery.”

“That’s as well directed mail as anybody gets here,” Fields said. “Just on a hunch, I’m wondering if he told her he was here at all. Or if maybe she didn’t find it out on her own.”

“Who would she find it out from?”

Fields glanced at him. “From Mrs. O’Grady?”

“Why?”

“I can give you a wherefore for every why. She’s got things down too smooth to suit me. Take that business about Naperville shutting up. Coffee wasn’t back there till he was on his way here. It’s no secret, of course, that Naperville’s closed…” He shook his head. “It just looks like she’s got all her ducks lined up in a row, and I keep wondering what would happen if we knocked one of them out of line too soon for her.”

He looked at his watch. “I’m going over to see the mine people now. Want to come?”

“Sure. Aren’t you going back to the mine?”

“After the meeting. I’ve sent a deputy up for fingerprint equipment. I’d like to see if there’s any prints on that still.”

An official of the Winston Collieries from their main office in Cleveland was waiting with Lempke at the Number Three office. There were brief introductions, and Lempke took the offensive immediately. “We’ve been going over production figures, Sheriff. Do you know how many ton we’ve hoisted in the last month?”

“I didn’t think you had enough to measure it. How many men went down this morning?”

“Less than fifty. Let me ask you something else, Sheriff. Do you know what it costs to resume hoisting after a layoff?”

“Look,” Fields said, “I know you’ve got a legitimate complaint. That’s why I’m working night and day trying to clean this up.”

“Are you any closer to it than you were the first of the week?”

“I think I am. But I’m not making any promises.”

The man from Cleveland spoke then. “Lempke here has given me an account of the inquest proceedings, Sheriff. It seems to me the thing is only vaguely connected with the mines—much too vaguely to warrant the emphasis you’ve placed on it. Isn’t there considerable evidence that Coffee might have leaped to his death?”

“There’s some might be taken that way.”

“Wouldn’t it be better for all concerned here if that were the case?”

“For everybody excepting the dead man,” Fields said.

“Well, the dead have buried the dead for a long time, so to speak, haven’t they?” the man said easily. “It’s the men who have to keep themselves alive that are primarily our concern now. Sheriff, you must look at the cold facts.”

“I know,” Fields interrupted. “I know the cold facts. I don’t see how you could make them any colder for me. There’s one thing bothering me where you gentlemen are concerned….”

“Laughlin’s death?” Lempke asked when he hesitated.

Fields looked at him. “Yeah.”

“You and I know the coroner has a personal grudge there. He resents the mines being taken out of his jurisdiction. Are you questioning whether Laughlin died of the gas?”

“No. I talked with Doc Turpel. He knows gas. I’m satisfied with that part of it for now. Matter of fact, that wasn’t what I had in mind. I just found out Coffee was in Cleveland a few hours before coming down here. And I know he contacted your people. Now this gentleman from Cleveland or nobody else connected with the Winston Collieries has volunteered that information to me. I had to have it checked through the hotel phone calls where he took a room. Don’t that strike you as peculiar, Mr. Lempke, when they instructed you to give me every cooperation?”

Lempke looked to his superior for an answer.

“Yes,” the Cleveland man said, “very peculiar. Will you believe me, Sheriff, when I tell you this is my first knowledge of such a call?”

“I won’t have any choice but to believe you if you find out for me in the next few hours what he wanted there.”

“I’ll put through a call immediately.”

“I’d appreciate that,” Fields said. He turned to Lempke. “You aren’t going to like this, but I want to go down in that section of Number Three again. I want your diagrams of it, showing all the old drift entries.”

There was a quick exchange of glances between Lempke and his superior. “All right,” Lempke said. “I’ll take you down in the morning.”

“No. I’ve been in the mines before. I want to go down alone, or with McGovern here to help me. I don’t want any more of us tracking it up till I’ve been over it myself. And I want to go now.”

Again Lempke and his superior exchanged glances. The man from mine headquarters nodded, and Lempke took the plans of the mine from his desk. He explained them to the sheriff.

The extent and limit of their cooperation was all decided beforehand, Phil thought. There was something in their attitude that intimated they intended giving Fields enough rope to hang himself. He was convinced of it when he started to the door with the sheriff and the Cleveland man called after them: “Sheriff, isn’t bootlegging a federal offense?”

“Yes, it is,” Fields said slowly.

“Have you contacted the federal authorities?”

“I haven’t seen anything that was bootlegged yet, sir. We’ve found the accoutrements of it, but that don’t prove the stuff was made and sold. All you need to close the place tight is a flock of federal men moving in there. I’m going to try and give them a package. But like you say, if I get hold of the stuff, I’ll be the first one to bring them in.”

Rebecca Glasgow was herding the goats into the yard in back of the house when they passed. Phil waved, but if she saw him, she gave no sign of it.

“The husband home?” Fields asked.

“I don’t know. She doesn’t talk much about him, except that she’d like to see him hang for Dick’s murder.”

“They must have a real chummy life,” Fields said.

He drove beyond the cliff and parked the car opposite the valley where the two entries were. Phil helped with the lamps and his fingerprint kit. As they trudged toward the entry, the three-o’clock siren sounded. Fields checked his watch with it. “Well, them that’s down are coming up now. I wonder how many’ll go down again in the morning.”

At the mouth Phil and Rebecca had found, Fields removed the boards. The touch of his hand was sufficient. He examined the floor near the entry before going in cautiously. “Footprints don’t mean very much, in spite of all you hear about them,” he explained. “Especially in the stuff we’re coming into.”

Their underground journey was similar to the one they had taken the day before, the smell and coloring of the dank passage familiar. Fields chalked the walls as they passed. Now and then he paused to study the floor under his lamp. “This is a pretty well-worn track,” he said. “Matter of fact, it’s better worn than the way we came in yesterday. If they was using an automobile to transport the stuff, I’ll bet….”

He did not finish the sentence. From somewhere in the darkness ahead of them came a noise like muffled gunshot. The noise was small, but the floor beneath them vibrated with increasing intensity. They careened crazily with the shock. The light in Field’s hand wavered with the sway of his body, but he did not fall. In a few seconds the floor steadied beneath them, but the walls gave off an acid-like smell.

“Goddam,” Fields said. “Come on back, McGovern.”

He kept his light to the wall, and picking up one marking after another, they scrambled on as though the ground were actually giving way beneath their feet. He made sure of the next marking, however, before leaving the last. Before they reached the mouth, a swirl of smoke and dust overtook them from the depth of the mine where the explosion had taken place. It seared their throats and nostrils, and worst of all, stung their eyes so that they imagined flashes of light where there were none. Fields stopped and shoved his electric torch into Phil’s hand. “Stand still. I’ve goggles in that kit.”

It seemed to take him an eternity to reach them. The only sound now was an occasional crackling, like the snapping of twigs, in the walls around them. Phil rubbed his eyes. For an instant he could see the sheriff, the light of the unguided torch playing over his sweating face. Phil directed the light on the box. He saw the lid of it open before his eyes bleared again.

In a moment, Fields straightened up and caught his arm. He led Phil into the open as though he were a blind man. They lay on the ground a moment, choking and retching. Behind them, the smoke billowed out of the opening. Fields got up, wiped his eyes, and looked around.

“Where’s the other entry, McGovern?”

Phil pointed in its direction. There was no sign of smoke from that end of the valley. The two men hurried to the mouth there. A thin film of dust wafted from it, no thicker than the rays of a winter sun. Even as they watched, it thickened a little, but not to near the intensity of the flow from the entry they had just left.

“Take the car and go for Lempke,” Fields said. “Tell him to bring masks. I don’t think that was more than a local blast, but I’m willing to bet right now it wiped out any information we might of wanted from down there.”

Chapter 27

“IT’S LIKE A BLOODY octopus, that’s what it is, with its catacombs waiting to suck a man in.”

“Shut up, Billy, and take your drink. You’ve got my flesh creeping.”

Phil stood at the bar with Nichols, listening to the complaining men in the back of the room. He was tolerated now—ignored or tolerated, sharing at least one misery with them, the waiting.

The force of the explosion had not been sufficient to carry into the present diggings, but word of it soon passed through the town. For several hours, subsequent explosions were awaited, but they had not come. The danger of cave-in handicapped the exploration, and now as the evening wore on, the men drifted back to McNamara’s to await the outcome and word as to whether they would be expected to go down in the morning.

The playing cards lay in a pile on the table, around which sat a dozen men, their taste for the game dulled. Phil knew some of them by name now—Billy Riordon, the O’Halloran brothers, Tom Cavanaugh—and the rest by face.

Cavanaugh got up and rubbed his hands down his buttocks. “I’m getting carbuncles on my backside with the sitting,” he groaned.

“They’ll match the pair on your knees from the crawling then.”

“Aye, but the devil a mouth of food they’ll earn me. How long do you think Lavery’ll carry us? And the contract negotiations coming up in June and us maybe going out then with a reason. I say the hell with all superstitions. When your time in this world is up, it’s up and there’s an end to it.” He blew his nose a honking blast.

“Will you listen to the one was turning blue and green going down this morning? He’s the brave one with a glass in his hand. Tell me, Tom, what’ll you do in the morning if they order us in?”

“Aw stick it, will you, Billy? The morning’s a ways off yet.”

“There’s a bad sign when a woman’s been in the mines. As long as she’s around living….”

“Can it!”

Billy humped over his glass of beer, measuring the amount left, Phil thought.

“They’re on edge, McGovern,” Nichols said.

Phil lit a cigaret. “They’ve got reason. I won’t ever forget the feeling in that tunnel.”

“Where’s the sheriff?”

“Still out there. They’ve got him in a hell of a spot.”

“There’s no gas in the mine, they tell us,” Billy keened over his empty glass. “Do you remember them telling us that in 1938, was it? They’re as pure as the mountain air. And sure the graveyard’s swimming with the pieces.” His voice rose like an evangelist’s. “Their souls were exploded to heaven.”

“Shut your gab for the love of heaven, man,” McNamara shouted.

“Then set me a drink on the book.”

“If you drained the barrel it wouldn’t improve your disposition. Sit there a while and count your blessings.”

“I can count them for you on this hand!” Riordon shouted. He waved the hand at McNamara on which three fingers were missing.

A cold chill ran over Phil. “Give him a drink,” he said through his teeth. He remembered the dancing little man of just two days before, when they voted a return to work. The dancing feet were still now, or shuffling, one foot on the other beneath the table.

“They’ve had enough charity from strangers,” someone said, coming up to the bar from behind him. In the mirror he saw the bloated face of Jerry Whelan, and even as he spoke, he gave off the foul smell of stale liquor. “I’ll buy a round,” the taxi man said. “Set us up eight of them.”

McNamara’s eyes were on him like the tongues of snakes. “You’d be better buying a bottle of milk for the kids.”

The reprimand rolled off Whelan like sweat. “That’s no way to talk to a customer, Mac.” He laid a dirty dollar bill on the bar. “Put them there on a tray, and I’ll save you the trouble of carting them.”

One by one the beaded glasses were drawn. Whelan rocked back and forth, waiting. He winked at Phil in the mirror. McNamara picked up the bill, and brought back twenty cents.

“Aw now, Mac. You’ve been charging the boys a nickel since their trouble. You’ve no reason to take advantage of my generosity.”

“To hell with your generosity. My price is a dime.”

Whelan shrugged and ambled back to the table with the tray.

“If I knew of a whorehouse in Winston,” McNamara said under his breath, “I’d swear to God he was their pimp.”

True to the barkeep’s prediction, Riordon drained his glass and began a litany of the disasters that had overtaken the Number Three mine. The men settled morosely beside him, and he wove his tale as an old woman would croon a lullaby to the one grandchild left her…the heroes and the cowards, and the giants laid low…the wailing of women and the cry of children at the smoke-scarred tipples. Other men drifted in from the gathering murk of a Winston twilight, some pausing at the bar, and some roaming back to listen, as the crying voice of the maimed miner droned on. Phil and Nichols stood, as though the power to leave had been taken from them, and behind the bar McNamara wiped his sweating face on his apron. Whelan sat beside Riordon, weeping a drunken flow of tears.

Finally McNamara brought his fist down on the bar with a blow that toppled the glasses set there. The men looked up at him as though startled out of a dream. “You’ll go home to your supper now, Billy Riordon,” he said quietly. “We’ve had enough of your keening.”

Riordon looked at him stupidly. Cavanaugh got up. “Mac’s right, Billy. You’ve the magic spell on your tongue when you’re wound up.”

“Aye,” someone added. “There’s the spell of magic on all of us. We can’t work and we can’t be idle. They’ve made us as leave trust the strangers as the men giving us work.”

“You’re right, Gabby,” Whelan shouted, clambering to his feet. “The curse of hell on all foreigners in Winston.”

“And on them that give them shelter!” Riordon added.

McNamara went to the end of the bar and took off his apron. “You stupid gobbeens,” he shouted, waving his hand. “There’s a country laying in two parts over there, and some of us banished from it forever because the ignorant likes of you took it over. You listen to the mouth nearest your ear and go wild at its bidding. Go home and listen to your children crying. There’s no superstition in that!”

“Will you look at the hackle rise on the man?”

“He’s a tender spot, you see, and we put our finger in it.”

“The tender old lady, the dear widow of Og…”

Phil lost track of the baiting voices, for the men had bunched around McNamara, jostling one another in the first sport they had that day. Beside him Nichols swore out loud.

“The one wouldn’t throw him a kiss unless she was chewing tobacco…”

“Mac, I’ve an idea!” someone shouted. “Why don’t you ask her to marry you? She’s got a pump in her kitchen, man. You heard what the old man of magic said at the hearing. She’s been waiting by it all these years to be turned from an old toad into Queen Maeve.”

“Aye, Mac! Speak up! You’ll go blind with the gold of her hair!”

“And she’ll sing to you, Mac! You’ll think it’s the nightingales calling…”

“Or the harps of Tara!”

“Oh, what a glorious transformation from an old bagpipe, and him only to say the word.” It was Whelan said that, wheeling around on Phil and spitting the words into his face.

Phil tightened his fist, and Nichols caught his arm. “They’re waiting for that, you damned fool. They’ll make a shambles of you.”

Whelan brushed the dripping sweat from the tip of his nose and threw back his head laughing. The laughter stopped abruptly as did the whorl of sounds in the barroom. McNamara had come round the bar, his eyes two slits of wrath. He caught the taxi man by the collar of his coat and lifted him off the ground. He set him down with a violence that brought the slobber to Whelan’s mouth.

“You’re a trouble-maker, Jerry Whelan, and I’ve never been afraid of trouble in my life.” He dragged him to the door and pitched him into the street. He whirled around. “I’ll sweep the whole damn lot of youse out if you don’t go now of your own power.”

He returned to the bar and put on his apron. One by one the men departed.

“Can we buy a drink?” Nichols asked.

McNamara shoved the bottle over to him without speaking, and then turned his back on them. He pulled a drawer open on the backbar, and for a second Phil saw a glint of steel, and in the sudden stillness, he heard the click of a cartridge chamber as the big Irishman checked the revolver.

Phil downed his drink and went outdoors. The street lights flickered on while he was standing outside the tavern, and as he became used to the half-light, he saw the men standing in clusters, hunched and cold, but reluctant to move on to their dismal homes. Their wives would be grim-faced, their children wide-eyed, and there would be no talk or laughter in the house…an early bed to save on light bills, to quiet hunger, to still complaint.

A few doors down the street, Whelan and Billy Riordon were peering in the window of the drugstore. Whelan gave a great shout: “Ho, boys! Come look who we found in the store here!”

The men lurched across the street to join him. There were no more than a dozen of them, tired, resentful men, with the wind catching at the legs of their pants like a cur dog.

“What would you say he’s buying? A blister maybe. Do you remember the blisters in the old country? And Lord, aren’t we the ones could blister a man if he was asking it? A blistered magician!”

The words cut through Phil like a knife. He swung back into the tavern. “McNamara, they’re up the street here waiting for Clauson to come out. I think there’s trouble.”

The big Irishman had his coat on in an instant. With Nichols and Phil he moved down the street. A burst of raucous laughter arose from the men gathered at the drugstore door, and they knew Clauson had come out. McNamara peeled the men off one by one and reached the old magician.

A sullen quiet settled over the group, and Clauson looked from one face to another in terror. He did not know foe from friend, and certainly he expected McNamara to be the last one to befriend him.

“Go on, you stinking cowards,” McNamara shouted. “One of youse lay a hand on him and I’ll blow you into the next county.”

Phil caught a glimmer of the revolver in his hand. The men fell further away from him. McNamara pocketed the gun, and took Clauson by the arm. “We’ll find the sheriff and you can make charges against this bunch of heroes.”

Clauson withdrew his arm. “I have no charges.”

“Make them, for God’s sake, man. They’ll take you for a coward if you don’t. They’ll be back at your throat when there’s no gun at their bellies.”

“Why should I charge them? Are they less afraid than I am? I will go home, and they will go home.”

“I’ll walk you out there, Mr. Clauson,” Phil said.

McNamara shook his head. He whirled around on the sullen men standing there, most of them not knowing what they might have done. “All right, you heard the man! Go home to your suppers. What you need is the fear of God put in you when you start acting up like this.”

“What they need is peace,” Clauson said, following Phil as he elbowed a way through ahead of him.

“We’ll be a long time forgetting this, Mac,” someone said.

“Use your head, man. You’d be a longer time forgetting it, if I hadn’t come out. How do you think you’d feel in the morning if you’d laid your hands on an old man?” He started for the tavern and then turned back on them. “Come round peaceable after your suppers and I’ll stand you a beer or two.”

Nichols went into the tavern with him, and Phil walked with the magician through the dim streets.

“All I wanted was a bottle of alcohol,” the old man said, as though he could not understand it at all. He repeated the sentence several times before they reached his house.

There, the sheriff’s car was parked in the driveway, and they could see Fields and Rebecca talking in the living room. Phil asked the old man where Glasgow was as they went up the steps.

“Working, I suppose. He has been gone since early morning. I wish that he would not return.”

Phil told the sheriff what had happened. Once more Clauson repeated: “And all I wanted was a bottle of alcohol.” He sat down wearily.

“By the sheriff’s calculations, you should have quite a supply of it, Papa,” Rebecca said.

The old man looked at her, not understanding, and then away at nothing in particular. He was almost beyond caring, either, Phil thought.

Fields took his hat from the table. “I’d stay away from town except in the daytime, Mr. Clauson. I’m going to round up as many deputies as I can. But with the mine the way it is now, I can’t even be sure of them not turning on me.”

Phil rode back to town with him. “We won’t know anything out there till morning,” Fields said. “It’s slow business. Who started the fracas in town?”

“It started in the tavern. Jerry Whelan in a way. He bought a round of beer. Then they started to rib McNamara about the widow and he threw Whelan out.”

“He’s a bad actor, that one,” Fields said. “He’s always around when there’s trouble. He thrives on it.”

“Could he be in the pay of someone?”

Fields slowed down to cross the tracks. “I don’t know. Before this explosion I might of thought so. But this business puts our trouble in the big leagues, and Jerry Whelan don’t belong there.”

Chapter 28

BY SEVEN O’CLOCK THE men were drifting back on the town again. The pianist without any music in his fingers came into McNamara’s and sat down at the piano. The card game picked up. One after another the roisterers of the afternoon returned, sheepishly passing the bar. McNamara grinned at them as though nothing had happened, but his small keen eyes measured every face for the mischief in it.

At the bar, Phil played blackjack with Nichols for an hour. He called a tune now and then for the pianist. Nichols and McNamara exchanged bawdy jokes, some of the men shuffling up to listen occasionally. Finally Phil pulled himself up. He did not want to drink. He did not want to sleep. He did not want to wait. But they were all waiting. At the house, the widow and Margaret were waiting, too.

He put on his coat and nodded to Nichols and McNamara. The street was the lonely captor of the wind, a scavenger down its length that flung its find of debris against the darkened store windows. He walked on to Lavery’s, reluctant still to turn up to the widow’s house. At the railway station, he saw two men parading the length of the platform and back, their breath showing in the cold damp of night. Deputies, probably. He walked on, remembering the old man as he walked through the mobsters… “what they need is peace…” and Rebecca Glasgow that morning weeping, and who would be glad to see her husband hang…

He was moving along the road toward the magician’s house, where the light in the window beckoned him, a will-o’-the-wisp. How many times had Dick followed it—warmth and a gentle word in Winston. How much greater his need, perhaps.

Two more men were pacing the road in front of Clauson’s driveway. He saw them first as shadows in the pale moonlight, as they must also have seen him. One of them flashed a light on him, and turned it out, recognizing him. They turned from him without speaking, and he walked up the drive.

Abreast of the house, he saw three people inside. Glasgow was home. The old man was in his chair, the shawl about his shoulders. While Phil moved closer, Glasgow went to the stairs and up them. After a moment, and a muffled sound as though he might have called her, Rebecca rose from the chair where she had been sitting opposite her father and laid a book on the table. She brushed his cheek with the back of her hand as she left him, the magician not looking up until she was gone. He sat for a long time, his eyes beyond the open book. His shoulders began to quiver then, and soon he raised his hand to brush each cheek beneath his eyes. Phil turned away from the sight of an old man weeping, and returned to the town.

Even from Lavery’s corner he could hear the piano at the tavern. Across the town, at the Sunnyside, no doubt the juke box was yielding what it had of music—there Slavic dances, the schottische instead of the jig.

The storekeeper was locking up, padlocking the door from the outside. When Phil called a greeting to him, he called back: “Are you going up home?”

“Yes,” he said, although the words put him in mind of the song of the night before. He felt far from home, indeed.

“I’ve a kitten here for the old lady. Take it up under your coat.” He went back into the store and returned in a moment with the small animal. “Mind you tell her to put butter on its paws the minute you get in the house. I don’t want it back here in the morning.”

The kitten nestled against him, and before he was halfway up the hill he could feel the vibration of its contented purring against him. He slowed his pace to enjoy it—warmth, trust—things as fragile as the animal that gave them to him. “It will take you a while to become a mouser,” he said aloud. “It takes all of us a while.”

The cat purred.

There was a light in Margaret’s room, and as he came near the house he could hear the radio blaring. The kitchen was darkened. The back steps creaked as he went up them. Laughter came through the living room window, the long, dry laughter of a stunt-hypoed radio participation audience. He fumbled for the back-kitchen door, and opening it, felt the presence of light where there was no light. The spring door closed behind him, nudging him in.

A giant green figure stood in the corner a few feet from him, all shimmering and aglow in the darkness, and seeming to move toward him. He leaped away from it to the kitchen door, and looking back, realized that movement was part of the illusion. He flung the kitten into the house and went back, catching the uncanny figure in his arms. It tangled on the washtub and crashed it to the floor. The substance went out of the figure and he found his arms enmeshed in a weblike cloth that glowed only sometimes, like a firefly on a summer night. He pulled the candescent cloth into the house after him. There was no doubt in his mind that he had found Nat Watkins’ lady with green wings.

He went directly to the living room. The two boarders looked up at him stupidly, angrily, and the radio blared on. “Shut that damn thing off,” he shouted.

“Who are you giving orders?” The widow got up on her cane.

He held the gauze illusion up. It was no more than a flimsy green rag in the full light of the room—a rag daubed with fluorescent paint. “Where did this come from?”

“Anna found it in the tool shed this afternoon—one of the chicken’s been hiding her eggs…”

“Where’s Anna now?”

“She’s home to her bed. Are you drunk, man? What’s the matter with you?” She turned and waved her cane at the two boarders. “Go up to your beds and stop gawking. Will you turn that blasted thing off?”

The men got slowly to their feet. They had to wait at the foot of the stairs, for Margaret was coming down. The widow strung out her abuse of them… “Sitting here, night in, night out, their mouths gaping like guppies. I’m the unfortunate woman to be burdened with the likes of them in my poverty…”

Phil was examining the illusion. Beneath the cloth was a large, doll-shaped balloon, deflated now. It had collapsed when it caught on the tub. Inflated, it would give buoyancy to the whole thing, and hooked in its back was a short string. A sickening realization came to him that Fields had found the rest of it in the room where Kevin Laughlin died.

“Phil, what’s wrong?” It was Margaret, in the room now, doll-like herself, in a quilted housecoat.

“He’s losing his reason,” Mrs. O’Grady said. “What’s that thing at all? It near frightened Anna out of her wits.”

Phil flung it on the couch. “When were you last in the tool shed, Mrs. O’Grady?”

“I haven’t been near it for months. Do you think I’ve the legs…”

“Who has been there?”

“The scraper’s there for the chicken droppings. It’s three weeks since the place was cleaned till today. I made Anna go…”

“Who cleaned it last?” he interrupted again.

“The dear one that’s gone. He was always helping me round the place.”

“Do you keep the shed locked?”

“Why would I lock it when there’s not a key to the house?”

Phil lit a cigaret and turned his back on them. In his mind’s eye was the picture Rebecca Glasgow had painted, the one hanging over the fireplace, with the little lights in it. A fool could see what might be made of it. Jerry Whelan would be carting the story to the pub, or telling it there this minute. He wheeled on the widow. “Did you ever see Dick with that?”

“I never laid eyes on it,” she spat. Her voice changed then to the crooning tones. “Is it some of their magic, Philip? It looks like something you’d use on a stage.”

“Do you remember the youngster at the inquest? Do you remember his lady with green wings everybody laughed at? It wasn’t the church angel he was imagining. This is what he saw in Dick’s arms.”

Margaret laid her hand on his arm. “What does it mean, Phil?”

He drew away from her touch. “All I know is that it means trouble.”

The widow’s eyes darted from where she had been watching Margaret’s hand to his face. He met them. “Why didn’t you send word to the sheriff?”

“For what? It’s a harmless rag in the daylight.”

“Then you’ve seen it in the dark?”

“Wasn’t it in the back kitchen when I went out a few minutes ago for a drink? Are you making me out a liar?”

“Do you have a bag I can put it in? I’m going down to the sheriff now. I’d lock the door if I were you tonight, Mrs. O’Grady. The men are flaming mad.”

“I’ve seen them flame and sputter and die,” she said with contempt. “What caused the explosion?”

“They don’t know yet.”

The kitten came into the living room and stretched out beneath the stove. The widow pointed her stick at it. “Where did that come from?”

“I brought it up to you from Lavery.”

“Is that what he expects to catch mice?”

“You can train it.”

“It’d be a sight easier training the mice… There’s a bag back of the breadbox you can put that magic in, and get it out of the house.”

Phil didn’t move. “Mrs. O’Grady, what do you think caused the explosion?”

The widow cocked her head. “Wasn’t it the gas?”

“Then why did you ask me what it was?”

She grinned. “You’re coming to life now, are you? The shaking up you got down there must of stirred your brain. I’m asking because of the one blast. There was never a gas explosion there yet didn’t go off like a bucket of firecrackers all through the place.”

Margaret stretched lazily. “Poor Phil,” she said, drawling the words with a silken patronage.

This time he checked the angry retort.

Chapter 29

FIELDS EXAMINED THE ILLUSION carefully. He turned off the lights, and saw it glow in the darkened room. Lighting them again, he took the piece of string from his desk and compared its texture with that hooked onto the cloth. He glanced at Phil once or twice, but whatever was going through his mind he kept to himself.

“It’s us have the imagination, and not  the kids,” he said finally. “And me thinking I was so damned smart figuring that angel. The closed mind is a sprung rattrap. It don’t catch a damn thing.” He put the string back in his desk. “It wasn’t any accident Laughlin was in that room. He got lured there.”

He put on his coat and called up the stairs to Krancow that he was going out. In the front, two boys of twenty or so were playing casino in the light of the funeral parlor night lamp, the blessed St. Veronica kibbitzing over them from her gilt frame, Phil thought irreligiously. Immediately it occurred to him that a death in Winston now would be an inconvenience to more than mourners. He shook his head at the weird, grim humor that had overtaken him.

Fields must have been pondering the same thing. “We’d be in a fine way here if Krancow was to get a sudden business call. Jimmie!”

The boys looked up.

“For your deputy’s pay,” the sheriff said, “I’d like you to keep an eye on McNamara’s. One of you go down there every fifteen minutes. Mind now. You’re responsible if there’s a disturbance there. We’re going from here to Watkins’ and then out to Clauson’s. Call Krancow if you need him. Otherwise let him be. Somebody needs to get some sleep around here.”

There was the one light in Watkins’, the father sitting beneath it, his feet on the fender of the kitchen range. He, at least, was one man not at the tavern, Phil thought. They went to the back door.

“I’d like to talk to Nat, Mr. Watkins,” the sheriff said. “I know it’s late, but something just come up.”

“Come in and close the door then. What’s he done now?”

“Nothing at all,” Fields said. “He’s a fine, observing lad.”

Watkins made a noise of disgust. He went to the hall and roared the boy’s name at the top of his voice. The hell with whoever else in the house might be sleeping, Phil thought.

Fields warmed his hands over the stove. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he grew up to be a policeman,” he said, trying to ease the father’s annoyance.

“He’s going down with me as soon as they’ll take him. That’ll take the starch out of him.”

Or put it in, Phil thought.

The boy came in, a sweater pulled over his underwear, his eyes full of sleep, and then of apprehension. “Go and put on your pants,” the father roared.

“I don’t think there’ll be any women around,” Fields said. But the boy had already fled. He returned in a moment tucking the sweater into his overalls.

“You’ve brought us a fine piece of trouble, haven’t you, with your smoking and hookying?” said Watkins.

“Don’t yell at me, Pa.” He was learning to fight back. He would not be bullied much longer.

The father lifted his hand, but dropped it again, and slumped into the chair.

Fields got to the point immediately. “Nat, you told us at the inquest of seeing Mr. Coffee with a woman that looked like she had green wings. Did you see a face on her?”

“No sir. It was almost dark. I wasn’t very close.”

“How did you know it was Coffee then?”

Nat thought about that. “It’s funny, I can remember seeing him just as plain.”

“Was that under the cliff?”

“Yes sir.”

“Which way was he going?”

“He went down to the road and across it, back of Lavery’s, only I couldn’t see him any further than that.”

“Could you say the way he was coming?”

“He came around the cliff. I was looking that way.”

“Now Nat, tell me, was the woman walking?”

“He was sort of helping her.”

Fields brushed his hand across his mouth thoughtfully. “Now think about this careful, lad. Can you try and remember the day that was.”

The boy screwed up his mouth, as though that might help him think. “It wasn’t a school day,” he said finally, “and I had my old pants on. I wasn’t afraid of squatting down on them. So it must of been a Saturday.”

“Was it before or after Laughlin’s death? Do you remember that?”

“It was after. Pa wasn’t working.”

“Are you sure of that, Nat?”

“Yes sir.”

“How can you be so sure when you can’t remember from the school to the house what page your homework’s on?” the father said.

“You were rolling your own cigarets then, Pa,” the boy said quietly.

“You’d of remembered if it was last Saturday,” Fields said. “You found Coffee the next morning.”

The boy nodded.

“Then it was a week last Saturday. Good boy. Go back to your sleep now. You’ve been a great help. My thanks to you and your father.”

In the car, Fields entered the information in his notebook without comment. He let the car slide into gear, and started across the town. Passing McNamara’s, he lowered the window. The tinkle of the piano rose for an instant above the sound of the motor. They could see the crowd of men in the smoke-clouded bar.

“As long as they keep that piano playing, I’ll feel easier,” Fields said.

He slowed down at Clauson’s driveway, and then stopped when one of the deputies signaled. “I’m colder than a blue monkey,” the man said at the car window.

“I hope you don’t get a chance to warm up.” Fields handed him his flask. “You and Pekarik can have this. It may help. If it looks calm I’ll pick you up at midnight.”

“That’s over two hours, Sheriff.”

“I know. Just tell stories to one another and stay awake.” He ran the window up and drove to the house.

Clauson came to the window at the sound of the car. Phil could see him straining to see who it was. “Poor old devil. I walked up here tonight. After Glasgow and the daughter went upstairs he sat there crying. It’s a terrible thing to see an old man cry.”

Fields turned off the ignition. “It’s a worse thing to see a young man die.”

Gainsay that, Phil thought. Sentiment be damned.

Clauson had the door open, waiting for them. The many lines had deepened in his face these last few days. His eyes were bloodshot and his hand shook as he motioned to them to sit down. “I have a little wine, gentlemen?”

“No, thanks just the same,” Fields opened his jacket but did not take it off.

“Do you want my daughter and him?”

“You don’t like him very much, do you?” Fields said.

The magician did not answer. He sat down and folded his hands in his lap. Fields was studying the picture above the fireplace. “Your girl’s got some real nice color there, Mr. Clauson.”

“She does good work,” Clauson said.

“Ever do any of that stuff on cloth?”

Clauson looked at him. “Yes. She paints all my things. Some illusions, though I sell few of them. Women are great illusionists, but women do not travel into these hills in search of a manufacturer.”

Somewhere above them, a board creaked.

Fields merely straightened up in the chair. “Did you ever talk with Coffee about that sort of thing?”

“Oh yes. Several times. We talked a great deal about spiritualists and so-called mediums. In my youth, I conducted a considerable expose of fakers. Then we talked about an opera called The Medium. Richard had seen it last year. I will tell you something. There it is on the table. It came this morning.”

Fields got up and went to the table. He picked up an album of records.

“That was the way he was,” Clauson explained. “We talked about it, and he wrote away and had it sent to us.”

Fields returned to the chair.

The magician touched the records lightly, almost affectionately.

“McGovern, would you mind going to the car and bringing me that package, please?” Fields spoke curtly and thrust the keys into Phil’s hand.

By the time he returned, Rebecca was coming down the stairs in her bathrobe. Glasgow was already standing in the room, his hands on his hips, a scowl on his face as heavy as his mustache. Whatever he had said, Fields was on his feet. “I haven’t accused you of anything yet, Mr. Glasgow. If I do, you won’t be standing in this room arguing with me. Now I want to know if you were home a week ago last Saturday.”

“I went to work at a quarter to five.”

“Couldn’t you just as well told me that civil?” Fields turned to Phil and took the bag from him. Without explanation he drew the green cloth from it and shook it out. Phil, watching Rebecca, saw her eyes narrow. A little pulse began throbbing in her throat.

“Mr. Clauson, do you recognize this piece?”

The old man nodded that he did.

“When was the last time you seen it?”

Clauson cleared his throat. “One night a few weeks ago. I cannot name it exactly.”

“You better tell me the whole story,” Fields said quietly. He motioned to Glasgow to sit down.

“There is no story,” he began scarcely audibly. He glanced up for a pained instant at his daughter and then down at his hands again. There was a little, tight grin on Glasgow’s face. “We were talking one night about effects on a blacked-out stage…”

“Who was with you?”

“Rebecca and Richard. I sent Rebecca to the trunk for it to illustrate.”

“Did you ever see it before, Glasgow?”

“Ha! Where the hell should I see it? Do you think they’d show their precious treasures to a dumb bastard like me?”

“I asked you if you saw it,” Fields repeated harshly.

“No. I never laid eyes on it.”

“Go on, Mr. Clauson.”

“What more is there to say? Afterwards Rebecca put it away. Didn’t you, my dear?”

“I did. I put it away.”

“But here it is now,” Fields said, draping it across the back of a chair.

“Maybe it got up and walked out,” Glasgow said. “It’s a lively looking thing.”

“It’s a deadly thing,” Fields said. He went to Rebecca’s chair then and looked directly into her face. She met his eyes evenly. “Mrs. Glasgow, you know the testimony given at the inquest. You know you were seen entering the drift mouth over behind that cliff with Coffee…”

“And I say it’s a deliberate lie,” she said, the veins standing out in her neck.

“It don’t look like a lie to me,” Fields said. “Coffee was seen carrying that bloody thing, and I say bloody, because I found a string matching the piece on the back of it. I found it where Kevin Laughlin died. He died in maybe the one room in that whole section where there was enough gas to kill a man. Something lured him in there. Richard Coffee told you about that gas. He even marked the room…”

“If he did it was for Laughlin…”

“Then you know he marked it?” She did not answer, and Fields went on relentlessly. “I’m telling you now what’s in my mind, and what’s going to be in the mind of the coroner’s jury when they meet again next week: You had a neat place there for meeting Coffee. It was dark, but you didn’t need any light. Then the old loon came on you, poor old daft Laughlin, and you thought you’d get rid of him.”

“It’s you that’s out of your mind,” she said into his face. “Richard Coffee was a decent man, the only decent man I’ve ever known. He was kind. I think I could kill if I had to. But he couldn’t.”

Fields straightened up. “Right now, I’m talking about you, Mrs. Glasgow.” He turned abruptly on Glasgow. “You were with the 118th Engineers in Europe after the war. Where were you stationed?”

“In Stuttgart,” he said immediately. “But we were a lot of places on reconstruction.”

“Have you ever been in the mines here?”

“Never.”

“Did you know Kevin Laughlin?”

“I knew him from seeing him around the town. I knew him for a nut.”

“He wasn’t around town much,” Fields said. “He was a bashful sort of man, looking for a woman he lost a long time ago. I’ve been told you were seen with him along the tracks out there back of the mines.”

“Then you’ve been told a cock-and-bull story. I never met nobody along the tracks unless it was the ginks working there.”

“You’ve the use of one of them little handcars, Glasgow. It comes in real handy, don’t it?”

Glasgow smiled. “You’re fishing in muddy water, Sheriff. You checked my record with the company. They wouldn’t stand any nonsense.”

Fields studied him. “Not a nerve in your body, is there, Glasgow? How much do you get in your pay envelope?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“I won’t have much trouble finding it out.”

“Twenty-eight dollars.” Glasgow looked at his wife.

There was a faint change of expression on her face. Fields caught it. “Did you think he made more, Mrs. Glasgow?”

She lifted her head but did not answer him.

“That ain’t much for a skilled worker. You wouldn’t have to put in much time for that.”

“What are you getting at, Sheriff?”

“Nothing special. I was just figuring you get quite a bit of time to yourself—one end of the line or the other. I was wondering what you did with it.”

“I read a lot,” Glasgow said sarcastically. “I want to improve my mind so’s I can talk with my family.”

Through it all the old man sat, his head bowed, his hands clinched together. Fields folded the illusion and put it back in the bag. “Somebody took this out of the house here,” he said quietly. “There’s three people living here, and one regular visitor when he was living. Sooner or later I’m going to find out who took it. It’d save the wear and tear on all of us if you could give me the answer right now.”

“I gave it to Mr. Coffee,” the old man said then. “Yes. He asked if he might borrow it, and I gave it to him.”

“When, Mr. Clauson?”

“When? I don’t know when. What is one day from another to an old man?”

“Did you see him give it to Coffee, Mrs. Glasgow?”

“No.” There was real fear in her face now. “Papa, did you give it to him?”

“I have just said that.”

“Maybe he wanted something to remember you by, Becky,” her husband said. “The old boy would have been all for that. Oh, how he’d like to have a son-in-law like Coffee.” He slapped his hand on the record album. “Opera, books, Latin, Hebrew, Greek. Godalmighty, maybe the Greeks had a word for it. So do I.” He spat a vulgarity at them.

“Norman, why don’t you get out of this house?” the old man said, his voice quivering.

“I will when I’m damn good and ready, Pop. She took me for better or worse, and damn glad to get me. Now I’m sticking.”

How many scenes like this had Dick suffered through, Phil thought. This was no new routine. Night in, night out when he was home, it must have gone on like this, the nagging, the baiting, the fear and hate.

Fields put on his hat. “I’m glad you’re sticking for a while, Glasgow. I’ll want to talk to you some more.”

“I’ve the Louisville run in the morning.”

“Just see you come home from it on schedule.”

He and Phil left then, none of the three moving from his place until the door was closed. Fields turned the car around at the back of the house, the headlights catching the eyes of one of the goats as it poked its head out of the shelter.

“Shooting from a blind,” the sheriff said. “It was like aiming a cannon at a gopher.”

“I don’t believe Clauson gave that illusion to Dick.”

“If he didn’t, one thing’s sure. He wasn’t protecting Glasgow.”

Chapter 30

“IT’S TIME THEM BOYS were breaking it up,” Fields said as they passed McNamara’s. “They’re spoiling for trouble.” He drove on to Krancow’s and parked the car. From the parlor steps they could hear the shouting and the clamor. There was no more music, just oratory, loud and abandoned.

Through the big window, they could see one of the deputies stretched out on the sofa and the other sprawled on a chair…the sleeping disciples. Fields opened the door. “How long’s it been since you were down the street there?”

One of them leaped to his feet. “Gosh,” he said, shaking off the sleep.

Fields disgustedly waved him back where he was. He and Phil started down the hill. They broke into a run, for at that moment the door to McNamara’s swung open. Nichols hurried out, the roar of the men following him until the slamming door muffled it. Fields called out to him.

“You better break them up,” Nichols said. “The talk in there now is that Coffee and the girl murdered Laughlin.”

Fields threw the tavern door open, and for a moment the place was hushed. It was the same crowd as in the afternoon, only swelled, and uglier for the more of them. Their faces were flushed, their eyes bloodshot from the smoke, so thick in the room that Phil brushed it from his face like a spider web.

The sheriff walked to the bar and turned his back on it, facing the men. “Is there something you’d like to say to me, any one of you?”

There was a grumbled, indistinct response.

“Is it that you have the case solved for me?”

“You’re the servant of the people, Sheriff. Maybe if you solved it, we wouldn’t be troubled this way.”

Fields whirled around, for it was Eddie Halloran, helping McNamara behind the bar. The big man himself was tight-lipped. Billy Riordon came up and stuck his face under the sheriff’s. “Eddie’s put it right on the line to you, Sheriff. Did you bring the woman in?” His voice hardened. “Or is it you’d like us to go out and assist you?”

“Do you have some evidence I haven’t seen?” Fields said, pushing Riordon from him with the back of his arm.

“It isn’t that you haven’t seen it, Sheriff. You don’t seem to get the sense of it.”

“Let me hear the sense of it then.”

“There’s a simple thing. Old Laughlin got in the way of their pleasure. Coffee and her tried scaring him out of the mine with a ghost. Instead they scared him into a bloody gas chamber.”

“Did you see the ghost, Billy?”

“I heard tell of it.”

“I can believe that. Where’s Whelan?”

“Here!” Whelan shouted from the back. “Here and accounted for.”

“Look, Sheriff,” Riordon insisted, pulling at Fields’ sleeve. “He knew there was gas there. Why didn’t he tell them before Laughlin was dead, and not after it?”

“Answer it, you. You’ll have solved one of my problems. Remember it’s Coffee’s death I’m investigating.”

“We think you’d be better investigating Laughlin’s death. He was one of our own.”

“Sam, there’s something to what the men say,” McNamara said then, “and they’re in terrible need of the work. Give them some satisfaction.”

“What are you persuading for?” Jerry Whelan thrust himself through the crowd. “I say we go up in a body. There’s ways of squeezing the truth out of one like that. You’re too easy, Sheriff.”

“But who the hell wants to squeeze her?” someone yelled.

There was ribald laughter. Whelan pounded his fist on the table. “You never can tell. The thorniest bush is often the mother of the sweetest berries.”

“Ah, you’re a philosopher, Jerry.”

“A philosopher and a philanthropist,” Riordon said, his tongue thickening on the word. He lifted a glass of beer. “Here’s to Jerry Whelan. May he live forever and get no older than he is today.”

Fields looked at McNamara. “What have you been pouring tonight?”

“Beer. Nothing but beer.”

“They smell of more than beer.”

“Some of the boys had a drop of their own. At times like these, I close my eyes to it, Sheriff.”

“At times like these you should open them. You had a sample this afternoon, didn’t you?” Fields strode across the room to Jerry Whelan and caught him by the front of his shirt. “So you’re a philanthropist, Jerry? Your wife and kids’ll be glad to know it.” In an instant he ran his hands over Whelan’s pockets, drawing from one of them a half-filled whiskey bottle. “Old Oak,” he read the label. He uncorked it and put the bottle to his nose. “The makers’ll be glad to test it for us. Where did you get this, Jerry?”

“I bought it. A man’s entitled to a bottle now and then. What’s this world but a misery without it?”

“Where did you buy it?”

Whelan’s voice rose to a falsetto. “In the liquor store. Where else would I buy it?”

“I thought maybe you made it. I’ll take it along for tests in the morning.”

As the sheriff let go of his shirt, Whelan rocked on his feet. He threw his hands up pleading to the men. “He’s trying to distract youse, making me out a bootlegger.”

“You’ve been drinking his liquor,” Fields said. “How do you feel?”

A chorus of “greats” went up.

“You’ll be retching your guts before morning.”

Whelan lurched toward the sheriff, the whole weight of his bulk falling against him. He was not that drunk, Phil thought. He moved in quickly, taking the bottle from Fields where he was falling back over a chair under Whelan. He no more than had the bottle in his hand when someone, in howling glee, leaped on him. Another man wrested it out of his hand. The bottle was hurled against the wall and smashed in a thousand pieces.

Fields got up and went to the bar. “Close up, Mac.”

“Why don’t you run Whelan in, Sam?”

“Because running him in, he’d be all by hisself, and Whelan never did anything by hisself in his life.”

Fields went outdoors to a chorus of laughter, Phil after him. They crossed the street to where the taxi was parked. Fields threw his flashlight on it. It was as dirty and sloppy looking as its owner. He examined the upholstery, spotted and torn, and pointed the light under the seats. The only thing he caught in its beam, aside from tools, was an old paving brick under the front seat. “For parking on hills,” Fields said. He turned the light on the dashboard and looked at the mileage. “Broken.”

He turned off the flashlight. “If only he had brains,” he said, more to himself than to Phil.

“For bootlegging?”

“For distributing it. That’s the rub. He’s giving out nips and pulls there tonight. But I’ll bet there wasn’t a man had a bottle in his hand more than a minute. They’re not hard drinkers, McGovern.”

“How about Glasgow? He seems to have the time. Does he have the brains?”

“Maybe. He’s got the cunning. One thing interesting, McGovern—for all their information in there in the tavern, nobody mentioned that room in the mine being marked.”

The men began to lurch out of McNamara’s, sullen, fuzzy and tired. Fields pulled Phil back into the shadows and watched. Whelan was lingering outside the tavern door, not detaining the men, indeed seeming to speed them on their way. Phil caught the sheriff’s arm. “That guy isn’t drunk,” he said. “He’s as sober as we are.”

Fields grunted. “Look at the other poor devils. They’re out on their feet.” He shoved the keys of the car into Phil’s hand. “Keep out of sight, but get the car ready. When he starts his engine you start coasting, and pick me up. Don’t turn on the lights.”

“I got you,” Phil said.

He moved swiftly up the street in the shadows. It was not much trouble keeping out of the lights in Winston. He reached Krancow’s, and then, acting on a hunch, got into his own car. The last of the men gone, Whelan crossed the street briskly and started the taxi motor. He drove toward the railway station, and Phil started down the hill. Fields got in.

Before he reached the station, Whelan turned right at Lavery’s corner, taking the road in the opposite direction of Mrs. O’Grady’s. He turned back on the town, then, in back of Krancow’s so that he would drive past it. His brake light flashed on as he slowed down to look in at the parlor.

“Good boy,” Fields said. “He was checking to see if my car was there.”

Picking up speed then, Whelan once more drove toward the station. He crossed the tracks and started on the road alongside them. It was little more than a path, used by the rail workers when they drove back to the loading tracks. He had made no more than twenty yards, however, when he was flagged down by one of Fields’ deputies. Phil and the sheriff drove by on the main highway, seeing the deputy talking to Whelan.

“Damnation,” Fields said. “The ones I want on the job are asleep, and this one’s alert as a hoot owl. Drive on out to Clauson’s now, and we might as well see where we’re going.”

The two deputies there had nothing to report. They climbed into the back seat. On the way back to town, they stopped at the station. One of the men on duty came over to the car.

“What’d Whelan say when you stopped him?” Fields asked.

“Aw, the drunken bum. He thought he was on Mill Street going home.”

“In a pig’s eye he did. All right, knock off for the night.”

He directed Phil to drive up Mill Street. There the cab sat alongside the house. Through the unshaded window they could see Whelan struggling out of his clothes.

Chapter 31

PHIL AWAKENED AS USUAL to the heavy footsteps of the boarders going down the stairs. He could hear Mrs. O’Grady shaking down the ashes in the grate. How long could she go on like this, an old woman getting up in the cold of mornings? But if she were not to do it, what would become of her?

The wind was crying outside his window like a small child. He got up and dressed, and went into the hall. He paused outside Margaret’s door, thinking he heard movement within her room. It was only the wind, or the old house creaking. Margaret Coffee was never up at that hour in her life unless it was finishing a day. The board sounded beneath his foot. Mrs. O’Grady would cock her head and listen. She would trace his journey down the hall. He moved quickly to the stairs.

He washed in the back kitchen, and sat down to breakfast as the two men were almost finished. “You’re lucky to be working on Number Two,” he said.

“Lucky?” one of the men repeated.

“As lucky as any guy who digs coal for a living. I mean you’re not in the confusion over on Number Three.”

“I wouldn’t work Number Three if I was to starve,” the man said. “There’s a curse on it.”

“Peh!” the widow said, her first comment of the morning.

“Wherever a woman’s been in a mine there’s a curse on it,” the man said, pointing his fork. “And mark my words, the mine’ll get her one way or the next.”

“Rubbish,” Mrs. O’Grady said.

“It got Laughlin’s wife when she went down there, didn’t it?”

“You’re full of ignorant superstitions,” the widow said. “Finish your breakfast.”

“Superstition,” he started again.

“That’s enough of your gab,” the widow said fiercely.

He looked up at her. “What the hell’s eating you this morning?”

She flung the wet dishcloth she was carrying across his face. “Get out to your work!”

He got up sullenly. “You old witch. If you wasn’t so crippled I’d say you was the haunt of them.”

The old woman laughed then, and for one wild moment Phil wondered if she were going out of her mind. There were indeed moments when the devil seemed to ride between her hunched shoulders. The two men went out of the house, banging the door behind them. She turned on Phil abruptly. “What did Sam Fields say to that thing?”

“He didn’t say anything. It belonged to the Clausons.”

“Tell me something I didn’t know. Did they own up to it?”

“Yes. The old man said he gave it to Dick.”

“What for?”

“He didn’t say.”

“He didn’t say. Isn’t there ways of making him say?”

“Mrs. O’Grady, how well do you know Jerry Whelan?”

“What do you want with him?”

“He’s been trying to stir the men up. I’d like to know why.”

“He’s a stupid lump. There’s no harm in him.”

“There’s not much good in him either. He makes the most of the information Anna takes home out of here. It didn’t take him long to carry the tale of that magic piece down to the tavern last night.”

“He’s the tongue of an old woman.”

“He’s the tongue of an asp. They’re saying Dick and the Glasgow woman killed old Laughlin.”

“They bottled the gas and took it into the mine,” she said sarcastically. “They lured the poor man in and left him there. The stupid lumps. Aw no, if there’s blood on her hands it isn’t poor Laughlin’s.”

“It’s too bad you weren’t at McNamara’s last night. They could have used some of that eloquence.”

The widow poured herself a cup of coffee, ignoring him. The kitten crawled out from under the stove and began mewing.

“Have you fed it yet?” Phil asked.

“Tell me the cat caught a mouse on a full stomach.”

Phil poured some milk in his saucer and set it on the floor. The cat reached it no quicker than the old lady’s cane. She tipped the saucer over, and the cat fled beneath the stove. “I’ll say what’s to be fed in this house. You’re not the master here.”

He pushed away from the table, got his coat and went outdoors. The six o’clock siren sounded. Men would go to work in Number Two, and others would arise with the wish for going to work, or, he thought, remembering the liquor some of them consumed, the wish to stay asleep. The church bell tolled early Mass. Father Joyce would come in from the sacristy to the altar of God, to God Who gives joy to His youth, and only the angels would attend His sacrifice. The priest would turn with his Pax Vobiscum on an empty church. There was no peace in Winston.

As he watched the sun sweep the mists from the valley, he saw Sheriff Fields turn up past Lavery’s. He went to the gate to meet him. The sheriff was unshaven and grey with the lack of sleep. He handed Phil a telegram without speaking.

CHICAGO MOVEMENTS COFFEE EARLY DECEMBER. FREQUENTED CLARK STREET AND CHICAGO AVENUE TAVERN SEVERAL TIMES. WIFE WITH HIM LAST OCCASION. HAVE OPERATIVE ON IT. WILL INSTRUCT FURTHER. BANK WITHDRAWAL FIFTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS DECEMBER FIFTH. NOT USED FOR TRANSPORTATION. TRANSPORTATION PAID TRAVEL AGENCY BY CHECK.

Phil returned the telegram to him.

“The wife up yet?” Fields asked.

“No.”

“Good. I’d like to get to her before she gets her mask on. What’s Clark Street like?”

“In that section it’s pretty rough, as I remember it.”

Mrs. O’Grady met them at the kitchen door. “Are you carting trouble here this hour of the morning, Sam Fields?”

“I want to talk to Mrs. Coffee. I’d thank you to call her and give me a seat in your house till she comes down.”

“You can sit or lie down, and call her yourself.”

It was Phil who went to the stairs and called up to Margaret. He did not mention that Fields was waiting. It was ten minutes before she came down, as long a ten minutes as he could remember. Fields sat at the table as though he were asleep. The widow sat on a stool watching him. There was an occasional crackle of fire in the kitchen range, and the floor above creaked under Margaret’s footsteps.

When she came, her face was carefully made up, and not a strand of the ash blonde hair was out of place. But for all her patience with the mask, as Fields called it, the tiny lines had begun to tighten on her. A stranger, meeting her, and knowing only the story of her husband’s death, would say the full impact of her loss was coming home to her now, two days after the funeral. And, Phil thought, the full impact of something was hitting her. For all her grace and beauty, she suffered what must have been most painful to her: Dick had left her, and if nothing else, he had done that before his death.

“Milady’s looking pert this morning,” the widow said. “Isn’t she, Philip?”

He looked from one to the other of them without speaking.

“I feel wretched,” Margaret said.

“It’s the lumpy mattress,” said the old lady. “She’s as tender as a princess sleeping on a pea.”

Fields cleared his throat. Margaret went to the table and sat down beside him. “More questions?”

There was no ceremony left in Fields. “I got word from Chicago this morning your husband was seen a lot in a pretty low tavern there. What can you tell me about it?”

Margaret’s face blanched. She lifted her head a little. “I knew about it.”

“What did you know about it?”

“I knew he was going to a cheap rotten place. I knew he was seeking the company of the dregs—the derelicts and dope fiends, whores and worse than whores.”

The tautness of her face did indeed make a mask of it. Phil stifled the anger he felt choking him.

“Were you ever there with him?” Fields asked.

“I followed him once. I wanted to salvage something of the person I once knew.”

“My information says you went with him,” the sheriff said. “The Chicago police have a way of being exact when they say something. If you followed him there, they’d of said that.”

“All right. I went with him. He made me go. He didn’t want to go to hell alone, he said. He was all rotten.”

“No,” Phil said. “I don’t believe it. If you swore it before God and all his angels I wouldn’t believe it. If Dick was there he had a reason for being there, but it wasn’t to go to hell himself or to take you there.”

“You’re simon pure, aren’t you, Phil? There’s no evil in the world where anyone you love is concerned. A saint can do no wrong. You wouldn’t believe in a Magdalene if the Lord Himself came and told you about her.”

“I would if you told me about her, Margaret,” he said quietly.

The old lady chuckled. This was the sport she liked.

“Mrs. Coffee,” Fields persisted. “Suppose you tell us just what your husband did in this Clark Street place.”

Mrs. O’Grady wagged her head. “Tell him the whole story, dear.”

Phil looked at her. Had she and Margaret gone over it together? The old woman sat, her head nodding, for all the world like Madame LaFarge watching the mobs of Paris.

A roistering sailor could not have given a more lascivious account of his brawling than Margaret unfolded for them.

Fields got up stiffly at the end of it. “That would take a lot of money, wouldn’t it? That would account for him taking fifteen hundred dollars out of the bank, December fifth?”

Margaret’s eyes widened, and then filled with tears. The only comfort offered her was the boney caress of the widow’s hand scratching her tender flesh.

Chapter 32

FIELDS WENT DOWN THE steps quickly, his mouth toughened with anger. He slammed the door of the car, and for the first time Phil had to hurry to keep up with him.

“Bitches,” Fields said between his teeth. “If they wasn’t getting so much pleasure out of it…” He shook his head. “Can I filch a cigaret?”

Phil gave him one and lighted it for him. The sheriff took a couple of deep pulls. The gears screeched as he jolted the car into motion.

They drove past the main tipple of the Number Three. There was not much activity. A few miners stood about, sullen, dejected. The few now willing to go to work, could not. The entire diggings had to be gone over and recertified. Fields drew the car up suddenly and got out. Lempke came to meet him. The men watched them glumly without even an answer to the sheriff’s greeting.

Fields spoke a moment with Lempke, and returned to the car. “That section was dynamited.”

“Was it planned for when we were down there?”

“I don’t think so. It must of been set off with a fuse. If we was expected to get it, they’d have waited. It was just meant to do what it did—destroy anything down there that might of involved someone.”

“Why wait that long if it wasn’t meant for us?”

“Because it wasn’t ready till yesterday afternoon, and then they didn’t want to be seen leaving. And there was just one person to see them before we got there.”

“Rebecca Glasgow.”

“That’s right. We saw her in the back yard when we drove by, going out there. In other words, if we’d of been five or ten minutes later getting there, we’d of seen who it was. After setting the fuse, they wouldn’t dare stay in there.”

He swung the car around and drove past the Number Two Colliery. The men were down there, but at the tipple several of the miners from Number Three were standing about. Billy Riordon was there, looking hung over, just about sick enough to talk about it.

“Drop me off here, Sheriff,” Phil said. “There’s one of those fellows I think I can make friends with.”

“Go to it, lad. We can sure use a few of them right now.”

Fields drove on, and Phil crossed to where Riordon was examining his shoe tops. “You look like you were poisoned last night.”

“I feel like it. My stomach’s like the inside of a churn.”

“Was the stuff bootleg?”

“I’ve never the sense to question anything as long as it comes out of a bottle.”

“You might know what Whelan gave you before.”

“He’s give me nothing but a belly-ache.”

“Did you notice he wasn’t drinking it himself?”

Riordon rubbed the two days’ stubble on his chin. “He was drunk though,” he said with some doubt.

“He was not drunk. He was deliberately feeding the stuff to you.”

“The hell you say.”

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“Spooning us poison with one hand, and muddying our minds with the other. The dirty little wart.”

“Did you ever see him sell any of that liquor?”

“No I didn’t, and that’s the truth. It’s just that he shows up with a quantity whenever there’s trouble.”

“Come down to the restaurant with me and have some black coffee,” Phil said.

Riordon sidled away from him. “Thank you, but I’d as leave not be seen with you.”

“Look,” Phil said. “I’m not trying to pump you. A friend of mine was killed. All I want to know is how it happened. I’ve nothing to gain with your going back to work or staying away from it. But somebody here in Winston is trying to make dupes of all of us. Do you think Fields is working against you?”

“The law’s always been a little partial to the operators down here. We’ve a notion they want to close Number Three entirely.”

“Fields had the same notion. He was in the mines himself, man.”

“Aye, that’s the truth. And I’ve never heard a word said against him by the boys till this.”

“Then pull with him and not against him. Give him a chance.”

“Och, my head’s killing me. Don’t be crowding it with any more confusions.”

“Come down, then, and have coffee with me.”

“Maybe I will. My old lady makes tea you could walk on, but a spoon of sugar would color her coffee.”

They walked into the town together, and here and there along the way their companionship was rewarded with a civil word from the townspeople. Riordon entered the restaurant hesitantly, and rubbed his hands off on his coat before sliding into the booth. He grinned foolishly. “You know, the last time I was in here, the old lady was complaining I never took her no place, and her boiling beef and potatoes from one day to the next. So we got dressed up of a night and come down here. And do you know the only thing they had on the bill o’ fare we could eat?”

“Boiled beef and potatoes,” Phil said.

“Aye, and bull’s beef at that.”

Randy Nichols came in before they were through breakfast. Riordon had recovered his appetite with the smell of ham and eggs. “You better get up to the mortuary, McGovern,” Nichols said. “The sheriff’s looking for you.”

Phil slid out of the booth and paid the check at the counter.

“If you’ll come round for supper one of these nights,” Riordon said, “I’ll be pleased to return your hospitality.”

Chapter 33

FIELDS WAS ROCKING BACK and forth in the swivel chair when Phil arrived. He swung around at the sound of his footsteps. “I got a communication here I think’ll interest you. It’s from the Adjutant General’s office, Washington, D. C. The army serial number Glasgow has on his application with the railway company’s a phony. They have no record of him.”

“That means his whole record is phony then,” Phil said slowly. “It means he falsified an army discharge to get a job with the railroad.”

“If it don’t mean that, it means he had to account for several years in his life some other way than he spent them. Let’s go, lad. We may come out of this on our feet yet.”

As they went to the car Phil told him about Riordon.

“That’s a real good sign,” Fields said. “So is that sun shining up there.”

It was the first really bright day Phil had seen since coming to Winston. Passing down the main street, they saw the hardware store proprietor setting some of his wares on the street—gardening implements and a seed display. The barber had a bucket of water, and was washing the shop window. Both of them looked up and nodded as Fields waved to them. “What a little sunshine’ll do to a dirty world,” he said.

Rebecca Glasgow was driving the goats out of the yard when they reached the house. Fields touched the car horn, and motioned her back. He and Phil waited, and went into the house with her. The old man came into the kitchen wearing a smock. He took it off.

Fields half-sat on the kitchen table. “Glasgow at work?”

“He is.”

“When’s he due home?”

“About five,” Rebecca said. “He was put on a special run this morning.”

Fields nodded and looked at his watch. “The two of you sit down a minute, and you, McGovern. Now, I’m going to have to be real personal, Mrs. Glasgow. You had a talk yesterday with McGovern. I think we know why you married Glasgow. But what we got to find out now is why he married you. How long did you know him?”

“A few weeks.”

“Where did you first meet him?”

“Out in the hills, too. Isn’t that funny?”

“Not specially,” Fields said. “What was he doing there? He don’t strike me as the kind to be enjoying nature.”

“Taking a short cut into town from his work.”

“Do you remember how he acted the first time he saw Coffee?”

“I don’t know. I never saw them together.”

Fields looked from her to her father. “Are you saying that out of all the times Coffee was in this house, they never met here?”

“I don’t remember their having met here,” the old man said.

“You heard him testify to meeting Coffee, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but I took for granted…”

Fields cut him off. “You like to take a lot of things for granted, Mr. Clauson. Didn’t it strike you as queer they didn’t cross here with Coffee coming so often?”

“Nothing that Norman does strikes me as strange.”

“Not even marrying your daughter?”

With effort the old man bestirred himself. “Don’t be cruel, sir.”

“I’m being kinder than I am cruel. A man that’s got some decency—maybe some music in him—I don’t know a better way to put it—maybe a man like Coffee would see the fine lady your daughter is. But a man like Glasgow takes a look at what a woman’s body’s like if he’s picking one to his own taste. If that’s cruel, I can’t help it. Death’s a lot crueler.”

“No,” Rebecca said. “Death is kind. It’s peace.”

“Death isn’t peace, ma’am, unless you’ve earned it.” He turned to the old magician. “Now, Mr. Clauson, I’m not going to say Coffee didn’t like visiting you, but did it ever occur to you that he was sitting here night after night waiting?”

“It occurred to me. I often feared the scene between them when they met.”

Phil remembered the mention in the notes of the candles starting up at a strange sound. Rebecca’s eyes were the candles…

“Why did you fear their meeting?” Fields persisted.

“Because I thought Richard was in love with my daughter.”

Rebecca turned on him fiercely. “You poor, benign old jackass. All my life you’ve told me the people who should be in love with me—who were in love with me. Even now you can’t see I’m an ugly duckling that all the tenderness of spring won’t change into a swan.”

The old man’s chin quivered. “I see my only child, the child of her mother, as lovely a woman as ever walked the earth.”

Rebecca stumbled from the chair and went to the window, her long wracked back more eloquent than her face. The chair cut into Phil’s hands where he clutched it. He had never wanted so much to comfort pain and been so helpless.

Fields rubbed his forehead with his fingers, as though to ease a headache. “Mr. Clauson, the truth now about that illusion. You told me last night you gave it to Coffee. Why did you tell me that?”

“Because I thought Rebecca had taken it. It is better that the man contrive the circumstances of love.”

Rebecca turned from the window, her whole face working. “Oh my God, Papa. How romantic! How fiendishly, disgustingly romantic.” She crossed the room to him. “Do you know something, Papa? I’m the healthy one. It’s you that’s ill. It’s this whole narrow town—and all people who would blight the lives of others by pairing them off like animals in season. That’s what Richard Coffee tried to tell me. He tried to convince me that Norman was no good. And I wouldn’t listen. It hurt so much when I knew he loved his wife. Pride was all I had. I gloried in telling him my devotion to my husband, the husband I despised.” She turned to Fields. “Why did he want Norman? I’m sure he did now. Only he waited because he thought I loved him. What stupid, vain folly!”

“I don’t know that,” Fields said. “Now there’s something I’ve got to get straight—that floating doll, the woman with green wings as the boy called it—neither one of you took it out of the house?” They had not.

“It’s going to be hard telling how much damage that lie of yours did last night, Mr. Clauson. The truth’s a lot better protection for an innocent person than a lie. I think we can be pretty sure Glasgow was watching here more often than he was at home. And Coffee was watching for him. All night sometimes.”

Fields got up, and moved back and forth in the room. He spoke as much to put his own thoughts in order as to speak to them. “…That room was marked. If Coffee did it, somebody had to see him doing it to know. If the doll was used to lure Laughlin in, it was taken out after he was dead, because the mine people didn’t find it. Wherever it was hidden, Coffee found it. He knew then it was murder. If it was Glasgow did it, we got to find out why he wanted Laughlin dead.”

“On account of the still?” Phil asked.

Fields looked at the Clausons. They suggested nothing.

“He wasn’t here yesterday when that place was dynamited,” Fields said then. “We got to look further.”

“And some place we have to figure Margaret Coffee in it,” Phil said.

“That’s a fact. I’ll tell you something, McGovern, the way she’s acted toward you, you’re just too mild a man for her. That kind’s got to have the devil in a top hat—or the tough guy who’ll beat her down to silk. I don’t think Coffee was her kind either.”

“He wasn’t,” Rebecca said then. “One of the last things Dick said to me: ‘We’re the victims of our own infirmities, my dear,’ he said, and he held my hand a moment. That was as close a touch as there ever was between us. I could not bear the sight of him again. I forbade him the house, and he went out with Papa that night. ‘I worship Margaret,’ he told me, ‘and she is no good, Rebecca. No good at all. Who am I to dissuade you from your love of him?’”

Fields watched her a moment, and then looked at Phil. “I’d say Glasgow might be her speed.”

“It accounts for her staying here,” Phil said. “She was all set to go before the inquest.” He remembered Glasgow’s eyes on her, insolent and, he thought now in retrospect, provocative—a brash dare.

“Was there a chance of a meeting here between them?” Fields said.

“Yes. The night before last. When I went up from town, Anna began jangling the gate as though she was crazy.” He told of going into the house and finding the widow alone in a smoke-thick room.

“Was your husband home then, Mrs. Glasgow?”

“He was home, but he went down to the yards for a couple of hours, or so he said.”

Fields got up. He sighed wearily. “That brings Mrs. O’Grady in on the whole mess.”

“She dealt herself in the day Dick was killed,” Phil said. “She told me to listen up there in the hills. I think she even knows how Dick died.”

Chapter 34

“POOR OLD LAUGHLIN,” PHIL said as they drove back to Krancow’s. “Poor old man, to be caught in the middle of a mess like this.”

“I don’t know,” Fields said. “I’m getting so I’d be suspicious of the Pope of Rome.”

Krancow was waiting for them at the parlor door. “They’re recertifying Number Three,” he said. “They can start hoisting in the morning.”

“They put the heat on for that recertification,” Fields said. “They really cooked on it.”

“Sam, if the men don’t go down, the mine people are going to put it up to the National Labor Board as a breach of contract…”

“So that’s it. The blister’s ready for me now, is it? Well, they’re not going to make it stick. Get Lempke on the phone for me.”

Fields unlocked the desk and took from it one of the magazines Phil had brought from Corteau. He waited without speaking for Krancow to put through the call.

Lempke talked first. Fields heard him out, and then said curtly: “The men will go down in the morning. It may disappoint you, but they’ll go down in the morning. Now I want to know what Coffee called your people for when he was in Cleveland.”

He listened to the hemming and hawing a moment, frowning. He interrupted. “I’ll give you just ten minutes. Then I’m putting the Cleveland police on it. The Winston Collieries ain’t so goddamn important to them. They’ll get the information.”

He hung up and checked his watch. He fingered through the magazine until he found the article he wanted. He looked at Phil. “That fifteen hundred dollars Coffee took from the bank bought something, McGovern. And it wasn’t women, dope or liquor.”

“Information?”

“Information. And he wanted it bad to pay for it in a place like that. That information brought him to Winston in the end. He wasn’t…”

Fields caught the phone at its first indication of a ring. “I’ll hold on all right,” he said, adding then to Phil: “They’re going to talk to me now from Cleveland. Why in hell can’t you get any place in this world if you don’t show your teeth? Aren’t we anything more than dogs?”

He waited, pencil in hand. On the phone, he repeated one name aloud, and wrote it down: “George Norton.” The call completed, he swung around to Phil. “There’s a stone in your shoe to walk with. He tried their Pittsburgh office first. Them two weeks must of been spent looking up George Norton.”

“Do you know who he is?”

“I sure do.” He put the magazine he had selected in his pocket and locked the desk. “He was superintendent at Number Three when Laughlin’s wife was killed.”

Chapter 35

IT WAS ALMOST NOON before they got to see Father Joyce. The priest was visiting the hill country to the south. While they waited they looked at the marker on Laughlin’s grave:

KEVIN LAUGHLIN 1885-1949

He hath labored all the days of his life

The grave was out of line with the others in that section, as though it had been added where no grave had been intended. Moving along the row they saw the reason. The next grave was that of Kathleen Laughlin, 1902-1921, the child bride, as Mrs. O’Grady had called her, and beside her, Eileen Laughlin, the child of the child bride and Kevin. When Phil had first met Fields, the sheriff had said that he thought the makings of how a person was going to die was sometimes in something that happened in his youth. For Laughlin surely.

“It was Coffee dug his grave,” Fields said, motioning to the stone, “and Coffee thought he might of saved him from it.” He scratched a bit of dirt from the marker.

Father Joyce parked the car as they turned back from the cemetery. The priest went directly into the church without speaking, carrying the Sacrament. They went into the church vestibule and waited for him, both of them looking up at the giant angel spreading its mildewed wings. A solitary vigil light burned before it. Fields moved uneasily from one end of the vestibule to the other. The priest finally came to them.

“Can we talk here, Father?” Fields asked.

“Yes, of course.” He nodded to Phil.

“I’d like to ask you something more about Kevin Laughlin.”

The priest frowned. “Ask it.”

“When he came to you, he’d been gone from Winston a long time.”

“He had. He asked at the rectory for Father Duffy.”

“Did he tell you where he’d been?”

The priest turned the vigil light around so that it would burn evenly. “Sheriff, I am not permitted to pass along that information.”

“Even with him dead?”

“Even then.”

“All right, Father. I have my own notion where he was, and I can find it out without disturbing you.”

“It isn’t a matter of disturbing me, man. You know yourself the vows that are upon me.”

Phil thought then that there were times when Father Joyce tried very hard to be a simple man among simple people. He was no hypocrite, but he could neither understand nor make a compromise.

Fields drew the magazine from his pocket, opened it to the page he had marked, and showed it to the priest. He had underlined a passage. When Father Joyce returned it, Fields handed it to Phil. He read:

…It is high time a distinction was drawn here between potential “repeaters” and the offender who has lusted after his concept of justice only. For example, I have studied an inmate of a federal penitentiary who is serving a long sentence for an attack upon a man whose negligence he blamed for his wife’s death….

“I’m sure now that was Laughlin he was writing about,” Fields said. “Richard Coffee traced him through George Norton. He was superintendent on Number Three then, and he’s been gone from Winston since that section was closed.”

“I know that,” the priest said. “I did not know Coffee was looking for Laughlin.”

“I don’t know why he had to trace him that way,” Fields continued, “but he did. I don’t know just why he traced Laughlin either, but I’m going to find out.”

“Will it account for Coffee’s death?” the priest asked after a moment.

“I think it will. And I know it’s going to account for Laughlin’s. Do you know how he got out of prison, Father? Or do I have to wait?”

“He served his term.”

“For murder?”

“He did not murder,” the priest said coldly. “The man he assaulted died of a heart attack.”

“You checked the story, Father?”

“I did not. When a man brings me the story of his misfortune in penitence, I do not question his honesty.”

Fields stood a moment thinking. “Father, what would you say if I told you Laughlin was operating an illegal still over in the abandoned section of Number Three?”

The priest shook his head. “I cannot believe that, Sam. He had neither the guile nor the wit. He was a broken, harmless man. He didn’t want money. He didn’t have it. No, Sam, I won’t believe Kevin had any part of a thing like that.”

Fields agreed. “When did he come here?”

“Three years ago.”

“The thing really bothering me,” Fields said, “if Coffee came on account of Laughlin, why did he stay on after the old man was dead?”

That was not bothering him at all, Phil realized. Fields knew now where he was going. But he was testing a part of the prejudice in the town that had complicated the entire investigation. In a way he was testing himself; for in the very beginning, he too had come dangerously close at one point to accepting Dick’s death as suicide, because he believed the dead man to have lost his faith.

“I thought that testimony had already been given,” the priest said quietly.

“The Glasgow woman?”

The color rose in the priest’s face.

“Coffee wasn’t a very penitent man, was he, Father?” Fields said. He did not wait for an answer.

Chapter 36

FIELDS RETURNED BRIEFLY TO the parlor and put through a phone call to the United States marshal at Los Angeles. He stationed Krancow at the phone to await the information he wanted. He and Phil drove once more to the Widow O’Grady’s.

Anna was finishing her chore in the chicken coop when they drove up, the widow directing her with her stick from the back porch. The girl fled inside the coop as they came through the yard, the chickens raising a racket in their flight from her.

“Come out of there, you dull-witted girl. You’ll scare the birds from a month of laying! Bring her out of there, Philip. You’re nothing but trouble around the place, Sam Fields. What is it you want now?”

Fields strode toward the steps without answering. The widow hobbled into the house ahead of him. Phil went to the chicken house door. Anna was crouching in the corner, the scraper in hand, a look of terror on her face.

“What’s the matter, Anna?” he asked gently. “What are you afraid of?”

“You leave me alone.”

“Have I ever touched you? Have I ever said a harsh word to you?”

She only crouched deeper in the corner.

“Anna, are you afraid because you’ve told a lie? Is that what it is?” He moved slowly toward her, the words purringly soft. “Sometimes we do things and we don’t know why we do them. Maybe it’s because we want somebody to pay attention to us. We want them to listen to us—maybe to laugh at what we say. So we make things up, things that aren’t quite true, but after we’ve told them a few times, we get to believe them ourselves.”

Phil was almost to her now. She stood hugging herself as though she were trying to hide nakedness, but still clutching the hoe. He could feel the dust of the coop in his nose, a nauseating smell, and the sweat broke out on his back. “Anna, when you were at the gate the night before last, were you warning them that I was coming? Who was in there, Anna?”

She swung out wildly at him with the hoe then, catching him on the elbow with it as he threw up his arm to protect himself. He caught the hoe, but the girl fled out of the building, and then down across the field, leaping over the rough ground like a young doe.

Phil swore to himself and went into the house.

Margaret was opposite Fields at the kitchen table, the widow on the stool by the sink. She pulled herself up when Phil entered. She had never looked more elegant, her hair freshly yellowed and waved, her gnarled fingers bizarrely jeweled—the color on her cheeks red roses, the skin beneath it like withered leaves. Phil wondered if she had not been waiting all these weeks for this moment.

“Where’s the girl?” Mrs. O’Grady demanded.

“She’s scared out of her wits,” Phil said.

“She hasn’t the wits to be scared out of.”

“You’ve just about convinced her of that, haven’t you, Mrs. O’Grady? Between you and her father she hasn’t a chance. You like to see people suffer, don’t you?”

“Yes,” the widow hissed, “the way I suffer. Do you know what it’s like to be prisoner of your own body? To sit night in, night out, a lifetime in the company of jackeens?”

“Then take it out on the jackeens,” Phil said fiercely, “and not on a girl who can’t defend herself. You think because you’ve a crooked body you can put a crook in the minds of them weaker than yourself.”

The widow rocked on her cane. A grin spread on her face that showed every tooth in her head. Dear God, Phil thought, this was her pleasure.

She clapped her hand on his arm, the whole weight of her body seeming to lean on him. “You’ve spunk in you, after all, Philip. Take me over to the table beside her.” As they moved across the room, and he felt the hard, dead weight of her hand upon his arm, he remembered that he had not offered her a ride in the car. Dick had done that. He had borrowed Father Joyce’s car and driven her over the countryside, easing her great lump of pain. What a concoction of vinegar and gall she was, contemptuous of the weak, but unenvious of the strong—the old lady at the pump, indeed, waiting to be disenchanted. Beside her at the table, Margaret was a tall, pale lily, the flower of purity. Both of them sat prim and erect, waiting. Fields, too, waited. Tired, overwrought, he would need all his reserve to win this struggle of nerves.

The sheriff lit a cigaret and blew the smoke between them. “You’re a liar, Mrs. Coffee,” he said then. “You’ve spun us the damnedest string of lies any human ever put together. And you almost made them take. It’s you scraped the bottom of the barrel and smeared it over your husband—every place you went. As close to despair as that man came, you drove him there.”

“Sheriff, if you’re saying that Dick committed suicide on account of me…”

“I’m not saying that, and you know it. Your husband died chasing a man who committed murder. You know that man, Mrs. Coffee.” He turned to Mrs. O’Grady. “And you know him, too.”

“Peh,” the widow said, but she did not deny it.

“He was here the night before last. He knew you, Mrs. Coffee, long before that, and when we take him into custody this afternoon, he’s going to tell us from where.”

“That should be interesting,” Margaret said serenely.

“He’s going to tell us of a prison break in California three years ago—right in the middle of a drive there for reforms. He’s going to tell how he took a simple little man with him because he was always talking about an abandoned mine where he lost his wife. That was a good place for a man to hide out till he could make himself respectable. He killed that little man when he was afraid he’d talk to Coffee. And there’s something terrible twisted in the way it turned out. Dick Coffee helped him, finding gas in that room and marking it. More than that, he almost got himself blamed for it.”

“Dick’s clay hand,” Margaret said then. “So many things he touched turning to clay, and all the time he thought he was giving life to them.”

“Do you deny knowing Glasgow, Mrs. Coffee?”

“Sheriff Fields,” Margaret started with a great show of tolerance.

The widow laid her hand on Margaret’s wrist. “It’s a story worth telling, dear,” she coaxed. “What can they do to you?”

The trace of a smile played at the corners of Margaret’s mouth. “I’m not one for boasting myself,” the old lady continued, “but I’d give them a story with a stick in it if I was you. Where’s the guts you told me about, the love of taking a chance, the wild dares of living with a man and cuckolding him at every turn of his back? Aye, and in all the ports of the world, and them sanctifying him.”

Margaret lifted her head proudly, defiantly. The widow had struck a responsive chord and knew how to play it. “Tell them the talk here the night before last,” she leaned into Margaret’s face… “the times you had with him on the seamen’s strike, was it? The thugs he run through the lines like water, and you riding the night rounds with him picking them up from the water-front hellholes, filling their guts with whiskey and shooting them through. Tell them that, and all the while the poor cuckold writing holy protests of the violence.”

She twisted her head around to Phil. “Did you think you were in her class at all? Or him? Was our Dicky boy in a class like that? No! He vomited every port he traced her to, but he couldn’t spit out his love of her. It was in him like bile.”

“You can’t spit out poison,” Phil said. “Not once you’ve swallowed it.”

The widow rocked in her chair. “There’s a fine bit of philosophy. I waited a long time for her coming.”

“From the letter she wrote him from Chicago?” Fields said then.

Margaret looked at Mrs. O’Grady.

“Aye. You’re sharper than I thought, Sam Fields. We’re not all dolts down here. He burned the letter here in the stove. But I fished it out before it caught.” Again she stretched her hand to cajole Margaret. “It skipped my mind to tell you that, my dear. But there was nothing much in it. It was no more than you telling him part of you was in him forever. That, and warning him about Glasgow. That was a great kindness.”

“Then it was Glasgow told you he was here?” Fields said.

“Yes, it was Glasgow.”

“And Glasgow saw you in Cincinnati, too, didn’t he, and told you to get him away from here?”

“No. He didn’t tell me that.”

“Can you think of the reunion here that night?” the widow said. She would not be done out of the leading part. “Can you think of it, Sam Fields?”

“I can think of it,” he said. “And I can think of the reunion on that prison story, too. Did you help in the break, Mrs. Coffee?”

“Save some of your questions for him, Sheriff.”

“I got enough for him to answer.” Fields looked at his watch. “About one more little tea party like this is all my stomach can take.”

And this was Margaret Coffee, Phil thought—the lovely woman he had envied his friend all these years.

“Margaret.” He waited until her eyes met his. “Why? Why to Dick? What started it?”

“You would even find an excuse for me, Phil? Dick knew what he was marrying—a girl that lived by her—beauty. Do you remember in New York? A pickup, he told you. It was the truth, and he never let me forget it. He was so proud of marrying a Magdalene.”

“You knew all this,” Fields said to Mrs. O’Grady from the door. “Even to how he died.”

“Why wouldn’t I? I’ve lived here sixty years of my life and not all of them crippled.” She cocked her head. “Do you know, Sam, there’s nary a thing you can hold this one on?” She nodded at Margaret. “She’s clear as a bird in a winter sky.”

“That makes two of you, don’t it?” he said contemptuously. “Come on, McGovern. Leave them. And may the devil take them before we get back.”

The widow’s laughter followed them out the door.

Chapter 37

THEY RETURNED TO KRANCOW’S. No word had come from the West Coast, but Krancow was pacing the floor with a telegram addressed to Fields. The constable was sweating profusely. Three deputies waited with him.

“Open it, man,” Fields said. He went directly to the phone and called Father Joyce. He asked him to ring the church bell. As Phil learned later, the tolling of the church bell was a signal to the townspeople—most times of disaster. They would go to the union hall. But this day they would know the reason they were summoned.

Fields made another call. He hung up, hearing the voice at the other end. To one of the deputies he said then: “Pekarik, I want you and Daniels to go up to Jerry Whelan’s house. He’s there now. I want you to see that he stays there for the next two hours. Understand?”

He swung around to Phil. “Where’s your car?”

“Outside here.”

Fields nodded and took the telegram from Krancow. He read it, handed it to Phil. It was from Chicago.

QUESTIONED PAROLED LARCENIST LEONARD COLEMAN ON RENDEZVOUS HERE WITH RICHARD COFFEE DECEMBER THREE, FOUR, AND FIVE. CLAIMS COFFEE OFFERED HIM FIFTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS FOR INFORMATION ON PRISON BREAK LOS ALTOS PENITENTIARY 1947. COFFEE AND WIFE RESIDENTS IN WARDENS HOUSE. COFFEE ABSENT AT TIME. WIFE INTIMATE WITH WARDEN ACCORDING TO COLEMAN.

TWO ESCAPEES STILL AT LARGE. KENNETH MCLAUGHLIN, LOS ANGELES. SERVED FOUR YEARS OF TWELVE YEAR SENTENCE, ATTEMPTED MURDER. JEROME GOW. SERVED ONE YEAR OF LIFE SENTENCE. WATERFRONT RACKET MURDER. CONTACT U. S. MARSHAL …

Phil read no more, for Fields was on his way. “Read Laughlin and Glasgow,” the sheriff said.

As they reached the parlor steps, the church bell started ringing. Fields checked it with his watch. The men came from their houses, the stores and taverns, women and children watching from behind thinly curtained windows. At the hall, McNamara was waiting, as were Riordon, Cavanaugh, Randy Nichols, their faces tense. Several deputies stood clutching rifles some of them must have thought never to use again, having laid them by after the war to pick up a miner’s pick or drill.

As Fields and Phil stepped from the car, Father Joyce drove up, a weeping Anna Whelan in the car beside him. The priest got out and brought the girl to the sheriff.

“I lied,” the words tumbled from her loose mouth. “The old lady laughed. She sent me up to spy and …”

Fields stemmed her flow of words and tears. “You’ll tell me the rest later, Anna. This is no place for a girl now. Go back to Mrs. O’Grady’s and wait for me.”

He stood on the hall steps and told the crowd briefly that he wanted the men to fan out from the station past the loading tracks. They were to do nothing unless Glasgow tried to leave the train before it stopped.

“How do you know he’ll be on it, Sheriff?”

“He was on it when it pulled out of Louisville at one-thirty.”

“What do you want him for?”

“I just want him. And I want him in one piece. You’ll get your explanation then.”

With Fields driving ahead, the men walked through the street in a body, each man moving with determined pace. If this were all, they would go back to Number Three in the morning.

Phil walked down among the men with Nichols. “I was right about the wife, wasn’t I?”

“Yeah,” Phil said. He felt as though nothing was left in him but the numb will to see the rotten business finished.

They waited at the center of the splayed tracks, the empty coal cars on either side forming a hollow cordon. The sun, near setting, was warm still, the only kindness of the day. Each minute was as measured as the breathing of the watchers.

…Never the twain shall meet…the silly phrase ran through his head over and over again like words at night when over-weariness wards off sleep. In the distance, riding from one valley to another, the train whistle sounded. The waiting men stiffened. An occasional crow swooped over them, crying noisily, the only other sound the slowly rising churgle of the train.

The long black line of cars hove into sight, and seemed to crawl warily forward. The engineer and fireman looked curiously among the tense-faced watchers, but there was no other human movement along the slackening train. The sheriff headed down the track toward the caboose, the men falling in with him, and those who lay in the wake of the train closed in from behind. There was still no brakeman as the cars jarred to a noisy halt, a lurch forward, and another halt.

Phil watched the faces of the men who passed him, Riordon, Cavanaugh, Pekarik… He was jolted into some remembrance, seeing the deputy. Pekarik had been charged with watching Whelan.

“Pekarik?”

The deputy turned at his name. Phil ran to him. “Does the sheriff know you left Whelan?”

“He was called to Mrs. O’Grady’s,” Pekarik said, “to bring her to the union hall.”

“She has no phone. Go down to the end quick and tell the sheriff.”

Phil ran, leaping across the tracks to the station and past it, cursing himself for leaving the car at the parlor. Nichols followed him, and McNamara. But he was already far ahead of them. He was gasping for breath as he reached Lavery’s, and there was not a car moving in the town. Only the startled eyes moved from behind curtained windows—darting after the wild-running man. He could see the taxi sitting in the widow’s driveway, already passengered, and a man flying across the field, twice as close to the house as he himself. Glasgow had jumped the train at the beginning of its hairpin turn around Winston.

The gate was flung open, and a panic-maddened Anna plunged down the road and threw herself on Phil. He could not shake her off. She dragged after him, wailing.

“She’s took leave of her mind,” the girl cried. “She split Pa’s head with the stick…”

Glasgow was almost across the field. Even without Anna, Phil knew he could not reach him. Mrs. O’Grady had split the seconds in her timing. Then, from behind him, a single shot rang out, and the echo flung its sound among the hills. Glasgow stumbled a few feet further and fell. McNamara’s aim was unerring.

Phil lifted the grappling girl from her feet and swept her off the road to the ditch. For out of the driveway, screeching like a wild beast, came the Winston taxi. The Widow O’Grady was at the wheel, her stiffened body flexing with the vibrant car. Phil clung to the road until the machine was almost on him. No fear of hell or damnation would halt her now. She drove like the avenging Maeve her chariot. For an instant before he leaped, Phil saw the terror-frozen face of Margaret Coffee. And he heard a tuneless music. The mad woman was singing.

“For the love of God,” he shouted at McNamara, “get the tires! Shoot them out!”

But McNamara stood where he was. He bowed, hat in hand, sweeping the ground with it as the widow passed, the revolver dangling from his other hand.

The car screamed around Lavery’s corner and through the deserted town. Phil stumbled down the hill as Fields turned out of the station. He picked him up, and drove in the direction Phil motioned.

“It’s no use,” Fields said, although he pushed the accelerator to the floor. “She as much as told us when she said there was nothing to hold the wife on.”

“It’s O’Grady driving,” Phil rasped.

“I know. That’s why it’s no use. She’s got her own vengeance all planned.”

He was right. They saw the car far ahead of them careening through the valley to the south and then begin the climb of one last mountain. At the peak of the ascent, the taxi splintered the road fence and soared an instant before plummeting downward like a stricken bird.

Chapter 38

GLASGOW WAS TAKEN TO the Corteau County Hospital, McNamara’s bullet lodged in his hip. Confirmation of his criminal record had come from Los Angeles, and Fields carried it with him as he went about one grim duty after another waiting for word from the hospital that he could talk with the convict.

It was late that night when Phil and the sheriff went to see Jerry Whelan at his home. He was sprawled on a couch in the living room. His first words were: “Jasus, what did she do to my taxi?”

“To hell with your taxi,” Fields said. “You’re lucky she didn’t take you along.”

“I am. She said it herself before crowning me.”

His wife stared at them from the kitchen, the two smallest children clutching at her skirt. Anna, on seeing the two men, fled to the back of the house.

“It was you and the old lady started the bootlegging, wasn’t it, Jerry?”

“It was.”

“When did you start?”

“Away during prohibition. She was working it herself in them days, and she’d run it herself, driving like the devil in a nightmare just before dawn. We made but a moderate drop of late, the market being what it is today. I was all for pulling out myself till she bought me the taxi.”

“And the distribution, Jerry, she didn’t trust you with that?”

“Well, it wasn’t her not trusting me as much as her liking the company now and then of her traveling men. And it was a sight safer. We’d keep the makings in her attic, you see…”

The mice, Phil thought. It was all theirs now, for the kitten would never grow to a cat in that house.

Whelan raised his hand to his head. “It’s throbbing something fierce.”

“It ought to with what’s in it,” Fields said. “When did Glasgow cut himself in, Jerry?”

“He came in on me working there one night. He was living in there at the time. He was a rum-runner once on the coast from Mexico. He’d wonderful notions of expanding our trade.”

“You’d of had grander notions if you’d banished the Clausons. Was it you set off the dynamite?”

“I only touched the match to the fuse, Sheriff. It was him laid it all out. I near died when I found you were down there. I’d no notion of harm. After you went down there he wanted the still destroyed.”

“And Laughlin?” Fields said, interrupting.

“I swear to God, Sheriff. He was no more than a nuisance, moaning after his poor lost wife.”

“But he was more than a nuisance to Glasgow when Coffee came.”

“I don’t know that at all. I cleared out the night before the old man died, for I saw the ghost as plain as you’re sitting there. I thought she’d come for him and might be taking me for good measure.”

Fields got up wearily. “What did the old woman say to taking in Glasgow?”

“She took his measure,” Whelan said. “She wasn’t a particular woman.”

Looking at him, Phil thought that was obvious.

Fields nodded. “She must of known from the day Coffee came. I don’t think she thought he’d be killed. Maybe she didn’t care till it was too late for her to do anything about it. But she laid out her vengeance like needlework, and it included herself. Lord God Almighty, what you don’t know about people.”

“I’ll behave myself after this if you go easy on me, Sheriff,” Whelan whimpered. “It was getting myself beholden to the old woman I went astray.”

“You’re beholden to your wife and kids, Jerry Whelan. If you get out of this, get yourself a decent job. And don’t be hiring Anna out till she’s the chance of growing and a bit of learning. Good night to you.” Then he called out: “And to you, Anna, and you, Mrs. Whelan.”

The haggard woman smiled wordlessly, and smoothed the heads of the youngsters at her knees.

Whelan motioned to Anna when she had come to the door. “She’ll hire out no more. She’s my darling girl.”

Of a darling father, Phil thought.

In the small hours of the morning Fields was permitted a few minutes with Glasgow. Confronted with his prison record, he listened to the sheriff recapitulate the events in Winston, nodding his head now and then in confirmation. His mouth twisted into a smile when he heard of the fate which had overtaken Margaret Coffee. He knew that it was intended for him as well. The widow had promised them a retreat in the hills where they might stay until the carrion birds found them.

It was Fields who shuddered at the meaning she had concealed in the words.

Not until Fields described the killing of Laughlin did Glasgow contradict him. “Take it easy, Sheriff. Take it easy. What in hell would I kill that old goat for? I took a chance with him in the first place because nobody gave a damn whether he lived or died. There was nothing in his record pointing to Winston. He was always talking about the mines, but anybody who thought about him at all thought he meant a silver mine out there. That’s where he went after the foreman. Laughlin was the easiest guy in the world to put away—in the pen or in the grave.”

The truth of that was proven in Winston. Only when Richard Coffee grubbed his story out of history did it come to light. And only when Coffee died did it seem to matter. One more sordid thing he had learned about the ways of men and justice, Fields thought, and he had to learn it from the enemy of both.

“It was Coffee I had to get,” Glasgow said, gritting his teeth. “When Margaret couldn’t get him out of here, I knew I had to get him. And I knew it meant a stink. If he got it in the mine it was somebody else’s stink. When Whelan’s kid saw him and Becky over there I got the notion of how I could do it. I knew there was gas there. It nearly put me out one night. I just got out in time. It turns out Coffee knew about the gas too, but I didn’t know that. And I’d been watching them. I knew he was looking for me. I thought I’d get him in there when I wanted him, using that magic doll. I figured he’d go after it, connecting it with Becky or even me. I grooved a notch in the wall all the way to that room so’s I could feel my way in the dark and lead him in there. I was going to give him a touch of chloroform and let the gas do the rest. I wasn’t in any hurry. He got interested in Becky. He wanted to let her down easy.”

He winced with pain. “Damn McNamara’s soul. What right’s he got carrying a rod?”

“Laughlin was caught in the trap you intended for Coffee,” Fields prompted.

“Godalmighty, I led him down that passage like he didn’t know it better than me that night. He was in the room after the magic piece before I knew what I had, and clear off his head. I couldn’t get him out and I couldn’t get the doll away from him. I had to get out myself…”

“All right. We’ll get that later,” Fields said, for Glasgow was getting weak. “What about the night Coffee died?”

“It was him or me after the Laughlin business. I was scared of the mine myself. There was just one thing I wanted to get out of it—the magic doll. I hid it after Laughlin was dead and I didn’t know Coffee found it. I went in after it that night. I thought using that other entry I could make it. I made it in all right, but he was waiting for me. I led him a crazy chase out that way. He almost got me once. It must have been then he turned his ankle. When I got out I was fuzzy myself. I heard the train whistles and I knew my directions. He didn’t and it was dark. I was lucky stopping right there. I saw him come out and listen and then start rushing up the hill. I knew what happened. He was climbing to hell on an echo. I shouted a couple of times: ‘You won’t make it, Coffee!’ He didn’t answer but I knew where my voice was hitting him. Dead ahead…”

Glasgow stopped. Then he repeated the words as though his mind and tongue were stuck on them: “Dead ahead, dead ahead…”

“Did you see him fall?”

The criminal’s eyes were glassy. “I didn’t see him. I heard him. He didn’t make much noise…” He closed his eyes. “Where’s Becky?”

Fields got up. “She isn’t here, Glasgow.”

“Did she send any word?”

“She didn’t send any word to anybody. The house is locked up tight. They got all the blinds pulled.”

Glasgow turned his head away. “Wouldn’t I give something if I was going to be as unwelcome where I’m going as I was in that house.”

Chapter 39

THE SHERIFF DROVE PHIL up the hill a last time, and waited with a padlock for the kitchen door while he packed his bag in the quiet house. The boarders were gone in search of another, kinder landlady. The placid O’Grady smiled wanly from the wall as Phil moved through the room. The only sound was the kitten mewing beneath the stove. He picked it up. He stopped a moment and felt the earth in one of the widow’s many plants. She had watered them that day.

“Whatever’s bad in them, there’s a bit of kindness in all gardeners,” she said to him once. She had said then the most there was to say of herself.

About the Author

Dorothy Salisbury Davis is a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, and a recipient of lifetime achievement awards from Bouchercon and Malice Domestic. The author of seventeen crime novels, including the Mrs. Norris Series and the Julie Hayes Series; three historical novels; and numerous short stories; she has served as president of the Mystery Writers of America and is a founder of Sisters in Crime.

Born in Chicago in 1916, she grew up on farms in Wisconsin and Illinois and graduated from college into the Great Depression. She found employment as a magic-show promoter, which took her to small towns all over the country, and subsequently worked on the WPA Writers Project in advertising and industrial relations. During World War II, she directed the benefits program of a major meatpacking company for its more than eighty thousand employees in military service. She was married for forty-seven years to the late Harry Davis, an actor, with whom she traveled abroad extensively. She currently lives in Palisades, New York.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1950 by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

Cover design by Tracey Dunham

978-1-4804-6050-8

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