by Jojo Moyes
* * *
• • •
Small towns being what they were, and Margery being who she was, it wasn’t too long before word got out that she was carrying, and for a few days at least, every place where townspeople were prone to meeting—the feed merchant, the churches, the general store—was thick with the news of it. There were those for whom this just confirmed everything they thought of Frank O’Hare’s daughter. Another no-good O’Hare child, no doubt destined for disgrace or disaster. There would always be those for whom any baby out of wedlock was a matter for vocal and emphatic disapproval. But there were also those whose minds were still thick with the flood and memories of what she’d said about Van Cleve’s part in it. Luckily for her, they seemed to comprise most of the townspeople, who believed that when so much bad had taken place, a new baby, whatever the circumstances, was nothing to get too aerated about.
Apart from Sophia, that was.
“You gonna marry that man now?” she said, when she heard.
“Nope.”
“Because you selfish?”
Margery had been writing a letter to the governor. She put down her pen and shot Sophia a look.
“Don’t you side-eye me, Margery O’Hare. I know what you think about being joined under the Lord. Believe me, we all know your views. But this ain’t just about you any more, is it? You want that baby to get called names in the schoolyard? You want her to grow up second class? You want her to miss out because people won’t have one of them in the house?”
Margery opened the door so that Fred could drop another load of books back into the library. “Can we at least wait for her to get here before you start scolding me?”
Sophia raised her eyebrows. “I’m just saying. Life’s hard enough growing up in this town without you giving the poor child another yoke around its neck. You know darn well how people made judgments about you based on what your parents did, decisions you had no hand in.”
“All right, Sophia.”
“Well, they did. And it’s only because you’re so pig-headed that you was able to make the life you wanted. What if she ain’t like you?”
“She’ll be like me.”
“Shows how much you know about children.” Sophia snorted. “I’m going to say it once. This ain’t just about what you want any more.” She slammed her ledger down on her desk. “And you need to think about that.”
* * *
• • •
Sven was no better. He sat on the rickety kitchen chair, polishing his boots while she sat on one side of the settle, and although his words were fewer, and his voice calmer, his point was just the same.
“I’m not going to ask you again, Margery. But this changes things. I want to be known as this child’s father. I want to do it all properly. I don’t want our baby to be brought up a bastard.”
He regarded her over the wooden table, and she felt suddenly mulish and defensive, as she had when she was ten years old, so that she picked distractedly at a wool blanket and refused to look at him. “You think we don’t have anything more important to talk about just now?”
“That’s all I’m going to say.”
She pushed her hair away from her face and chewed at her lower lip. He crossed his arms, brow lowered, ready for her to yell that he was driving her crazy, that he had promised not to keep going on, and she had had enough and he could git on back to his own house.
But she surprised him. “Let me think about it,” she said.
They sat in silence for a few minutes. Margery drummed her fingers on the table and stretched out a leg, turning her ankle this way and that.
“What?” he said.
She picked at the corner of the blanket again, then straightened it, and then looked sideways at him.
“What?” he said, again.
“You ever going to come and sit by me then, Sven Gustavsson? Or have I lost all appeal to you, now you’ve got me blown up like a milch-cow?”
* * *
• • •
Alice let herself in late, thoughts of Fred crowding out everything she had seen that day, the apologies of families whose library books had drowned along with the rest of their belongings, the black slurry that marked the base of trees, the scattered belongings, odd shoes, letters, pieces of furniture, broken or ruined, that lined the paths of the now sedate creeks.
All I can give you, Alice, is words.
As she had every morning and every night since, she felt Fred’s fingers tracing her cheek, saw his narrowed, serious eyes, wondered how it would feel to have those strong hands tracing her body in that same gentle, purposeful way. Her imagination filled those gaps in her knowledge. Her memories of his voice, the intensity of his expression left her faintly breathless. She thought about him so much she suspected the others could see right through her, maybe catch snatches of the constant fevered hum in her head as it trickled out through her ears. It was almost a relief to reach Margery’s cabin, her collar turned up against the April wind, and know that she would be forced to think about something else for a couple of hours at least—book bindings or slurry or string beans.
Alice walked in, closing the screen door quietly behind her (she’d had a horror of slamming doors since she’d left the Van Cleve house), and removed her coat, hanging it on the hook. The cabin was silent, which usually meant that Margery was out back, attending to Charley or the hens. She walked over to the bread bin and peered inside, pondering how empty the place still felt without Bluey’s boisterous presence.
She was about to call out back when she heard a sound that had been absent these last weeks: muffled cries, soft moans of pleasure coming from behind Margery’s closed door. She stopped dead in the middle of the floor and, as if in response, the voices suddenly rose and fell in unison, threaded through with terms of endearment and suffused with emotion, springs creaking and the head of the bed banging emphatically against the wooden wall and threatening to build to a crescendo.
“Oh, ruddy marvelous,” Alice muttered softly to herself. And she put her coat back on, stuffed a piece of bread between her teeth and went to sit outside on the front porch on the squeaky rocker, eating with one hand, and plugging her good ear with the other.
It was not unusual for the snows to last a whole month longer on the mountaintops. It was as if, determined to ignore whatever was going on down in the town, they refused to relinquish their icy hold until the last possible moment, right up until waxy buds were already poking through the thinning crystalline carpet, and on the upper trails the trees were no longer brown and skeletal but shimmered with a faint hint of green.
So, it was some way into April before the body of Clem McCullough was revealed, his frostbitten nose visible first, as the snows melted high on the uppermost ridge, and then the rest of his face, gnawed in places by some hungry creature and his eyes long missing, found by a hunter from Berea, who had been sent to the hillsides above Red Lick looking for deer, and would have nightmares for months afterward about rotting faces with fathomless holes for eyes.
To find the body of a well-known drunk was not that much of a surprise in a small town, especially in moonshine country, and might normally have guaranteed just a few days’ chatter and shaking of heads, as news got around.
But this was different.
Clem McCullough’s head, the sheriff announced, not long after he and his men came back down the mountainside, had been stove in on the back of a pointed boulder. And resting on the upper part of his chest, revealed as the last of the snow melted away, was a heavily bloodstained, fabric-bound edition of Little Women, marked Baileyville Packhorse Library WPA.
NINETEEN
Men expected women to be calm, collected, cooperative, and chaste. Eccentric conduct was frowned upon, and any female who got too far out of line could be in serious trouble.
• VIRGINIA CULIN ROBERTS, The Women Was Too Tough
&nbs
p; Van Cleve, his belly full of pork rinds and a fine film of excitement glistening on his brow, walked into the sheriff’s office. He brought with him a wooden box of cigars and a beaming smile, not that he would have admitted any particular reason for either. No, but the discovery of McCullough’s body meant that the breached dam and the slurry clean-up were suddenly old news. Van Cleve and his son could walk down the street again and, for the first time in weeks as he emerged from his car, he experienced something like a spring in his step.
“Well, Bob, I can’t say I’m surprised. You know she’s been causing trouble the whole year, destabilizing our community, spreading wickedness.” He leaned forward and lit the sheriff’s cigar with a click of his brass lighter.
The sheriff sat back in his chair. “I’m not entirely sure I’m with you, Geoff.”
“Well, you’ll be arresting the O’Hare girl, won’t you?”
“What makes you think it has anything to do with her?”
“Bob . . . Bob . . . We’ve been friends a long time. You know as well as I do the beef the McCulloughs had with the O’Hares. Goes back as far as any of us can remember. And who else would be riding all the way up there?”
The sheriff said nothing.
“And, more pertinently, a little birdie tells me there was a library book found by the body. Well, that just about settles it, I’d say. Case closed.” He took a long drag of his cigar.
“Wish my boys was as efficient at solving crime as you, Geoff.” The sheriff’s eyes crinkled with amusement.
“Why, you know she was responsible for persuading my Bennett’s wife away from him, though we’ve tried to keep that on the low-down, to save him embarrassment. They were happily married until she came along! No, she puts wicked ideas in girls’ heads and causes mayhem wherever she goes. I for one will sleep better knowing she’s locked up tonight.”
“Is that right?” said the sheriff, who had known about the Van Cleve girl’s movements for months. There was little in this county that escaped him.
“That family, Bob.” Van Cleve blew smoke to the ceiling. “There’s bad blood, shot all the way through the O’Hare line. Why, do you remember her uncle Vincent? Now there was a rogue . . .”
“Can’t say as the evidence is conclusive, Geoff. Between us, as it stands, we can’t prove beyond doubt she was on that route, and our one witness is now saying she can’t be sure whose voice it was she heard.”
“Of course it was her! You know darn well that the little polio girl wouldn’t do it and nor would our Alice. That leaves the farm girl and the colored. And I’d put money on it she don’t ride.”
The sheriff turned down the corners of his mouth in a way that suggested he was not convinced.
Van Cleve jabbed a finger on the desk. “She’s a malign influence, Bob. Ask Governor Hatch. He knows. The way she was spreading salacious material under the guise of a family library—oh, you didn’t know about that? She’s been fomenting discord up on North Ridge so they wouldn’t allow the mine to go about its legal business. Every bit of trouble around here for the past year you can pretty much trace back to Margery O’Hare. This library has given her ideas above her station. The longer she’s locked up the better.”
“You know she’s with child.”
“Well, there you go! No moral compass whatsoever. Is that how a decent woman behaves? Is that really someone you want going into houses where there are young and impressionable people?”
“I guess not.”
Van Cleve mapped it out with his fingers in the air, looking at some distant horizon. “She took her route, crossed paths with poor old McCullough on his way home, and when she saw he was drunk, she had an opportunity to avenge her no-good father, and killed him with the nearest thing she had to hand, knowing full well he would be buried under the snow. She probably thought the animals would eat him and nobody would ever find the body. It’s only luck and the grace of God Almighty that somebody did. Cold-blooded, that’s what she is! Contravening the laws of nature in every possible regard.”
He took a deep draw of his cigar and shook his head. “I tell you, Bob, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she did it again.” He waited a moment, then added. “That’s why I’m glad there’s a man like you in charge around here. A man who will stop the spread of lawlessness. A man who is not afraid to make the law count.”
Van Cleve reached for his cigar box. “Why don’t you take a couple of these home for later? Tell you what, take the whole box.”
“Most generous of you, Geoff.”
The sheriff said nothing more. But he took a long, appreciative drag on his cigar.
* * *
• • •
Margery O’Hare was arrested at the library on the evening they moved the last of the books back to their shelves. The sheriff arrived with his deputy and at first Fred greeted them warmly, thinking they’d come to examine his newly replaced floorboards and relined shelves, as townspeople had been doing all week; checking on the progress of everyone else’s repairs had added a new dimension to the daily passing of time in Baileyville. But the sheriff’s face was long and cold as a tombstone. As he planted his boots in the center of the room and gazed around him, something in Margery plummeted, a heavy stone in a bottomless well.
“Which one of youse takes the route up to the mountains above Red Lick?”
Their eyes slid toward each other.
“What’s the matter, Sheriff? Someone late returning their books?” said Beth, but nobody laughed.
“The body of Clem McCullough was found on Arnott’s Ridge two days ago. Looks like the murder weapon came from your library.”
“Murder weapon?” said Beth. “We don’t have no murder weapons here. Murder stories, we got those.”
Margery’s face drained of color. She blinked hard, put out a hand to steady herself. The sheriff caught it.
“She’s in the family way,” Alice said, taking her arm. “She gets a little light-headed.”
“And that’s dramatic news for a woman in the family way to have to hear straight out,” Izzy added.
But the sheriff was staring at Margery. “You take that route, Miss O’Hare?”
“We share the routes, Sheriff,” Kathleen interjected. “It really depends on who’s working that day and how each horse is doing. Some ain’t so good on those longer, rougher routes.”
“You keep records of who goes where?” he said to Sophia, who stood up behind her desk, her knuckles tight on the edge.
“Yes, sir.”
“I want to see every route taken by every librarian over the past six months.”
“Six months?”
“Mr. McCullough’s body is in a state of . . . some decay. It’s unclear how long he has lain there. And his family don’t seem to have reported him missing, according to our records, so we need all the information we can gather.”
“That’s—that’s a lot of ledgers, sir. And we’re still in a little disarray here because of the floods. It may take me a while to locate them among these books.” Only Alice was positioned so that she could see Sophia slowly nudge the ledger on the floor firmly under her desk with her foot.
“To be frank, Mr. Sheriff, we lost a good many of them,” Alice added. “It’s entirely possible the relevant entries have suffered catastrophic water damage. Some were even washed away.” She said it in her most clipped English accent, which had been known to sway sterner men than him, but the sheriff didn’t appear to have heard her.
He had moved around to Margery and stood in front of her, his head tilted to one side. “The O’Hares had a long feud with the McCulloughs, am I right?”
Margery picked at a scuff on her boot. “I guess.”
“My own daddy remembers your daddy coming after Clem McCullough’s brother. Tom? Tam? Shot him in the stomach Christmas 1913 . . . 1914, if I remember right. I bet if I asked around there’
d be other bad blood could be recalled between your two families.”
“Far as I’m concerned, Sheriff, any feud died with the last of my brothers.”
“Be the first blood feud around here just melted away with the snows,” he said, and put a matchstick between his teeth, which he waggled up and down. “Mighty unusual.”
“Well, I’ve never been what you might call conventional.” She appeared to have composed herself.
“So you would know nothing about how Clem McCullough happened to be brought down?”
“No, sir.”
“Tricky for you that you’re the only living person might have had a grudge against him.”
“Ah, come on, Sheriff Archer,” Beth protested. “You know well as I do that family is proper hillbilly trash. They probably got enemies halfway to Nashville, Tennessee.”
That was true, they all agreed. Even Sophia felt safe enough to nod.
It was at that point they heard the engine. A car drew up, and the sheriff walked slow and stiff-legged to the door, as if he had all the time in the world. Another deputy appeared, and he murmured something in his ear. The sheriff looked up and behind him at Margery, then leaned in for further information.
The deputy entered the library so that there were three of them. Alice caught Fred’s eye, and saw he was as nonplussed as she felt. The sheriff turned and when he spoke again, it was, Alice thought, with a kind of grim satisfaction.
“Officer Dalton here has just been speaking with old Nancy Stone. She says you was making your way to her back in December when she heard a gunshot and some kind of a commotion. Says you never arrived and that, rain or shine, you had never once missed a book delivery before that day. Says you were known for it.”
“I recall I couldn’t get past the ridge. The snow was too deep.” Margery’s voice, Alice realized, had taken on a slight tremor.
“Not what Nancy says. She said the snow had eased two days past and that you was by the upper levels of the creek and that she heard you talking right up until minutes before the gun went off. Says she was mighty worried about you for a while.”