by Jojo Moyes
Mr. McCullough had not owned a horse or mule.
The prosecution counsel then interviewed their witnesses. There was old Nancy, who was pushed again and again to confirm that her first statement had stated clearly that she had heard Margery up on the ridge, followed by the sound of an altercation.
“But I didn’t say it like you’ve made it sound,” she protested, her hand reaching for her hair. She turned to look at the judge. “They twisted my words all this way and that. I know Margery. I know she would no more murder a man in cold blood than she would . . . I don’t know . . . bake a cake.”
This prompted laughter in the courtroom and a furious outburst from the judge, and Nancy put both hands to her face, guessing, probably correctly, that even that simile would add to the idea that Margery was somehow transgressive, that in her non-baking habits she went against the laws of nature.
The prosecution counsel got her to talk some more, about how isolated the route was (very), how often she saw anyone up there (rarely) and how many people regularly made the trip. (Only Margery, or the odd hunter.)
“No further questions, Your Honor.”
“Well, I would like to add one thing,” Nancy announced, as the court clerk made to lead her out of the witness box. She turned to point at the dock. “That there is a good, kindly girl. She’s brought us reading books through rain and shine, both for me and my sister who ain’t left her bed since 1933, and you so-called Christian folk judging her might want to think hard about how much you do for your fellow man. Because you’re none of you so high and mighty that you’re beyond judgment. She’s a good girl, and this is a terrible wrong you’re doing her! Oh, and, Mr. Judge? My sister has a message for you too.”
“That would be Phyllis Stone, older sister of the witness. She is apparently bedridden and could not make it down the mountain,” murmured the clerk to the judge.
Judge Arthurs leaned back. There may have been a faint roll of his eyes.
“Go ahead, Mrs. Stone.”
“She wanted me to tell you . . . ‘Y’all can go to Hell, because who’s going to bring us our Mack Maguire books now?’” she said loudly. Then she nodded. “Yup, y’all can go to Hell. That was it.”
And as the judge began to bang his gavel again, Beth and Kathleen, on each side of Alice, couldn’t help but let out a small burst of laughter.
* * *
• • •
Despite that moment of cheer, the librarians left the building that evening in muted mood, their faces drawn, as if the verdict could only be a formality. Alice and Fred walked together at the rear, their elbows bumping occasionally, both deep in thought.
“It might improve once Mr. Turner gets his say,” said Fred, as they reached the library building.
“Perhaps.”
He stopped as the others went inside. “Would you like something to eat before you head off?”
Alice glanced behind her at the people still spilling out of the upper level of the courthouse and felt suddenly mutinous. Why shouldn’t she eat where she wanted? How much of a sin could it be, given everything else that was going on? “That would be lovely, Fred. Thank you.”
She walked up to Fred’s house alongside him, her back straight, daring anybody to comment, and they moved around each other in the kitchen, preparing a meal, in some strange facsimile of domesticity, one that neither of them felt able to remark upon.
They didn’t talk of Margery, or Sven, or the baby, even though those three souls were lodged almost permanently in their thoughts. They didn’t talk of how Alice had divested herself of almost all the belongings she had acquired since arriving in Kentucky, and that just one small trunk now sat in Margery’s cabin, neatly labeled and awaiting her passage home. They remarked on the good taste of the food, the surprising harvest of apples that year, the erratic behavior of one of his new horses and a book Fred had read called Of Mice and Men, which he wished he hadn’t, despite the quality of the writing, as it was too darn depressing just now. And two hours later, Alice set off for the cabin and, while she smiled at Fred as she left (because it was almost impossible for her not to smile at Fred), within minutes of her departure she found that, behind her benign exterior, she was filled with a now semi-permanent rage: at a world where she could sit alongside the man she loved for only a matter of days more, and at a small town where three lives were about to be ruined for ever because of a crime a woman had not committed.
* * *
• • •
The week slid forward in fury-inducing fits and starts. Every day the librarians took their seats at the front of the public gallery, and every day they listened to various expert witnesses expounding and dissecting the facts of the case—that the blood on the edition of Little Women matched that of Clem McCullough, that the bruising to the front of his face and forehead was consistent with a blow from the same. As the week drew on, the court heard from the so-called character witnesses: the purse-mouthed wife who announced that Margery O’Hare had pressed upon her a book she and her husband could only describe as “obscene.” The fact that Margery had just had a baby out of wedlock, and with no visible shame whatsoever. There were the various older men—Henry Porteous for one—who felt able to testify to the length of the O’Hares’ feud with the McCulloughs, and the capacity for meanness and vengeance in both families. The defense counsel tried to pick apart these testimonies in the interests of balance: “Sheriff, isn’t it true that Miss O’Hare has never been arrested once in her thirty-eight years for any crime whatsoever?”
“It is,” the sheriff conceded. “Mind you, plenty of moonshiners around here ain’t never seen the inside of a cell either.”
“Objection!”
“I’m just saying, Your Honor. Just because a person ain’t been arrested don’t mean they behave like an angel. You know how things work around these parts.”
The judge ordered the statement expunged from the record. But it had done what the sheriff had known it would, and stained Margery’s name in some vague, unformed way, and Alice watched the jurors frowning and making little notes on their pads and saw Van Cleve’s slow, satisfied smile along the bench. Fred had noted that the sheriff now smoked the same brand of fancy cigar as Van Cleve, imported all the way from France.
How was that for a coincidence?
* * *
• • •
By Friday evening the librarians were despondent. Lurid headline had followed lurid headline, the crowds, while having thinned a little, at least to the point where baskets of food and drink were no longer having to be raised and lowered from the second floor, were still transfixed by the Bloodthirsty Girl Librarian From The Hills, and when Fred had driven over to see Sven on Friday afternoon after the court had gone into recess for the weekend to give him a report from inside the court, Sven had put his head in his hands and not spoken for a full five minutes.
That day the women walked down to the library and sat in silence, not having anything to say, but none of them wanting to leave for home either. Finally Alice, who had begun to find the silence oppressive, announced that she was going to head to the store to get some drinks. “I reckon we’ve earned them.”
“You don’t mind being seen buying alcohol?” said Beth. “’Cause I can go get some ’shine from my daddy’s cousin Bert, if you’d prefer. I know it’s hard for you with—”
But Alice was already at the door. “To Hell with them. I’ll most likely be gone within the week,” she said. “They can gossip about me all they like by then.”
She walked down the dusty street, weaving in and out of the strangers who, having exhausted the day’s entertainments at the courthouse, were now zigzagging to the honky-tonks or the Nice ’N’ Quick, all of which were struggling to feel too bad for Margery O’Hare, given the roaring trade. She walked briskly, her head down and her elbows slightly out, not wanting to exchange small talk or even acknowledge any of those neighbors to whom s
he and Margery had brought books over the past year, and who now appeared traitorous enough to be enjoying the week’s events. They could go to Hell, too.
She pushed her way into the store, stopping in her tracks and sighing inwardly as she realized there would be at least fifteen people in the queue before her, and glanced behind her, wondering if it was worth heading to one of the bars to see if they would sell her something instead. What kind of a crowd would be in there? She was so full of anger, these days, that she felt like a tinder box, as if it would take only one wrong comment from one of these fools for her to—
She felt a tap on her shoulder.
“Alice?”
She turned. And there, by the preserves and canned goods, dressed in his shirtsleeves and his good blue trousers, without a speck of coal dust on him, stood Bennett. He had probably just finished work, but looked, as ever, as fresh as if he’d stepped out of the pages of a Sears catalog.
“Bennett,” she said, blinked and looked away. It wasn’t as if she was physically moved by him any more, she realized, searching for the reason for her sudden discomfort. There was only the vaguest hint of residual affection. What she felt was mostly disbelief that this man, standing here, was someone she had wrapped herself around, skin to skin, kissed and pleaded for physical contact with. This strange, unbalanced intimacy made her feel vaguely ashamed now.
“I . . . I heard you were leaving town.”
She picked up a can of tomatoes, just for something to do with her hands. “Yup. Trial looks to end on Tuesday. I’ll be headed out on Wednesday. You and your father won’t have to worry about me hanging around.”
Bennett glanced behind him, perhaps conscious that people might be watching, but all the customers were out-of-towners, and nobody saw anything gossip-worthy in a man and a woman exchanging a few words in the corner of the store.
“Alice—”
“You don’t have to say anything, Bennett. I think we’ve said enough. My parents have engaged a lawyer and—”
He touched her sleeve. “Pa says nobody managed to speak to his daughters.”
She pulled back her hand. “I’m sorry? What?”
Bennett looked behind him, his voice low. “Pa said the sheriff never spoke to McCullough’s daughters. They wouldn’t open the door. They shouted to his men they had nothing to say on the matter and they wouldn’t be talking to nobody. He says they’re both crazy, like the rest of the family. Says the state’s case is strong enough not to need them anyway.” He looked at her intently.
“Why are you telling me this?”
He chewed at his lip. “Figured . . . I figured . . . it might help you.”
She stared at him then, at his handsome, slightly unformed face, and his baby-soft hands, his anxious eyes. And briefly she felt her own face fall a little.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
“I’m sorry too, Bennett.”
He took a step back, ran a hand down his face.
They stood for a moment longer, shifting a little on their feet.
“Well,” he said eventually. “If I don’t see you before you leave . . . safe travels.”
She nodded. He headed for the door. As he reached it he turned, his voice lifting a little to be heard. “Oh. Thought you’d like to know I’m fixing to get the slurry dams made up. With proper housing and a cement base. So they can’t burst again.”
“Your father agreed to that?”
“He will.” The smallest smile, a flash of someone she had once known.
“That’s good news, Bennett. Really good news.”
“Yeah. Well.” He looked down. “It’s a start.”
With that her husband tipped his hat, opened the door, and was swallowed by the crowds still milling around outside.
* * *
• • •
The sheriff didn’t speak to his daughters? Why not?” Sophia shook her head. “It doesn’t make no sense to me.”
“Makes perfect sense to me,” said Kathleen, from the corner, where she was stitching a broken stirrup leather, grimacing as she forced the huge needle through the leather. “They got all the way up to Arnott’s Ridge, to a family they was expecting trouble from. They figure the girls wouldn’t know nothing about their daddy’s movements, given he was a known drunk who used to disappear for days on end. So they knock a few times, get told to git, then give up and come back down, and it takes them half a day each way to do it.”
“McCullough was a sundowner and a mean one at that,” said Beth. “Might be the sheriff didn’t want to push them too hard in case they told him something he didn’t want to hear. They need him to sound like a good man to make Marge seem bad.”
“But surely our lawyer should have gone asking questions?”
“Mr. Fancy Pants out of Lexington? You think he’s going to ride a mule half a day up to Arnott’s Ridge to speak with a bunch of angry hillbillies?”
“I don’t see how this is going to help us none,” said Beth. “If they won’t talk to the sheriff’s men they ain’t hardly going to talk to us.”
“That may be exactly why they would talk to us,” said Kathleen.
Izzy pointed at the wall. “Margery put the McCullough house on the list of places not to go to. On no account. Look, it says so right here.”
“Well, maybe she was just doing what everyone’s done to her,” said Alice. “Going on gossip without actually looking at the facts.”
“Those girls haven’t been seen in town for nigh on ten years,” Kathleen murmured. “Word is their daddy wouldn’t let them leave the house after their mama disappeared. One of those families that just stays in the shadows.”
Alice thought of Margery’s words, words that had rung through her head for days: There is always a way out of a situation. Might be ugly. Might leave you feeling like the earth has gone and shifted under your feet. But there is always a way around.
“I’m going to ride up there,” said Alice. “I can’t see what we have to lose.”
“Your head?” said Sophia.
“Right now, the way my head is, it wouldn’t make that much difference.”
“You know the stories come out of that family? And you know how much they hate us right now? You just fixing to get yourself killed?”
“You want to tell me what other chance Margery has right now?” Alice said. Sophia gave Alice a hard look but didn’t answer. “Right. Does anyone have the map for that route?” For a moment Sophia didn’t move. Then she opened the drawer wordlessly and flicked through the assembled papers until she found it and handed it over.
“Thank you, Sophia.”
“I’m coming with you,” said Beth.
“Then I’m coming, too,” said Izzy.
Kathleen reached for her hat. “Looks like we got us an outing. Here, eight tomorrow?”
“Let’s make it seven,” said Beth.
For the first time in days Alice found she was smiling.
“Lord help the lot of you,” said Sophia, shaking her head.
TWENTY-FIVE
It was clear within a couple of hours of setting out why only Margery and Charley ever undertook the route to Arnott’s Ridge. Even in the benign conditions of early September, the route was remote and arduous, taking in steep crevasses, narrow ledges and a variety of obstacles to scrabble down or over, from ditches to fences to fallen trees. Alice had brought Charley, confident he would understand where he was going, and so it proved. He strode out willingly, his huge ears flicking backward and forward, following his own well-worn tracks along the creek bed and up the side of the ridge, the horses following on behind. There were no notches on trees here, no red ribbons; Margery had plainly never expected anyone but herself to take such a route, and Alice glanced behind her intermittently at the other women, hoping she could trust Charley as a guide.
Around them the air hung
thick and moist and the newly amber forests lay dense with fallen leaves, muffling sound as they made their way along the hidden trails. They rode in silence, focused on the unfamiliar terrain, only breaking off to praise their horses quietly or warn of some approaching obstacle.
It occurred to Alice as they headed along the track into the upper reaches of the mountains that they had never ridden together, not all of them, like this. And then that it was entirely possible this would be the last time she rode into the mountains.
In a week or so she would be making her way by train toward New York and the huge ocean liner that would take her to England, and a very different kind of existence. She turned in her saddle and looked at the group of women behind her and realized she loved them all, that leaving each of them, not just Fred, would be a wrench almost greater than anything she had endured up to now. She couldn’t imagine meeting women with whom she would feel so in tune, so close to in her next life, over polite chit-chat and cups of tea.
The other librarians would slowly forget her, their lives busy with work and families, and the ever-changing challenges of the seasons. Oh, they would promise to write, of course, but it wouldn’t be the same. There would be no more shared experiences, the cold wind on their faces, the warnings of snakes on tracks, or commiserations when one of them took a fall. She would gradually become a postscript to a story: Do you remember that English girl who rode with us for a while? Bennett Van Cleve’s wife?
“Think we’re getting close?” Kathleen broke into her thoughts, riding up alongside.
Alice pulled Charley to a halt, unfolding the map from her pocket. “Uh . . . according to this, it’s not far over that ridge,” she said, squinting at the hand-drawn images. “She said the sisters live four miles that way, and Nancy would always walk the last part because of the hanging bridge, so I make the McCullough house . . . somewhere over there.”
Beth scoffed. “You reading that map upside down? I know for a fact the damn bridge is that way.”