Burn forever, p.16
Burn Forever, page 16
Wade bit off the end of a diminutive cigar and spat it out.
“And somebody tried to burn the cedar knot they were clubbed with,” he said.
Ben nodded.
“That was me,” he said. “I guess I did it without thinking. The fire was going out. It . . . it’s never been out before. Foolish, wasn’t it.”
“Damn foolish,” Wade said. “If you didn’t kill them. You’re going to offer temporary mental aberration?”
“No. I’m not going to offer anything. Nathan Currier was lying there dead when I got there. The dog died a minute later.”
“Nathan Currier,” Wade said slowly, “left the workshop at eight o’clock. Old Doss waited there for Doss until a quarter of nine. Doss was late. The old man went up to the cabin then and met Doss coming down the hill. They saw your car and went in—and found you just climbing up to the loft where the girl was. They covered you, and they’d have shot you dead if I hadn’t come in. Old Doss told me that, and I guess you know it as well as I do.”
“Haven’t a doubt of it,” Ben said.
“Good thing I was hanging around. Don’t bother to thank me for saving your life.”
Ben flushed at the dry irony.
“What the hell good is that, if you think I murdered the old man?” he demanded hotly.
“Wait a minute,” Wade said coolly. “I guess you don’t see that if you came up for trial tomorrow, a jury wouldn’t think twice about you. You’re known to have been hanging around Currier Hollow. You’ve been warned away by both the old Curriers and Young Doss, who aims to marry his cousin. Both the old fellows want it that way, and until you barged in there wasn’t any doubt it would go that way. All right. You come along. You fall in love with Julie. You try to get her to run away. You even suggest to her grandfather that he let her go visit your mother. He’s fooled by your slick city ways and decides maybe she can go. Then he thinks it over and sees it’s all wrong. So he tells you she can’t go, and he locks the girl up so she can’t run away with you at night. He knows you’re coming, and he goes to the house to meet you. He tells you she can’t go. You pick up a cedar knot which you’d carefully brought down to the cabin yourself. You club him to death. The dog attacks you and you serve him the same way.”
Wade stopped, waiting for him to speak. Ben waited.
“Then there’s something else too. I understand you know that Nathan Currier was in Knoxville yesterday.”
Ben nodded.
“You know what he went for?”
“About his land, I guess.”
“Do you happen to know what they were giving him for it?”
“I heard twenty thousand. They’ve got a lot of land back there.”
The red tip of Wade’s cigar glowed brightly a moment.
“Nathan Currier,” he said dryly, “had the money in his belt. Tonight. When he was killed. It’s gone now.”
Ben took his pipe out of his mouth. Wade cast a sidelong glance at him in the dark.
“What did you do with it, Davidge?”
Ben sat for an instant. It was even more than Julie, then. He took a deep steadying breath.
“Listen,” he said. Then suddenly it all seemed preposterous, unbelievable. There was hardly any use in saying anything.
“Why didn’t you search me?” he said quietly.
Wade shook his head.
“I saw you didn’t have it on you,” he said coldly. “You can’t put that much money in your vest pocket. You could have done something with it, I suppose. What was it?”
“I’ll have to have notice of that question, Mr. Wade. I’m not good at thinking things up offhand.”
“I’m giving you notice.”
There was a curious quality of tired patience in his voice. Ben looked at him sharply.
“I’m giving you notice. A lot of people are waiting for the answer.”
Wade was silent for a moment. “I’m also giving you notice and fair warning to keep away from the Curriers.”
“I thought I was under arrest.”
“You are. But there isn’t any lockup to put you in. If you tried to get away we’d get you. The Federal government has a long arm nowadays. But if you took it into your head to go back to that girl, the Federal government and nothing else is going to save you from the buzzards. I’m just telling you.”
Ben nodded. “I’m not likely to be going back.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Wade grunted sardonically and tossed the stub of his cigar out towards the branch.
“Hope you’ll feel the same way about it tomorrow.”
Ben looked towards him curiously. “Do you think I don’t know when I’ve been given the air?”
Wade grunted again.
“I think you’re just the sort of young fool that gets it into his head that a certain mountain girl is ‘different,’ and sets about trying to do something about it without thinking what he’s likely to get into. You’re worrying too much about what you’re getting her out of.”
Wade lighted a second cigar.
“She’s got to get out anyway,” Ben said. “The TVA and the dam are fixing that. I think she’s . . . she ought not to have to marry Doss—when she doesn’t want to.”
“Are you planning to marry her?” Wade asked quietly.
“Good God, no.”
“That’s what I thought. Going to be hard to explain to a jury up this way, isn’t it?”
Ben looked at him in the tiny light of the cigar cast up on his lean face.
“Nathan Currier understood all that,” he said. “He didn’t think I was trying to . . . get away with anything.”
“Nathan Currier’s dead,” Wade said coolly. “The people that make up juries in these parts are going to believe Old Doss and Young Doss. They say Nathan Currier had changed his mind about letting the girl go. They say the Curriers have always had trouble with their women because of men like you coming in from the outside. No jury’d believe you for a minute. They know about women. Especially Currier women. They know about men. If a young fellow is interested in a girl as pretty as Julie Currier, he either wants to marry her or he doesn’t. And you don’t. You’d never get them to see it any other way. Looks bad, doesn’t it?”
Ben was silent a moment.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I think you’re in love with the girl, whether you know it or not.”
Ben stared at him.
“Do you think I killed her grandfather—and robbed him?” Wade hesitated.
“I think you’ve got a good chance of being the guy that pays for it,” he said slowly. “Whether you did it or not. I think we’re going to have a hell of a time keeping the Curriers from killing you, if you don’t use your head.”
“I didn’t ask you that. I asked you if you thought I killed him.”
“I might . . . if it hadn’t been for the dog,” Wade said coldly. “I don’t know. I don’t think you’d kill the dog.”
“Thanks,” Ben said. “What about the twenty thousand dollars?”
Wade got up. “I’ll put it this way,” he said curtly. “You didn’t have it on you.”
“Thanks again. One more thing. Am I supposed to have killed Speer too?”
“You still being funny?” Wade said. His voice had no tinge of friendliness in it. “I don’t know whether you killed him or not. You had the empty cartridges and you lost them. You’re one of the few people around here that would be likely to know you can fingerprint a shotgun cartridge by the way the firing pin strikes just as well as you can fingerprint a revolver bullet.”
“I didn’t happen to know it,” Ben said. “What about my motive? Did Speer have twenty thousand sewed up in his belt?”
Wade looked down at him.
“Son,” he said, “when you’re as old as a lot of us you’ll find out that when there’s a woman involved, people aren’t going to go far hunting motives. Speer was supposed to have been interested in the girl too.”
“You know he wasn’t.”
“I think he wasn’t. I don’t pick the juries in these parts. And I’m going to bed. Good night.”
Ben sat motionless on the steps, his mind going back slowly over the strange ground he had covered since meeting Speer, looking over the barrier at the Norris Dam. That was the first time the people of Currier Hollow had taken on any definite meaning for him. And he now found himself in a fair way of being hanged for the murder of one of them.
It was funny, the way he had got mixed up in it. It was on account of the tree, chiefly. If it hadn’t been for his going up there to tell them he was cutting the tree down, there would never have been the business of the dog, and Julie hauling him off. Or his going back and finding Sisky. There would never have been the letter Speer gave him. There might still have been murder—Speer and old Nate Currier—but it wouldn’t have been tangled up with the girl.
Ben shook his head, filled his pipe, lighted it, and got up. The maddest thing was the idea Wade seemed to have, that he was in love with the girl. It was absurd on the face of it, the sort of an idea you would expect people like Wade and Loftus and Mis’ Mincey to have. Yet he was worried about her, back there alone in the mountains. And, in some way, it wasn’t only that. If it was only her white anguished face as he had seen it last that kept slipping in and out of his mind, it wouldn’t matter; but it kept shifting back and forth into her calm lovely face under the two smooth gold wings of her hair, and two long deep-fringed gray eyes would be there, lighting up suddenly the way they did with new wonder, or joy, or quick impish humor. That was why the white drawn little face was more poignant than it should have been.
He thrust his hands deep in his pockets and paced up and down in front of the porch. Suddenly he stopped and stood leaning against the crab apple tree by the kitchen stoop. A frail light had begun to dawn in the back of his mind. Was someone quietly playing him for a sucker, using Julie Currier for bait—and had he, like a sap, fallen for it hook, line and sinker? He stood there a moment, went back to the porch and sat down.
“It’s time you pulled yourself together, old son,” he said soberly. “Before you turn into a first-class corpse.”
For the first time he realized the truth of what Wade had said. If Doss Currier shot him now, it would be instantly taken for granted, in the simplest possible way, by both jury and judge, that Doss had not only saved the girl he intended to marry, but also had, according to the old law of an eye for an eye, avenged the murder of Nathan Currier. That would explain why Doss had not met his father at the shop—if his father had ever been at the shop. If he hadn’t, it explained how both of them appeared the moment they did. It also explained why Doss had not shot him already—as he would have done if all the things they said about him up in the hills were true.
Then another idea came to him. He glanced at the dark oblong of the door leading into Wade’s room and got up. A board in the porch creaked as he went across to the agent’s door. He rapped softly, not to wake Loftus or Miss Elly, then louder. He grinned suddenly. Wade was a swell detective, if that didn’t wake him. He tried the door. It was unlocked. He opened it, looked into the pitch-dark inside, and listened. There was no sound.
“Wade,” he said quietly. “It’s Davidge.”
His voice sounded eerie in the quiet of the night. He went inside and closed the door.
“Wade,” he said again.
There was no sound. He took out a box of matches and struck one. It flared an instant, half blinding him, and went out. He struck another and held it over his head. The double bed was empty. The quilts were still thrust neatly up under the coarse linen bolster. Wade had not even sat on the edge of the bed. Ben dropped the blackened match stump and lighted another.
The door leading onto the front porch was closed. He went over to it and opened it. Wade’s car was in the yard. Ben looked around and listened. He could not see or hear him.
It was queer, he thought. He went back into the room and closed the door. He did not light another match, remembering where the door in back was. Halfway across the room he stopped. The door behind him had opened softly. He looked back quickly. The wiry form of the agent was in the faint oblong of light.
“Want something, Mr. Davidge?” he asked quietly. His voice was cold, ironic, questioning.
Ben flushed in the dark.
“I wanted to tell you something. I thought you’d be in bed.”
“Let’s have it.”
Ben started to speak and stopped. It occurred to him abruptly that he had no proof that Doss had killed Nathan Currier. Furthermore, the idea that they were using him as a fall guy was certainly not likely to appear as obvious to Wade as it did to him.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I guess I was having a brainstorm.”
“Have ’em in your own room after this, will you?” Wade said. “You’d better go to bed. The farm hands’ll be getting out to milk in a few minutes. They don’t understand people who stay up nights, in these parts.”
He opened the door to the tiny vestibule between his room and Ben’s. Ben heard him turn the key in the lock. Wade went to his suitcase, unlocked it and put two empty cartridges, badly burned and faintly pink where any color showed, with one bright red cartridge burned at the end, into a concealed compartment in the bottom of his collar box.
CHAPTER 26
Ben sat down to breakfast next morning aware of the dark pointed looks of Miss Elly and the averted eyes of the three farm hands at the foot of the long table. Wade sat on Ed Loftus’s right, his gray cold eyes bent on the plate of ham and string beans in front of him.
“They say you was there when hit happened, Mr. Davidge,” Loftus remarked. He reached for the corn bread. “Is hit a fact?”
“No. I got there after it happened.”
“I reckon some folks’ll be wonderin’ what you was doin’ there at all.”
Loftus shook his head soberly.
“They ain’t so fond a’ havin’ people hangin’ round Currier Holler.”
Ben flushed, and caught the warning flicker in Wade’s eyes. He shrugged his shoulders and went on with his breakfast.
“I reckon Yancey Turner’ll be comin’ along any time now.”
Loftus examined the big silver watch he carried chained across the front of his blue overalls. He pushed his chair back and scratched his head under his black felt hat.
“They tell me hit ain’t goin’ to be no use in Jess Kilgore’s holdin’ out agin the gover-ment. All they got to do is condemn th’ land, an’ take hit fer anythin’ they want t’ give fer hit.”
He spat in the empty fireplace. Ben glanced up. Wade was stirring his coffee with no apparent interest in Loftus’s comments on the local scene.
“They tell me you was along t’ see Jess las’ night, Mr. Wade. You ain’t got th’ idea Jess is mixed up in killin’ Nate Currier? ’Cause if you have, you’re plumb crazy.”
Loftus spat again and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“If Jess had a’ killed ’em, he’d a’ killed th’ whole kit an’ caboodle. He wouldn’t ’a stopped with Old Nate.”
He looked at Wade quizzically and winked at his sister, standing tight-lipped and beady-eyed at her place at the table.
“I reckon Mr. Wade ain’t one a’ them that’s goin’ t’ die talkin’—air you, Mr. Wade?”
An amused smile flickered behind Wade’s eyes and vanished.
“Doesn’t pay to tell all you know, Mr. Loftus.”
“That’s what I tell Elly there, but shucks, what’s th’ use? Might as well save my breath.”
Miss Elly’s eyes snapped.
“There’s Yancey Turner comin’ down th’ road,” she said sharply. “An’ he ain’t goin’ t’ git a mouthful t’ eat in this house.”
Loftus grinned.
“Now, now, Elly.—Yancey, he used t’ court Elly when she was younger’n she is now, an’ a heap better lookin’.”
He ambled slowly out onto the porch.
“Howdy, Yancey.”
He shook hands with a bright little man with bulging eyes and a pug nose that made him look like an old and unamiable Pekingese. The Attorney-General walked with a limp, and all in all, Ben thought from a hasty glance, was not much more prepossessing at present than Miss Elly. Ben finished his breakfast, listening with only half an ear to their talk.
When he had finished he went out onto the porch with Wade. The talk stopped abruptly. The Attorney-General looked at him, bug-eyed, with open curiosity.
“This yere’s Mr. Wade, General,” Loftus said genially. “An’ this young feller’s Mr. Davidge.”
General Turner nodded, and spat calmly over the rail into the yard.
“You’re the gentleman who was at the Curriers’ last night?” he asked.
Ben nodded.
“I’ll be wanting to have a talk with you.”
“He’s staying here,” Wade said shortly.
General Turner nodded and spat again. “It’s safer,” he said laconically. “That’s one thing. Well, we’d better get along. I’ll leave my car here. Yours looks more comfortable.”
Ben watched the three of them squeezing into Wade’s small car, and glanced at the Attorney-General’s bright new sedan.
“Yancey Turner’d skin a flea fer hits taller,” Miss Elly said. They watched them turn out into the road and set off towards Currier Hollow. Miss Elly turned to Ben.
“Hunt yerself a seat, Mr. Davidge.”
Ben looked at her. It was the first time he had heard a gentle note in Miss Elly Loftus’s high incessantly nagging voice.
“Thanks,” he said.
“You ain’t used to folks’ ways up thisaway,” she said, nodding her head wisely. “An’ they ain’t used t’ yourn. Fact is, they think you’re plumb crazy.”
Ben managed a grin.
“I guess maybe I am,” he said.
Miss Elly picked up a handful of peas. Ben listened to the rhythmic drop of the small green pellets against the bottom of the tin basin. He knew when the bottom was covered without looking at the little woman rocking back and forth. It was very hot. The warm sweet odor of ripe pears and the bees in the honeysuckle, the smell of the barns and all the sounds and odors of the farm carried him back to Currier Hollow—to Julie Currier’s front porch. He chewed at the end of his pipe.
