Chapter 38

C HAPTER 38

Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.

—Mark Twain

Marigold's natural impulse to say, I told you so , was completely overridden by her astonishment—and terror. The image of Daisy brandishing her pistol in the blink of an eye was stark in her brain. And if Ellery had somehow taken a detour from preaching to try to interfere with Daisy's newfound chance at happiness …

"When?" she asked, hoping to put paid to such ghastly suppositions. "And why wasn't he covered in blood?" Marigold pointed at the fabric of his shirt, which was remarkably unstained.

The doctor shot a hard look at her over the top of his spectacles. "Hard to say. But from the size of the wounds, I'd say he was shot with a thirty-eight caliber or so."

Cab's gaze immediately shifted to Marigold, because he knew the caliber of her gun quite exactly—but with any luck, he might not know Daisy's. "Did any of you hear gunplay?"

"Nope." Wilbert was quick to answer.

"No, no. No guns here," Cleon agreed.

"I didn't hear a gun," Marigold added in her own defense, as well as that of her absent cousin, while cleaving closer to the truth than addlepated old Cleon. "But I did hear a scuffle the night before last."

"What sort of scuffle?" Officer Parker asked.

"Noises, doors slamming, that sort of thing. Loud enough to wake me from sleep. But when I went to investigate, I found I was locked into my room—from the outside. I never left my room, though I could hear people abroad in the house." Marigold noted that Wilbert kept a careful watch on his boots while she spoke and neither added nor contradicted her version of events, while Cleon gazed at her in stupefaction.

"And what about last night?" Cab asked. "We saw the fire from the mainland. How did that happen?"

"No idea how it started—except that a noise woke me," she said. "And when I looked outside, the barn was on fire."

"I was woke the same way," Wilbert said. "Ma and I came down together and went out straightway."

All the while they had been talking, Dr. Oliphant had been making acute observations of the body, sniffing and poking and prodding, peering under Ellery's eyelids and examining his fingernails. "Let me see that bottle from his pocket."

"Why, that looks like the ones Crestfield sells of mine," Sophronia said. "Apple cider vinegar tonic for digestion and chronic complaints."

"You make these yourself, here?" The doctor's question was quiet but sharp. "Where?"

"Stillroom." Sophronia cocked her head toward the back of the kitchen, past where the larder and the broom closet were located. She drew a key strung on a worn ribbon around her neck out of her bodice. "Kept locked, you see. Fermented spirits," she explained as she led the way.

Her key opened the door to an immaculately clean and neat workroom, with dried herbs hanging from a rack—there were the chives hung to repel evil spirits—and shelves filled with neatly labeled bottles. Clearly, this tidy stillroom—an astonishing contrast to the rest of the previously unhygienic house—was the source of all those unexplained, astringent smells.

"Those, there, are the elderberry tonic." Sophronia gestured at the well-organized shelves. "Elderberry, honey, ginger, cinnamon, and clove. That's a strengthener if you find yourself under the weather or such. And the digestive, there. And that dark one is rose hips and coneflower with honey for a cough."

Dr. Oliphant put on his spectacles to take a closer look. "These aren't labeled."

"I trade them with Crestfield over at the druggist. Puts his own labels on. Doesn't want people to know he doesn't make them himself." Sophronia's mouth twisted into a sardonic smile. "Or mayhap he doesn't want people to know they came from a Hatchet."

Sophronia, busy with her own business, just as Cleon had said that first morning. "Is that how you made money, Cousin Sophronia?"

"Ayuh. Traded for credit with Crestfield, but he'd get what I needed elsewhere so's I'd only have to deal with him. Ingredients for the tonics. Beans and bacon, flour and rice. Sugar every now and again. Whatever I needed. Kept on credit. Never too much at one time. Never wanted it to be so much it'd excite Hatchet's attention."

This explanation went a fair way to answering Marigold's earlier questions about how the house had sustained itself. So like Hatchets to keep beans and bacon secret. "How did you get to town if your husband didn't like anyone leaving the island?"

"Got a little peapod sailer hidden away from his notice," Sophronia admitted.

Naturally. Each to fend for themselves. It seemed that Marigold was the only one without her own hidden boat.

"Did you pack the tonic for your husband when he left?" the doctor asked.

"He never got that tonic from me," Sophronia said with a mirthless laugh. "He'd never have touched it had he known it came from my hand."

"And why was that?" was Dr. Oliphant's next question.

"He'd taken a bad turn once before and accounted it was my hand that poisoned him. It weren't," she avowed, with that sly half smile, "but it kept me from having to do any cooking for nigh on twenty years."

"You keep this room locked?"

"Alcohol," was Sophronia's explanation. "There's them that don't hold with spirits and them that the spirits get hold of too tight."

Cab sent a questioning look Marigold's way.

"Ellery for the first," she answered quietly. "Teetotaler. And Cleon for the second. Hopeless drunk, according to him, though I've seen him muzzy headed only once, the day I arrived." The others in the household, she could not vouch for.

"I'll take the key, if I may," the doctor said.

Sophronia handed over the black ribbon without any objection.

"Well?" Officer Parker demanded. "What gives?"

Dr. Oliphant answered obliquely. "Let's get the body decently wrapped up to take back to my surgery."

"What for?" Wilbert asked. "Ain't no surgery going to revive him."

The doctor looked at him over the top of his spectacles. "For what we call an autopsy."

"No," came that frailly authoritarian voice. "I forbid it." Alva Hatchet stood in the doorway to the kitchen, looking far older and more like Death than Miss Havisham with each passing appearance, which Marigold noted was her second of the day. For an old woman who never left her room, she seemed surprisingly mobile.

"Mrs. Hatchet, I presume." Dr. Oliphant nodded his head in greeting. "I know the idea is upsetting—"

"A desecration!" Alva's voice choked with tears. "And on whose authority?"

"Generally," the doctor began reasonably, "it's for the coroner to decide. But I am the coroner in Essex County. And I've decided." The doctor gestured to Cab and Wilbert. "If someone would help me get the deceased wrapped up in a clean sheet or blanket—"

It was Marigold who overcame her horror of both the body itself and its frankly fetid smell to help. "There's clean linen here, in the cupboard." She retrieved the sheet and brought it to the table. "Should you like me to remove his wet shirt beforehand?" The shirt fabric was coolly damp, chilling in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.

"No. Don't let her touch him." Alva's voice was thin and frail, but she strengthened as she spoke. "You leave him and take her. She did this. She wanted him dead—she said so!" she accused. "I heard her with my own ears threaten to put him to bed with a shovel. Her exact words! And tell them what else you told me," she commanded Cleon.

"Oh, it's true what Alva says." Cleon shook his jowly hound's head. "Told Cousin Ellery right to his face, right out there in that garden, Miss Girl did. And she did swear to Wilbert she'd get rid of Cousin Ellery for him. But that was in the kitchen, next to the fire, not the garden."

Well! That eavesdropping old son of a … How rude, to appear to be such an addlepated old codger when all that time he was practically memorizing their conversations. At least he couldn't have heard Wilbert saying he wished his father would drop dead.

But she had some information of her own. "Why don't you tell them that Ellery Hatchet was an awful man who threatened to strangle his children and to strangle me with his own two hands and throw me in Salem Sound just for making a garden?"

"Marigold," Cab said in a warning undertone. "You're not doing yourself any favors. That's what's known as a motive."

"Then there were a great many people before me who had both the motive and the means to murder Ellery Hatchet. There is no shortage of people who hated him with every emotion from fear to vengeance—your uncle, Mr. Endicott, included! I myself felt mostly fear. And revulsion. I'm quite particular about people who don't bathe."

"Marigold," Cab repeated. "You're not helping yourself."

"She'll have poisoned him." Alva took up her accusation again. "Ellery knew she had it in for him—that's why he left us, because he was afraid of her! She stole rat poison from Cleon."

"Afraid of me?" Marigold all but guffawed. "I've never heard anything so preposterous. I've stolen nothing."

"Tell them, Cleon," Alva insisted.

"Took the store of poison I was keeping safe, she did," Cleon confirmed. "First thing she got here—took that straightaway."

Marigold very nearly gaped at the wretched old man in incomprehension before she recalled herself. "Do you mean the dirty sugar I cleaned out? The little sugar pot, you called it, from over the stove that was full of rust and dust? I certainly did throw it away and replace it with real sugar."

"Stole it away," Cleon reasserted.

"Well, if it was poison, you had no business keeping it in a sugar pot over the stove." Marigold tried to inject some reason—and hygienic standards—into the proceedings. "No wonder you Hatchets all feared poisoning."

"Marigold." Cab was at her ear again. "Again, I don't think this is helping."

"What am I to do, then? Stand quietly by while Mr. Bumble and Miss Havisham here tarnish my good name?"

"You might try a different tactic," Cab advised with quiet exasperation. "You might not have the right to vote, but you do have the right to remain silent."

"And that's what women are always meant to do—stay silent and let someone else defend them? Do the laundry and clean the cupboards and let mean-spirited people make farfetched accusations?"

"Let someone else help defend them," Cab insisted. "We're on the same side here, Marigold."

"Well, I'm on the other. I've heard enough." Officer Parker hitched up his britches. "You fellows take the body," he directed Cab and Wilbert. "And I'll take the girl. I'm arresting you, Miss Marigold Manners, on suspicion of murder."

While Marigold was neither surprised nor overly concerned by Parker's ploy—her assessment of him as the type of man who would only reach for the low-hanging fruit was merely confirmed—she was surprised by Cab's vehement reaction.

"I'd advise you against using hearsay to base an arrest, sir." His voice had lost any semblance of "not letting on"—it was cold and chiseled and as hard as granite.

"Well, I reckon if both Miz Hatchet here and Cleon can say—" Parker hedged.

"I don't know as what their part is in this …" It was Sophronia, strangely calm as ever, interrupting Parker. "You don't need to take the girl—she's no part of this. I can vouch for her whereabouts and her character. She might not know this"—her dark eyes darted to Marigold's—"but every night, I lock her into her room."

Marigold felt the blood leave her face before it rushed back up her neck from the realization that all the while she had thought she was locking the Hatchets out, they had been locking her in. "Whyever would you do that?"

"Wanted to make sure you were safe," Sophronia answered.

"From what?" Marigold heard her voice crack.

"From Hatchet, for starters." Sophronia's expression—that stoic acceptance—never varied. "He could always do more harm."

More harm? For the first time, Marigold understood that the locked doors at Hatchet Farm might have had another purpose than solely keeping her out—they were meant to keep others out as well. She felt rather warmer toward Sophronia's actions. "Thank you."

"What will be will be," was all the older woman said before she sat down at the table, patient as Job, as if she were confident that what would be would have nothing to do with her. "It'll all come out now, the litany of Hatchet's sins." Sophronia shook her head even as the corners of her mouth twitched up in a rueful smile. "Because of you. Determined, that's what you are, aren't you? Esmie's girl. You'll uncover his sins against us all."

"Will I?" Was this another of Sophronia's prophecies, like the Hanged Man, or was she actually encouraging Marigold to carry on asking questions and prying into dark, undusted metaphorical corners?

"What will be will be." Sophronia repeated her bywords. "No sense in trying to put it off. Told Hatchet that, time and again. But he had his mind set a long time ago—set and closed as the grave."

"And so have I," said Officer Parker with finality. "It sure does seem suspicious to me that she's the one with poison and she's the only one hearing sounds and she's the first one to see the fire." He ticked off the accusations on his fingers. "And the one to find the body, and the coat, and the Bible too. Too convenient, if you ask me." He jammed his hat back on his head. "So, like I said, I'm taking her in. And I don't want to hear another word against it."