Chapter 41

C HAPTER 41

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the

impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

—Arthur Conan Doyle

"Really, Cab!" Marigold remonstrated. "Eavesdropping. You're as bad as old Cleon and Alva. And awfully darn soft-footed for a city boy."

He was unapologetic. "A man has been murdered, Marigold—it's my job as your attorney to listen to everything and everyone I can." He turned a chair backward and sat down across from Bessie. "Now, suppose you tell me from the beginning how you fished Ellery Hatchet out of the cove."

Bessie was adamant. "Didn't fish—he fetched up in the reeds, facedown in the shallows. It was at the end of the dirt path, just where the boardwalk rises off the shore. I was standing right there when I saw him. And I swear to you, he'd already breathed his last."

Cab narrowed his eyes. "So how did Ellery Hatchet, who gets a lobsterman to drop him off on Great Misery, sick as a dog, find himself fetched himself up at your dock the next morning?"

Marigold's mind's eye supplied the red swirl of the only body she had actually seen in the water. "Floated across-sound, much like Minnie Mallory?"

"Interesting connection," he posited, unaware of her witnessing the prior crime. "But where did he go into the water and how?"

"I don't know about that," Bessie averred.

"But what I think you do know, Bessie Dove"—Cab turned all that steely intelligence upon his landlady—"was how his body got from your dock all the way back out to Great Misery and the garden at Hatchet Farm, with no one the wiser, to be planted in the rosemary."

The rosemary—for remembrance.

For the first time, Marigold thought Bessie looked scared. "Now, he was already dead, you understand? And I didn't want no more trouble with that man than I already had."

Cab shook his head. "Then why didn't you wake me?"

"For all your kindness and honesty, you're one of them," Bessie replied defensively. "You don't understand what it's like to be a Black woman in a white town."

The truth of this Cab acknowledged with a nod. "So tell me."

"It's danged precarious is what it is."

Cab again nodded his understanding. "So what did you do?"

"Only Christian thing I could do—I hauled him out. I put him in the smokehouse so he wasn't laying there in the open, all indecent like. Then, once I'd had a minute to think, I put him in the skiff to take him back where he belonged," Bessie finished. "Where he couldn't trouble me no more."

"All by yourself?" Cab scratched at his chin, where the barest beginnings of whiskers were starting to make their appearance. "Why? Why did you not take the body to the police, or better yet, since I was here, come get me to take care of things and call them here for you?"

"Well, I thought of that, but I've lived in this world long enough to know that sometimes, oftentimes, a Black person is made to take the blame when they ain't done nothing wrong. I knew that if that policeman heard I found that body, he wouldn't look no further to make up his mind, and not even you might could change it."

Cab heaved out a sigh of acknowledgment regarding the character of Officer Parker. "How tall are you, Bessie?"

"Oh, it weren't no bother. Skinny old man like him—bones like a bird, nothing but air and resentment. Didn't weigh much."

"It took two grown men to move him this morning," Cab observed. "You dragged him out of the water to the smokehouse, then the length of the dock to your skiff, sailed him across to Great Misery, dragged his body more than a mile across the island, through the woods, and propped him up in the garden? Alone?" Cab repeated his question. "You sailed Ellery Hatchet up to Hatchet Farm by yourself in the dark and got back in time, against the tide, to be home at dawn to give me the news that Hatchet Farm was on fire? Or did you set that fire while you were out there?"

"No, now don't you go looking for trouble where there is none," Bessie complained.

"Bessie." Cab's voice was quiet, but all the more steely for its softness. "Please don't lie to me. It wasn't you, because I saw you in your kitchen late last night. I was awakened by voices and came down to see you pacing up and down as if something heavy were weighing on your mind. And that's when Seviah came in."

Marigold heard her own gasp.

Cab's gaze pinned Marigold just as sharply as it had Bessie, telling her not to interfere.

"Seviah came in before dawn, along with your Samuel—through that porch door. Which is when I smelled the ash on the wind and noticed the glow of the fire out on Great Misery all those miles away. But I wrongly thought that whatever mischief Samuel and Seviah had been up to could wait until we'd sorted out whatever was wrong at Hatchet Farm. Only what they'd been up to was part of what was wrong at Hatchet Farm, wasn't it?"

"Could be." Bessie put a gentle hand to Cab's arm. "But we don't need to bring Samuel, or Seviah for that matter, into this, do we? You know what the police are like—always ready to let a Black man take the blame. You mix my Samuel up in this and Parker will put a noose around his neck, sure as wonder. And Ellery Hatchet was dead already. I swear to it. And I'll swear to it in court."

"If you want to keep safe from prosecution, Bessie, both of those men will have to corroborate that fact—swear to it in a court of law."

Marigold was not sure how much swearing Seviah might do under oath, but she recalled vividly his swearing that night they had talked about Minnie in the breezeway. Sell Hatchet Farm , he had said. Or burn it to the ground.

"Marigold? What is it? What are you not telling me?" Cab insisted. "What does it have to do with Lucy being Ellery Hatchet's child but Seviah Hatchet not? Tell me the truth!"

Her poker face was clearly slipping under duress. "Eavesdropper," Marigold accused again. The truth was as mutable a thing as justice in this circumstance—there was no one absolute. And these truths were not hers to tell.

But Bessie was more than equal to the moment. "Ellery Hatchet was Lucy's sire. By force—do you understand?" She leveled Cab with the fierceness of her gaze. "And Samuel was twelve years old back then, just a boy. But Lord, he seen it, what Ellery Hatchet done …" Bessie shook her head, too overcome by the memory to speak it. "That man had the devil in him, and no mistake," she finally said. "It's the Lord's work that he's finally gone."

"Yes," Marigold agreed, taking Bessie's hand, though she knew it was small comfort for the violent crime done to her, and years too late. "It most assuredly is."

"He was a mean old rip, as savage as a meat ax." Once Bessie admitted the truth, the words came tumbling out of her. "Ask anyone—mean and hard, they'll tell you. So mean and so hard I packed myself and my boy up from that place without a penny I was owed. After what he done to me, I had rather take my chances in the world than stay there a minute longer."

"So how did you get the money from him?" Marigold prompted, trying to get the information Cab needed to understand the history that had indeed gone on long before the two of them ever came to Pride's Crossing or Great Misery. "The money that paid for this boardinghouse, as recompense?"

"Ain't nothing could be true recompense for what he did to me," Bessie swore. "But I had to think of my children."

"So you took the money he offered?"

"Never offered so much as one thin dime. But I was determined to take what I could, so I packed up everything I had canned or put up—everything, down to the last potato in that root cellar. And the Lord provided the rest."

"Just like you did when Lucy left, and again this morning." Marigold didn't mean it as a question—she was thinking of how careful Lucy had been with the contents of that root cellar—but Bessie took it like one.

"Lord, there's no getting anything past you." She sighed. "I thought no one would ever know—or notice. I said those Hatchets didn't know about it all those years and weren't likely to do anything to put things to rights anyway. But Lucy said you'd set to cleaning things up and that you'd surely find it."

"Find what?" Cab persisted.

"The money." Bessie took a deep breath. "I'd took all I could carry with me that first time I left Great Misery behind, before Lucy was born, but it still wasn't all I was owed or had earned. But we got the rest of what I was owed out eventually, a little at a time over the past few years, every time Lucy came back over."

"What money?" Cab probed.

"Or should we ask, whose money?" Marigold clarified, because there was something tickling at the back of her brain about money and the lack thereof on Great Misery Island.

"I was my money—what I was owed," Bessie swore. "There, in an old sea chest covered in dust and bushel baskets down in the root cellar—a strongbox filed with what was called specie."

"Coins of different metals?"

"That's right. Mostly Mexico silver dollars—what they told me was reales ."

"Who told you that?"

"Friends in Boston who know about money. Friends who didn't ask questions about how a Black woman got ahold of Mexico silver coins but understood that money was provided to me by the Lord. I didn't take anything that I hadn't already earned by my work and by my labor, you understand." She looked Cab in the eye, daring him to contradict her. "Years of back wages I was owed. Years. And other costs as well."

"Quite right," Marigold agreed. "So you took the chest? Is that what you had in the stern of the boat this morning?"

"Lord, but you are a sharp one. But it wasn't the chest itself—that old chest was banded with iron bars. But there was a smaller strongbox inside that we took with the last of what I figured I was owed—Lucy and I both. Because it was rightfully mine by then—I worked out the terms of Lucy's employment in a contract that said the contents of that little house and root cellar was ours. Got it right there in writing."

"Very smart thinking, but I'll have a look at that contract, if you please," Cab asked.

"Sure. I got nothing to hide. Because I left the rest of it for them, that chest, just as was right. The rest is out there for that Wilbert to find. Poor boy deserves something for all his years of labor, just like the rest of us."

But Marigold's reasoning had turned in a different direction. "After what had happened to you, whyever did Lucy come to live and work out there?"

"Now that was the hand of the Lord again. Miz Sophronia sent a letter, asking if Lucy was available to cook for old Alva. I reckoned the old biddy had a scare about poisoning or something. Or had to eat too much of poor old Cleon's cooking, which is about the same thing. But Miz Sophronia, she worked out the terms with me so I could feel all right about Lucy going out there. I didn't think she knew, that Sophronia, but after talking to her, I reckon now that she did know all along—about Lucy, not the money—and was trying to put things right."

Sophronia, with her letters, trying to put right what Ellery Hatchet had long ago put wrong.

Cab cleared his throat. "So, Samuel had good reason to hate Ellery Hatchet—"

"I told you," Bessie insisted, "Hatchet was already—"

"—dead." Cab held up his hands to forestall her. "I'll need to corroborate that fact with Samuel and Seviah."

Bessie folded her hands in her lap. "Well, I reckon it's too late for that now—they're already gone. All of them. I advised them all to clear out until all this blows over and it's safe to come home again. And I don't know where they've gone, so don't ask me."

"Seviah? Samuel? Lucy too?" Cab pushed to his feet and raked his hands through his hair. "Blast it, Bessie. As an officer of the court, I'm sworn to do everything in my power to serve justice, and justice is finding whoever shot Ellery Hatchet—"

"But he weren't shot!" Bessie insisted. "He were white as a dead cod's belly, not a bit of blood on him. He drowned—water come all up and out of his mouth when we moved him. You mark my words, that man drowned."

"Agreed." A new voice intruded on their conversation. "Ellery Hatchet was drowned."