Chapter 43

C HAPTER 43

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do,

because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

—Susan B. Anthony

"Rise and shine." Bessie was at the door of her room. "I brushed out your clothes and drew a bath for you in the washroom."

"Thank you, Bessie." It was a glorious thing to have friends with plumbing. "You are a lamb."

Marigold allowed herself the luxury of a good long soak before she was obliged to face the wolves at the door—this time in the form of Mr. George Endicott, who seemed to have hauled himself to Bessie Dove's boardinghouse at a clip, pillows of dust rising behind his elegant piano-box carriage. He barely took the time to secure the horse to the hitching post before he accosted Cab and Marigold on the porch, clutching a letter of some sort in his fist.

"Did you know about this?" He thrust a crumpled paper at them.

"Is this about the murder?" Cab asked.

Everything within Endicott stilled and shifted and recalibrated within an instant. "So, it was murder? By God, if that isn't the fittest thing."

Cab tried to curb his uncle's unseemly enthusiasm. "We're currently waiting upon the coroner's report for confirmation—"

But Endicott was only temporarily diverted—his frustrations found a new target in Marigold. "Did you know? Did she write you?"

Marigold decided she didn't like his tone—and frankly, she never had. "Did who write me about what ?" she asked for precision's sake.

"The Hatchet girl." He all but spat the words. "Was this her idea?"

"Then, no, my dear cousin Miss Daisy Hatchet did not write me. Although I wrote to her at your address condoling her for her father's death, I've yet to receive a reply."

"Then you knew nothing of their plans?"

Marigold had had enough vagueness. "Who are they , and what, specifically, were their plans ?"

"To elope!" Endicott thundered in the violently threatening way that powerful men who are thwarted too often employ. "My boy left a note that they were bound for New York early this morning and that they'd be married by the time I found them."

Marigold was of two minds simultaneously—she was both delighted that Daisy had gone ahead and done what she wanted to do without waiting for the world to catch up to her and terrified that her cousin's departure might be seen as fleeing the scene of her crime. But it was the accompanying swell of emotion within her that took her entirely by surprise—Marigold could not have been any prouder. "Brilliant, headstrong, independent girl."

"Brilliant?" Endicott echoed in disbelief. "First there was a fire, then Ellery Hatchet was shot, and then the girl conveniently leaves town to elope with my son, maybe so he can't testify against her? I've seen that little gun she tries to hide in her skirts, and I don't like it. I don't like how any of this looks for that girl."

"Your gossip has served you ill, Uncle George." Cab's tone indicated he had taken more than enough of his uncle's guff. "Ellery Hatchet wasn't shot. He drowned, after being poisoned."

Marigold's emotions took another leap from relieved—for Daisy—back to concerned—for Sophronia and Bessie. "Cab, what do you know?"

"Dr. Oliphant arrived earlier, while you were …" He diverted himself from blushing over Marigold's bath by gesturing mutely toward Bessie's stillroom. "He's inside, taking samples."

"I've got nothing to hide in my larder," Bessie said from the doorway, as if she hadn't a care in the world. "Most I make goes to Crestfield, the druggist, and the rest is for my own people, who come to buy it from me here. I don't have any complaints. My room is clean as clean can be."

Judging from the generally immaculate state of the house, Marigold didn't doubt it. But one could be hygienic and still be a poisoner, she supposed.

It didn't help that Dr. Oliphant came out of the larder a short while later with no expression on his face. "I have what I need."

Marigold was going to have to trust that the doctor would be of the same mind as Cab and let the facts lead him to his conclusion and not the other way around.

Those same facts also led them back to Great Misery after taking their curt leave of Cab's uncle. The sail out to the island—in a blessedly comfortable catboat that Marigold suspected Cab had borrowed from his Endicott cousin—was both a timely diversion from the reckoning to come and an unexpected pleasure. Cab commanded the helm as elegantly and efficiently as he did everything else, and Marigold could only wonder at the extraordinary circumstances that had thrown them together so much—she never would have gotten to know him so well had she gone to her archaeological field season in Greece.

But it was an unproductive thought. Despite her current circumstance, despite the murder, Marigold remained determined that her future was going to include going to Greece to study and excavate and no amount of attraction ought to sway her from her plan. She was more than glad of the brisk wind that blew them along and cooled her heated cheeks lest her poker face give way.

"Now, where is everybody else?" Officer Parker asked when they arrived at the farm. "Ought to be a passel of Hatchets out here."

"My cousins Daisy and Seviah Hatchet have lately moved into Pride's Crossing, as has Lucy Dove," Marigold interjected before Cab might be inclined to offer more than was necessary. "Seviah to join the theater companies of Mr. Keith of the Orpheum and Daisy to a visit with her betrothed's family, the Endicotts."

"And didn't that engagement surprise us all," Parker said under his breath as he headed around the house. "Let's have another look at where you found the body."

The body. How strange that Ellery Hatchet, a man who was such a force in life, had been reduced so completely in death.

Sophronia hung back in the doorway but was looking at Marigold in that strange, mutely searching way that unnerved her so—watchful and probing. "You cipher out what happened to him yet?"

"We know some," Marigold admitted out of earshot of Officer Parker. "Like how he ended up in the garden—propped up on the scarecrow by Seviah and Samuel Dove."

For all her vagueness, Cousin Sophronia instantly understood the implications of her son's involvement. "And then set the fire in barn," she sighed with that fatalistic shrug. "What will be will be."

"I see you have a number of medicinal plants in your garden, Mrs. Hatchet." Dr. Oliphant addressed Sophronia.

"Not my garden," she answered with a glance at Marigold. "Grown for the table, not the stillroom. I forage for my tonics."

Marigold spoke up for herself, though she did so tentatively. "I'm the one who started the garden shortly after I arrived, to improve the culinary variety."

"If it's a kitchen garden, why do you cultivate foxglove?"

Behind Marigold, Sophronia made a sound of frustrated derision. "Fust! That weren't there afore," she stated. "That weren't there when we took Hatchet down. It's been planted in since."

"That tall, spire-shaped pink one?" Marigold asked. "There was one before—another plant just a pretty as this one, planted the day Ellery tried to uproot—" But perhaps it were better to exclude all references to her prior conflict with Ellery. "But the flower disappeared. I thought it died or was eaten by some scavenger."

"You'd know if it were eaten. Dangerous stuff, that," the doctor returned.

"Ayuh," Sophronia agreed tersely. "That's why I pulled it out—before. Don't use it in my tonics."

"We'll see about that." Doctor Oliphant led the way inside before he disappeared into the stillroom with his bag, presumably to test the veracity of that statement, much as he must have done with Bessie's stock.

"All right then." Officer Parker addressed the rest of them in the kitchen. "I'm going to need some answers to my questions. We've established that Ellery Hatchet made his way here, to Hatchet Farm, two nights ago. Who saw and who talked to Ellery Hatchet that night?"

"Not me," Wilbert said. "But my room's up at the top of the house."

"I locked him in too, along with Marigold." Sophronia didn't blink. "And Daisy. Have for years. To keep Hatchet getting to them in one of his rages. Seviah was already gone."

"So you did see old man Hatchet?" Parker probed.

"Ayuh," Sophronia admitted freely. "I seen him. But I kept my distance, same as always. I let him be."

Cab tried to be patient with Sophronia's melodramatic vagueness. "Where, specifically, did you see him, ma'am?"

"Here, in the kitchen." She gestured to the hearth end of the room.

"And where were you, ma'am?"

Sophronia tossed her head toward the stillroom. "End of the hallway, next to my room. Retreated there behind my lock once I'd secured the others, same as I normally did when Hatchet was in one of his takings."

Which left … "Cleon?" Marigold ventured. "This seems to be where you sleep most nights, here at the table. Did you see Cousin Ellery when he came in?"

"Oh, I surely did," Cleon admitted, as if he had only just thought of it. "He come home all boogered up, he was."

"Boogered?" Marigold had not heard this particularly expressive description before.

"Bent over, like he was crippled, maybe," Wilbert clarified. "Or boozy." Wilbert's shrug was a mirror of his mother's. "Figure he fell back on the booze—the old man claimed to be a teetotaler, but that was on account he used to be a bottle hound once."

"That's not true." Great-Aunt Alva appeared among them again as if she'd been conjured, thumping her cane, an insistent hodgepodge of shawls, nightgown, and defiance. Her voice was small but furious in her grief. "He was a good man, my Ellery was."

"Ellery Hatchet was a son of a bitch," Officer Parker declared baldly. "Begging yer pardon, ma'am, but I don't think there was a body in Pride's Crossing he hadn't argued against, especially Mr. Endicott."

"Which is why we keep out here, to ourselves on our island, away from the Endicotts' pernicious influence." Alva shook her cane at Parker.

"This island was deeded to Mr. Elijah Hatchet, Ellery's father, by Captain Jacob Endicott." Cab put forth the history between the two families as it was known to him. "As payment for a debt of wages."

"It was all as it should be, legal and binding," Alva quavered. "You can't take it away from us now."

"No, ma'am," Cab confirmed. "Just as you say."

"Hatchet gave up drink back in the year eighteen and seventy-five," Sophronia put in. "He swore on a Bible he'd give up the drink if the Lord would spare his life. Traded liquor for milk."

"But the milk of human kindness still never flowed in the old man's veins," Wilbert claimed. "He was a right mean old cuss. Thought all fathers were like him—all people. But now I know better." He looked at Marigold.

"No. She made him that way," Alva insisted, pointing her arthritic white finger at Sophronia. "With her sour looks and heedless—"

"Mother Hatchet." Sophronia cut Alva's tirade short with a withering look. "He was a grave sinner, like us all, no more, no less. You know that."

"But he were washed clean of his sin," Cleon claimed. "Just like he asked. Wanted to be washed clean." He nodded as if agreeing with himself. "He said so to me."

Marigold felt the hairs on her skin tingle in that strange way. "Exactly when did he say that, Cleon?"

"What sin?" asked Cab.

"Don't rightly know which of them all." Cleon looked puzzled. "But it were spilling out of him. Like Jesus and the centurion's lance, he said, 'cept it weren't water and wine coming out from his side."

A realization came over her. "Was he bleeding, Cleon?"

"Like a red gum stump," the old fellow admitted. "Looking to die with the pains. Going on and on about the sin and how he needed to be washed clean of it, he was. Begged me take him down to the water."

How horrifyingly biblical. "So did you take him down to the water's edge? To Salem Sound?"

"I surely did," Cleon assured them. "I do as I'm told. Same as always."

"He was alive when you took him there?" Cab asked.

"Ayuh. Took him to his praying place, where he'd go so's the Lord could speak to him direct like."

"God spoke directly to Ellery down on the shore?" Marigold had assumed that Ellery Hatchet's conversations with his maker were strictly one-sided.

The old man just bobbed his head in agreement. "I laid him down there just like he asked. And Cousin Ellery patted my face when he look up at me. Said I looked all yellowed with the moon behind my head like a saint."

"There wasn't a moon that night." Marigold recalled the inky blackness perfectly. "It was cloudy."

"Xanthopsia," the doctor muttered. "From digitalis, the plant of the foxglove or nightshade," he explained. "Digoxin is the poison extracted from the leaves of the foxglove." Oliphant's gaze landed squarely on Marigold. "When given in large enough doses, it can occasion sickness, purging, giddiness, confused vision, objects appearing haloed in yellow or green, increased secretion of urin … beg your pardon." The doctor left off his list. "All leading to death. In short, all the symptoms that have been reported for Ellery Hatchet."