dream. “I think I dozed off.”
“I told you it was too soon for you to be out!” she hissed back.
“No. I’m all right. I just have too much on my mind, that’s all.”
People were beginning to file out of the pews now, and he realized that the service was over. It seemed to him that only a few minutes had passed since he’d gone into the church. Several of his mother’s friends paused in the aisle to wish him well, and he shook white-gloved hands with a tentative smile. He hoped his mother had not invited company over for Sunday dinner. He was not equal to the small talk of village acquaintances.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, Sheriff,” said a soft voice beside him.
He turned to find that Nora Bonesteel, one of the oldest parishioners, had slipped into the pew behind them. She was tall and straight in her blue church dress with the gray wool shawl draped over her shoulders. Her hair, still more dark than silver, was pulled back in two wings framing her face, and drawn into a knot at the back of her head. She touched his arm and he suddenly felt cold. “The poor in spirit,” he murmured, recognizing the Beatitudes. Miss Bonesteel had been his Sunday school teacher more years ago than either of them cared to remember. “For they shall see God.”
The old woman smiled and shook her head. “You never could keep those verses straight, could you? It’s: For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
He shrugged. “Well, I guess that’s why I didn’t see God.”
“What did you see?”
People told tales about Nora Bonesteel, though nobody ever said she wasn’t a good, righteous woman. She knew things, though. She saw things before they happened, and she had a way of knowing secret things no one would have dreamed of telling her. She didn’t exactly meddle in other people’s lives, but if you went to her for help, she always knew what it was you’d come about. The old folks claimed that Nora Bonesteel even talked to the dead, but Spencer could not let himself believe that, so he chose never to consider the matter at all. He had known her all his life.
What did you see?
“Frankie Silver.” He blurted it out before he thought better of it. Nora Bonesteel had always been able to get the truth out of him, even when he was a sullen teenager who passed the few minutes between Sunday school and church sneaking a cigarette in the back of the churchyard with some of the older boys. Nora Bonesteel had put a stop to that one spring morning without so much as a word passing between them.
Frankie Silver.
Anyone else might have said, “Who?” or, “You must have been dreaming!” Or they might have passed the remark off as a joke, but Nora Bonesteel did none of those things. She considered the matter for a moment and nodded slowly.
“I have heard that she walks,” she said. “Though I have never seen her myself. It’s not surprising, though, is it?”
“No?” He could not believe that he was having this conversation in broad daylight in the sanctuary of the little white church. The place was nearly empty now. His mother had walked toward the door to speak to some of her friends, so there was no one to overhear them.
“They say that those who die by violence often walk. Hers was a cruel death.”
“Do you know what really happened that night?”
Nora Bonesteel shook her head. “It’s not for me to say. But if you have seen her, she means to tell you something, Spencer. You’d best find out what it is.”
That night Spencer Arrowood sat in a circle of light at his dining room table with case-file papers and books of North Carolina history mingling in a pile in front of him. What was there about the Harkryder case that had reminded Nelse Miller of Frankie Silver? He couldn’t see it. He didn’t think Nelse had known the connection, either. It was a hunch of some sort that had never clarified itself in the old man’s mind. Spencer hadn’t taken much stock in such things in those days, but now, twenty years older and wiser, he believed that the intuition of an experienced cop could be counted as probable cause. If you lived long enough, you knew things just from instinct and observation.
By now Spencer had read all the material that the libraries could supply on the Silver case. Some of