the passenger seat of his white sedan and waited for her to fasten her seat belt before he took off down the winding Ashe Mountain road and made the right turn that would take them east into North Carolina.
Nora Bonesteel said nothing.
She knew. He wouldn’t ask himself how, or whether his belief in that statement constituted faith of any kind, but he had to know about Frankie Silver, and there was no one else he could bring here who would be able to understand.
“I’ve been studying the case of Frankie Silver,” he told her, after many miles of silence. “You probably know the story, but I’d like to tell it if you wouldn’t mind listening. It would clear things in my mind.”
Nora Bonesteel nodded, and the sheriff began to go over the facts of Charlie Silver’s murder—haltingly at first, but then with greater assurance, until at last he forgot she was there, and he was simply thinking aloud to align his thoughts. The Harkryder case hovered in his mind, parallel to the story he was telling, but although it flickered through his consciousness from time to time, he could not yet see the link.
They drove the winding back roads of Mitchell County, North Carolina, past settlements with colorful names like Bandana and Loafers Glory. It was just as Spencer remembered it from two decades earlier, when he had made the journey with Nelse Miller. If progress had come in the intervening years, it was treading lightly.
When they arrived at the white frame church in the community of Kona on state route 80, the air was still and the shadows sharp, promising a day of breathless heat. Spencer parked his car in the gravel driveway of the churchyard. A slender blond man came out of the church building and waved to them. “I’ll be right back,” said Spencer, as he got out of the car and headed toward the old church.
The blond man was a Mr. Silver, the keeper of the family history. He could have been any age, and he had been born here in the county, but his accent had been worn away like a river rock, softened by years spent in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles. Now he had come home to stay, and to tend the legends. He had a serenity now that one did not often find in the big cities in which he had spent his youth. People—mostly distant relatives, but sometimes scholars and writers—came thousands of miles to ask their questions, to look at the little stones, and to compare the list of names on their genealogy charts with the reams of information in the collection at Kona. They wanted to know who they were, and they seemed to think that Mr. Silver could tell them. Sooner or later most of the visitors got around to asking about Frankie Silver. Mr. Silver knew all the questions, and most of the answers. He was used to it by now.
Spencer told him who they were and what they wanted. Mr. Silver spoke with him for ten minutes, pointing out landmarks and telling Spencer Arrowood what he needed to know. When he had finished, the two men shook hands and Mr. Silver went back across the road to the newer church to tend to the family-history collection housed in its basement. Later they could come over and look at the maps and the photographs, he said. Spencer thanked him again and walked back to the car.
“We’re in the right place,” he told Nora Bonesteel, as he opened the door and helped her out of the car. She nodded without surprise and followed him through the little mountain graveyard.
Spencer walked over to the three uncarved rocks at the edge of the cemetery. “That’s Charlie Silver,” he said.
Nora Bonesteel nodded again. “Yes.”
“They didn’t find him all at once.”
The old woman was looking at the sheriff, not at the grave, and she knew that he was troubled by more deaths than this one. “It’s over now,” she said.
Spencer knelt and ran his hand along the top of the weathered stone. “Charlie Silver. He’s been nineteen for a hundred and sixty-five years now. I used to wonder what kind of a man he was. Whether he deserved what he got. Do you know?”
Nora Bonesteel considered the question. “The cutting came after,” she said at last. “He went quick. She didn’t.”
“Yes, but did he deserve to die?”
“I won’t say that anyone deserves it. Sometimes it has to be done, that’s all.”
Spencer thought that