The Ballad of Frankie Silver - By Sharyn McCrumb Page 0,153

by the hand, helping her gently down the muddy bank. “Will you be able to find it in all this underbrush?” he asked her, looking at the unbroken tangle of woods. No remnant of a farmstead remained.

She nodded. “It will be near the creek. I’ll know.”

He stepped aside to let her pass, and then fell in behind her as she made her way through the woods as if she were following a path. She deviated from a straight line only to make her way around a bush or to skirt a fallen log. Spencer scanned the ground around them for snakes and wondered if they would ever find the site. He could have asked Mr. Silver to come with them, but he hadn’t wanted to share the experience with a stranger. Either he would feel foolish embarking on this journey with Nora Bonesteel or else he would learn what he came to find out by a means that would not bear explanation. Either way, he knew that he would never talk about this journey to anyone else.

They were just beyond sight of the road in a clump of beech trees interspersed with tall yellow-flowered weeds when Nora Bonesteel turned to him and put her hand on his arm. “Here,” she said.

The canopy of leaves was so thick that it seemed to be twilight where they stood, but Spencer’s eyes were accustomed to the dimness now, and he began to pace slowly through the weeds, looking for some

sign that Nora Bonesteel was right. He had not ventured more than a few yards away from her when he found the rocks. “It’s here!” he called, motioning for her to come.

A wide, flat rock lay half buried in the black earth, nearly covered by the branches of a shrub growing beside it. “This must be the hearthstone,” said Spencer, kneeling down to examine it. “There are no logs or traces of wood that I can see. I had heard that the cabin burned.”

Nora Bonesteel nodded. “What else could they do?” she said. “The blood had soaked into the logs, into the earth. No one would have lived there.”

It was a crime scene, Spencer told himself. In twenty years, he had seen hundreds of them. You approached each crime scene in the same way. Picture the scene on the night the incident occurred, and try to work out what had to have happened. “December 21, 1831,” he murmured, thinking aloud. “The snow was knee-deep. The river was frozen. According to Frankie Silver, her husband Charlie had been to George Young’s place to get his Christmas liquor. But he came home. Yes. We know he came home.”

Spencer paused, expecting Nora Bonesteel to say something, but she did not, so he went back to his musings. “Christmas liquor. . . . Everybody said that Charlie liked a good time. Liked music. Liked to dance. . . . He’s only nineteen. He’s had quite a lot of George Young’s brew before he gets home. Of course he has. He comes home stinking drunk, and Frankie gives him hell about it. He hasn’t done his chores, and he’s been out partying, leaving her home alone with the baby. They get into a shouting match.”

“They were children themselves,” murmured Nora.

Spencer barely heard her. He was reenacting the crime now, as he had learned to do over the years in his own cases. “Why doesn’t Charlie storm out when the quarrel begins? Because it’s a bitter cold winter night. Deep snow. Frozen river. Nowhere to go. They’re trapped in that tiny, cold cabin. Two angry, shouting adolescents. Maybe the baby is crying. Maybe she’s sick, or colicky, or just plain hungry, and she won’t hush up.” The dark shape of a cabin had begun to appear in his mind, but he knew he wasn’t seeing it in the sense that Nora Bonesteel saw. The old woman had the Sight, but the picture in the sheriff’s mind was constructed out of cold reason. Cops did it at every crime scene. Medical examiners did it when faced with the map of injuries on the body of a victim. Cast your mind out into the possibility of what might have happened, and search with your educated instinct until you can determine what must have happened.

He plunged on into the narrative. “They’re teenagers. Not much self-control.” Trapped. Miserable. If you don’t shut that kid up, I will.He had seen it before. Often. This might as well have been a run-down trailer in a shabby