These Honored Dead (A Lincoln and Speed Mystery #1) - Jonathan F. Putnam Page 0,18

you leave it alone?”

Simeon did not budge. Johnson sighed.

“Very well, if you must know, Mrs. Johnson thinks there was some encounter between me and that wretched girl. Which there wasn’t, of course. I was merely kind to her on one occasion, and she was a friendly sort. Flirtatious, even. But there was never anything else.”

Judging by the fervor of the man’s reaction, I was skeptical of his profession of innocence. I could tell Simeon was as well. Nonetheless, the newspaperman nodded and resumed his seat.

“We shan’t mention her again,” Simeon said, “if you’ll bring us a towel, a new glass of ale for my friend here, and two bowls of beef stew. You tell Mrs. Johnson we’ve heard far and wide her stew’s the best in the whole entire county.”

“As you wish,” said Johnson, retreating grudgingly.

“What do you think?” I asked Simeon a half hour later when we had collected our horses from the stables and sat astride them as they grazed in the middle of the Menard commons.

“You heard what the Widow Harriman told the sheriff about the girl’s nature,” Simeon said. “I wager there is no shortage of men around here who had encounters of one sort or another with the girl.”

“And no shortage of wives who bear a grudge,” I added.

“But can you imagine any of them doing what someone did to her?” he said, rubbing his rough chin with both palms. “Such intense violence. That’s the difficulty.” He paused. “Back to Springfield, then. We’ve learned quite a bit for one day.”

“You go ahead,” I said. “I’ve a customer to visit up north near Miller’s Ferry. I want to see if I can’t get him to increase his take-up for the harvest season.”

Simeon stared at me for a moment, then slapped his horse on the backside and headed off on the trail toward Springfield. Hickory and I watched until man and steed became a small, ungainly speck on the horizon.

CHAPTER 8

There was no customer near Miller’s Ferry. Instead, once Hickory and I were out of sight of the Menard commons, I pulled her up and we looped around the woods toward the familiar log cabin by the stream just beyond the main settlement.

Our conversations with Johnson and the stable boy had made it clear there might be a number of persons about who bore ill will toward Lilly. But if my goal had been to establish, for the newspaperman’s satisfaction as well as my own, that Rebecca could not be among them, I knew I had not yet succeeded.

Rebecca’s house looked deserted when we came upon it. My eyes glanced up to the roof and I saw with pleasure that my patches still held. I’d devised them the prior summer on a sultry evening as Rebecca stood below on the ground, her hair falling beguilingly in front of her eyes, offering alternatively encouragement and direction. She had suggested, laughing, that fixing the new leak in her roof was the price of one more night spent in her bed, and it was a price I happily paid.

I tied Hickory to one of the birches and walked around behind the cabin. The door to the adjoining barn was secured by a rusty padlock. Rebecca used to keep the key in an eye-level hollow in the closest birch. As I walked over to the hollow, I heard a metallic noise from above. I looked up and gave a little jump.

A murder of crows, some three dozen in all, lined the upper branches of the birch tree. Three dozen pairs of steely black eyes stared down at me. Their spokesman was on a low-hanging branch and he reproached me insistently: caw caw caw. His fellows clicked their beaks rapidly in concurrence.

“Quiet down,” I said.

The birds clicked even louder.

My hand found the key, just where it used to be, and it turned in the padlock. The wooden door to the barn opened reluctantly. I peered in cautiously at first and saw with relief that Lilly’s corpse had been removed. I hoped Rebecca had given her a decent burial; whatever the imperfections of her life, the young woman plainly merited as much.

As my eyes adjusted to the dim interior, I gazed around the small enclosure, not sure what I was looking for but looking nonetheless. The slatted walls were bare. Loose bales of hay lined the perimeter of the room. In the center of the dirt floor, like an awful beacon, lingered an irregular dark stain. I gulped and stared at the shadow