“It won’t,” he answered, gently.
“I ain’t a bad person,” she went on. “I mean, I’ve had my share of scrapes, but I ain’t bad. Exactly.”
“I need your help,” he told her.
She was silent. An expression of incomprehension flickered across her face. Now she did look as if she might turn and run.
“Don’t go,” Matthew said. “Just listen.”
So close to running…so close…
“Mrs. Lovejoy may be in some trouble.” Matthew kept his voice low, but he was also very aware of their surroundings, that no one—especially the mistress of Paradise or her Noggin—would come along the path unheard.
Opal regarded him as he had regarded the rattlesnake beneath his tricorn. “Who are you?”
“I’m going to ask the questions. Has there been a male visitor here lately for Mrs. Lovejoy? Say…in the past five days?”
“A visitor? Who?”
“Listen to me, Opal. In the past five days. Has a man come to visit her? A big man, with broad shoulders.” Only true when he swelled himself up, Matthew thought. “Reddish-blond hair, parted down the middle. Going gray on the sides. He would have a bandage probably on the left side of his head, just above the ear. Very pale blue eyes. Like ice. Have you seen anyone like that?”
“Here?” she asked.
“Yes, here. Please, Opal, it’s important.”
“Why is it important?”
Oh Christ! he thought.
“If this is about Kitt, I don’t know anything,” Opal said.
“Kitt? Who’s Kitt?” Matthew felt as if he were back in the night wilderness and unable to see his hand in front of his face.
“I don’t know anything.”
“All right, then.” Matthew held out a hand to steady her, even though she was more than ten feet away. “Tell me about Noggin. He lives somewhere else?” When she nodded, he asked, “Where?”
She shook her head.
He tried for a flintlock shot in the dark, thinking that there might possibly be some connection between the fact that Slaughter’s safebox—bought by Mrs. Lovejoy—had been wrapped up in a Mrs. Sutch sausage bag, and now a Mrs. Sutch sausage bag appears in the back of her handyman’s wagon. “Do you know the name Sutch?”
“Who?”
The sausages were likely too expensive for her purse, he thought. And too expensive for Noggin’s, as well? “Back to Noggin. And use yours, please.” He waved away whatever she was going to say before she could open her mouth. “Has Noggin brought a man here to see Mrs. Lovejoy? In the past five days? Or after dark?” But how would she know? he wondered. Where the girls lived was a good distance away from Mrs. Lovejoy’s house.
Opal just stared at him, her eyes wide. Matthew thought she was trying to make a decision. Whatever it was, it wasn’t easy.
“I am investigating Mrs. Lovejoy,” Matthew said. “It’s better that you don’t know my name. But I believe that a man I’m looking for may have—”
“Kitt found out Noggin didn’t bury Mr. White,” she blurted out. “She told me. Everythin’ she saw that night.”
Matthew had stopped speaking at this bizarre assertion; he had no idea what she was talking about, but it seemed very important—urgent—to her. He said, “Go on.”
“Mr. White was laid out in his coffin, in the church,” Opal said. “For the service. Kitt said for me to look, that Ginger had dressed him up in that fine lace cravat he always wore, and it was a shame such a nice piece of lace was gonna get buried. She had a mind to come back before Noggin put him under and get it, but I said if Mizz Lovejoy caught her she was out on her ear.” She paused, making sure Matthew was following.
“Ginger being another servant?” Matthew asked.
“Yeah, she’s gone now. But Kitt said she wanted that lace, and she wanted me to go get it with her after we’d fed ’em their suppers. I wasn’t havin’ no part of it. So Kitt said she was gonna hurry to the church, sneak in and get the lace before Noggin wheeled the coffin out.”
“Wheeled it out?”
“He’s got a cart with wheels on it, that’s how he moves the coffin about. See, he makes the coffins, too. So Kitt went back just as dark was fallin’, but she told me she was too late because she saw Noggin’s lanterns burnin’. And the thing is…the thing is…she saw Noggin right there pushin’ the coffin into the back of the wagon, and she didn’t know what to make of this so she slipped into the woods to watch.”
“He’d already dug the grave?”
“That’s not what I’m gettin’ at,” Opal said. “Kitt told me she saw him open the coffin and look in it for a time. Then he reached in, lifted up Mr. White’s head—she said she could see his hair in the lamplight—and all of a sudden, whisk! He pulled that lace cravat off Mr. White and wrapped it around his own neck. Then…then…he closed the lid, and he walked back to the graveyard as nervy as you please.”
“Then he hadn’t yet dug the grave?”
“No, just listen!” She came closer, until she was right in front of him a hand’s reach away. “Kitt couldn’t make tits nor teeth out of this, so she followed him. And there was Noggin in the graveyard, tampin’ the last of the dirt down on Mr. White’s pile. He’d finished it. But Mr. White was still in his coffin, sittin’ in the wagon!”
“Noggin didn’t bury him,” Matthew said.
“That’s right! He didn’t bury him! But he’d made it look so! Well, Kitt figures she ought not to be where she is, and she starts off along the path away from there. Then all of a sudden somebody comes out of the woods right in front of her, right smack dab, a lantern’s pushed in her face, and she said she hollered so loud she was surprised I didn’t hear it way down where I was. She said she just turned tail and ran. And she said, ‘Opal, don’t you breathe a word of this, and I’m forgettin’ I saw anything either.’ And I said, ‘Well, what is it you saw?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know what I saw, but I didn’t see it.’”
“Saving money on their coffins, I suppose,” Matthew ventured. “Using the same one over and over in the funeral service.”
“Yeah, I thought that.” She leaned in to him, her eyes wide again. “But what became of Mr. White?”
Her question begged another. Matthew wondered if any of those forty-nine graves were really occupied. Were the bodies actually buried somewhere else? Or just dumped into the woods beyond Paradise? If so, what the hell was this about?
“The next day,” Opal said, “I went and looked for myself. Sure enough, the grave was dug and filled and there was a new marker planted. And I started wonderin’ right then…is anybody to home in there?”
“Interesting,” Matthew agreed, but this was totally off the subject of Tyranthus Slaughter. Except for the fact that if Mrs. Lovejoy knew about this fraud, it indicated a larcenous frame of mind. Still, what did she stand to gain from something like that? A few shillings saved on the wood for a coffin? “Have you or Kitt told anyone else?”
“Not me, for sure. I can’t say for Kitt. ’Specially since she up and ran away about three days after it happened. So says Mizz Lovejoy to the staff. Says Kitt must’ve gotten sick of the work and bolted in the middle of the night. She wouldn’t have been the first, just took out for the road. Well, I looked and all her clothes were gone out of her room, and her travellin’ bag gone too.” Opal held up a finger. “But,” she said, “Kitt never would’ve left without sayin’ good-bye to me. Never. I just know it in my bones. So right after that Mizz Lovejoy says she wants to see the staff one-by-one, to find out what might have made Kitt bolt like she did, without even drawin’ her week’s coin. Find out what might have been so heavy a weight on Kitt, she says. Me, I sat in there across from Mizz Lovejoy and all I thought about was who it might have been come up on Kitt and shone a lamp in her face. And I kept my mouth sealed tight. There you have it.” Opal looked in all directions to make sure no one had crept close enough to overhear.
It was an odd story, Matthew thought. He really didn’t know w
hat to make of it. A grave dug and filled, but no coffin or body in it? The coffin and body then put onto a wagon, and taken…where? Obviously Noggin knew. Matthew was surmising that Mrs. Lovejoy also knew. And Kitt’s fate? Had she actually run away, or had she…
There was a very large mallet in the back of Noggin’s wagon, Matthew remembered.
But was what Kitt had seen damning enough to kill her for?
Matthew figured that had to do with the importance of the secret.
If, for instance, a servant-girl decided to ask for a little extra shine in her pay in order to keep the secret, a mallet might have to fall. Or the decision might be to go ahead and use the mallet early, because if that same servant-girl got in contact with one of the families of a deceased person and talked them into coming back and having a grave dug up…
“Tonight,” Opal said. “He’ll be doin’ it again, with the widow Ford.”
Whatever Noggin was doing, Matthew knew it had to be nasty.
And Nasty seemed to be Tyranthus Slaughter’s middle name.
Was there a connection? He had no idea. But he thought one slime trail might lead to another.
“I’d best get you back,” Opal offered, suddenly sounding wan and older than her years. “Oh…the man you’re talkin’ about? I ain’t seen nobody like that.”
Matthew didn’t follow when she started back toward the cemetery, and she paused to wait for him. He asked, “What’s your full name?”
“Opal Delilah Blackerby.”
“All right, Opal Delilah Blackerby. I want you to have this.” He reached into the pocket of his dark green waistcoat, felt for what he knew to be there, and brought it out. “Here. Come take it.”
She came forward, slowly, and when she took what he was holding she blinked first at it, then at him, then at it again. “Is this…is this real?”
“It is.” The ring was real gold, of course. Was the red stone a ruby? He would leave it for her to find out. Never let it be said that Slaughter’s treasure hadn’t offered a chance for escape to someone. “I wouldn’t show that to anyone else. And I wouldn’t care to stay around here very much longer either.”
“Why are you…givin’ me this?”
“Because…I like you,” he answered, in all truth. “I think you’d make a good detective.”
“A what?”
“Never mind. If you ever get to New York, come to Number Seven Stone Street. Can you remember that?”
“Remember it? Hell’s bleedin’ bells, I’ll never forget it!”
“I can find my way back,” he said. “Just be careful, do you hear me?”
“I will,” she promised. He started to go back along the path, leaving her staring at the gold ring with its small red—ruby?—stone, and then suddenly she caught at his sleeve and she asked, “Can I kiss you?”
Matthew said yes, it would be fine, and Opal gave him a sedate but heartfelt kiss on the cheek. A far cry from doing it behind the church, he thought, but maybe at its essence a little bit of warm.
He returned to Mrs. Lovejoy’s house. Another servant-girl answered his knock at the door. No, sir, Mrs. Lovejoy has gone out, she said. Mrs. Lovejoy has asked me to tell you that urgent personal business has called her away, but she will be glad to finish the arrangements if you would come back tomorrow or the following day.
“Thank you,” Matthew replied. “Tell her…”
Tell her I’ll be back tonight, he thought.
“Tell Mrs. Lovejoy I shall look forward to her charming company,” he said, and then he walked to his horse at the hitching-post.
Twenty-Nine
CROUCHED in the woods that faced Paradise’s cemetery, Matthew didn’t have long to wait before Noggin came calling.
It was a hazy blue twilight. Matthew had left his horse hitched among the trees at the edge of a meadow about two hundred yards away, back toward the Paradise sign. He had been waiting little more than ten minutes, and here came Noggin’s wagon along the road to the church.
Noggin pulled his team up in front of the church, set the brake and climbed down. He lit the two lanterns and set them in back of the wagon. He put on his gloves, took his pickaxe and shovel to the cemetery, came back for the lanterns, stripped off his cloak and then set to work digging a grave with what appeared to be formidable strength.
Matthew settled back. From where he was positioned, he could see Noggin working if not speedily, at least steadily. The digging was not what particularly interested him; it was what happened to the coffin and the corpse afterward.
He’d spent some time this afternoon visiting the village of Red Oak, which was about two miles away from Paradise and the nearest community. It was ringed by farms and lush pastures where cattle grazed in the golden light. Red Oak itself had a busy farmers’ market, a main street of craft shops, three taverns, two stables, and between thirty and forty houses separated by gardens, picket fences and fieldstone walls. Matthew had received a few curious looks as he walked from place to place, being a stranger, but for the most part he was taken as having business there and left alone. His business was to stroll into some of the shops and inquire about a handyman from the area called Noggin. The closest he got to an affirmative answer was from the blacksmith, who said he thought he knew a young man named Noggin who lived in Chester, but then again now that he remembered it the man’s name was Knocker. Matthew had thanked him kindly and moved on.
The patrons of the taverns had been equally unhelpful. Matthew had gotten back on his horse and ridden another few miles to Chester, where a further unprofitable hour was spent. Then, as the afternoon was growing late, he’d returned along the road toward Paradise, and had decided to stop for a meal and drink at the Speed The Plow.
“Noggin?” The beak-nosed tavernkeeper had shaken his own bald nog. “Never heard the name, sorry.”
Matthew had eaten a humble pie and nursed a mug of ale, waiting for the twilight to gather. Several people came and went, a rather raucous drunk had to be swept out with a broom to the backside, and Matthew must have looked a little forlorn at his table because the tavernkeeper called out, “Hey, Jackson! You know a fella by the name of Noggin?”
Jackson, a black-garbed stout who wore a powdered wig and resembled for all the world either a hellfire preacher or a hanging judge, looked up from his second mug of ale and said in a gravel-scrape voice, “Not recallin’,” which put paid to that particular bill.
“I know the name,” said a younger but equally stout gent sitting at a table just beyond Jackson. “Fella named Noggin did some work for me last summer. Who’s askin’?”
Matthew watched Noggin dig, as the darkness began to come on. According to the farmer who lived just outside a village called Nicholsburg, the handyman called Noggin could patch a barn roof like nobody’s business. Could chop wood like there was no tomorrow. Could slap on paint as sure as the day was long. And had told the farmer in his garbled voice that he was just trying to make some extra money because his regular employer was a tightfisted…
“Bitch, was the word he used,” the farmer had related, over the mug of ale that Matthew had bought him.
“I’m sorry to hear him speak of the lady in that way,” Matthew had said.
“Oh?” The farmer’s thick brown eyebrows had gone up. “Do you know Mrs. Sutch?”
It had taken Matthew a moment to digest that. “Mrs. Sutch?”
“That’s who he said he worked for. Owns a hog farm up north of Nicholsburg. She makes sausages.”
“Ah,” Matthew had said, brushing some invisible dust from the front of his waistcoat. “Sausages.”
“Big taste for ’em in Philadelphia, I hear. Too damn expensive for the home folk, though.”
Matthew listened to the wind moving through the trees. He heard Noggin’s shovel stop scraping dirt.
In another moment he heard the dirt start going back into the grave.
The farmer couldn’t describe Mrs. Sutch. He’d never seen her. A private type of lady, he thought. H
ad heard tell of Mrs. Lovejoy, but had never seen her either. She was probably private, too.
Nicholsburg was about seven miles up the road, the farmer said. He didn’t get down this way often, but this morning he’d gone nearly to Philadelphia to a cattle sale. “What was it you were wantin’ Noggin about?”
“Oh,” Matthew had said, “I’d heard he was a good worker. Just trying to find him.”
“I don’t think he’s the kind of fella you find,” came the reply. “He finds you.”
It was almost full dark. Matthew watched as Noggin used his shovel to tamp down the dirt. Noggin did a good job of it, not rushing at all. Then Noggin came back to his wagon, took a wooden cross from it, and planted the marker with two firm whacks of the mallet. After his tools were squared away, Noggin carried one of his lanterns into the church, and Matthew sat wondering if the lowest point of human evil could ever be reached.
Noggin returned wheeling his cart with the coffin on it, and the lantern on the coffin. He pushed the coffin into the back of the wagon with ease. He took the cart back into the church for the next occasion, and when he came back out again he opened the lid and looked into the widow Ford’s face as if determining whether she had anything worth stealing. Matthew saw by the lamplight that Noggin’s flat, bovine features were totally devoid of expression. Not even a shred of curiosity. Noggin was obviously an old hand at this; he even had the ill manners to yawn in the widow’s face before he eased the lid shut. For the sake of decorum he’d brought along a ratty old gray blanket, which he spread over the coffin. Then he took off his gloves and threw them in the back. He put on his cloak and hung the two lanterns up on hooks on either side of the driver’s seat. The horses rumbled and shifted, ready for a trip.
Matthew watched Noggin get the wagon turned around. When the wagon pulled away, heading back in the direction of the main road, Matthew emerged from his hiding-place and made his way as quickly and safely as possible across the meadow to his horse. As he mounted up, he looked toward Mrs. Lovejoy’s house through the trees on the other side of the meadow. Not a light showed in the windows.