Chapter 9

Beall's mare trotted down toward the tavern that had once been the county courthouse while he thought about his conversation with the Brookeses. He pulled his notebook from his pocket and looked at his Saturday jottings. He had written that the dress billed to "T. Brookes" cost one pound two shillings, that would be the stepmother's dress, the one to "J. Brookes" was nine and six, and that one was somebody's else's. The noted measurements, though similar, were not identical so they obviously were not the same bill twice. Why would James lie to him, he wondered. Whose dress was it?

The horse's easy gait brought his bladder to his attention, and he stopped to relieve himself noting the still uncleared ditch at the roadside as he did. He wrote a note to himself to see Mansfield Clagett again and wondered if his memory was really getting bad. What had he forgotten about the earlier crime that might be important now? Had he heard about the overseer's knife before? He should have.

He remounted and as he rode south saw Lem Clagett's crooked lane in his mind and the dog's body, its head at an impossible angle. Cut, clawed? He hadn't looked, that he could recall, and the crows and buzzards had taken care of the carcass by the time he thought about it. When was that, early autumn of '77. Arnold County was a year old, and he was its rather proud sheriff. He had walked into the rude summer kitchen, crudely put up by a non-carpenter, probably Lem Clagett himself, and there was the sprawled body, the dead woman. She looked like a girl. Slim, narrow hipped, her dark blonde hair fanned out above her face. He reached down and closed the eye he could see, and then he had looked at the bloody stump of her left arm. There wasn't much left, a very clean cut.

What had he seen? He had helped to bury them and even said a few words over the grave since no one else seemed willing to do so. But what had he seen? The stump looked like what a butcher might do cutting a leg from a sheep or lamb. Right through the joint at the shoulder with the white bone and gristle showing. Clean edges mostly. Beall closed his eyes. He could not see any signs of teeth or claw marks in his mind, but the dress was torn, ripped open. He would have to ask Wainright about Betsy Miller's wounds. Make a note, make another note.

The boy had three or four cuts across his back, shoulder and neck, and the blood had sprayed across the cellar floor and drained into cracks in the hard dirt. The ants were busy, he remembered. Somebody or something must have held the child down and then killed him. He had looked at Lem's body more carefully than at the other two. The dead man had scratches or cuts on his right forearm and left palm as if he had been fighting off somebody, somebody with a knife. He had a deep puncture wound just under his ribs and some dreadful cuts across his chest. Beall remembered that he had found what looked like a chopped place on the man's left elbow. He recalled brushing away the flies, couldn't have been too cold if there were flies, he thought, and he had covered Lem's body with a blanket or a quilt. Which was it, damn it? I should remember even if a lot had happened in five years.

When he got to the tavern, Beall had a beer and some beef, bread and gravy with Stud Farrell and then went out looking for bricks. He found a house nearby that had burned some years before where part of the chimney still stood. It had been made of a combination of field stones and bricks, and most of it had tumbled into the small home's ashes. Beall picked up some loose bricks, knocking them together while his mind still replayed his discovery of the Clagett family's bodies and the stump of the dead woman's arm, the white bones. He walked back to the tavern and pulled a small wheelbarrow out of the shed and pushed it to the stub of a chimney and threw in his bricks and pieces of brick and then returned to dump the load in front of Annie's shack.