The Devil Amongst the Lawyers (8 page)

The sheriff, who was not a relative, and who therefore had nothing to be embarrassed about, offered her a few books he said he had already read, perhaps some of them left behind by previous inmates. If so, their taste had run to thrillers and adventure tales: Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Dickson Carr. Such yarns did not interest her, except that they were better than staring through the bars. She was always careful to mention to whoever visited that she would be glad to be given things to read, and some of the local ladies had obliged by sending her books. The ones who reckoned her guilty sent Bibles. She wondered sometimes whether these strangers brought her books in order to be kind, or if they did it just so that they could boast that they had given a book to the murderess from Pound. Well, she didn’t care. Let them talk. At least they had provided her with a way to pass the time.

She read
Murder on the Orient Express
, the new whodunit by Mrs. Agatha Christie, which was entertaining enough, but anyone who had read last year’s newspapers could see what the story was based on. The author had simply changed the names of all the people in the Lindbergh kidnapping case, and set them on a train, heading from Paris to Istanbul. It wasn’t what she’d call fiction, but it passed the time. It also made her wonder if anyone would ever do that to her, put her in a book and say what they liked about her. Probably not, though. She wasn’t very interesting, really.
The Lindberghs were famous and rich—a dashing pilot and an ambassador’s daughter—and so it mattered when one of them died, and people wanted to hear about it. But who cared what happened to ordinary folk in a little town so far up the mountain that they had to pump in the daylight?

The book she liked best was by Mr. James Hilton, a famous author who sometimes visited with friends at the theatre down in Abingdon. The coal gentry from the mountain mining communities often spent time in Abingdon, and she wondered if the donor of that book had met the author on one such excursion. The volume was not signed, however, so perhaps not. She had read his earlier book, the one about a mountain village in the Himalayas called Shangri-la where people stayed young for centuries. There weren’t any Shangri-las in these mountains, that’s for sure. Up here people got old at forty. They were grandparents in their thirties, like as not, with leathery faces from toiling in the sun, and gnarled hands and sunken mouths that spoke of hardship and manual labor. How could Mr. Hilton imagine a remote mountain village where one’s youth lasted forever? Why, you hardly had a single summer to spread your wings before it was gone. She thought that Shangri-la story was mostly wishful thinking, and she didn’t see how it would make your life any more pleasant to dream about things you couldn’t have, like eternal youth.

But his new book was more to her liking.
Good-bye Mr. Chips.
That one was about a schoolteacher, and although she hadn’t really wanted to be a teacher, she felt a kinship with the character on account of that. Of course, the fellow in the book taught in a high-toned English private school, so it wasn’t really like her job in a one-room schoolhouse up on the mountain, but some things don’t change, no matter who your pupils are, and so she thought she understood the feelings expressed in the book. She read it through twice.

One of the younger women in the county, either as a thoughtful gesture or else as a cruel joke, sent her a few recent issues of her college newspaper, the
Grapurchat.
The name stood for gray-and-purple chat, she’d explained to the turnkey when he brought them to her cell. Gray
and purple were the colors of Radford State Teachers College, where she’d earned her two-year degree. She had read them willingly enough, because there would always be more hours than books in the Wise County Jail, but she came to the conclusion that they were about as fanciful as that magical Himalayan kingdom of Mr. Hilton.

In mid-August Miss Martin, the campus dietician, surprised the students with an evening picnic on the lawn, featuring fried chicken, sandwiches, iced tea, and ice cream. A local man came to campus to show off the forty-two-pound catfish he caught in the New River; he donated the fish to the biology department—front page news, that. And in the October 2 issue, the Alumnae News reported four marriages, one birth, and the campus visit of a 1916 graduate who had spent the last fourteen years as a missionary to China. She had read that section three times, looking for her own name. One might suppose that a column devoted to news of RSTC’s former students might find space among the brides and babies to mention a more ominous milestone: Miss Erma Morton of Pound, Virginia, is currently awaiting trial for first-degree murder on the charge of having murdered her father. Not a peep about that.

She combed through every issue since her arrest in July. In her two years at college, she remembered seeing her name in the paper only once: in the June 1934 graduation list, midway through the list of names. Most of the issues featured the same few girls, mentioned as squibs in the gossip column, or in social notes as they visited friends and family in nearby towns, or listing their little triumphs in this play or that poetry reading. In her two years in Radford Erma had never done anything noteworthy, and now that she obviously had, the
Grapurchat
declined to take note of it.

They did, however, find the space to list the names of the girls in the Alice Evans Biology Club who went out with a telescope in the wee hours of a Sunday morning to observe the Leonid meteor shower. The heavens themselves may blaze forth the death of princes, but in that event the genteel newspaper of Radford Teachers College would glorify the stars and fail to mention any accompanying death.

That night we were entertained by a blind singer playing a lute to boisterous backwoods ballads one only hears deep in the country.

—
MATSUO BASH

As the departing passengers stepped down onto the Abingdon station walkway, Rose Hanelon appeared at Henry Jernigan’s elbow, her cheeks red from cold, and the collar of her lamb coat turned up, so that she peeped up at him through dark eyelashes like a bashful turtle. Had she been a pretty woman, the effect would have been charming. “Are you all right, Henry?” she said. “You look like you’re sleepwalking.”

He nodded, willing himself out of his reverie, and allowed himself to be led toward the doors to the depot. A gust of mist-laden wind hit his face, making him shiver. “Right as rain,” he murmured, wiping his eyes. “Is the hotel far from here, Rose? Are there taxis?”

“Shade Baker has just gone to find out, while I came to find you. Why don’t we stay here and wait? There’s no point in going out in that weather until we have to.”

He nodded, mopping the rain from his face with his linen handkerchief. He had been dreaming. The rocking of the train carriage, aided perhaps by the contents of the silver flask, had lulled him into a fitful sleep, and, loosed from its mooring in the here and now, his mind had transported him back to Edo. Not to Tokyo, the modern city that he had known as a young man, but back to the old city as it had existed for him only in the woodcuts and painted screens from that earlier era.

In his dream he had fancied that he was walking along the Tokaido, the city’s high road from Kyoto. On the hill before him, overlooking Edo Bay, he saw the temple of Sengakuji, with the graves of the forty-seven samurai. This was his pilgrimage, some message from Asano was intended for him, but as he moved toward the shrine, his rabbity seatmate shook him awake, and he found himself a world away. Part of him was still on that other journey, though, envisioning the mountains of Honshu and the shimmering sea beyond.

Now, shivering on the threshold of the Abingdon train depot, staring at the crowd, but still under the spell of his reverie, he tried to banish the cold by sorting the departing passengers by
Shi-Nou-Kou-Shou,
the classes of Japan’s feudal system. He watched a raw-boned soldier in uniform striding toward the exit with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder: one of the
shi,
the warrior class. And there were farmers aplenty in the crowd, the
nou
: spare, leathery men in faded work clothes or clad in their shabby Sunday best. The artisans, the
kou
, were harder to place: perhaps the man carrying a violin case, but any of the other passengers hurrying past could be a potter, a carpenter, or a stonemason. There was nothing to distinguish them from anyone else. He supposed that the smug, stout businessmen with fedoras and briefcases constituted the
shou
, the merchant class—the lowest in the hierarchy of the Orient, but try telling them that.

Finally, he shook off the last vestiges of the dream, remembering his destination. Not Tokyo, past or present, but a sleepy little town in the Virginia Blue Ridge, currently obscured by drizzling rain and the gathering dusk.

Shade Baker reappeared, motioning them toward the front door, saying that the Martha Washington Inn had sent a car for them, although the hotel was only a block away. “But we had so much luggage between us that I was afraid we all three wouldn’t fit, so I told
the driver we’d walk. I thought we might as well get a look at the town while we’re at it.”

“Don’t blink,” said Rose. “I think this place is only on the map two days a week.”

Henry Jernigan yawned and stretched. “I, for one, welcome the opportunity to stretch my legs, after that interminable train ride,” he said. Securing his hat firmly over his ears, he covered his nose and mouth with a silk muffler and set off down the sidewalk with a purposeful stride.

Rose watched as Henry disappeared around the corner. “You’re being straight with us, aren’t you, Shade?” she said, with the earnest look she wore in her sob sister portrait. “It is only a block from here to the hotel? Because I don’t want to find that poor old galoot face down in the street a mile from here.”

Shade Baker shook his head. “Just around the corner, Rose. You have my solemn word.”

She looked at him doubtfully. “Well, I guess I can trust you,” she said. “As long as you don’t put it in writing.”

HENRY JERNIGAN HAD FORGOTTEN
to ask the way to the hotel, but fortunately, just as he reached the street, he saw the hotel car pulling away from the station and making a right turn at the corner. He quickened his pace, watching his breath cloud the cold air, while he took stock of his surroundings. As small towns go, Abingdon seemed ordinary enough: automobiles trundled up and down its main thoroughfare, and beneath their black umbrellas, the people who hurried along the sidewalks looked just as they would in Washington or New York. Perhaps among them were farm laborers in overalls, but, if so, their rain gear rendered them indistinguishable from the more prosperous citizens.

The buildings lining Main Street were nineteenth-century structures, with gingerbread trim and mellowed rose brick, but they were well cared for, and reminded him of a genteel section of Baltimore. He saw no horses and buggies, no rustic women in bonnets or pioneer dress, no gas lamps or candles. Local color was thin on the ground, he told himself with a rueful smile. But, after all, the trial wasn’t being held here. They might have better luck finding cultural curiosities in that smaller, more remote mountain town. A dog fight or a colorful village idiot would not come amiss.

“I THOUGHT THEY SAID
this was a new hotel,” said Rose, squinting up at their regal destination, which stood at the end of a circular carriage drive. “If you ask me, they could have filmed
The Little Colonel
in that place.”

After a five-minute walk, Rose and Shade Baker had reached the hotel to find Henry Jernigan there on the sidewalk, smiling benignantly, and waving them over as if they had gone astray.

“If you got lost in this hamlet, they’d probably put up a statue of you to mark the achievement,” muttered Rose, but she smiled and waved back at Henry, and they hurried forward to join him. Luster Swann was nowhere to be seen, but generally he kept to himself except when they were actually working, and nobody missed him. Rose suspected that he had opted to stay at the Belmont, whose sign proclaimed:
Rooms $1.99 and Up.