Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 116, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 709 & 710, September/October 2000

But everything got worked out by the time of the funeral. The sheriff examined Billy’s trap at Lookout Point, where he always stopped on his way home from work to pick up whatever small animal was waiting for him to put it out of its misery. There was a fair amount of trapping done in the Hills that time of year. Still is. Nancy Baldwin is famous up and down the valley for her hasen-pfeffer. Never had much stomach for it myself. The sheriff brought the trap down with him. Had to spring it and break the lock. Billy was working on it, it looked like, when he slipped and tumbled halfway down the hill. It was scrambling up again and getting himself home safe, the coroner reported, that brought on the heart attack. I sure thought about those words, home safe. Dead. I asked Prouty what he thought happened. Prouty’s the undertaker and my friend. It was in his cold room they did the autopsy. But Prouty didn’t want to talk about it. In fact, nobody in the whole town did, including me.

I did pay attention to who was at the funeral and who was not. Mostly women were there. They take to funerals better than men, certainly to this one they did. Mary Toomey was sitting next to Nancy in the front pew. Big Mary sat in the front pew of most things, especially since she’d been made president of Webbtown State Bank. First woman to hold the job. Nancy looked mighty frail and kind of scared. Every once in a while she’d let out a big, wet sob that started the little one in her arms wailing. Big Mary — we’d called her that since she was a bulging-out teenager — would clamp her hand on Nancy’s and you’d have thought it was a tourniquet, the way it stopped the tears for a while. If the baby didn’t let up, Mary took hold of her and gave her a shake that must’ve cured her of everything but breathing. I’d heard it was Mary who’d called Prouty from the Baldwin place. Said she’d been with Nancy when Billy died. I guess you could call that the truth if you wanted to, and I didn’t know of anyone who didn’t. Across the aisle, next to the plain coffin he’d steered into the church, was Prouty, as pale as any corpse he ever got ready for a last viewing. In the next pew back were the four pallbearers Mary Toomey recruited on Nancy’s behalf. I was one of them. During silent prayer I heard Mrs. Prouty clear her throat. Prouty gave a little flex to his shoulders when it happened so I assume it was Mrs. Prouty sending some kind of message he picked up. Alongside her was the pastor’s wife, Faith Barnes. She sat straight and solid as a farm silo. She’d always stood for what the pastor preached, even ecumenism when it came along. It was a word most of us found hard to say, but we swallowed it. Didn’t mean much except to Pastor, who tried to keep up with what was going on in the world. We’re a one-church town unless you count the itinerant alleluia-sayers who show up regular and get us hollering. I mention them now because one of them was going to show up before long, though we didn’t know it then.

One person who wasn’t at the funeral was Clara McCracken. I might as well say now, I don’t think I’d have lived as long as I have if it wasn’t for Clara McCracken. I’m a lawyer, and I’ve practiced in Webbtown ever since I first hung my shingle upstairs of Kincaid’s drugstore, some six decades ago. I don’t have much of a practice left, but I’ve played the fiddle for pleasure all my life, and if I’m not better known for fiddling than I am for the law, I’m sure better liked for it.

McCrackens have run the Red Lantern Inn since the first of them came west after the War of Independence. One story says they were on the run from the revenue men during the Whiskey Rebellion. That sounds about right. The McCrackens almost died out twenty years ago, down to two sisters, Clara and Maud, maiden ladies. Maud, twice Clara’s age, was determined to marry her sister to a paint salesman who put in at the Red Lantern whenever he came through the Ragapoos. Clara wanted nothing to do with him. She wanted to run wild in the hills with young Reuben White, until the day he cornered her in the sheepcote. Maudie was accidentally shot dead that day, and Clara tumbled Reuben headfirst into the well. I defended her when she was tried for murder. She wouldn’t have any outside lawyer, and she wasn’t much use in her own defense, taking the jury to the well and showing them how she did it. She did fifteen years.

Reuben’s family didn’t get much sympathy from the town. They moved away — deeper into the hills; I suppose more in shame than sorrow — when most of the townspeople drove up to the county jail to see Clara off to prison. The one member of the family, a first cousin to Reuben, who did not move away, was Mary Toomey, Big Mary.

I brought Clara home after she’d done her time, and allowed myself to be made a silent partner so she could reopen the Red Lantern. Not much business, but it’s been going since.