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

“Good old Hank,” she said then and gave me a cold smile. She ought to have known I wasn’t smart enough to make that insinuation on purpose. But what she’d be pretty sure of now was that I knew what the women did that night, and how her and Faith had got Billy home where they could say he died in his own bed.

What made Christmas special that year was Jeremiah. There hadn’t been a tree at the Red Lantern since before Clara went away. She wanted to know if I thought he’d understand if we got one for him. I said we’d be lucky if he paid it attention at all, and I told her about the Christmas I remembered most. I’d have been five years old. My folks didn’t have much money, and what Ma and I did, we went out in the woods back of where we lived, picked out a tree, and made Pa come and chop it down. I told Clara the whole story, how we stuck it in a bucket of coal and decorated it with pictures of toys and bicycles and sleds we cut out of the Sears Roebuck catalogue. I’ll be darned if she didn’t make me do the same thing and herself got out the Sears catalogue and cut it up. They don’t make catalogues like they used to, but Jeremiah didn’t know that, and he kind of liked the whole celebration.

On Christmas Eve, a dozen or so youngsters with Isaiah leading them, and Anne Pendergast, Mrs. Prouty, and Faith Barnes a kind of rear guard against defections, came up from the town and sang carols below the Red Lantern sign. I stood out on the veranda and waved my hands like I was directing them. I wanted to take Jeremiah out, but Clara said no and took him into the storeroom again till they were gone.

There wasn’t going to be a better time to ask Clara a question that’d been nagging at me since Jeremiah’s arrival, so I just blurted it out. “What are you going to tell him when he starts asking about not having a father like other kids?”

“I’m going to tell him about a hunting accident,” she said, and got a dreamy look in her eyes. “It was way up north in Canada, bear country, during a terrible blizzard. His pa was hurt bad and his partner went looking for help. Got somebody, but they got lost on their way back and couldn’t find him. They looked and looked and they called and called, and all they could hear back was their own voices. They never found him. All they found was bear tracks in the snow. Ain’t that beautiful, Hank?”

I figured there was no point in reminding her about bears hibernating in the winter.

By Groundhog Day, no word had come from the Convention. Faith Barnes, who was trying to pack up a lifetime, invited Isaiah to board with her and Pastor for the last months of winter, but he said no, but thank you kindly. He called the trailer his hermitage, said the solitary life was good for him. He stopped by most times he came to town, pinched Jeremiah’s toes and talked real soft to Clara. Left her a Bible I never caught her looking at, but maybe she did. Even a good baby gets tiresome when you don’t know what he’s saying back to you.

I did better than I thought I would collecting a retirement purse for Reverend Barnes, and we decided to give it to him early so him and Faith would know what they could count on. Easter was coming mid April that year and we decided that was when we’d hold the party for them. Nobody was pushing things except maybe Big Mary. Most of us, even me by that time, didn’t see why Convention had to make a theological issue of it, if that’s what was happening. After all, Pastor had preached ecumenism to us and it could be stretched to fit. But Isaiah himself was for due process, as he put it to me, the lawyer.

It was Clara, squinting into the early dark, noticed Big Mary going by most nights when the snow was cleared, driving up past Lookout Point. If I was behind the bar, Clara’d call out — whether I had a customer or not — “There she goes!” An hour or two later, Mary’d come down again. Clara was clocking her. I wasn’t. She figured Mary was taking him up a warm supper and looking for a little cuddling. I thought it’d be easier to cuddle with a giraffe, but I didn’t say so.