Don Gutteridge - Turncoat

“How long have you been listenin’?” Beth was staring anxiously at Aaron, who was standing by the woodbox with an armful of split logs.

“I just c-c-come in,” he said, dropping the wood helter-skelter at his feet.

Beth looked relieved. “It’s all right, Aaron. I’m not mad at you.”

Marc suddenly had an idea. “Did anyone question Aaron about the night of Joshua’s death?”

Beth grimaced. “MacLachlan and Mr. Hatch, both of ’em-in my presence. He was out back for a few minutes and saw Father walkin’ past towards the front of the house. He saw no one else.”

Marc looked at Aaron, who was following the conversation closely. “Son,” he said, “would you think back to the night when Mr. Smallman rode out into the blizzard?”

“I reme-m-member,” Aaron said.

Beth couldn’t bear to see her brother distressed. She turned to Marc. “Please-”

“I’ve got to,” Marc said. “Think carefully, Aaron. When you saw Mr. Smallman pass you on his way from the barn to the front door of the house, was he carrying anything in his hand or did you see anything sticking out of his pockets?”

Aaron smiled and said without hesitation, “He had a letter.”

Aaron stood placidly amidst the scattered wood, but Beth leapt up. “Why didn’t you tell that to Mr. Hatch?” she said as gently as she could.

“He d-d-didn’t ask me.”

“Don’t you see what this means, Beth?” Marc said. “You were right all along. There was a written message calling him out there on some pretext. It was a rendezvous. There was foul play. And we must pursue his killer until we find him!”

“Calm yourself. You’ll have a fit.”

“I’m having more than that! I know who killed Joshua.”

Beth’s face betrayed her skepticism. “You do?”

“First of all, the motive behind the murder was Joshua somehow discovering among Jesse’s effects evidence related to his dealings with Connors and O’Hurley. You said last night that Joshua became obsessed with Jesse’s suicide. He may have deduced that Jesse was rum-running. He could have bumped into Connors anywhere about here last fall. He might have learned, from Winnifred or Durfee, that Mrs. Stebbins was Connors’s sister and-”

“What?”

“When I left the mill,” Marc said breathlessly, his heart racing as fast as his mind, “I saw a letter from Lydia Stebbins’s mother in Buffalo: it was addressed to Lydia Connors.”

“She was a Connors?”

“That’s right. And her father was a bigwig in the Loco Foco wing of the Democratic Party, a group of fanatics who hate centralized government and big banks and go about rattling sabres everywhere. The Hunters’ Lodges could easily be an offshoot. And Connors’s mate O’Hurley was hiding out at Stebbins’s place the day I went there. He hobbled my horse so I couldn’t trail Stebbins to some secret meeting out past Mad Annie’s.”

Beth leaned back, a bit overwhelmed by Marc’s fervid narrative. “But I heard he’s a gambler and dicer,” she offered.

“He tells his wife and everybody else he’s going hunting!”

“Most of the farmers hunt-”

“Don’t you see, hunting is the code word. And he’s never come back with a deer that anybody’s actually seen. Gambling at Mad Annie’s was just another cover story, like the hunting. Somewhere out in the bush there were secret and dangerous meetings going on.”

“But how did Father-?”

“Joshua would’ve found out from you that Jesse was out in Buffaloville doing carpentry work most of the summer and fall before he died. My hunch is that your father went out to Stebbins’s place to confront him with whatever he thought he knew. Remember that Joshua must’ve had mainly suspicions at this point. If he had had hard evidence, he would have gone immediately to Philander Child with it.”

“Come to think of it,” Beth said, “Father did go out that way-once-sometime in October, to look at some pigs.”

Marc scarcely heard. “As it was, he was probably relying on surprise and conviction. We’ll likely never know exactly what Joshua thought he knew: whether it was suspicion that Jesse was a rum-runner whose death could have been linked to those outlaws, or something more sinister, like secret societies and vendettas against turncoats.”

“Turncoats?”

“Well, if Jesse joined the Hunters even nominally and then got cold feet, they would have considered him to be a turncoat. In that case, either Connors forced him to hang himself, or he and O’Hurley did it for him.”

Beth shuddered. “So you’re sayin’ that if Connors didn’t kill father, then Stebbins did?”

“It could have been any one of the Hunters,” Marc said. “Stebbins no doubt denied all the accusations, and, without proof, being an honourable man, Joshua told no one for the moment. But I’m certain he had not given up. Nevertheless, the wind was up among the conspirators. My guess is that on New Year’s Eve one of their lesser lights delivered a message to Joshua. The bait would have been information related to Jesse’s death. It might well have hinted that somebody knew something to suggest it had not been suicide after all. That would have drawn your father out in a blizzard on any night. It would also have sealed his own silence in the interim. Likely he was instructed to tear up the note and scatter the pieces, or his killer callously came down from the cave and removed it.”

Beth was having difficulty with the pace and fever of Marc’s monologue as well as with what he was saying. For a moment she had an image of this man in the thick of some battle, eyes ablaze, sword raised in righteousness. “But Azel and Jess were good friends,” she said. “We went to rallies together.”

“Not everyone is what he seems,” Marc said, and the sudden deflation of his voice and demeanour caused her to glance at him in alarm.

Marc took a deep breath. “I should have told you this right at the outset,” he said quietly. “You must believe me when I say it was not because I mistrusted you. I trusted you right away, and I’ve had no cause to regret it.”

“What is it?” Beth appeared incapable of bracing herself for more news, good or bad.

“I didn’t want to tell you unless it became a necessary part of the investigation. I think now that it is.” After the briefest of pauses he said, “Joshua Smallman was a commissioned informant for Sir John Colborne. He sent back monthly reports on suspected incendiaries in this district.”

Beth sighed, not with disappointment but relief. “I’ve known all along.”

“You have?”

“Oh, he never told me. But I knew all the same.”

“But you took him to Reform rallies, to party meetings!”

“I told you that first day: he was the most honourable and decent man I ever met.” Something in her glance intimated that she might have added “until now.”

“You see, I knew he would report the truth. And the truth’s always been that the farmers of this township are simply fightin’ for their rights and their livelihood by electin’ members who’ll represent their interests. It’s not been us who’ve twisted the laws for our own ends.”

Marc wisely refrained from mentioning contraband rum and bat-wielding rallymen. “I’ve got the last report he ever wrote in my saddlebag,” Marc said. “When you read it, you’ll see that your faith in him was justified.”

“But why is this important now?”

“If the Hunters, or whoever they really are, suspected your father was an informant or even a personal friend of Sir John’s, they would be even more desperate to silence him, and to do it quickly.”

Beth took that in. Then she said, “But what are you goin’ to do about Stebbins? You’ve got no more proof than Father had.”