Peyton took the small book and turned it over in his hands. Then he said, “Buchan was across and spoke to Richmond and Michael Sharpe.”
“Reilly told me as much.” He shook his head. “Richmond isn’t feared of the man. And young Michael will tell the clock to whatever hour you gave him.” John Senior paused for so long then that Peyton asked what the matter was. “Buchan knows about the other one was killed,” he said. “That one up to the house give it away to him.”
Peyton forced out a breath of air. “Well,” he said, “she never saw nothing more that could hurt anyone. As long as we all keep our mouths shut.” He looked down at the journal, then held it up for the old man to see. “Not a word to Cassie. No sense dragging anyone else into all this.”
John Senior looked away from his son. “She was there.”
“Where?”
“With Buchan and that one, when she went on about it all.”
Peyton picked up a thin knife from the cutting table and stabbed lethargically at the wood. “Well Christ,” he said.
He sat alone in the kitchen now, the rest of the house asleep, the journal sitting on the table in front of him. He turned the book sideways and lifted the front cover slowly, then set it down again. The motion like a mouth talking, the jaws of a skull working open and closed. Something close to a deathwish weighted his shoulders, a desire to be free of all that surrounded him regardless of the cost. It was an urge that was no less appealing to him for being obviously irrational and illusory.
The afternoon he and John Senior had uncovered the skeleton of the dead Indian together on the beach on Swan Island, his father opened the tiny medicine bag and laid its contents on the ground, then handed his sixteen-year-old son one of the bird skulls to hold. The bone was dry and as light as the air and it seemed to Peyton to belong to a world beyond the one he knew. His father collected the materials together and retied the bag, then offered it to Peyton. A keepsake, he’d called it. Peyton looked at the stained pouch and then at his father. He refused to take it.
John Senior set the bag on the ground between his feet. There was an amused look of surprise on his face. He reached a huge gnarled hand and closed it around the skull of the Indian man. He lifted it clear of the frame and then gathered up the jawbone as well, holding the two together at the joint. All the teeth but one were still in place. He flapped them back and forth and spoke under this mime in a low-pitched voice. “Just a dead Indian,” the skull said. “Nothing to bother your head about.”
Peyton stared. He could feel the violation in that act, putting words so carelessly and callously in the mouth of the dead.
“Harry Miller used to play around with them like that,” John Senior said. He seemed embarrassed, apologetic. He flapped the jaws several times more and then turned the skull to stare into the empty eye sockets, the full, baleful grin of those teeth. “Poor bugger,” he said then and Peyton couldn’t tell if he was talking of Miller or the Indian whose remains he held in his hand as he spoke. He replaced the skull and offered his son the leather pouch again.
Peyton turned the journal in circles on the table. He’d told Reilly he wanted some notion of how much Buchan knew, to be able to anticipate, to plot a defence. But he was afraid to open it now, after asking the Irishman to risk his life stealing it away from the officer. He would find himself in there, and his father and Mary, and all the men who made up the party to the lake, but not, he was sure, in the fashion they had conspired to present themselves. The start of their undoing, that little book, now or some time beyond their time. There were things he’d seen and heard in his days he vowed to take to his grave, as if that was a safe place for the truth. But two hundred years from now, he knew, some stranger could raise his bones from the earth and put whatever words they liked in his mouth. It was a broken, helpless feeling.