The two women exchanged a look and Cassie nodded finally to encourage her. Mary shook her head no, although she was clearly uncertain what the exact nature of the question was.
The officer bent to his notebook. When he looked up from the page he said, “The man who was killed, Mary, who was he?”
She hesitated and turned to Cassie.
“Dead man,” Cassie said softly. “Dead man on the ice, on the lake.”
Mary nodded.
Cassie pointed to the Indian woman. “Your father?”
“No,” she said. “No father.”
Buchan broke in. “Brother, Mary? Husband? Uncle?”
Mary nodded. “Yes,” she said.
Buchan sat forward. “Which one,” he said. “Husband?”
“Yes,” Mary said again.
He nodded and looked down to write the word husband in his notebook.
“Captain.”
He looked up to see Cassie staring at Mary. The Indian woman’s face was tortured and expectant. She was waiting for something more.
“What is it?” he asked.
Cassie felt a cold trickle at the back of her neck. She leaned forward. “Dead man on the ice,” she said. “Your brother, Mary?”
“Yes,” she said.
Buchan slumped back in his chair. He made small disgusted motions across the face of the page with his pen. “I have a feeling this will be of very little use, I’m afraid,” he said.
The two women were watching one another. Cassie could hear the wet labour of Mary’s breathing. Her hands were folded over her bundle of clothing. Cassie said, “Captain, how many Red Indian men came down to meet John Peyton’s party on the lake.”
“Two,” he said. “The man who was killed and the second man who ran off once the struggle ensued —”
“Husband and brother,” Cassie said to Mary, raising her fingers in a V. “Two men. Two men dead.”
Mary saw the growing expressions of consternation on their faces and she opened her mouth without speaking.
“Both shot,” Buchan said, and he mimed holding a rifle to his shoulder. “Bang,” he said. “Bang.” He was sitting on the edge of his seat, incredulous. The notebook had fallen from his lap and lay face down on the floor like a wounded bird.
Mary had begun to cry and lifted her bundle of clothing to hide her face.
After Cassie settled Mary in her room she came back down the stairs and leaned in the doorway to the kitchen. Buchan had retrieved the fallen notebook from the floor and was sitting at the kitchen table, making notes and nodding furiously as he wrote.
“Why would they hide that?” she said. “Why admit killing one man and not another?”
“Obviously they felt the one reported could be justified before the courts. The second, quite clearly, could not.”
“Perhaps she is lying.”
“I have it on good authority our witness is a poor liar. And there is no profit to her in telling such a story.”
Cassie shook her head. “Poor John Peyton.”
He slapped the pen on the table. “I’m not convinced your sympathies are properly placed in this instance, Miss Jure.”
She regarded Buchan with a puzzled expression. He had been clipped and professional in questioning Mary, cold, even obtuse. Not the same man to whom she’d confessed her father was a feckless drunk. “Do you think Mary is pretty?” she asked him.
He looked at Cassie and then quickly around the kitchen, as if the question had come from some invisible source.
“Do you find her attractive? As a woman?”
“Of course not,” he said. “No, I retract that statement. What could it possibly have to do with anything of consequence?”
“I was simply curious.” She shrugged. “What do you hope to see come out of all this, Captain?”
“Two men have been killed. Lies have been presented as fact. I want justice done.”
Cassie looked behind her and up the stairway and then directly at the man across the room.
He said, “It perplexes me, Cassie, why you see fit to protect these men, seeing what they’ve been party to.”
“It has never been my business,” she said quietly, “to see what they have been party to.”
Buchan shook his head. “Don’t tell me you don’t know the truth of what these men have done in their day.”
Cassie bowed her head and whispered something he was unable to make out.
“What? What are you saying?”
“You are such a simpleton about the truth,” she said. “You think there is never anything to fear from it.”
The officer worked his jaw silently a moment.
“Tell me, does your wife deserve to know the truth, Captain Buchan?”
“I love my wife,” he said.
“But that’s only part of the story, isn’t it?”
He stood from his chair. “I must ask you not to report the substance of our conversation with Mary to anyone. It would be best for the investigation if those involved believe their subterfuge remains intact. May I count on you in this regard?”
She shook her head slowly. “I will not promise that, no.”