“But I take it Mr. Cline was nowhere near the scene of the attack on Father Storey?”
Ben’s eyes were dull, expressionless. “No. He was in the boat with me. Father Storey and Mazzucchelli arrived back at camp first. Then Allie and Mike. Cline and me got lost paddling around in the mist and for a while I couldn’t find the bay. Finally I spotted a flashing light and we rowed toward it. It was Allie, signaling us from the beach. She stayed on the beach to be sure we found our way back, while Michael went on ahead. We had barely pulled the canoe onto shore when we heard Mike screaming for help. We proceeded to the scene”—Harper noted the way Ben had unconsciously begun to tell the story as if he were giving a deposition to a hostile lawyer—“and found Mike sitting in the snow with Father Storey and blood everywhere. Mike said someone had killed him. But when Allie checked his pulse, we determined he was still with us. Michael carried Father Storey into camp, which was where we found a few men holding Mr. Mazzucchelli. Allie observed that Mazzucchelli was wearing Father Storey’s boots and coat. After that the situation turned hostile. Both these men are lucky they weren’t killed.”
“That still doesn’t explain why Mr. Cline is being treated as a threat,” Renée said.
Gilbert said, “When things turned ugly, my partner shouted for help. I gave it.”
“He broke three fingers in Frank Pendergrast’s right hand,” Ben said. “And punched Jamie Close in the throat so hard I thought he crushed her windpipe. Jamie is nineteen, by the way, barely more than a kid.”
“A kid who was holding a broken bottle,” Gilbert said, almost apologetically.
“I’ll need to see them both,” Harper said. “I should’ve seen Mr. Pendergrast before now.”
“He didn’t want to distract you from Father Storey,” Ben said. “Don bandaged him up pretty good with some rags we had laying around.”
“Goddamn it,” she said.
The injuries she couldn’t adequately treat because she didn’t have the supplies kept piling up: subdural hematoma, facial contusion, advanced exposure, John’s sprains and smashed ribs and dislocations, now a badly shattered hand. She had iodine, Band-Aids, and Alka-Seltzer. She had sealed the hole in Father Storey’s skull with cork and candle wax, like a doctor from the seventeenth century. It was the seventeenth century out here in the woods.
Ben went on, “Whatever Cline did and whyever he did it, let’s be clear. We all knew who bashed in Father Storey’s head, Cline as well as us. He chose his side.”
“He chose not to watch his friend be killed by a lynch mob,” Renée said. “That’s understandable.”
Ben looked at Gilbert Cline and said, “What I understand is he ought to pick better friends. His buddy nearly killed a man. Cline knew it. He could’ve stayed out of it. He chose to commit some life-endangering assaults of his own. You want to dispute any part of this story, Cline, you go on and speak right up.”
“No, sir,” Gilbert Cline said, but he was looking at Renée. “That’s how it happened. The Mazz is the only reason I didn’t die in the lockup. And I never would’ve made it through the smoke and down to the canoes if not for him. I could barely move my legs. He just about carried me. I felt obliged not to stand back and watch him get killed.”
“And did you think he bashed in Father Storey’s head?” Ben asked.
Cline looked at Mazzucchelli and back to Ben. His face was a calm, composed blank. “It didn’t cross my mind it mattered one way or another. I owed him.”
Harper had, until now, been concerned with injury and ex posure. She had not paused to think about what it meant if Mark Mazzucchelli had really done it . . . really taken a rock to the back of Father Storey’s head, all for a pair of boots.
The rock.
“Was the weapon on Mr. Mazzucchelli when you discovered him trying to get away?” Harper asked.
“No,” the Mazz said. “’Cause it’s all bullshit. I never had no weapon.”
“We haven’t found what he used to crush Father Storey’s head in,” Ben said, his voice stiff. “Not so far. We may turn it up yet.”
“So what you have is an assault with no witnesses, no weapon, and a man who professes his innocence even after you hung him up in a stress position and struck him with your gun.”
“It wasn’t even a little like—”
Harper held up a hand. “You’re not in court and I’m not a judge. I don’t have any authority to go casting judgments. And neither do you. As far as I’m concerned, you don’t have proof of anything, and until you do, these men ought to be treated as well as anyone in camp.”
Renée continued, “And without any evidence of wrongdoing, I’m curious how long you plan to keep them locked up and on what basis. There needs to be some kind of fair process. They have a right to a defense. They have a right to rights.”
“I’d love to take that dump now,” said the Mazz, but no one listened to him.
“I don’t know if you heard, Renée,” Ben said, “but the Constitution went up in flames, along with the rest of Washington D.C. The people in this camp would like very much not to wind up in cinders as well, Ms. ACLU.”
“I used to donate to them every year, in fact,” Renée said. “Never mind that, though. I’m trying to make a point. We don’t just need to decide whether or not this man tried to kill Tom Storey. We need to decide how we decide, and who does the deciding. And if Mr. Mazzucchelli here is found guilty, we have to make a choice, as a community, about what to do with him . . . about what we can live with. That’s the hard part.”
“I don’t think it’s that hard. I think this community has already made a choice. You would know that if you’d been there when they started throwing rocks. I don’t know what you were doing all night, but you missed all kinds of fun.”
“Maybe I spent my night hiding in the woods,” Renée said, “waiting for a chance to kill Father Storey.”
Ben stared, his mouth open and his brow furrowed, as if she had just posed a particularly irritating riddle. He shook his head.
“You shouldn’t make cracks. You don’t have any idea what Carol and Allie and that crowd would do to you if they thought . . .” His voice trailed off, and then he started again, with a hard smile on his face. “Thing about you, Renée, you’re a good-intentions person. With your tea and your books and your story sessions for the kids, you’re just as harmless as they come. And like most really harmless people, you don’t have the faintest idea what other people are capable of doing.”
“But don’t you see, Ben? That’s precisely my point. We don’t know what other people are capable of doing. None of us does. Who could say for certain Father Storey wasn’t surprised by someone in this camp who wants to do him harm? For all you know, I might have a reason to want him dead, and it might’ve been me waiting in the trees with a rock. It could’ve been anyone, and without certainty we can’t publicly execute a man. We ought not to even lock him up indefinitely.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Renée. That’s where you talk yourself into a corner. See, Mark Mazzucchelli here, he had a motive and he had an opportunity. Which is bad. But what’s worse, I can’t think of one other person in this whole camp would wish harm on the sweet old man who took us all in, who gave us shelter, and who taught us how to protect ourselves from the Dragonscale. It’s that simple. I can’t think of one reason why anyone else would want Father Storey dead.”
Which was when Harper remembered what Tom Storey had told her in the canoe.
I’m going to have to send someone away, he had said. Someone who has done . . . unforgivable things.
“Oh,” Harper said, “I can think of a reason.”
3
From the diary of Harold Cross:
JUNE 19th
THE SHITTERS. THE LOATHSOME IGNORANT SHITTERS.
JUNE 19th, LATER: