The Ballad of Frankie Silver

Chapter Two

I GUESS HE’S ALL RIGHT.” Martha Ayers was on duty break, eating a quick supper at the diner with Deputy Joe LeDonne, who was scheduled to work until eleven. “He’s not as bony-looking as he was, and his color’s good. He’s going to start raring to come back to work any day now.”

“Let him,” said LeDonne. “It would probably help him take his mind off himself. Besides, we could use the help.”

“His mind isn’t on himself, Joe. Spencer is brooding about this upcoming execution. They’ve asked him to be one of the witnesses—sheriff of the prisoner’s home county—and he says he has to go, but you can tell that he’s just making himself sick about it.” She looked with disfavor at the lump of mashed potatoes and the congealing brown gravy that seeped down toward the green beans and meat loaf. She pushed the plate away with a sigh. I feel as tired as Joe looks,she thought.

“Fate Harkryder,” LeDonne was saying. “I read about the scheduled execution in the Chronicle. Paper said he was local. I didn’t realize that Spencer knew him, though. He’s been on the row a long time.”

“Spencer was Nelse Miller’s deputy, remember? He’s the one who arrested this guy. I think he had all but forgotten about him—and now this. It couldn’t come at a worse time. Spencer’s just out of the hospital, trying to recover from a wound that almost killed him, and now the state comes up with this business. He’ll worry himself sick over it. You know how he is.” She reached for her coffee cup, saw that it was empty, and set it down again. Without a word, LeDonne handed her his. Martha smiled her thanks. “It’s just bad luck, is all,” she said, sighing. “Out of all the men Tennessee has got on death row, they have to pick this guy to go first.”

“It didn’t surprise me much that it’d be him, though,” said LeDonne.

“Why not? There are about a hundred men on death row. It could have been any of them.”

“ Anyof them?” There was no amusement in Joe LeDonne’s smile. “Hardly that. This will be Tennessee’s first execution in more than thirty years. They’re going to choose that first prisoner very carefully—very politically. It’s not going to be a woman, even if there’s one eligible to be executed. Ladies firstdoes not apply to the electric chair. It can’t be any of the new guys, because the public will say it’s unfair to execute one of them ahead of fellows who have been there for decades. And it’s not going to be a black man, because the death penalty is a sticky enough issue as it is, without leaving yourself open for a charge of racism. You don’t want to enrage any special-interest groups if you can help it. So you check the list of condemned prisoners and you find a poor white mountain boy with no money and no political influence, and there’s your pigeon. Nobody’s going to kick up a fuss when he’s put to death. Nobody cares what happens to poor Southern whites. Nobody gets fired or takes a beating in the press for using words like redneckand hillbilly. When you think about it, Fate Harkryder was the perfect choice for the electric chair. A nobody without a cause.”

“You won’t make me feel sorry for him,” said Martha. “No matter why they picked him to go first, he killed somebody, and the jury said to execute him. Some people might say that Fate Harkryder got twenty more years of life than he was entitled to.”

LeDonne nodded. “You’ll get no argument from me. I was just pointing out the logic of it to you.”

“All right then.” The silence stretched on longer than Martha could stand it, so she said, “Spencer asked me to bring him some books on Frankie Silver.”

“Who?”

Martha shrugged. “It’s an old murder case. North Carolina. It must be unsolved. Anyhow, he’s looking into it.”

“Oh. He must be bored if he’s looking for crimes to investigate.” He paused for a moment before he said, “Did you tell him about the current investigation?”

“No,” said Martha. “He’s fine where he is. And I’ve been keeping the newspaper away from him, too. Let him keep his nose in the history books for at least another week. I don’t want him to come back before he’s well enough to handle it.”

“But the similarities between the two incidents . . .”

Martha shrugged. “Coincidence. Anyhow, he’s too ill to concern himself with criminal investigation. We can handle it. I’ll get him his books on Frankie Silver. They will keep him busy, and if it keeps his mind off the execution and out of the office, so much the better.”

Fate Harkryder. Spencer didn’t want to think about him right now. He didn’t want to relive those hours at the floodlit campsite, and he didn’t want to think about the inevitable conclusion to that chain of events set in motion so long ago.

He stood at the sliding glass doors of his cabin, looking out on the folds of hills stretching away to North Carolina. The sight of the mountains in the morning sunshine always brought to mind the 121st Psalm: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.Usually he found that gazing out at the mountains soothed him and made the concerns of the day fade away into the haze of geologic time. It was a spiritual experience that he could not explain, except to say that the vista gave him perspective and made his problems seem insignificant when measured against the eternity of the land itself.

He found himself thinking instead about Frankie Silver.

It had been twenty years, but Spencer still remembered standing beside Nelse Miller at the grave in the mountain churchyard on that bright summer day and feeling a chill as the old man talked about the death of Charlie Silver. On the drive back to Hamelin, Nelse had rambled on for nearly an hour about the nineteenth-century murder case and the events that followed, making a tale of it as mountain storytellers instinctively do. Spencer had forgotten most of the details of the story—the names of the witnesses and the attorneys had passed from his mind almost as soon as Nelse uttered them. He had spoken fluently, from long familiarity with the case, with never a moment’s hesitation in his recital. What Spencer chiefly remembered was the passion of the sheriff’s interest in that one incident and the power of the spell woven by the tale on the long drive back over the mountain. Nelse Miller seldom talked about his own experiences in law enforcement, and he showed only a perfunctory interest in high-profile crimes reported in the national news. It was only this one obscure, seemingly insignificant case that held him in thrall.

Back then, Spencer Arrowood had thought the story of Frankie Silver was only a captivating folktale, entertaining enough to pass the time on the way home, but nothing that he ever needed to think about again. The story held no lessons about criminal investigation that he could see, since forensic detection was all but nonexistent in those days, and despite Nelse Miller’s obsession with the case, he saw no chance of resolving its mysteries after so many years had passed. Spencer had forgotten about Frankie Silver. Sheriff Nelse Miller, by then retired and crippled with arthritis, died in 1984, his book about Frankie Silver unwritten, his questions unanswered.

He could have forgotten all about that little-known murder case if it weren’t for one thing that Nelse Miller had said. “There’s only two cases of mountain justice that I’m not happy with. One is that fellow you put on death row, and the other is Frankie Silver.”

And now she haunted him. It was nothing he wanted to talk about with anybody—except Nelse Miller, who was long dead. He would have understood the fascination of the story.

Three graves in a mountain churchyard.

Spencer wondered if his sudden interest in the case was merely a product of the boredom of an active man forced to sit still for the first time in his adult life, or if it was a displacement of his own anxiety about the approaching death of Fate Harkryder. His great-aunt Til would have said, “You are called to solve the mystery,” and he smiled at the memory of an old mountain woman and her simple faith. He would look into the case, he told himself, and of all the whys he had to consider in the matter of Frankie Silver, the one he resolved not to look into was the why of his own interest in her story.

Dr. Alton Banner was checking up on his patient in an after-hours visit to the sheriff’s mountain cabin. “I don’t generally make house calls these days,” he remarked as he examined the stitches on the wound. “It frightens the younger members of my profession. I made an exception in your case, however, because any man who is fool enough to get himself shot for trespassing is probably fool enough to try to drive himself into town for his doctor’s appointment.”

Spencer did not reply. Useless to argue that in “trespassing” he had been in the line of duty, enforcing a court order, or to protest that he felt well enough to end his convalescence. The old man had his own opinions on everything, and he was unlikely to be deterred by the facts as his patient saw them.

“I don’t know why you live up here anyhow,” Banner went on, as he continued to poke and prod his patient. “The road up this mountain is a sheet of glass in the wintertime. I wouldn’t even try it in a four-wheel drive. It’s damned near vertical, that’s what it is. You’re like all the rest of these mountaineers. Moonstruck over these hills, and willing to sacrifice damn near anything to stay in them. It’s incurable, though. Forty years in an east Tennessee medical practice has taught me that right enough. Incurable.”

“Well, aside from that, how am I?” asked the sheriff.

Alton Banner peered at Spencer over the top of his glasses. “That depends,” he said. “If you were planning to take a couple of weeks off and go to Wrightsville Beach, then I’d say you were making satisfactory progress, considering your age and your indifferent attitude toward your own health, but if you’re angling to get back in that patrol car, I would be forced to downgrade your condition to critical. Now, which is it?”

“Neither one at the moment. It’s just that they want me in Nashville six weeks from now.”

“Six weeks! Well, then. If you continue to progress as you have been, I see no problem with that. You won’t be prancing around like Garth Brooks, mind you, but I’d say that if you just want to drive over to the state capital for a meeting with the bureaucrats sometime next month, I could in good conscience allow that.”

“I see.”

The toneless reply made Banner look up. “What’s the matter?” he said, peering at his patient. “Did I give you the wrong answer? If you want to skip a budget hearing, just say the word.”

“It’s more than that.” Spencer handed him the letter from the Department of Corrections.

Alton Banner scanned the letter. “Summoned . . . execution . . . six weeks—my God! Fate Harkryder! Hearing that name is like a goose walking over my grave. I haven’t thought about him in years.”

The sheriff nodded. “You remember, though, don’t you? You were there.”

“I was. I never will forget it.”

They sat in silence for a few moments, thinking back on a night that they both would have preferred to forget.

“That was the night of Emily Stanton’s murder. Gone before I got there, poor thing. You had to break the news to her parents, but I saw them at the trial. I remember her father asking me, Did she suffer? —and God help me, I took a deep breath and I lied to that man, because I couldn’t stand to utter the truth any more than he could stand to hear it.”

Spencer nodded. “They drove over from Wilmington the next day. So did the Wilson boy’s mother, but I can’t remember her very well. Just the Stantons.”

The flash of headlights on the front window and the crunch of gravel indicated that another visitor had arrived at the sheriff’s ridgetop home.

Dr. Banner pushed aside the curtain and peered out. “You’ve got visitors. Looks like Martha’s car,” he grunted. “Shall I make myself scarce?”

“No,” said Spencer. “She’s probably just bringing up some more mail from the office.”

“She’s got some woman with her,” the doctor announced.

“My mother?”

“No. About her age, though.” Spencer struggled to his feet, but Alton Banner motioned for him to sit back down. “You’re an invalid. You stay put. I’ll answer the door. Do-gooders! I reckon it’s too late to put the lights out and pretend we’re not here.”

Spencer laughed. “Who’s being a mountaineer now?”

A moment later Alton Banner put on a welcoming smile and flung open the door. Martha Ayers ushered in a timid-looking older woman whose tinted blond hair did nothing to disguise her age.

“I brought you a visitor,” said Martha. “This is Mrs. Helen Honeycutt.”

Spencer’s greeting was almost cordial enough to hide his bewilderment. He had never seen the woman before in his life.

“I could make you some coffee,” Dr. Banner said, ushering them to chairs after the introductions had been made. “Since I’m a doctor, though, it is traditional for someone else to go and boil the water.”

“None for me, thanks.” Martha smiled at the sheriff. “I’m here to report on my assignments.”

“Your assignments—?”

Martha smiled and handed him a coffee-stained manila folder. “Here’s the case file you asked me about. Took me forever to find it.”

Spencer resisted the urge to sit down and open it immediately. He waited for Martha to explain the rest.

“Frankie Silver,” she prompted him. “You asked me, remember? The library said that there aren’t any books about her. Apparently nobody has ever written one. I’ve got the Book Place in Johnson City double-checking, and the librarian said she’d see if she could find some articles in local history books, but while we were talking about the case, Mrs. Honeycutt here came up to the desk and said that she’d heard that story as a child from her relatives over in North Carolina.”

“I didn’t mean to eavesdrop,” the older woman assured the sheriff, as if she expected him to scold her for it. “But I heard the name Frankie Silvers, and of course, being from a Mitchell County family, I know all about her, so I thought I’d offer to help.”

“That’s very kind of you,” said Spencer, with the carefully cultivated courtesy of an elected official. He didn’t like to deal in hearsay, though. He yearned for a concise listing of facts bound, printed, and documented. I will go to the library myself,he thought, but he wasn’t well enough to go yet, and he couldn’t discourage Martha or hurt this woman’s feelings. At least this was a start. Aloud he said, “I’d be grateful for anything you could tell me.”

“It’s a true story that happened in Mitchell County, North Carolina. At the Dayton Bend in the Toe River is a place called Kona. It wasn’t called that when Frankie Silvers lived there in the 1830s, but that’s its name now. It wasn’t in Mitchell County back then, either. In those days Burke County hadn’t been subdivided, and its territory stretched all the way to Tennessee. That’s not part of the story, Sheriff. I just know that on my own, from looking up census records. I’m tracing my family back to the American Revolution. The Overmountain Men.”

Spencer nodded. “That must take a lot of research,” he said politely, and waited. He hoped he wasn’t going to hear a discourse on Mrs. Honeycutt’s glorious ancestors.

She blushed. “Well, I’ll just tell it straight out then,” she said. “My grandmother made a tale out of it, and I’ll tell it like she did, best I can remember. We’re not used to tale-telling any more, what with the TV and all, but I will try.”

Dr. Banner sat down on the sofa beside his patient and smiled encouragingly. “I’ve heard something of this story. I’d like to listen, too, if I may.”

Spencer reached for the notepad beside the telephone. “Do you mind if I ask you questions as you go along?”

Mrs. Honeycutt looked startled. “My goodness! You’d better wait ’til I’ve finished, or I might forget where I was. Being questioned by a sheriff is bound to make me nervous. And when you do ask me questions, I don’t know if I’ll know the answers, but I’ll try to help you as best I can.”

Spencer smiled reassuringly at his guest. “Go ahead, then,” he said. “I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

Helen Honeycutt perched nervously on the edge of the sofa, toying with the leather strap of her handbag. “I’m not a storyteller or anything like that,” she warned her audience. “I’m just going to say it as I was told it.”

“I’d be most grateful if you would,” said Spencer. On the lined message pad he wrote: “Frankie Silver, testimony of Helen Honeycutt, resident of Mitchell County.” He had already begun a file on the case as if it were one of his current investigations.

“Well, the way I heard it . . . at the Dayton Bend of the Toe River—which in Tennessee we call the Nolichucky—well, you know that. . . . Anyhow, in a little log cabin at Kona in the 1830s, there lived a young couple named Charlie and Frankie Silvers. Now, Charlie was a handsome boy, fond of dancing, and fonder still of the ladies, but he and Frankie had married young, and by now he was nineteen years old, and already they had a little baby, who had just passed her first birthday.”

Spencer scribbled notes on his legal pad. All of that information sounded either verifiable or not relevant. Nothing he wanted to quibble about. He nodded for her to continue.

“They say Frankie was a pretty little blonde, but she was the jealous type, and they say that Charlie had a sweetheart. He didn’t care to be stuck at home with a nagging wife and a crying baby. Maybe he was planning to leave them both for good. Anyhow, one winter day, Frankie and Charlie had words about the other woman, and then when they’d wore themselves out with arguing, Charlie lay down on a pallet beside the fire to go to sleep. And he held the little baby Nancy in his arms.”

Spencer Arrowood opened his mouth to speak, remembered that he had promised not to interrupt, and

closed it again.

“Frankie saw him sleeping there by the fireplace, and she picked up an ax. Some say her daddy was there a-visiting in the cabin with them, and that he told her to do it. He might even have threatened to kill her if she didn’t murder Charlie. Family honor, I suppose. Like it says in the song, He was her man, and he was doing her wrong.”

With an almost imperceptible shake of his head, the sheriff stopped Alton Banner from interrupting.

“Anyhow, Frankie Silvers snuck up on Charlie, brandishing that ax, but he was holding the baby, and he rolled over and smiled the sweetest smile in his sleep. And she looked down at her handsome young husband, sleeping there so peaceful-like with their little daughter snuggled against him, and she just couldn’t do it. She backed away. Three times Frankie crept up close to him, and three times he smiled like an angel and caused her to put down the ax and back away again, but the fourth time, he was sleeping sound, and the baby crawled out of her father’s arms, and Frankie brought the ax down—whop!—and she near ’bout cut his head off. Charlie opened his eyes, and he said, ‘God bless the child!’ And then he was gone.”

The first page of Spencer’s notepad was full. He flipped to a new page and scribbled on.

Martha Ayers looked at the expression on his face and wished she’d waited for a book.

Helen Honeycutt smiled at the sheriff’s diligence, pleased at being given such rapt attention. She picked up the tale again with more enthusiasm in her voice. “So Charlie Silvers was dead, laying there by the fireplace in their little cabin. Then Frankie had to figure out what to do with that body. So she cut him up like a deer, and she put his body into the fire, but she didn’t have enough firewood to finish the job, so she took the pieces that were left over and she hid them out in the woods. Her daddy took the ax and threw it in the river on his way home, so they never did find it.

“Well, the next morning Frankie went over to her in-laws’ house, and she told them she was worried about Charlie. She said he had gone hunting, and he hadn’t come home last night. Every day for three days she went to Charlie’s parents’ house and said, ‘No, he’s not back yet.’ And his folks were getting frantic with worry, because it was winter and all. They rounded up most of the neighbors and started hunting the woods, looking for tracks or some sign of Charlie. They didn’t find him.

“Then one of Charlie’s old hunting buddies got suspicious, and he went into the cabin after Frankie left, and he found ax marks on the log walls, and blood all over the floor. Then they started hunting the woods up close around the cabin, and they found Charlie’s body parts scattered around, some in tree stumps and over by the creek. So they arrested Frankie and took her on horseback down to the jail in Morganton.” She paused for breath, smiling expectantly at her audience.

Spencer reminded himself that he wasn’t interrogating a suspect. He managed a polite smile. “Can I ask questions now?”

“Yes, if you’d like.”

Spencer glanced down at the scrawled notes. “I appreciate your coming and telling me this story,” he said gently. “And I know that folktales are supposed to be heard and not dissected, but this is a true story, which is why I’m interested in it. You see, I have the mind of a policeman, even when I’m not on duty, and so I’m going to ask you some questions about what you told me, just as if I were the investigating officer.”

Mrs. Honeycutt looked wary. “Well, I can’t promise I’ll know the answers, but you can try.”

“All right. First of all, where did your grandmother hear this story? Was she kin to any of the principals in the case?” “Well, everybody’s kin to everybody in Mitchell County if you go back far enough, but I don’t think we

were more than distant cousins by marriage to anybody. I don’t know where Nana got the story, though. A lot of people tell it.” Spencer made a note. “Were there any witnesses to the crime?” “Some say that Frankie’s father was there. I told that part, didn’t I?” “Yes, but how do they know?”

Helen Honeycutt looked puzzled. “It’s what people say,” she told him, as if that settled it. “Yes, ma’am, but how do we knowthat Frankie Silver’s father was present at the time of the murder? You said there were no witnesses. Was he charged as an accessory?”

“No. I believe the mother was, though.” “The motherwas charged?” “I think so.” “Not the father?” “No.” With a weary sigh, Spencer sat back and began scribbling in the margins of his notes. “Why?” “Why wasn’t he charged? I don’t know, Sheriff, but it didn’t matter anyway. Nobody was tried for the

murder except Frankie Silvers herself.” Alton Banner cleared his throat. “About that name, ma’am. I’m acquainted with some of the Silvers from over there in Mitchell. I don’t believe they have a final son their name. I believe it’s Silver. Singular.”

“I always heard it Silvers.” Mrs. Honeycutt’s face had taken on a sullen expression, and no doubt she was regretting her impulse to do good deeds for invalids. “That can be checked fairly easily,” said Spencer, unwilling to quibble about minor points. “Let’s go

back to the story of the murder itself. Did Frankie Silver leave a written confession?” “Not that I ever heard of. The books don’t mention one.” “I’d be astonished to hear that she could write,” muttered Dr. Banner. “Consider the time and place.” Spencer nodded. “I was just wondering how we knew the circumstances of Charlie’s death so exactly.

Where he was lying when the attack came. How many times she attempted to kill him. Especially his last

words. God bless the child.It sounds like something out of a play.” Alton Banner chuckled. “ Porgy and Bess,to be exact.” Mrs. Honeycutt’s eyes narrowed. “That’s the way I heard the story, Sheriff.” “Speaking of songs, ma’am,” the doctor continued. “I noticed you quoted from another one in your

recounting of the story. You said, ‘He was her man, and he was doing her wrong,’ which is from ‘Frankie and Johnny.’ ”

“Oh, yes. That’s where that old song came from. It was inspired by this murder case.” Spencer shot a quick glance at Alton Banner. Later,his look said. “This is extremely helpful,” he said to Mrs. Honeycutt. “Now, tell me, was the murder weapon ever found?”

She thought for a moment. “I don’t think so.” “Then how do they know it was thrown in the river?” Spencer consulted his notes. “You said, maybe

the father—who was not definitely there— threw it into the river on his way home.Witnesses?” “No. It’s what people said.” She glanced at her watch and then at Martha. “Okay,” said Spencer. “Then she was arrested. . . .” “I really have to be going,” said Mrs. Honeycutt with a plaster smile. “Good luck with your research,

Sheriff.” Martha stood up, too, gave him a look, and said, “I’ll check on you tomorrow.” Spencer saw the visitors to the door with fulsome thanks and offers of coffee, but his peace overtures

were coldly received. When he saw the taillights on Martha’s car disappear around the curve of the

driveway, he sank back on the couch with a weary sigh. “I don’t blame you,” said Alton Banner. “That much pleasant hypocrisy would wear out even a well man.”

“No, it was kind of her to come and tell me the story,” said Spencer. “I really did appreciate it. She probably told it just the way she heard it. It wasn’t her fault that—that—” “It was piffle.”

“I think so. Most of it.” The doctor squinted at him. “What do you want to know about this for, anyhow? Long time ago, not your jurisdiction. You writing a book?”

“No. I’m not planning to. I guess it’s just something to keep my mind occupied while I’m home.” Spencer tried to make his interest seem desultory. “It’s an old story, and I always wondered about it. Heard it from Nelse Miller.”

“I hope he had more sense than to tell you that this story inspired the song ‘Frankie and Johnny.’ ”

“He didn’t say that. No.”

“You don’t believe it, either, do you?”

Spencer shook his head. “Stranger things have happened, I guess, but it doesn’t seem likely. ‘Frankie and Johnny’ is an urban song. The woman goes to a bar, finds out that her lover is unfaithful to her, and kills him with a pistol, which she fires through the door of an apartment or a hotel room. Except for the name ‘Frankie,’ I see no similarities between the two incidents.”

“It’s like confusing Barbara Bush with Barbara Mandrell,” Banner grunted. “A mere coincidence of names. I hear nothing of our mountains in either the tune or the story of ‘Frankie and Johnny.’ ”

“No. I wonder if there is a song about Frankie Silver.”

“Bound to be, if anybody remembers it. So, tell me, as a lawman, how do you see the rest of it?” The doctor smiled. “In your professional opinion?”

“I don’t have enough information yet. Just offhand, though, I’d say that all that business about her sneaking up on him three times and backing away again is the embellishment of a storyteller.”

Alton Banner hummed a snatch of an old tune. “Three times he kissed her lily-white hands . . . three times he kissed her cheek.”

“Yes, exactly,” said Spencer. “It sounds like a ballad-in-the-making. And I don’t think her father was there, either.”

“Why not?”

The sheriff shrugged. “Just a hunch—and a lot of experience with rural justice. If there was a man around, they sure as hell would have put him on trial for the crime. Charging a little eighteen-year-old girl with an ax murder had to be a last resort for the sheriff of Burke County.”

“Well, I’ll leave you to it, son,” said the old doctor. “I’ll check back on you toward the end of the week. See how you and Frankie are getting along.”

The sheriff smiled. “You do that. One more thing, though. Can I drive yet?”

“To Nashville in six weeks? You still thinking about that?”

“No. I meant around the county here—soon.”

Alton Banner shook his head. “Ask me next time.”

* * *

In the sheriff’s office Jeff McCullough, editor of the county’s weekly newspaper, the Hamelin Record, sat in the straight chair beside Joe LeDonne’s desk, scanning the prepared statement that he had been given.

“So I can use everything in here without compromising the investigation?”

“Of course,” said the deputy. “We don’t have the forensic evidence back from the lab anyhow. I hope we have an arrest by then.”

“You were the investigating officer?”

“I took the call when the bodies were found. Martha came out shortly thereafter to help with the crime scene.”

McCullough tilted his glasses to the end of his nose and looked again at the press release. “It’s eerie, isn’t it?” he said. “I just finished doing a story about Fate Harkryder’s upcoming execution, so I had to go back and read the old stories on the Trail Murders. I could just about run them again for this new case with no rewrite.”

“There are some similarities,” LeDonne conceded.

“Well, we know it isn’t Fate Harkryder this time,” said McCullough. “Do you have any suspects?”

“Nothing to speak of.”

Jeff McCullough smiled. “You wouldn’t speak of it, anyhow, would you? But that’s okay. I don’t want to hinder the investigation. I think my angle for this week is the irony of these murders happening so close to Fate Harkryder’s execution date, and bearing such a resemblance to his own crime. What does the sheriff think about it?”

“He’s still recovering from his wounds. He’s not part of this investigation.”

“But I just read those old Harkryder articles. Spencer Arrowood was the arresting officer in that case. What does he think about this one?”

“We haven’t told him about this one. He’s still weak from surgery, and he’s not up to any more strain right now. Martha thinks he’s better off not being told.”

“So I can’t interview him about the new case, and whether he thinks they’re related?”

“No. He knows nothing about it. Martha and I will keep you posted on what’s happening in this case. And the old one is closed—or it will be in a few weeks, when Fate Harkryder goes to the chair.”

Jeff McCullough frowned. “When is the sheriff due back on the job?”

“Couple of weeks. We’ll have an arrest by then.”

Fate Harkryder was thirty-seven years old and looked fifty. His hair was shot with iron gray. A lifetime of smoking and hard times had etched deep creases between his nose and chin, and had stitched a chain of fine lines around the hollows of his eyes. He had not run to fat, though, as so many of the prisoners did, partly because Harkryder men were built short and wiry, and partly because Fate Harkryder stopped eating when he felt his body thicken. Fat was weakness, and in prison it did not do to give the appearance of weakness. Fate Harkryder liked to be left alone. He was soft-spoken and courteous to those he encountered, but people who mistook his remoteness for weakness did so only once. He had learned long ago that if you are polite and distant, people will leave you alone. He could fight if he had to, but he avoided it if he could do so without backing down. Shouting and striking people is a form of

intimacy, and for that reason alone Fate Harkryder avoided confrontations.

His lawyer had just left. This one was an earnest kid out of Nashville who was working pro bono because he claimed to hate the death penalty. He had offered his services when the state announced its intention of executing Fate Harkryder in six weeks’ time. Maybe he was a do-gooder, or maybe he wanted to get his name in the paper by representing an infamous man. It was all the same, though. Fate didn’t think there was much the kid could do, but for zero legal fees, he was welcome to try. What the hell.

Fate had lost count of the lawyers he’d gone through in twenty years. Some of them had only been voices on the phone, staying on the case just long enough to find some other sucker to take it off their hands. None of them stayed long. Fate wasn’t notorious enough to make a name for an ambitious litigator, and his family was too poor to make it worth anybody’s while to defend him. That had been the trouble to begin with. The court-appointed lawyer at his original trial went through the motions of defending him, but his efforts had been all but useless.

He sat on a concrete bench outside Pod Five and looked up at the hill beyond the river. The sun was warm against his skin, and he yawned and stretched, savoring the smell and feel of early summer. If he kept his eyes closed, he could picture the homestead back in east Tennessee. He wondered if it had changed much in the decades that he’d been gone. Probably not. The land had been farmed out two generations before he was born. Who’d want it now? He hadn’t even seen any pictures of the home place since he left, and what little news he had from the relatives at home never touched on the farm or the changing seasons, which they all took for granted, while he, deprived of it forever, would have traded them all for a hill and a meadow.

His father’s sister was the family correspondent. Her spelling was as haphazard as her narrative skills, but at least she made the effort two or three times a year, which is more than the rest of them did. Scrawled pencil notes on lined paper informed him of the birth of a child to cousins he dimly remembered as infants themselves, or the smudged pages wished him a merry Christmas, with a spidery postscript enumerating the Harkryders’ car troubles, job losses, and the illnesses of aging relatives. As if he cared. They were all like characters in a movie he had seen once and only vaguely recalled, without any real certainty about the names or their function in the story. In his memory, time in east Tennessee stood still. Hamelin was a sleepy little seventies community still peopled by folks who were old when he was seventeen and his brothers were still young men in their twenties, with unlined faces and thick dark hair. He knew that they had grown older, as he had in the years since he had seen them. They were as old now as his father had been back then, but somehow his mind would not adjust his memories to accommodate the aging process. He could not picture Tom’s cold steel eyes looking out of their daddy’s furrowed face, or Ewell with Mama’s aging dumpling chins and graying hair. His brothers still grinned out at him from Technicolor daydreams as swaggering youths on the brink of manhood.

Tom and Ewell.

Tom was the oldest, a dark-haired banty rooster with a look of sleepy indifference that masked his intensity. That vacant stare had stood him well in poker games and bar fights. His opponents thought that he would be easy pickings, and by the time they cottoned on to their mistake, it was usually too late.

Ewell . . . Mama’s side of the family. Bigger, soft-bodied, with heavy-lidded eyes and fleshy lips, and always that look of wantingsomething. He had looked at girls in church, cars on the highway, and deep-fried drumsticks on other people’s plates with that same naked hungry stare.

Tom and Ewell. How long had it been since he’d heard from them? There had been a few letters at first.

Just after Fate had been sent away to prison, Ewell sent him a couple of postcards that said things like Cheer up, kid! The lawyers won’t give up. They’re bound to get you out.Eventually. Ewell didn’t seem to mind about “eventually,” since it was not his life trickling away behind cinder-block walls. Fate wondered, sometimes, who Ewell had turned out to be, but he didn’t much care about it one way or the other. Not enough to try to find out. Ewell had drifted away from home, and the family had lost touch with him—not that any particular effort was made by the Harkryders or Ewell to maintain the ties. Maybe he had done well and wanted no reminders of his hillbilly relatives. Maybe he finally had enough money to buy all the things he lusted after in the catalogues and the mall displays. Or maybe he was already dead. It was all the same to Fate. Ewell wasn’t real anymore.

After the trial Tom did a stint in the army, and ended up with an infantry company in Korea. I reckon we must be in about the same boat,Tom had written him. Both of us government prisoners, only they want me to kill people. It rains here all the time. Rains ’til your feet rot in your socks. You probably eat better than I do. . . .Fate couldn’t remember if he’d bothered to answer.

At first he had thought a lot about his brothers. During the first months of his imprisonment, rage had been his warmth, his comforter, and his friend. He would look at the wall, trying to shut out the ceaseless noise of the cell block, and he would imagine his brothers eating hamburgers at the Dixie Grill, or walking the October woods with rifles in search of deer, or burying their faces in the breasts of sweet-smelling doe-eyed girls. In his imaginings they were always laughing, always free. Fate wanted to destroy them. He would escape from prison, he thought, and he would put a gun barrel into Tom’s grinning mouth, and he would make the laughter stop. Or he would recant. Break the silence. Tell what happened that night, but tell it a different way, so that they, not he, would be shut away here until they faded away into nothingness. Except that no one would believe him this time. Nobody cared about the truth anymore—if, in fact, they had ever cared at all. The trial was finished, the sentence was passed, and now it was all over but the waiting.

His brothers were beyond his reach now. Gradually he had come to accept that. Eventually the rage flickered out, to be replaced for a while by sweeter memories of home and family. Fate lived for a while on scenes from his boyhood. There hadn’t been many happy memories of home, but the few that could be lit with the softer light of reflection he replayed over and over again in his mind until they became a tapestry of warmth and laughter, and the other, darker truths lay discarded and forgotten in the bottom of his mind. He subsisted for months on snapshot recollections: he was six, wobbling down the blacktop on a homemade bike, built by Tom from scraps and scrounged (perhaps stolen) parts. . . . He was eight, in overalls and barefoot on a cold, wet rock, fishing in the creek with Tom and Ewell, the spring woods ablaze with redbud. . . . Ten, chugging his first beer in the cool darkness of the smokehouse, Ewell laughing while he choked and sputtered on the bitterness. Tom stood by with his sleepy-eyed smile, looking as if he were somewhere else.

After a year or so, those memories wore out. They became so tattered with replaying that the magic leeched out of them, and they no longer had the power to take him away from The Walls. Sometimes other, harsher memories crept in to taunt him with glimpses of Tom and Ewell that he would rather not recall. Little by little he let go of the other life, as the voices faded and the faces dimmed.

Only here was real.

He knew every arch of the land and every tree by now. The hill was forested with elms and pine—not the oak, and ash, and hickory trees of home. In the springtime the elm pollen turned the prison into a wheezing nest of watery-eyed allergy sufferers, but Fate didn’t mind. He had no adverse reaction to the elms, only a mild resentment that they were not the familiar trees of home. He had been staring at that puny middle Tennessee ridge for years now, ever since he was moved from The Walls to Tennessee’s

new maximum-security prison, Riverbend. At first he had welcomed the change of scenery, and he had stared at the hill on the curve of the river like a starving man, trying to will the ridge to transform itself into one of the mist-shrouded mountains back home.

Prison is a village, and now it was his hometown. He had lived here for twenty years, and soon now he would die here.

Burgess Gaither

HABEAS CORPUS Frankie Silver and her mother and brother were under lock and key in the wooden house that served as Morganton’s jail, and all the town was talking about the dreadful crimes that had happened in the wild land beyond the mountains. The old folks harked back to the time of the Indian raids forty years ago, and those of a religious turn of mind quoted Scripture verses about demons in mortal form. It would be two months before that fair-haired girl and her kinfolk would answer for the crime, and I wondered where an impartial jury could be found in all of Burke County, and who among my colleagues would be fool enough to defend them. Surely he would never draw up a deed or will for an upstanding client again after linking his name with the infamous one of Frankie Silver. I was well out of it, I thought, for having taken the clerkship instead of establishing a private law practice.

The morning after Constable Charlie Baker brought his prisoners down the mountain to Morganton, he headed home again, back past Celo Mountain and into the valley of the Toe River, named for the legendary Cherokee maiden Estatoe, a star-crossed Juliet of the Indian nation. It was a good day’s ride up the Yellow Mountain Road even in high summer. Now, with a foot of snow on the trail, and winds like knife blades whipping through the passes, it was bound to be a bitter journey, but at least the constable could travel faster and easier in his mind without three dangerous prisoners in tow.

Before he left Morganton, though, Charlie Baker must have spent some time in Mr. McEntire’s tavern—fortifying himself for the long ride back over the mountains. No doubt an innkeeper’s bill for lodging, food, and drink (mostly the latter) would be submitted to the county treasurer with the constable’s record of expenses for bringing in the prisoners. Charlie must have told his tale many times before the innkeeper’s fire, and I’ll wager that he bought very few of his own whiskeys. By the time Baker and his companion had set their horses westward on the Yellow Mountain Road, the town was humming with the news of the gruesome murder in the west county.

With all the conviction of eyewitnesses, the tavern gossips recounted the grim tale of the finding of poor young Charlie Silver: bits of his bones and skin in the fireplace ashes, and sundry limbs and body parts scattered about the woods near the cabin. They never did find all of him. The snow was still deep, and general opinion was that bits of the corpse would continue to turn up well into the April thaw, when the last of the spring snowmelt revealed the most deeply covered pieces.

“They buried what they found,” one traveler remarked. “But there’ll be more come spring.”

“Reckon they’ll have to start over,” said another.

Even greater than the unseemly interest in the gory details of the tragedy was Morganton’s fascination with the widow—and accused slayer—of the murdered man. The jailer’s wife had done her share of gossiping as well, letting all and sundry know that a handsome young woman was locked away in the upstairs jail cell. News of Frankie Silver overshadowed talk of the other unfortunates, her kinfolk, for a mature woman and a youth were less interesting subjects for speculation.

Even my Elizabeth pressed me for details about the case, but I was able to tell her only what I had heard from the constable, and even that I softened for the ears of a gentlewoman.

“They say that she cruelly murdered her young husband and chopped his body to bits,” said Elizabeth. She had met Constable Presnell’s wife Sarah on the street and had stopped to “pass the time of day,” the term used by our womenfolk for the giving and receiving of local gossip. “Can this be true, Burgess?”

“That is for a jury to decide,” I said, hoping to deflect her attention from the matter. “There are two other souls in custody for the crime.”

“But the body was found in pieces?”

“Constable Baker said that it was,” I said grudgingly. My efforts to protect my wife from the unpleasantness of this case were proving futile, thanks to the incessant curiosity of the town folk.

Elizabeth leaned forward, her eyes shining, eager for news. “And you have met this creature, Burgess? What was she like?”

“She is small and fair. No more than eighteen years of age. She spoke but little. I saw no hint of madness in her.” I shrugged. “She seemed like any backwoods girl.”

“So she is not mad.” Elizabeth considered this. “That makes the story all the more strange. Whyever can she have done it, then? Or do you think her brother did it to protect her honor?”

“I have heard nothing to implicate the boy,” I admitted. “He is but fifteen, I think.”

“And the mother?”

“Little has been said about her. It is the young widow Silver who was caught in a lie, saying that her husband was gone from home when in fact he lay in pieces within the cabin.”

Elizabeth had obviously heard these details before, for she evinced no dismay upon hearing the particulars from me. “Perhaps her husband was paying court to another woman? That is the only reason I can think of to take an ax to him.”

“I shall take your warning to heart, madam,” I said, smiling.

“See that you do, Burgess Gaither,” said Elizabeth, and she laughed at my expression of mock alarm. But the levity left her almost at once. “It is a terrible crime. Do you know what her motive was?”

“The trial is two months away, Elizabeth,” I said. “Let us not convict her or her family just yet. You are a lawyer’s daughter. Must I remind you that it is the job of the prosecution—not the town gossips or the clerk of court—to fix upon a motive?”

“I think it must have been jealousy,” said my wife, as if I had not spoken. “Men are too cruel. Perhaps he was unfaithful to her. And I have heard that the unfortunate couple has a child. Was anything said about that?”

“The prisoner has a baby girl, according to Constable Baker.”

“Poor child! Is it imprisoned with its mother, then? Have you seen it?”

“No. Frankie Silver had no child with her. I suppose it is with its father’s family.”

“How cruel for both mother and infant!” cried Elizabeth. I knew that she was thinking of our own child William, who was not much older than the Silver baby, and it made me shiver to think that any fellow feeling could exist between my wellborn wife and that ignorant girl in Will Butler’s jail. I could not imagine William deprived of his parents and left with a legacy of shame, and I wondered what would become of the child of the murderess.

“Do not forget the fate of the baby’s poor young father,” I said. “Charlie Silver was nineteen, and his family grieves for him, you may be sure.”

“A pretty young woman with a baby daughter,” said Elizabeth. “How could she have committed such a crime?”

“They live in a savage wilderness. They are not like the gentlefolk in your society, my dear. How can we hope to understand their ways?”

Two days later I was back in my office, working once more on county legal business. As clerk of court, I had deeds and wills to record, and a thousand points of law to commit to memory, for I was expected to advise the judge and members of counsel in the coming term of the circuit court. My father-in-law had forty-four years in which to make himself an authority on the law and the affairs of the county, while I had only a few months’ time to prepare to succeed him in a competent fashion that would reflect well upon his choice of a successor.

Once more my labors were interrupted by more pressing business.

I heard the outer door of the courthouse open and slam shut again, and then the sound of hobnailed boots clattering across the oak floor of the courtroom. I sighed and put down my pen. “Come in!” I called out. My office door was ajar, and presently I saw it pushed open, and a man red-faced in furs and buckskin glared in at me.

“What can I do for you?” I asked politely, ignoring the intruder’s belligerent expression.

The scowling man approached my desk. “They’ve got my family locked up in the jail here, and you can tell me what to do about it.”

“Oh,” I said, for now I realized who my visitor must be.

This was Frankie Silver’s father, returned from his long hunt in Kentucky to find his wife and children imprisoned. I should have considered the shock and anguish of the poor fellow, but in truth my first thought was to wonder uneasily: was he armed, and what did he intend to do about his family’s imprisonment?

I looked more closely at the man, and I decided that his anger was born of fear for his family. He was unkempt, as most of the trappers are, with a grizzled beard and hair that had seen neither comb nor soap in a good while, but he was sober, fine-featured, and well-spoken enough. From the look of him I thought that he might have started out life in circumstances more propitious than a log cabin in the wildwood. I felt a sudden pang of sympathy for the poor old fellow. The life of a backcountry farmer and trapper is a harsh one, uncertain at the best of times, and the man before me seemed aged before his

time. What a blow—to come back from the cold and pitiless frontier to find that your wife and children are in deepest peril and accused of the worst of crimes. What man wouldn’t shout his way into a courthouse on such provocation? He was a stranger here, and he was by no means certain of his welcome.

“I am the clerk of the Burke County Superior Court,” I told him, extending my hand with a smile of welcome. “My name is Burgess Gaither, sir. I know who you must be.”

He nodded. I could see the weariness etched in the lines on his face. He must have ridden all night to get here. “Isaiah Stewart,” he said. “I got back last night. Me and my oldest boy Jackson. We was hunting over to Kentucky way. The Howells told us my family had been taken. Have you seen them?”

“Only for a few moments when they first reached the town,” I told him. “They waited here in this courtroom until the jailer could be found. They are all well, though. I would have heard otherwise.”

Isaiah Stewart sat down in the cane chair beside my desk. His boots made a puddle on my polished floor, but he was too anxious in his mind to notice such a thing. “What must I do?” he asked me. His look was as guileless as a child’s, and again I felt a twinge of pity for this poor bewildered fellow. I had no doubt that Stewart would be fearless against an attacking bear, or in defending his pelts against a band of Shawnee, but here in the county town, with all the intricacies of the law in a maze before him, he was powerless, shackled by his own ignorance and his rusticity.

“You know the circumstances of their arrest?” I asked, hoping dearly that it would not fall to me to break the news to him.

“I heard. Charlie Silver’s been kilt.”

“The trial will take place in March,” I told him gently. “You must secure an attorney to defend your family, for they are charged with the crime.”

“March! That’s two months away. Do they have to stay in jail ’til then?”

I hesitated. In the wake of such a gruesome murder, no bail would be granted. I was sure of that, but I hated to give such bleak news to this careworn man.

“I fear for their safety, sir,” he said.

I was about to protest that Dr. Tate was an excellent physician who lived in the very shadow of the courthouse. He attended prisoners at the county’s expense if needed. Before I could blurt out this information, I suddenly took his meaning. He was concerned not that his family might succumb to disease during their confinement, but that their lives might be threatened by vigilantes in the town. I had heard wild talk in the taverns about doing away with the murdering savages in Butler’s jail; perhaps Isaiah Stewart knew of such sentiments from his neighbors up-county, or else he had met with such a harsh welcome upon his arrival in Morganton.

“They are drunken louts who make such threats,” I told him. “No one here would harm helpless women and a young boy in custody, no matter what they are thought to have done.”

He looked unconvinced by my speech, and indeed I had spoken more out of hope than conviction. “I must look after my family,” he said at last.

“Did they tell you what happened to Charlie Silver?”

“I heard from them that found him.”

I had the feeling that Isaiah Stewart had more to say on the subject of his son-in-law, but nothing more was forthcoming. He seemed impassive for one whose kinsman had met such a brutal end. “It was a shocking crime,” I told him, for I was not sure that a backwoodsman would understand the degree of horror that had been generated here in Morganton by the news of the murder.

He nodded. “It sounds so.”

“The poor young man was hacked to pieces, Mr. Stewart! They have not yet recovered all of him for a Christian burial. People are enraged.”

“They are quick to judge without knowing the facts of the case,” said Stewart.

“The fact of the butchered corpse speaks for itself,” I said. “I must tell you that there is very little sympathy for those who have committed this crime. The killing was brutal, and the attempt at concealment was pitiless, some say cowardly.”

He winced at that, but he gave me no argument. “Is there not some way to free them?” he asked me.

I considered the matter. “Would it be wise, Mr. Stewart? Think about what you are suggesting, regardless of the guilt or innocence of the prisoners. Feelings are running high concerning this case. Even if you succeeded in securing their release on bail, it is possible that a mob would overtake you as you attempted to leave town, or perhaps those nearer to home—the family of the victim—would seek a private vengeance for their wrongs.”

“We can take care of ourselves,” said Stewart. “My son Jack is twenty-four, and married to a Howell girl. I reckon the Howells will stand with us.”

“You could cause the deaths of the very persons you are attempting to save.”

Stewart grew impatient. “My wife and my children have been locked away on the word of the Silvers. I want somebody here—somebody who isn’t beholden to the damned Silvers—to see if there’s any cause to accuse my family of this crime. I’m not saying it wasn’t a terrible thing. I liked young Charlie well enough. But besides the Silvers’ say-so, I want to know on what proof the Stewarts stand accused.”

Fair enough, I thought. Perhaps the family of the murdered man had fixed upon a handy scapegoat to assuage their grief and to settle old scores in the bargain. From what Constable Baker had told us, I did not think it likely, but Isaiah Stewart was correct: his family was entitled to face their accusers.

“If you are set on securing their release,” I told him, “and if you are correct about their being unjustly arrested, there is one possible way to free them. You could seek out the magistrates and request a hearing of habeas corpus.”

Isaiah Stewart blinked uncomprehendingly. “Can it be done quickly?” Another anxious thought darkened his face. “Will it cost much?” he asked. “I reckon I can raise some cash, but—”

I shook my head. “You must look ahead to the trial in March, for then you will have greater lawyers’ fees to pay, but this hearing is a simple matter before the magistrates. Its purpose is to see if there is

enough evidence to charge the prisoners with murder. You must request this hearing, though.”

“How can I do that?”

“You must find the magistrates—Mr. Hughes or Mr. Burgner, our justices of the peace—and you must formally request the hearing for a legal reason. I will tell you exactly what you must say. The phrases will be strange to you, but you must get them off by heart. Can you manage that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right. I could write it down for you. . . .”

“Memory will serve.”

“Find Thomas Hughes or John C. Burgner—either will do—and say that you wish to take an oath that the prisoners Barbara Stewart, Blackston Stewart, and Frankie Silver have been imprisoned without the legal forms of trial and without the parties having it in their power to confront their accusers before any legal tribunal.”

He made me say it twice more, and then he said, “They’ll let my family go, then?”

“No. The magistrates will then order a hearing with witnesses to testify, just like a trial. Then the magistrates will determine if there is enough evidence to keep the accused persons in jail. Or they may release them on bond. Do you understand?”

“Well enough,” said Stewart. “Say those legal words again.”

I drilled him on the form of the request until I was sure that he had committed the phrases to memory. I then gave him directions to John Burgner’s house and wished him well.

Isaiah Stewart thanked me gravely, and before he turned to go, he said, “Are you a lawyer, sir?”

“I am,” I said, “but I may not represent you in this matter. As the clerk of Superior Court, my part in the case is already assigned. I will be present at the trial as the record keeper, and to advise the members of counsel on points of law. Take heart, though! There are half a dozen qualified attorneys in this town, with much more trial experience than I have. I am sure you will find a good one to take the case. The habeas corpus matter can be handled by any lawyer worthy of the name.”

He nodded. “I’ll see about that hearing now.”

North Carolina—Burke County Whereas Isaiah Stewart hath complained to us, John C. Burgner and Thomas Hughes, two of the Acting Justices of the Peace in and for the county of Burke aforesaid, that Barbara Stuart, Frankey Silver, and Blackstone Stuart have been suspected of having committed a murder on the body of one Charles Silver, and whereas it has been made to appear on oath of the said Isaiah Stuart that the said defendants have been committed to the common Jail of the County without the parties having it in their power of confronting their accusers before any legal tribunal:

These are therefore to command you, the Sheriff of Burke County or any other lawful officer of said county, to arrest the bodies of Barbary Stuart, Frankey Silver, and Blackston Stuart, and them safely

keep so that you have them before us at Morgan within the time prescribed by law, then and there to answer the charge and to be further delt with as the law directs. Herein fail not at your peril. Given from under our hands and seal, this 13th day of January, A.D. 1832.

Thomas Hughes, J.P. John C. Burgner, J.P.

I returned the document to Will Butler. “Poor Tom Hughes. His command of the language leaves much to be desired, but he’s a good man for all that.”

Butler tapped the writ. “I see your hand in this, my learned friend.”

“Surely I spell better than that, Will,” I said, smiling.

“ Isaiah Stewart doth make oath that his family has been denied the right to face their accusers! Those are fine ten-shilling words to come out of the mouth of a backwoodsman! Why, you could engrave on the head of a pin all that fellow knows about the law. I’m thinking that someone put him up to it.”

“Some good Samaritan, perhaps,” I said. “Stewart is within his rights in this. Surely you don’t object to a hearing.”

I watched my breath make mist in the air between us. Will Butler had waylaid me on the street near the Presbyterian church. I had been admiring a churchyard snow scene of redberry bushes flanked by snow-laden boughs, and thinking that even the dead had their seasonal finery, when Butler hailed me to discuss his newfound fame as the keeper of the most notorious murderess since the Lady Macbeth.

Will Butler had been considering my question. “Object to a hearing? Not I. Tongues are already wagging about this case. Perhaps a dose of the facts would put the matter to rest. Besides, the magistrates may grant bail to some of the prisoners anyhow. The boy is mighty young. I suppose I wouldn’t mind having fewer prisoners to guard until the March term of court.”

“Are you worried that someone may try to harm the Stewarts before then? I have heard talk.”

“We are vigilant,” said Butler.

“I have spoken with one of your charges, but only glimpsed the others. What are the prisoners like?”

“Quite ordinary.” Butler shrugged. “Backwoods people, of course. They are not the leering savages that the taverners make them out to be. Mrs. Stewart is a small woman, a faded version of her daughter. The son is a sullen fellow—not an uncommon condition for lads of sixteen, though, and hardly an indication of guilt. They are peaceable enough in their quarters. Young Mrs. Silver weeps now and again, and she often asks about her baby. The others sleep or pray or talk in low voices as the mood takes them. The jailer’s wife is quite taken with them, I hear. She will have had worse guests to contend with, I’ll warrant.”

“Have they said anything about the death of Charlie Silver?”

“Nothing for my ears. Perhaps the hearing will enlighten us. Will you be there, Burgess?”

“In my official capacity, no. But I am as curious as the next man. As a private citizen, nothing could keep me away.”

The court system of a frontier town is a wonderful thing. Morganton, on the very fringe of civilization, has little in the way of public entertainment. We have a fair at harvesttime, but indeed the highlight of the year is the annual Fourth of July celebration staged by the Morganton Agricultural Society, with its stirring patriotic speeches, a spirited reading of the Declaration of Independence, and the ragtail parade of surviving veterans of the Revolution through the streets of the town—a smaller procession each year, as time thins their ranks. Among the gentlefolk, there are supper parties and balls, with music and dancing, but week in and week out, there is little but hard work to occupy the mind of the common man.

Court is our theatre.

There may the most humble citizen view the dramas of their neighbors, whether it be the small comedies of a squabble over a stray calf or a fence line, or the life-and-death tragedy that will end at the gallows. And not a penny of admission is charged to view this spectacle; indeed it is our right as citizens to view the judicial process at work. The lawyers are the principal actors, and they are accorded respect and an increase in business in proportion to their degree of showmanship. Since it was January—midway between the harvest festival and the Fourth of July revels, and a time of idleness for farmers—I knew that the little courtroom would be packed to the rafters with spectators. There was scarcely a soul in Morganton who had not heard of the dreadful fate of Charlie Silver, and those who could walk would not miss a single performance of the legal process that brought retribution to his killers. It was reckoned to be a three-act play spread out over the next several months: hearing, trial, and hanging. The audience for each would be prodigious.

This was my one chance to be a spectator in the drama. Henceforth I would be playing a supporting role on stage, prompting the lawyers and keeping track of the progress of the trial. I would be too busy with my duties then to be able to savor the action for its own sake. Only now could I sit among the crowd and observe the faces of the principals in the drama. Only now could I listen to their stories as a mere observer. It was not to be missed.

I arrived early, but already there was a goodly crowd milling around outside. They seemed cheerful enough—not the angry mob that Butler and I had feared only three days before. All I saw in the faces of the men was a happy anticipation of an afternoon’s entertainment. Perhaps it was unfeeling of them to think so lightly of an event that could mean life or death for a fellow human being, but the Stewarts were strangers among us. Also, there could be no real grief over the death of Charlie Silver, for he was not known to anyone in the town. Only the circumstances of his death had acquainted us with him, and the only feelings stirred by his passing were a general regret that a young man had died a terrible death, and a wish that justice should be served on the perpetrators of that foul deed. Life was hard enough for everyone. Death was nothing out of the ordinary. Indeed, it was a regular visitor in every family I knew. There was nothing remarkable about a young man cut down in his prime, as the sorrowful passing of my brother Alfred had taught me not two years ago.

I pushed my way into the courtroom with the general rabble from town and contrived to take a place next to my wife’s kinsman Colonel James Erwin, a tall and powerful man of fifty-six, renowned for his horsemanship. Colonel Erwin, who was himself the county’s clerk of the Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions, was not a lawyer, but he was the squire of lands totaling twenty thousand acres, stretching all the way from the Catawba River. Like me, he was present at the hearing not in his official capacity, but as a pillar of the community taking an interest in all events that touch the welfare of its citizens. The other thing we had in common was the way in which we secured our positions in county government: Colonel Erwin’s father had been the clerk of Pleas and Quarter Sessions for more than a decade, and he had resigned to let his son take over the job. There was talk in the family that the process would be repeated within the next few years, for just last year Colonel Erwin’s son Joseph had graduated from Washington

College in Lexington, Virginia, and now he was preparing to become a lawyer.

“Good afternoon, Colonel,” I muttered as I squeezed in beside him. “A grim business, this.”

“Indeed. All Morganton wants a look at the devils who would defile a man’s body after depriving him of his soul.”

The crowd parted a bit to allow the two justices of the peace to take their places on raised chairs at the front of the courtroom. I saw that the two gentlemen presiding were John C. Burgner and Aaron Brittain. Burgner had signed the warrant for the habeas corpus hearing, but Brittain had taken the place of Thomas Hughes, the other signing justice of the peace. The five witnesses were escorted in, and I studied them closely, trying to guess at who they were, for all of them were strangers to our part of the county. There were three men, a somber-looking matron, and a wide-eyed young girl, who looked no more than fifteen. Her hands plucked continually at the folds of her skirt, betraying her nervousness, and she huddled close to the other woman, evidently a relative, nodding solemnly at the other’s urgent whispers—exhortations of courage, I thought, for the girl looked as if she needed encouragement to endure the proceedings. Her eyes were red and swollen. She stole occasional glances at the crush of spectators, which seemed to frighten her so much that I was afraid she would faint before the hearing could even begin. Another maiden who is unused to town ways, I thought. This bedlam was indeed an ordeal for a young girl, especially one who had suffered a shocking bereavement not many days ago.

“That young girl is a sister of the murdered man!” I murmured to Colonel Erwin.

“And the other one—her mother?”

“No. There is little likeness between them. Besides, she has not a sufficient look of grief to be closely involved in the tragedy. She is a neighbor, perhaps, or another kinswoman. We’ll know soon enough, for here comes Gabe Presnell with the prisoners.”

A sudden hush fell over the spectators, and I turned to view the entrance of the principals in the drama. Our local constable Gabriel Presnell had escorted the prisoners on the short walk from the jail, for they were no longer in Constable Baker’s jurisdiction. He herded before him a scrawny, faded woman and a scowling, fair-haired youth shackled together, more for show than security, I thought. They made their way along a path that had opened up on their account, for the crowd shrank back from them, not so much, I thought, from the stink of unwashed confinement, as from the thought of the deed of which they stood accused. The prisoners ignored the silent throng. With their heads high and their backs straight, they made their way to their appointed positions before the judges. There was no hint of madness or craven guilt in their demeanor, and I could tell from the silence that the crowd was puzzled by the forthright look of them. The hostility lessened by degrees.

Another murmur began when Mr. Thomas Wilson strode through the crowd and took his place at the rail beside the prisoners. Wilson is one of the town’s most prominent lawyers, although he has been in Morganton just over a year. He is a former state legislator, and another of my kinsmen by marriage, though he came to it late, as befits a prudent man, I suppose. Thomas Wilson is forty, while his wife Catherine is but twenty-two. She is the first cousin of my Elizabeth, for their mothers are sisters, daughters of the late William Sharpe, an Iredell County patriot and statesman who served in the Continental Congress.

Wilson, in his black suit and silk cravat, made an elegant and poignant contrast to the two shabbily dressed prisoners he represented. Here was the majesty of the law reaching out to the lowest and least of its citizens. He took his place beside them, courteously distant, as if to make it clear that duty alone had

placed him in their company. I was glad that Isaiah Stewart had found such distinguished counsel for his wife and children, but I did wonder what town sentiments would be toward the Wilsons at the coming trial, and Wilson’s demeanor suggested that he, too, worried about the unpleasant association. These thoughts reminded me to look for Isaiah Stewart in the crowd, but I could not spot him in the crush of more than a hundred avid spectators.

When the assembly began to close ranks behind the principals, I suddenly realized that something was amiss.

“There are only two of them!” I said, rather louder than I had intended. Fortunately, a rising tide of muttering covered our conversation. “The victim’s widow is not with them,” I told the colonel. “Frankie Silver herself is not present. Can you see beyond the crowd, sir? Is there another constable approaching?”

“None that I can see. Perhaps the widow will wait to take her chances in court.”

I thought about it. “That is certainly possible. This is a hearing to determine if there is enough evidence to keep the prisoners in jail. From what I have heard from Constable Baker, there are witnesses aplenty to see that Mrs. Silver will stay confined until the trial, for she has lied to every one of them in saying that her husband had not returned home when—”

“Yes. I have heard the tales,” said the colonel hastily. “No doubt you are right. Why should she demand evidence of her complicity when half the neighborhood stands ready to condemn her? Her trial is inevitable. What about the others?”

I thought back to Charlie Baker’s recital of the facts of the case. “The others were scarcely mentioned,” I told him. “Perhaps he has left out some details of the events.”

John Burgner called the hearing to order, adding an acerbic warning to the rabble that he would have order and silence in his court, or else he would empty it. He needn’t have worried. When the witnesses began to testify, those eager to listen would enforce the silence.

The first witness called to the stand was Thomas Howell, a kinsman by marriage of the oldest Stewart son, Jackson. I wondered if the family tie was close enough to cause difficulty for the young couple. Howell seemed ill at ease on the stand, but he took his oath in a clear voice and began his testimony without flinching. His story echoed the one I had heard from Charlie Baker: Frankie Silver reports that her man has gone missing, followed by days of searching through forest snowdrifts, only to be summoned to the missing man’s own cabin by Jack Collis.

At the end of Howell’s recital, the defense attorney rose and approached the witness. “Did the Stewarts have anything to say about the disappearance of Charlie Silver?”

“Never saw them,” said Howell. “They didn’t come help us search, that’s certain.”

“But they did not lie to anyone about the whereabouts of Charlie Silver?”

“Not that I know of.”

“And did you see them near the cabin of Charlie and Frankie Silver?”

Tom Howell answered, “I did not.”

William Hutchins, Elendor Silver, and Miss Nancy Wilson said much the same. I missed some of their testimony because it was after Howell’s turn on the stand that I noticed a flash of red among the spectators and turned to see a familiar but formidable lady caped in black. She was thrusting her way forward in order to get a better look at the proceedings, and her expression suggested that if matters were not handled properly, the court would hear about it. I nudged Colonel Erwin.

He looked in the direction I indicated, and groaned. “Damn! Cousin Mary is poking about, is she? Never a moment’s peace, is there?”

“She does take an interest in civic matters,” I said tactfully. I was, after all, a rather new connection to the Erwin clan.

Colonel James Erwin snorted. “Your father-in-law ought to marry her off, Burgess. Preferably to someone heading west.”

I permitted myself a discreet smile. “It would serve the Indians right, wouldn’t it?”

“Maybe having a house to run would keep Mary’s nose out of everyone else’s business. She would have made a lawyer for sure, if she hadn’t been born female. Be glad you didn’t marry that one, Burgess!”

Mary Erwin is an elder sister of my Elizabeth, but I can see little resemblance between them. Where Elizabeth is gentle and reticent, Mary is a strong-minded woman with intellectual pretensions and more opinions than God gave Congress. If she was taking an interest in this cause célèbre, then all her connections in the legal profession would be grilled upon the matter at great length, probably at the next dinner party. Heaven help us all—her list of victims included the colonel, Mr. Wilson, and myself. I wondered what Miss Mary made of this case, and from which quarter she planned to stir up trouble.

The young girl was the last witness to be called. There was a murmur of sympathy from the crowd as the slight, fair-haired girl stood up to take the oath.

Thomas Wilson turned to Magistrates Burgner and Brittain. “I consider Miss Margaret Silver the most important of my witnesses, sirs. I would like her to tell her story in her own words, without being interrupted by questions from me. The witness is understandably nervous to be speaking before such a congregation, and I think she will come through it better if she can lose herself in the telling of her testimony.”

The justices of the peace had a brief whispered conference. Then John Burgner said, “We’ll allow it. This is merely a hearing, and we may relax the rules a bit, especially to accommodate a young lady in distress.”

Mr. Wilson turned to the witness and gave her a reassuring smile. “Now, Miss Silver, just a word or two to begin with, so we’ll know where we are. Would you state your age, please?”

“Sixteen.”

“And your relation to the deceased?”

“Sister. Well, half. Half sister, that is, but we didn’t take any notice of that. We were all just family. Our daddy was a widower when he married my mother, Nancy Reed, that was, in October of 1814, when he

first came into the Carolina backcountry to settle. Charlie was two years old. That first wife in Maryland, she had died in 1812, giving birth to Charlie. I was born on December 2, 1815.”

Young Margaret seemed to be reciting these facts to herself, for she did not so much as glance at the audience. Wilson must have decided that he had let her ramble enough to put her at ease, for he stopped the flow of family reminiscences. “Now, Miss Margaret, I’d like you to remember the events of just a few short weeks ago, when your big brother Charlie went missing. Can you speak up loud and clear now and tell us exactly what happened?”

The girl took a deep breath and nodded, closing her eyes for a moment to compose herself before relating the difficult tale. Thomas Wilson handed her his linen handkerchief and she wound it around her fingers, tugging and picking at it until I thought it would unravel into threads.

“Tell us about your brother Charlie going missing,” Wilson prompted.

“Reckon it was two days before Christmas when Frankie showed up at our log house with the baby on her hip, and Charlie nowhere to be seen.”

“The day before Christmas Eve.”

“Yes, sir. I wasn’t thinking on it being nearly Christmas Eve at the time, mind you. We don’t make much of Christmas up home, so there was no decorating or presents, no fancy dinner being prepared. Menfolk mostly use it as an excuse to get liquored up. They shoot their guns in the air to make a joyful noise unto the Lord, I reckon.”

There was a ripple of amusement in the audience, but the witness ignored it and plunged ahead into her story. “Us women didn’t pay Christmas much mind, unless there was a church service near enough to go to, so it was just an ordinary day in the dead of winter, but real cold. The ground was hard as slate under drifts of snow, and the Toe River that runs brash past our mountain land was so hard froze that a body could walk on water. It was a day to run for shelter, if you had any call to be out in the elements at all, but I watched her coming, and Frankie Silver was walking slowly down the track in the frozen hillside, in no hurry to reach our place. And she may have been shaking, but we would have blamed that on the cold.”

Here the witness faltered, as if dreading what was to come.

“Tell us about Frankie Silver,” Wilson prompted her. “Your sister-in-law.”

“She’s just two years older than me, but prettier—I’ll give her that. I turned sixteen last month. Not that much was made of that, either, except that my brothers Alfred and Milton teased me about being their old-maid sister, seeing as how my sister-in-law Frankie was already expecting a young ’un by the time she was my age, and I hadn’t so much as kissed a man yet. I wasn’t studying to be like Miss Frances Stewart, I told them.”

Margaret Silver blushed. “The truth is, sometimes I wished I was more like her. She was little and fair, and she worked hard, too. Of course, she had to. Being married to Charlie and all.”

Margaret Silver ignored the rumble of laughter from the back of the court, but the noise drew scowls from both magistrates.

“Go on,” said Burgner. “And I’ll have less noise from the gallery, gentlemen.”

“About Frankie. Well, she kept that cabin clean, saw to the baby, tended the cows and the chickens, and did the cooking and the washing and kept the fire going. There are three of us girls to help Mama do what Frankie did all by herself. That set me against marrying up early, too.”

The two prisoners sat up straight when they heard these words, and they looked as if they might be about to chime in, but the lawyer silenced them with a shake of his head, and Margaret Silver hurried on.

“Charlie wasn’t much to bestir himself around the place, no, but he was dashing. People took to him. He and Frankie made a likely pair. It’s no wonder they married so young, and, of course, Charlie always did have an eye for beauty.”

“A man of refined tastes,” murmured Wilson, and I heard no hint of irony in his voice.

Margaret Silver nodded. “I guess Charlie must have taken after his mother’s people. We liked him fine, but we weren’t like him. He was handsome, and he could charm squirrels out of a gum tree with that smile of his, and he never said no to a jug or a fiddle tune, but . . .”

The magistrates gave Thomas Wilson a look, and he leaned in close to the witness and said softly, “It’s time to tell us what happened to Charlie, Miss Margaret.”

She took a deep breath and blinked back tears. “We were working when Frankie showed up. Of course, we always are, with ten folks to be fed at mealtimes, and a fire to be kept going, and young ’uns to be tended—my brother William, the youngest, isn’t but two years old.

“It was early morning when Frankie came in. She stood there on the threshold, stomping snow off her shoes and shaking the ice flints out of her hair. She handed me the baby, and began to untie her wraps and rub her hands together to warm them. I took the little Nancy over by the fire, peeling off her blankets and checking her fingers and toes for frostbite. It isn’t more than a quarter mile over the hill to their place, but the wind was fierce.” Her voice softened as she spoke of the child. I had to lean forward to hear her.

“Charlie’s baby is just over a year old.”

“And what is the child’s name?”

Margaret Silver smiled. “Why, it’s Nancy. Maybe Charlie named her after our mother that raised him, or maybe the name came from one of Frankie’s people, or maybe they just liked the sound of it. I don’t know what Frankie thought about that, but maybe she didn’t like her own mother’s name—Barbara—or maybe Charlie didn’t give her any say in the matter. Charlie would have his own way: if he could charm you into doing his bidding, he would, but if not, he could get ugly about it. It’s a pretty name, though . . . Nancy Silver. . . . Folks said that if she got her mother’s looks and her father’s charm, she’d be a force to be reckoned with a dozen years hence.”

Talking about her young niece seemed to comfort the poor girl, but Wilson could not allow her prattle to take up the court’s time.

“You are dutiful to tell us so much, Miss Margaret,” said Wilson, and this time he was smiling gently. “But we do not require such detail, only the bare bones of the tale. Frankie turned up at your parents’ house that morning, then, with the baby, did she not?”

“She did.”

“And what did she say?” “She was bragging. She said she had been working since sunup, chopping wood and scrubbing the cabin floor. . . .” She faltered a moment when the gasps from the spectators nearly drowned her out.

Perhaps it was the first time the poor girl had realized the significance of those words. “What else did she say?” “She wanted one of the boys to feed the cattle. Said Charlie was gone from home. So we sent Alfred

back with her.” “Did she say where Charlie was supposed to have gone?” “Over to George Young’s. Most of the men get their Christmas liquor over at George’s place.” “So you had no reason to doubt her story?” “No. It sounded like Charlie, all right.” Thomas Wilson permitted himself a perfunctory smile. “Tell us what happened then, Miss Margaret.” “Well, Frankie took herself off then, but the next morning she was back, saying Charlie still hadn’t turned

up. After a couple of days we took to searching the woods, but we never did find no trace of him. Not ’til Mr. Collis went to the cabin, after Frankie went home to her people.”

“Did you see the Stewarts at any time during all this?” Margaret Silver thought about it. “I never did,” she finally admitted. “They didn’t stop by to sit a spell with us, or to ask after Charlie, not one bit.”

“But they said nothing about his disappearance? They were not seen at Charlie and Frankie Silver’s cabin?”

“Don’t reckon they were.” Beside me Colonel Erwin stirred in his seat. “There it is, Mr. Gaither,” he murmured. “Wilson has established that there is not one whit of evidence linking the Stewart woman or her boy to this case. They said nothing and no one saw them. They will have to be let go. Wilson has done his best for that poor family, no doubt, but at what a cost!”

“What do you mean?” I whispered back. “He has put a rope around the neck of Frankie Silver.” I am alone now, but I do not mind the solitude. I have lived all my life in one-room cabins, first with Daddy and Mama and my brothers, and then with

Charlie and the baby. It seemed strange at first to have so much space on my own, and so much quiet. I had Mama and Blackston to talk to for the first week or so, but they were afraid that someone was listening, and we found that apart from that one big thing, we had not much to say to one another. Fear is

like a stone in your mouth. When you have it, you cannot talk of anything else. So we passed the days in near-perfect silence, with dread kicking in our bellies. Then there was the hearing, and Mama and Blackston got bond and were let go. After that it was only me, to sit here and wait ’til spring.

I think I would not mind the prison cell but for the idleness. I don’t know what to do with my hands. They move in my lap and will not stay still. I asked the jailer’s wife if I could help her do the chores so as to pass the time, but she said I mayn’t be let out, and that she could not let me have an iron or a needle, for fear that I would use them for mischief. Her name is Sarah. She has a baby, and I ache to hold it, for it reminds me of my Nancy, but of course she will not bring it near me. I watch her sometimes when she plays with it out in the garden. Its golden curls glint in the sunshine, but if she looks up and sees me watching them, she frowns and takes the baby away. Her man has told her that I am mad, and although she sees that I am as mild as milk and never angry, she is still afraid, and hangs back, well away from the door of my cell, whenever she has cause to speak to me. I am a killer.

“You can have a Bible,” she said.

I shook my head and she went away, thinking that this was proof of my wickedness, perhaps even a sign that I am a witch. I did not tell her that I refused the Good Book because I cannot read.

I pass the time at the barred window, looking down on the muddy road that passes through the center of the town. There are more people here than I have ever seen in my life. Some of the women have velvet cloaks and bonnets with white feathers. I wish I could see their shoes. Sometimes the people pause and look up toward my window, and I step back into the shadows because I don’t want them looking at me. I wonder where they are going, and what the fine houses look like on the inside, and what fancy goods are to be had over there in the store. I had me a store-bought china bowl up home. Someone gave it to us for a wedding gift—one of Charlie’s kinfolks, that was. It didn’t get broke, in spite of all that happened there in the cabin. I remember it sitting on the pine table when I went away, down to Mama’s, not knowing for sure that I was leaving that place for the last time, but thinking I probably wouldn’t want to sleep there ever again. When Daddy got home from Kentucky, I’d make him take me back there to get my things, I thought, but that wasn’t to be. I wonder what happened to that bowl. It was white with three marks like blue feathers painted on one side. I would like for the baby to have it when she is grown.