.
disappeared one day, and to tell the truth, I never gave him a second thought until you brought his name up just now. And now you’re telling us that he’s decided to be a preacher.” She would tuck this information away until the first moment that she could flourish it for anyone who would listen. “You know, he might be just fine at that. He certainly likes the sound of his own voice. He might better use it for something good.”
“And prior to this last disappearance he never left Demorestville? Never decided to try his luck somewhere else?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “In fact, he probably never even got as far as Picton. It’s a long walk unless you have good reason and he didn’t own a horse. I suppose if he’d really wanted to go sometime he could have caught a ride with someone else, but as I said, nobody liked him, so that’s unlikely.”
And with those words Morgan Spicer was in the clear. The Varneys had placed him firmly in Demorestville at the time of Sarah’s death, and it wouldn’t be hard to confirm that fact, provided of course that he could make Mr. Kemp understand what he was asking him.
His strategy of milking information from the town gossip had worked so well that he decided to push his luck. “I hear the Caddick boys are both married now?”
“Oh, yes, and both working at the tannery. Those girls have settled them right down. There’s no more of this painting nonsense, although I expect there will be a lot of people who miss those little pins. They were surely popular, all right.”
“They’re not making them at all?”
“Oh, no. Their wives have them far too busy for that. Benjamin’s taken over the running of the tannery and he’s building a new house as well. Willet, I think, is just as busy. He told me they unloaded their entire stock to Isaac Simms. You remember Simms, the peddler? ”
Lewis nodded. “When did they stop making them?”
“As soon as they got serious about settling down. I’d say a number of months ago, maybe even a year or more, wouldn’t you, dear?”
Mr. Varney nodded his agreement.
Lewis thanked the Varneys for their hospitality and left the store, grateful that the one thing a gossip never questions is the motivation behind an inquiry.
As he walked along, he was once again conscious of his own guilt, and this time his sin was not anger and hate, but a casual acceptance of a harsh judgment: he had been willing to believe that Morgan Spicer might be a murderer simply because he was an unpleasant man. Nobody liked him — in fact Lewis didn’t like him — but that was no reason to assume the worst of him. He supposed he might make the excuse that he hadn’t known about Spicer’s early life and the obstacles that had been put in his path so unfairly, but he rejected this as soon as he thought it. He was supposed to be a Christian, and charity was a cornerstone of his creed. He had been uncharitable, and it was wrong. He vowed to find some way to help Spicer realize his ambitions; if he could finally attain a respectable position in life, perhaps he would stop being so unpleasant and could achieve some of the importance he craved, and in so doing, realize how unimportant it was. There’s more than one way to bring a person to humility of soul, he ruminated. He had certainly learned that.
He wandered toward the tannery, hopeful that he might find the Caddicks there. He was rewarded when Willett appeared in the doorway of the storehouse. As Lewis watched, he and two other men began loading hides into a wagon that had drawn up to the big double door.
“Mr. Lewis! Good to see you again, sir.”
“And you, Willett. How goes it with you?”
A grin split his face. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’ve been married this twelvemonth. It goes very well, indeed. We’re expecting a little gift from heaven in a few weeks.”
“Congratulations! And your brother?”
“Oh, he’s married as well. We married the two Tobey sisters. Ben and Fanny have no children yet, though, nor any sign of one.”
For once Willett had bested his brother, then.
“Are you still painting?”
“Oh, no. This place is too busy for that anymore, and I’ve a household to support. No, I’m afraid Ben and I are homebodies now. Father has more or less retired now that we’ve “settled down” as he would put it. We don’t even have time to paint those little pins that everybody liked. It’s too bad. We made a little money from them. But this business comes first.”
This confirmed what Mrs. Varney had said.
“I thought you might still be at it. I keep seeing them everywhere I go.”
“That must be Simms. We actually stopped making them a couple of years ago, but he kept pestering us to paint him one last batch and he took them all. He’ll be running out again soon, I expect, and want us to do some more, but I don’t think we will.”
Everything Willet said squared up with what others had told him and he seemed unconcerned about any of the questions he was being asked. Lewis decided to push the inquiry a little further. “Do you remember Rachel Jessup?”
The young man’s face clouded. “Oh, aye, how could you forget Rachel?”
“I thought, at one time, that you might have had feelings for her.”
“I did. We all did. Any one of us would have married her in a minute, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with any of us except for Levi White. I don’t know that you’d know him. He’s a Quaker lad.”
He had forgotten about the Quaker boy who had mooched around the church looking as though he didn’t belong. Was this who Rachel had been meeting on the sly? Why she had ducked around the corner of the barn that day after the meeting?
“Poor Levi’s heart was broken when she died,” Willett went on, “although there would have been an almighty uproar if they’d gone ahead and wed like they’d planned. Levi would have been disowned. That’s what the Quakers do when one of them marries out. And he had no money of his own. I don’t know what he and Rachel thought they were going to do.”
So Betsy had it right from the first. She’d said that Rachel had already made her choice and just wasn’t ready to admit it yet. As it turned out, she had good reason for staying mum, and now he was beginning to understand his last conversation with her. She had said that she needed to be quite certain in her mind, that she knew she must settle soon. She realized then the enormity of what she was asking of the Quaker boy; he would have to leave behind his faith and his family in order to be with her. It was no decision to make on an impulse, and she must have thought long and hard on the consequences.
So the question was this: What had she decided? Had she backed out of the arrangement at the last moment and been killed by her spurned suitor? If that was the case, then her death was unrelated to the other murders, all evidence to the contrary. Or was the Quaker boy the madman he was looking for? It seemed unlikely, but then he had no experience with what, exactly, a mad murderer was supposed to look like, did he? Or had Seth Jessup learned of the relationship and intervened? Was that the explanation for his absence on the night of his son’s birth? Was he a suspect after all?
“Where is Levi now? What did he do after Rachel died?”
“Oh, he moped around for a few months, but then he settled down and took over most of the work on his father’s farm. He married Phoebe Parker last year. She’s a good Quaker girl and they’re in fine standing with the Society. His father even added a wing onto the farmhouse for them.”
So, Levi White could not have been in Prescott or Millcreek, nor, probably, anywhere near Sarah’s cabin. If the murders were related then the Quaker boy was suspected and summarily dismissed as a suspect within a few sentences. If they weren’t, the information he had gleaned took him no farther along the path of inquiry. He asked Willett to convey his best wishes to his brother and their families and set off to return to the Jessup’s.
He walked slowly while he