window. A tall woman, pretty in a severe way, with her hair in a tightly confined bun, her sweater and skirt a very prim gray with only a touch of color in the silk shirtwaist, a paisley of peach and gray and white.
She made a fuss over the potted plants that stood on either side of the shop door. They were pretty, a mixture of rose geraniums and something lavender and white, like pansies. Satisfied, she turned and went quickly back inside. He looked at the neatly painted sign above the door. A. TAIT MILLINERY. He filed it away for future reference. If she had been interested enough to inspect a stranger, she might also be a gossip…
Rutledge retrieved his car from The Ballantyne’s yard and drove out past the church. He found The Reivers again and stopped across the road to look at it. Yes, he’d been right. Comfortable, decent-hardly a blot on the conscience of Duncarrick. Neither a wild tavern nor a seedy lodging.
Small and long, no more than two stories with an attic above, the inn was one of those old buildings that survived because they were in nobody’s way-no one wanted to build a square here, or shops, or a large house.
Duncarrick’s main square, on the other hand, had probably seen the demise of a whole street of houses to widen the space to suit nineteenth-century builders with Progress on their minds.
The houses on either side here and down the lane by the inn’s stables were neither picturesque nor ugly, more a reflection of the straightforwardness of the people who lived in them. Only the house to one’s left facing the inn was by any measure grand, boasting three stories and an extension toward the rear, as if it had grown over the years with the family living there. The windows had been set with some eye to symmetry and style, lending a faint touch of grace.
The inn looked rooted in its earth, tidy, freshly whitewashed in the past year, the door to the bar hidden behind a climbing rose that had spread with age to cover the porch it had been intended to adorn. It was a hardy rose to survive in this climate, and the small garden at its feet showed some care for the impression the inn made on passersby. The bar parlor, on the side facing the narrow lane into the inn yard at the rear, had a green door, and crisp white curtains showed behind the windows next to it.
Time could have turned this into a rowdy pub on the outskirts of town, but the inn had managed, somehow, to retain a certain dignity. Because two women had had the care of it?
“I canna’ think why they’d persecute a lass with such a dowry as the inn,” Hamish was saying. “They’d be more likely to want their sons to wed her.”
And that, too, was a question worth considering. It all kept coming back to that: Why had the town united so easily against this woman?
On impulse, Rutledge shut off the engine and got out, crossing the road and walking down into the inn yard, where the stables and outbuildings stood.
They were in a fair state of repair. With little work done during the war and no money after it to tackle major improvements, upkeep spoke well for the management.
He was poking about in the stable, looking for the cabinet where Inspector Oliver had discovered the first set of bones, when a loud voice said, “Here! What do you think you’re doing!”
He turned to find a tall, heavy-shouldered man of middle age standing in the doorway, arms akimbo, staring at him with harsh dislike. Shadowed by the doorway, his face was dark and ugly but had a strength to it as well.
Rutledge, well aware that he was trespassing, replied peaceably, “I’d heard that the inn might be for sale.”
“There’s no decision been made to sell or not sell,” the man said.
“I see.” Rutledge turned, having found what he was looking for, the part of the wall pulled down to bring a skeleton to light. The cupboard, deep enough to start with, had been made shallower to conceal the grave behind it. A careful bit of work-a hundred years ago trouble had been taken to make the spot seem ordinary, unsuspicious. It must have been quite a shock for Inspector Oliver to discover that his “corpse” was nearly as old as the inn.
Rutledge began to walk toward the man blocking the exit. It made him uneasy to have his way closed-even in the relative spaciousness of the stable, he could feel the claustrophobia it invoked. The air seemed thick, suffocating “Tell me about the owner-” He broke off. After being buried alive in the impenetrable mud of a shell crater, weighed down by Hamish’s body, Rutledge had come to hate being shut in-confined in any fashion. Traveling on trains, sleeping in a small room, seeing himself cut off from escape through a door or down a stair-the need for space was so urgent that it ignited a rising panic. Even here he could feel the sudden dampness of sweat on his face, the difficulty breathing, the awareness of hideous danger “You’ll be wanting to speak to the police, then,” the man told him bluntly but didn’t elaborate. His stance was intentionally threatening now, belligerent, as if he sensed Rutledge’s sudden uneasiness. Rutledge felt his own muscles tensing.
Rutledge replied, “A woman, I understand. What has she done to find herself of interest to the police?”
“None of your affair, is it?” At last the man moved out into the sunlight, and Rutledge followed, his breathing still uneven.
Damn this, he swore, fighting the claustrophobia. Keep your mind on what you’re doing, can’t you?
But Hamish, too, was responding to the man’s aggressive stance, asking if he had believed the innuendoes and the letters-or was incensed by them. Rutledge thought, It was difficult to tell. He was a man who showed little in his face; he would not be easy to interrogate.
“Does she have any family? Heirs?”
“None.” Uncompromising. Cold. Then, grudgingly, “None that I know of.”
No mention of the boy. But he would inherit nothing… would he?
“Then I’ll be on my way.” Walking back toward the inn, Rutledge could sense the man’s stare boring into his back between his shoulder blades.
If this was any example of how the townspeople felt about the woman who owned this property, it was evident that she had somehow made abiding enemies.
Which didn’t fit into the picture of her that McKinstry had so glowingly painted.
Who was the woman in the eye of a controversy that might well end with a hanging?
Rutledge realized suddenly that he didn’t even know her full name. Not that it mattered, he thought, but it was an indication that whatever crime she had committed-from lying to murder-she had somehow lost her identity because of it. As if, by refusing to call her by name, Duncarrick could finish what they had begun back in June- shunning her until she was without reality and finally disappeared.
What had this woman done to stir up such dark passions?
It was odd, he thought, crossing the quiet street to his car. First the venomous letters and then the one to the minister-Elliot? The finding of one body that didn’t match the crime, and another that did. Persistence, patience-and what else? Luck? Or persecution?
It smacked of the latter. Hamish, in the back of his mind, agreed.
Rutledge stopped before turning the crank and looked back at The Reivers. The accused owned this inn. Did someone covet it? She had a small child to provide for, never mind whether it was rightfully hers or not. Did someone covet the child? Or want it taken away to punish the accused, a twisted revenge for a real or imagined grudge? And these were the more obvious reasons for wanting the woman in prison and out of the way. What others might there be? Was there something in the inn that no one knew about, which mattered to another person? Or was it something in the past of the accused that put another person in jeopardy? Hanging was a certain way of silencing her.
He found himself thinking of the child again. Torn away from its mother, from the only home it had known, put to live with strangers. There was a cruelty in that.
Then why hadn’t she lied to protect the boy? “I don’t have my marriage lines-my husband took them, to show the Army…”
Why hadn’t she left the town as soon as the shunning had begun? But he thought he had the answer to that- the shunning had reduced custom at the inn to the point that she might not have had the money to go away. Had that been the intent of it-?
The woman’s voice behind him startled him. “Are you looking for someone?”
Rutledge turned and removed his hat. Hamish, responding to his surprise, was suddenly alert, watchful. She was tall and plump, dressed in black but young, perhaps twenty-four or -five. A little girl of six or seven held her hand.
“I was admiring the inn. I’d heard it might be for sale.”
The woman shook her head. “Early days to know that!” She turned to the door of the house in front of which
