Picture the Dead

morning, died Friday, and was buried today.” She looks kinder than her father. She turns to him now. “Best to hurry, Fa. I’ve got the stew on.”

“Are you the one who cared for Nate?” I ask.

“I am. I’m Sue.” When she smiles, shyness turns her face even rosier.

“Not that it makes a whit of difference to you,” Wigs adds in his blunt, bullying way, “who didn’t share that burden at all.”

“I’m sorry, but I didn’t really know him.” I catch my breath and then say, awkwardly, “My name is Jennie Lovell. Nate Dearborn was in the same regiment as my fiancé, William Pritchett. He was killed this summer in battle at the Wilderness, in Virginia. I hadn’t met Nate until last week, but I’d like to pay my condolences to the boy’s family all the same. Are they here?”

My words have caused Sue’s eyes to round like an otter’s, and I sense a change in Wigs’s manner, too. “No, Miss, there’s no family,” she answers faintly. “We telegraphed to Pittsfield to notify his kin. Seemed he hadn’t anyone close, though a cousin did telegraph back. ’Twas a most distressing communication. He’d thought the boy’d been dead for months. In fact, he’d had a captain’s telegram this past summer that stated Nate had fallen in battle. In the Wilderness. Just like your William.” She concentrates her stare on me, awaiting some clarification.

“The records of the fallen are sometimes painfully inaccurate,” I note. But my mind is reeling. It’s too much a coincidence.

“He’d been lucky to have died in battle,” adds Wigs, whose disapproval toward me seems to have neutralized with my explanation.

“Least it’d been over quick.”

“Pyemia is the name the doctor gave it. An infection that got in Nate’s blood after the amputations.” Sue hoists the child to her hip. “Such suffering in that boy’s short life.”

I murmur sympathies, but then have to ask, “Did the cousin in Pittsfield give you the captain’s name? The one who signed the death notice?”

Sue taps her fingers to her lips. “There was a name, but I can’t recall.”

“James Fleming, perhaps?”

“That’s it, yes.” Sue nods. “He was commander to your fiancé, too?”

“He was.” Out of the corner of my eye, I watch Quinn exit the cemetery, skirting through to a shortcut that leads to the wooded trail back home.

“It’s a forgiving commander who allows folk to think their boy fell on the field,” says Wigs. “There’s honor in it. For your fiancé, too, I’d warrant.”

It is an almost audible click into place. Of course. In one powerful signature, Fleming bestowed legitimacy on the captured men of his company. The grace of a death in combat, so that families wouldn’t suffer to learn the horror of death in prison. What did Nate say? Slipped the noose. Nate Dearborn was supposed to be dead. My stomach lurches. Quinn would never confess it, but he might confirm it.

First I’ll need to catch up with him, though. Before he locks himself in his room or disappears for the rest of the day.

“Excuse me, then.” To Sue, “Very glad to meet you.” To Wigs, “Good day, sir.” And I peel off as fast as my muddy boots can take me.

Quinn has kicked a path through the snow, which helps my own journey, but he has a lead by a few minutes. When I reach the bend and shout his name, I can feel him startle, though he keeps his pace.

“Where are you coming from?” He looks suspicious. “Are you spying on me?”

“Spying on you?” I try a laugh, which falters. “’Course not. Why would I be?”

He doesn’t answer, but his answering scowl reminds me of a particular day, years ago, when Toby and I’d first arrived at Pritchett House. Exuberant, Will had taken me in hand at once, eager to show off all his home’s delights from Uncle’s ivory menagerie to the lions carved in the parlor fireplace, and the Dresden jar where Aunt kept her digestive peppermints.

Quinn had followed from an aloof distance. Every moment we’d waited for him to turn his heel altogether. As if we were hunting him. “Best not to spy on cousin Quinn for a while,” Toby had decreed in those early days. “His guard is high as ours.” His guard is up now.

“I’m not spying at all,” I promise. “But I saw you at Nate Dearborn’s burial.”

Quinn’s silence speaks to his uncertainty.

“You were in the Twenty-eighth together,” I continue. “In fact, you’d sent away a messenger a few weeks ago to prevent me from talking to him. But I found him anyway.”

“However you know him, let me assure you, Dearborn wasn’t fit for your company,” Quinn retorts. “I’m paying for his tombstone as an anonymous gift, so he and I are square but he wasn’t welcome in Brookline. Not by me, anyway. He ought to have stayed on that train and gone all the way home.” He pivots and starts to walk, but I won’t let him outpace me.

“Nate was hiding something shameful from his family, and you know it. Stop lying, Quinn, it’s no service to me Will’s letter confessed more than you’d ever want me to know.”

He halts so suddenly that I almost careen into him. He turns. Behind the steely freeze of his face lives the truth. I am sure of it.

“Will’s letter?” he repeats. Is it fear that flickers in his eyes? Or is it something else?

“Yes. It told everything. That he and Nate were both prisoners of war, and both of them were sent to Camp Sumter.” My words spill before I can catch them back. “Something happened to Will there, didn’t it? He had no glorious death on the battlefield. He wasn’t any hero. That’s what Nate meant when he spoke about being the only one to slip the noose. Did Will commit some horrible crime while in prison? Was he…punished? Was Will hanged in prison?” I feel my lungs strain against the pressure of my corset as I voice my most shocking thought. “Quinn, was he?”

But he is shaking his head. “How did you get hold of that letter?”

“Nate gave it to me.”

“This changes everything,” Quinn says.

“It changes nothing,” I protest. “Except that you can stop protecting Will. Please, tell me the truth.”

“It’s a deadly rotten, rotten business. I didn’t think…I didn’t realize you’d got hold of that letter.” His voice is shaking.

“I understand that you’re scared. None of us wants Will’s name smeared. But I can’t help re-piecing together from bits I’ve got when the whole picture doesn’t make sense. And the less I know, the more it frightens me especially when I’m sure that Will’s spirit won’t rest until the truth is laid bare. Geist himself has proved to me that it is fully possible for a restless soul to commune from beyond.”

Quinn looks ashen, and I sense his reluctance to hear me out even as he waits for me to continue.

“I know that you’re angry enough about whatever Will’s done that you hid my necklace. It was you, wasn’t it? But I found it anyway, see? He led me to it.”

I draw out the locket and chain from beneath my collar. The winter light catches it. Quinn’s gaze is pulled to the gold pendant as if hypnotized. “All right, Jennie,” he answers after a pause, “if it’s a confession you want. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I…yes. I had it and I hid it. Just don’t give me that Spiritualist bunk that you were led. Someone must have been spying on me from the house when I buried it.” He flexes an eyebrow. “Most likely you, since you always seem to locate me easily enough.”

It’s no use trying to justify how I came to discover the locket. “The point is that it wasn’t yours to hide.”

Quinn thrusts the information at me quickly, as if he can’t stand holding on to it anymore. “Actually, it was mine. Sometimes the truth laid bare is ugly. But here it is. My brother bet and lost your necklace in a card game.”

“No.” I draw back. The information is the lash of a horsewhip. “No, that’s a lie.”

“I wish it were. When I won it back some weeks later, I kept it.” He shrugs, defiant. “Then when I came home, I couldn’t give it to you. To see it ’round your neck would have been hypocrisy.” His fists are solid at his sides. “Some things I won’t abide.”

I try to picture the soldiers’ tent. The sputtering oil lanterns and empty whiskey bottles. Will at the poker table, slouched in his slatted chair, cards fanned to his chest, dangling the chain from his fingers before dropping it into the pot of coins and dented gimcracks. The sweat of suspense, then his good-natured laugh when he’d lost. It’s an unnerving sort of image of a Will I’d never known.