I am safe, I am unknown—if there were emotions corresponding to those words, then they pulsed through Lyman’s bloodstream.
In the woods, they stamped out the fire and Lyman returned a pensive Minerva to her father’s house. It was by then suppertime, and after the meal and the chores, Lyman found himself returning to the stone house in almost utter blackness. Having come directly from their walk in the woods, he had neglected to bring a lantern for the return journey to his bed, and it always amazed him how dark the countryside became without the light. But he assured himself the distance wasn’t far, and slowly and carefully set off in what he estimated was the correct direction. Before long the silhouette of stones blotted against the deep blue, and the latch of the front door was in hand as he stepped inside.
Fingers and thumbs locked around his throat.
Lyman gasped, clawing at the grip, and felt himself propelled backward. Once and then again and again lights exploded in the blackness as his skull was slammed into the stone wall. Then the hands vanished, and he collapsed on the floor, half-senseless.
There were sparks and then flames as someone started a fire in the main grate. Another figure took a taper around the room to lantern and lamp until the area was well lit. From his vantage on the floorboards, Lyman saw shoes pass before him, though he had no ability to count or determine how many pairs there were. His vision had attenuated almost to pinpricks; his ears rang.
Gradually he became aware he was being addressed, and he looked up.
One of them sat in a chair by the fire. The other lurked nearby, though where precisely Lyman couldn’t say.
“Boy, we sure had a hard time finding you, Caleb,” said the man in the chair.
Lyman’s eyesight broadened slightly, and the ringing sank just a little.
“I have staked my reputation on finding men within sixty days of accepting the contract. Sixty days from handshake to apprehension.”
Lyman tried to sit up against the wall. Failed.
“Four months,” said the man. “The better part of four months, we’ve been tailing you. Isn’t that right, Mr. Doyle?”
“I should know,” said the other man, somewhere. “I’ve been there beside you, Mr. Myerson, every mile of the road.”
“You certainly have, Mr. Doyle. Your diligence to duty is exemplary.” For a moment there was only the sound of the fire crackling. Lyman smelled pipe smoke.
“Tracking you to Norwalk wasn’t an issue, Caleb. The problem there, however, was what direction you had gone in. I made the mistake of thinking you might’ve gone to Ohio. I’m afraid much time was wasted in fruitless pursuit of that hypothesis.”
“Poor Mr. Rose is still out there somewhere, pursuing that false trail,” said the one named Doyle.
“Indeed,” said Myerson. “But then we returned to the coffeehouse in Norwalk where you frittered away so many mornings. The proprietor kindly informed us that you spent a great number of hours there reading the newspapers. ‘Well now,’ we said to ourselves, ‘maybe our good friend Mr. Caleb Kopf went somewhere he saw in the paper.’ But how to find the newspapers you had been reading weeks prior?”
Myerson sucked on his pipe and pointed the stem at Lyman.
“It was wise Mr. Doyle who had the epiphany. The privy.”
“I had it while in the privy,” said Doyle. “Nothing like a strong cup of coffee to lubricate the bowels.”
“Indeed. In the privy, about the privy. Because of course what does anybody do with an old newspaper? Why, they cut it up for repurpose in the privy.”
The two men chuckled.
“So we took all of the paper out of the coffeehouse privy and we put them back together, and then we looked at the ones existent on those dates we knew you inhabited Norwalk. We learned those dates from your landlady, dear Mrs. Farrington. You remember Mrs. Farrington, don’t you, Caleb? You stayed at her boarding house for a little over two weeks after steeple chasing out of New York.”
“Very talkative is Mrs. Farrington.”
“Oh, she’s a garrulous woman, all right,” said Myerson.
Lyman pushed himself up, spine against the stone. He managed to stay up.
“Well, one thing led to another and pretty soon we asked ourselves, ‘Wouldn’t it be something if old Caleb used part of that money he stole to buy himself a subscription to this socialist farm they’re talking about in the newspaper?’”
“I confess I was very doubtful over such a theorem,” said Doyle. “I apologize for my skepticism, Mr. Myerson.”
“Nothing to apologize for, sir. We all make errors in judgment. I myself was the strongest proponent of Caleb’s heading to Ohio. Before this contract, never in a million years would I have believed, with all that money in a carpet bag, that somebody like Caleb Kopf would go to ground performing manual labor so close to the city where he murdered his employer.”
In a strange way, it felt good for it to be spoken out loud. The thing Lyman had been living with for so long, to be said and acknowledged.
“How did that feel just now when I knocked your head against the masonry? Must’ve felt much worse for Mr. Tallmadge.”
Tallmadge. To hear that name from another’s lips made Tallmadge real, made the act real. It had never been intentional. It had always been an accident, a set of circumstances—of reactions.
“Evil snowballs, don’t it, Caleb? A few dollars embezzled to impress a young lady, and when Tallmadge confronted you—well, that’s when the molasses hit the pie pan. Then you emptied the safe and ran. And for a while you thought you were secure. But here’s the thing of it: Mrs. Tallmadge. She is not
