A crash of lightning startled her. “Ooh!” She tittered at herself. “That one got even me!”
She lowered her window a crack and listened to the thunder. “Something strange going on. Somewhere close.”
She scanned the sky until lightning flashed again. “Behind us, wasn’t it? My storm seems to sense a contingency.”
She drew the flask. “Turn us around, and I’ll give you a little sip.”
Chapter 29
Anatomy of Despair
Settlement era
Bennington went to the tiny, wooden-barred window and tried to peer out. It was too high, even for a man of his height, to see much more than the roofs of the main street’s other structures.
Turning to Jonas Cooke, stationed at a chair beside the door, he said “Can’t you let me take her place? Poor Chloris doesn’t deserve such abhorrent treatment.”
“And you do, good sir?” Jonas lit his pipe. “Is that a confession?”
Bennington knew it was pointless to answer. “Tell me then, Jonas. Was Hezekiah’s corpse there in my barn when you first searched? Or did you place it just before ‘finding’ it?”
Jonas approached without hiding his smugness. “Perhaps your false God will arrange your release, hmm?”
“Our God is the same.” Bennington went to the window wall and sat on the floor. “How deeply is your father involved with Conal’s scheme?”
“Don’t speak of my father,” warned Jonas.
“Only you then?”
“Best not to speak at all, perhaps.” Jonas placed the candle lantern closer to the holding cell but well outside of Bennington’s reach and settled in his seat.
* * * *
Chloris couldn’t imagine trying to sleep like this, stooped in the pillory. But some time had passed, perhaps an hour, during which she had not been so aware of her predicament. The air had grown cooler, the blue-gray cast of the moon upon the ground, brighter.
Her agony, deeper.
After a lifetime of labor-caused aches and pains, Chloris had never hurt this much. Her back, wrists, ankles and neck all bore a dull burn she couldn’t have imagined.
Relief was only a call—and a false confession—away. She shook her head violently, and instantly regretted it.
She wondered if she could somehow do herself in. Death seemed not like a terrifying plunge into the unknown but rather a sweet respite from the ever-increasing misery of her circumstances.
God forbade it—or so claimed the church.
Trying to conceive some method of suicide, if only as a distraction for now, Chloris suddenly had a sense that Death was already close. With its proximity came the sudden return of its inherent terror.
She would not betray Master Bennington. But she would call for Jonas and gladly accept his abuse if it forestalled this sudden certainty of imminent doom.
“Jonaaass!” she called, and again, louder.
* * * *
Bennington woke and stood from the floor, his joints crackling. For a moment, he was confused to find himself in this strange…
He was in the town jail, and it was his maid he heard, shouting as if the devil himself was upon her. His horror escalated when he recalled she was in the pillory
“Jonas!” he called. But the Cooke boy, whose father should have known was too deep a sleeper for night-watch duty, had his head back, dozing.
Chloris called again, more stridently than Bennington had ever heard.
He went to the wall of bars and used his own rumbling voice. “Ho!” Jonas popped up as if on a spring. “What is it!?”
“Chloris is calling for you!” said Bennington. “She’s in danger!”
“This best not be some scheme of escape,” warned Jonas, taking up his rifle. “My father and brothers are more vigilant than I.”
* * * *
It was at Sloane’s dry goods store, just behind her and to her right, that Death was, in the dark under the overhang.
“Come nowww, Jonas!” she screamed. Chloris could not see, hear or even smell anything unusual. She felt it. It was familiar, and terrible.
She was relieved to hear Bennington bellowing too. Soon the shopkeepers would rise and come to see. She had considered how much like a guillotine was this infernal device. Now it seemed like that exactly, a brace to hold her head still for removal. Chloris feared the curious would not arrive soon enough.
Sounds of movement from the jail eased her terror only a little. Jonas was coming, but in no hurry.
“Hush, woman!” he called. She did not obey.
His dirty boots appeared in her periphery, but reassurance did not accompany his appearance.
“Something’s there!” She tried pointing to it.
“If you want release, you may start confessing.” His voice carried groggy disdain. “Do you?”
“Yes. I will tell all.”
“And all means what?”
A scraping of wood from Sloane’s store sent her heart plunging into terror.
Jonas heard it too and spun fast. “Who’s there?”
“Halloween in you?” asked the shadow in a raspy voice.
Jonas’s rifle clashed with something heavy and fell away. Twisting her head to the point of near-unbearable pain, Chloris made out a silhouette against the dark blue sky.
An axe.
A fleshy thunk-crunch hinted to Chloris what had just happened. The two cloven halves of Jonas Cooke, falling messily to either side of her eye line, told her more.
“Yes!” said Everett Geelens. “There’s Halloween!”
Voices rose from nearby. The townsfolk, finally starting to rouse.
The familiar, burlap-clad face nearly touched Chloris’s. A groan of dismay came from behind it.
The axe rose again, then the sound of metal striking metal. A split second later, the chains closing the pillory fell to the ground.
Chloris pushed up the top board and fell to her knees, keeping her hands smashed against her eyes, certain the axe would fall on her next.
“Chloris!” called Bennington from his cell, the only other sound besides that of something heavy being dragged.
The moment of silence before shopkeeper John-David Sloane himself arrived seemed to Chloris longer than the hours she had spent in the pillory.
“Who’s making the disturbance h—?” Sloane’s complaint was cut short by his stunned shout.
Chloris finally opened her eyes.
His lamp held high, Sloane backed away from the corpse. But before the dark settled where the lamp had withdrawn, the dim candlelight revealed Everett’s handiwork: the two halves of Jonas Cooke, propped opposite
