Dead Men's s Boots

I stepped in on cue. ‘Some men are cold to strangers, but to their family they’re entirely different.’

Ruth smiled a pained smile. She bent down to pick up a biscuit, but her eyes remained locked on mine. ‘My father was very cordial with strangers,’ she said. ‘It was to his wife and his children that he was – hard.’

‘Does it hurt you to talk about this?’ Juliet asked, as direct as ever.

Ruth shook her head. ‘Not any more,’ she said. ‘No. It used to hurt, when he and my brothers were still alive. Now that I’m the only one left – now that I know all this is going to die with me – it doesn’t seem to matter so much. I’d like to know, though, why you need to find out these things. And I’d like to know where you saw Myriam.’

I told her the story of Doug and Janine Hunter, or at least the parts that were fit to print: I went very light on the forensic details. Ruth Seaforth sighed a lot as she listened, and after I was done.

‘It sounds like her,’ she said, seeming not the slightest bit surprised to hear about her sister’s return from the dead. ‘I mean – the violence sounds like her. You have to understand, Mister – I’m sorry, I can’t remember your name . . .’

‘Castor. Felix Castor.’

‘Mister Castor. I don’t believe that violence was something she was born with. I think it was my father’s gift to her.’ After a pause she added: ‘To us all.’

‘You don’t strike me as a violent woman, Miss Seaforth,’ I demurred.

‘Don’t I?’ Ruth dabbed her mouth on a lace-edged napkin. ‘No, maybe not. But that’s mainly because I’m old, isn’t it? Old people always seem harmless. I guess because they move slowly and look a little vague sometimes. It doesn’t mean there’s any less fire inside. It just means you don’t get to do so much about it.’

There was a bitterness in her voice that surprised me. I tried to get the conversation back on track. ‘So would it be fair to say that you and Myriam had an unhappy childhood?’ I asked. ‘I mean, did you feel that-?’

Juliet cut right through my measured and mealy-mouthed phrases. ‘Did your father abuse you?’

Ruth folded the napkin three times with excessive care before putting it back down on the plate. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He did.’

‘Sexually? Or did he just beat you?’

‘The one shaded into the other. I was happy when he died, because he was the fountainhead of violence in this house. It all flowed from him. To our brothers, Zack, Paul and Tyler. To Myriam. And to me.’

‘How did he die?’ I asked.

Ruth seemed to consult her memory – or at least she paused, looking into the depths of her lemonade, before she answered. ‘Well,’ she said, almost dreamily, ‘he slipped and fell off the roof of the barn when he was fixing it for winter. I wrote to Myriam to tell her, and she wrote back that she’d already heard. She said she was happy he hadn’t died in his bed, but sorry it wasn’t slower.’

‘And your brothers?’ Juliet asked.

Another pause. ‘Tyler died first,’ she said. ‘Some men from out of town came into the Pit Stop Bar in Caldwell. A blond man in a white suit, they said, and two others. They picked a fight with him, and they took it outside. Beat him to death, more or less, though he lived a couple of days on a machine.

‘Zack got himself drowned in some mud, over by Caldwell Creek. There’s a wallow there that’s very deep, and he fell into it and didn’t come out. Perhaps he was drunk. It’s not that difficult to climb out if you’re sober.

‘And Paul died from a heroin overdose. That was a big scandal, as you can imagine. Nobody even knew you could get heroin around here back in those days. The doctor said it had to be the first time Paul had ever tried it, because there were no needle marks anywhere on his body. So I guess he didn’t know how strong the dose was, and he just took more than he could handle. I gather that’s easy to do.’

When Ruth finished this litany of disasters, nobody spoke for a moment or two.

‘How long ago did these thing happen, exactly?’ I asked, breaking the strained silence.

‘A long time,’ she said. She met my gaze and stared me out.

‘While Myriam was still alive?’

‘Yes. That long ago.’

‘So is it possible . . . ?’ I left the question hanging. Ruth put her glass back down on the tray, hard. It hit the side of the jug, and the ringing sound hung in the air for a second. She tensed, seeming to be about to stand, but the impulse spent itself in a sort of tremor that passed through her. Still she didn’t avoid our eyes: she seemed to me to have made a decision at some point in her life not to duck or flinch from anything.

‘God works in mysterious ways,’ she said, her voice very low. ‘Or so we’re told. But He doesn’t have a monopoly on that, does He, Mister Castor? It was an awful thing. Of course it was. But it spared me. All those deaths . . . spared me. I was twenty years old, and I was hoping to escape this house by getting married, but my father wouldn’t let me out and he wouldn’t let any boys come by. He said he’d had one daughter go wild on him and he wasn’t going to have another go the same way. So I stayed here, with him. And with my brothers. All the day, and all the night.’ She looked at her hands, spreading the fingers slowly as if she was examining them for scars or imperfections. ‘Somebody had to come and save me. And somebody did.’

Ruth paused, but she didn’t seem to have finished speaking, and neither I nor Juliet jumped into the gap. After a few moments she took up again in a different tone, softer and more wistful. ‘She only came back to visit a couple of times, and it was always in secret, because she was afraid they’d hold her for Tucker’s murder. But she used to write me letters. About Chicago. About the things she was doing there. They were full of lies – but nice lies. Lies that would make me happy for her. And it did make me happy, to think that she was free of this place.’

‘Why do you stay here?’ Juliet asked. There was no indication in her voice of what she was feeling, but I recognised the look on her face. All things considered, it was probably a lucky break for Lucas Seaforth and his three sons that they were dead already.

Ruth’s eyebrows rose and fell again. ‘It’s my home,’ she said. ‘It’s the only place I know, really. And it’s the only place she’d ever be able to find me, if she wanted to come and see me again. And I’m too old to start over, anywhere. I could move, if I wanted to. Insurance paid off a lot when my father died, and it all came to me when there was no one else left to lay claim to it. But I don’t really have any use for money. And I don’t really have any use for travel. I’m happy where I am.’

The last sentence was belied by the tears that sprang up in her eyes and overflowed suddenly down her cheeks. Water in a dry place: she blinked it away almost angrily, but it kept right on coming.

‘You’ll have to go now,’ she said, her voice perfectly clear despite the rain of tears.

‘I’m sorry, Miss Seaforth,’ I said, meaning it. ‘We didn’t want to upset you. But there’s one more thing we’d really like to do while we’re here. If you could just point us to where Myriam’s grave is, with your permission we’ll visit it before we leave.’

Ruth stood up and folded her arms with brittle ferocity. ‘No,’ she said.

‘No?’

‘No, you do not have my permission. Like I said, you have to go. I’m sorry, it’s not because you’ve offended me in any way. I’m just very tired now, and I need to sleep. I hope you’ll take account of my age and do as I ask.’

‘Of course.’ I stood up, and Juliet followed my lead. ‘Thanks for all your help, Miss Seaforth. And I’m sorry if we’ve trespassed on your time. We’ll let ourselves out.’

Ruth watched us all the way to the door, not moving an inch. I opened the door and stood aside for Juliet to go first, but she waved me through and then didn’t follow. ‘I’ll be a moment,’ she said.

I turned and stared at her. ‘What?’

‘I’ll be a moment, Castor. Wait on the porch.’ She took hold of the door and shut it in my face.

I think it was all that talk about abusive men that made her so brusque – and as symbolic humiliations went, it was one I could walk away from without a permanent limp so on the whole I was cool with it. I sat on the porch swing and waited for Juliet to finish whatever business she had with Ruth that required my not being there.

She came out about a quarter of an hour later, shot me a look in passing and walked on down the steps back into the thick, encroaching undergrowth. I jumped to my feet, ran and caught her up.

‘Is it this way?’ I asked, falling in beside her.

She didn’t look in my direction, or slow down. ‘Is what this way?’

‘Myriam’s grave.’

‘No. It isn’t.’

‘Then-?’