Read More Than You Know Online
Authors: Beth Gutcheon
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Romance, #Contemporary
attract attention. If I got there and Connie was gone, I thought I would
lie down and die. At least I would be in the right place for it.
I found it easily enough. It was in a sheltered copse, off the road.
Once sunny, with a view of the bay over farmland, it was now set
around with tall evergreens, dark, and hardly visible from the road,
unless you went right in.
Connie was there. He had pulled his truck in on a spur of aban-
doned farm road, where it couldn’t be seen. He was sitting on a head-
stone, very composed, just waiting. I thought he was the most beautiful
man I had ever seen.
When we kissed, it felt as if the trees around us had grown there
just to give us a safe hiding place; we came together as if our thoughts
had kept pace and we had never once misread each other since the
moment we had parted.
When we could bear to let go of each other, we moved to a
spot in the late afternoon sun and sat on an almost illegible stone
slab. By tracing nearly vanished grooves in the stone with our fin-
gers, we read the name Mehitable, and the date 1801. I told Connie
everything that had happened to me on the night we were parted,
and afterward. He said that his father was violently angry; he had
never seen him stay so mad for so long. Edith had made him feel
like a servant.
“She wrote him a letter saying that it wasn’t suitable for us to
see each other, and she was sure he would understand.”
“Suitable!”
“Yes, well, that’s the word that’s done it. He’ll calm down for
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a long time and then something will make him think of that letter, and
he just goes off his head. He’s hitting the bottle pretty hard, and it
isn’t improving him.”
“Mary said he was keeping you in—I got the impression he had
you locked up.”
Conary shrugged. “He pretends to lock me in and I pretend to
let him. That house has more holes than a basket. I’ve been able to
get out since I was ten. But I try not to make it too obvious; I don’t
want him to get huffed and take it out on Mary.”
“Does he know you’re out now?”
“Yes. I’ve been released. He was forced to it, since the blue-
berries are coming in and he needs the money I earn. We’re raking
up on the Kingdom Road this week.”
I had tried to get Connie to talk about his family the day we
spent together, without much luck. Now it was like the kissing; once
he started telling me what he never told anyone else, he didn’t want
to stop. It was as if he wanted me to know everything about him so I
could keep his story safe and make it come out right.
“He wasn’t like this when our mother was alive. I think everyone
was so surprised she had married him, it gave him some pride he
needed.”
And what had she seen in him? I thought about Edith and won-
dered why my father had married her. Why did people marry people
who were mean?
I didn’t ever want to stop touching him, listening to him. “How
long can you stay?”
“Not long. It took me a while to find a place we could meet. Is
this all right?”
“Yes, I like it.” I did. It felt peaceful and safe. Conary kissed
me again, and time must have slipped a cog, because almost at once
the clearing was filled with long shadows.
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“We have to go,” he said, and we kissed some more.
“Can you come tomorrow? Can you get away?”
“Yes. They pay by the bushel, not the hour. If I want to leave
early it’s my lookout. Can you?”
“I’ll try to get off a little early. Connie—can I have something
of yours?” I had told him about Edith and the flannel shirt.
He grinned, that gorgeous smile, and unbuttoned his work shirt.
I was about to say I wanted something smaller, that I could hide, when
he stripped off the white undershirt he wore underneath and gave it
to me. It made me smile like a fool to see him standing there, pleased
to have been asked for something it was in his power to give. The
shirt had an intense smell of sun and sweat and him. They said raking
was hard work, and I believed it, and was glad of it.
Connie kissed me again, and when I put my hands on his bare
back, I was shocked at how different it felt from touching a body
clothed. I wanted to say something, but there were no words.
“We’ve got to go, or we’ll never get out again.”
“I know.”
We went on kissing.
Finally we parted and Connie put on his work shirt. He said, “I
forgot . . . I found something. Look at this.” I followed him across the
clearing. There were some almost unreadable headstones, many from
the eighteenth century, and then one much newer. It read, AMOS HAS-
KELL. 1862–1874. GOD IS MY MARINER.
I said, “But . . . I thought he was never found.”
“I thought so too. I had looked for him in the Haskell plot in
the new cemetery.” The new cemetery was opened just before the Civil
War.
“Maybe it’s some other Amos Haskell. Would the dates be right
for Sallie’s brother?”
“They would.”
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*
*
*
I thought about the grave marker all the way home. It was odd
enough for anyone to have been buried there at that late date. Could
the Osgoods, could Claris herself, have been so cruel as to withhold
from Danial the news that the body had come in? To bury Amos
privately, among Osgoods, so that . . . what? So that he would never
lie alone on a deserted island, instead of being where his relatives
could remember him and tend his grave? But Danial couldn’t have
agreed. If he had, the grave would have been in the new cemetery.
And no matter what he had done, he was still Amos’s father . . .
I was thinking there must be some kind of record of burials at
the church, and even considered stopping, until I saw on the steeple
clock the lateness of the hour. Edith would be furious, and suspicious
as a snake. If she guessed that I’d been with Connie, I didn’t know
what she would do.
Life is full of surprises. When I got home I found Stephen by
himself in the living room eating cinnamon toast and feeding Whitey
the crusts. From the mess in the kitchen, I knew he had made it him-
self. He was reading the
Bangor Daily
funnies and getting butter on
the carpet.
“Where is Mother?” I asked him.
“Upstairs,” he said, and then began to tell me about his excite-
ment of the afternoon. Kermit Horton had invited him to see his pig,
which had the thumps.
“She made a noise like this,” cried Stephen, and he began imi-
tating a pig with hiccups. “And you know what he told me? He said
the pig has a stomachache, and when Mrs. Foss has a stomachache,
she eats a spoonful of gravel! She got the idea from her chickens!”
We laughed and laughed, Stephen because it gave him the giggles,
and I because I was in love and felt as if I’d swallowed a planet full
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of joy. I had Conary’s undershirt hidden in the bag I carried with me
for my books, and my wallet and my diary. The smell of it utterly
thrilled me.
Edith appeared eventually and cleaned up the mess in the kitchen
without saying anything about it. She made us canned hash with
poached eggs on top for supper. She looked pinch-faced and puffy-
eyed. She had already heard about the pig, but she let Stephen make
the pig noise twice more, and even tried to laugh. Then she said, “I
have news, children. It’s quite exciting. Your father has been offered
an important job, and he’s moving to Chicago.”
That certainly stopped things cold. Stephen stared at her, chew-
ing with his mouth open.
I said, “We’re moving to Chicago?”
Edith looked at me with hard eyes. Trust you to find the painful
point and bring your weight down on it, the look said.
“
He’s
moving to Chicago. The company won’t pay to move the
whole family, at least not at first.”
“He’s moving away without us?” Stephen got the picture very
clearly.
“It’s a promotion,” Edith said. “We should all be proud. When
he gets established, we can join him.”
“I don’t want to live in Chicago,” Stephen said. “I won’t know
anybody.”
“If you have to, you’ll make new friends,” said Edith. That was
all that was said on the subject for the rest of the meal. Edith was
eager to get away and go upstairs, and Stephen wanted her to go, so
he could ask me what it was all about.
I didn’t know what it was all about. I wasn’t at all sure that the
cover story was the true one, but there was no way to find out. I did
know that Edith was plenty upset, and I wondered what would happen.
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Spring 1886
AllthewhilethepeopleofBealIslandwereinanuproarover
the murder, the three women who might have been presumed to know
most about it sat together in the upstairs room of the schoolhouse. The
men of the town could be heard rushing around outside shouting orders
at each other. It seemed to the still, silent women as if they were playing
some game out there. Someone had been sent to the main, and by after-
noon more men arrived from Unionville. There was a photographer and
Dr. Bliss, acting as coroner, and a couple of reporters from
The Citizen.
Naturally the crime scene had been thoroughly disturbed by people of
the village being officious and helpful. The rumor was already abroad
that Paul LeBlond had fled at dawn wearing women’s clothing. No one
seemed to be able to find much of anything telling except the disgusting
details which would later be released by Dr. Bliss about the contents of
the victim’s stomach.
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The women of the household, Mrs. Claris Haskell; her daughter,
Sallie; and the schoolteacher boarder, Mercy Chatto, were waiting quietly
when the men from the sheriff’s office got around to them. By then the
men were pretty excited about the foreigner Paul LeBlond and deep down
the rumor well about Sallie’s rows with her father. The early betting was
that if Paul had done it, with or for Sallie, she too might try to flee. An
ancillary theory was that Paul had gone ahead, and Sallie had killed her
father to keep him from following them.
The women, sitting silent together, had not guessed that that was
what would be said about them. They were all thinking about something
else. They were thinking that if none of them talked about what happened,
all the noisy ones outside would have to go away.
It had been said that the Haskells were arrogant, but had they
stopped believing that anyone outside themselves could judge anything
they did? Apparently. The sheriff’s man was ready to disabuse them.
A reporter from
The Citizen
described the scene. When the deputy
said he was placing Sallie Haskell under arrest, she started and turned to
her mother. That seemed natural. At such a moment, you would turn for
protection to the one who had always sheltered you before, even knowing
that you had done the unforgivable. Thousands read, the following Thurs-
day, of the terrible and suspenseful event. Later the reporter was made to
describe it again and again during the trials.
Sallie looked to her mother, and the reporter watched the dawning
horror in her eyes as she saw that her mother would or could do nothing
for her. Minutes later, the mother stood at the upstairs window of the
schoolhouse and saw her daughter being helped into a rowboat with her
hands cuffed together in her lap. The daughter stared intently from the
boat up at her mother with an expression that befitted a murderess. The
mother watching from the upstairs window returned the gaze, with a look,
the reporter thought, of one who was watching her whole world drawing
away from her, and quietly going mad.
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Edith’s concentration on my crimes and punishments had
been broken, and, with it, the blights of the summer seemed to vanish.
There were no more strange noises in the house, no fuses blown, no
doors latched at night found standing open in the morning. I spent my
days in freedom; I left the library early and came home late for supper,
and Edith didn’t seem to notice.
Mysteries that had been beyond my reach now started offering
their secrets, like jammed knots in a high wind that suddenly free
themselves, allowing the mariner to ease sail and avoid disaster. Mrs.
Allen asked me to take her in her husband’s car to Unionville; her
husband was in the hospital there with gallstones and she had never
learned to drive. I drove her there three times, and while she visited I
was free at last to wait in the Unionville library, poring over brittle
yellow news accounts of the murder of Danial Haskell and Sallie’s
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trials. The accounts were florid and repetitive, but reading them was