Dead Men's Boots (40 page)

“Please sit down,” Ruth Seaforth said, and she disappeared through another door. I crossed to the photo instead and examined
it. If it was the Seaforths, the period had to be mid-1950s. Father and mother at the back, arm in arm but with no real suggestion
of intimacy: the man smiling, although the look in his eyes was a little stern and serious.

Three teenage boys, then, forming the middle row. All much of a muchness, all broad, boisterous, manly self-satisfaction,
looking as though they’d been caught in a rare moment of stillness and balance.

Then Ruth and Myriam, gazing solemnly up from where they sat in the front row. I was probably imagining things, but they didn’t
look happy. The expression in the eyes of the girl on the left, particularly, was like a message in a bottle: “Help, I am
stranded on a desert island, and I need to be rescued.” They were dressed in identical blue crinolines—Sunday best. They looked
like dolls, and that wasn’t a comparison I was happy with right then.

Juliet had sat down on the three piece’s sofa. I went and joined her on it. “Feeling any better?” I asked.

She gave me a sour look. “Castor, the next time you ask me how I feel, I’m going to break the little finger on your right
hand.”

“I’m left-handed,” I pointed out.

“I need to be able to escalate for repeat offenses.”

Ruth Seaforth came in with a tray on which there were three glasses, a jug, a plate of biscuits, and a neatly folded stack
of napkins. She set it down on the table in front of us, poured the lemonade, and then sat down in one of the chairs. “Help
yourselves,” she said, indicating the refreshments with a slightly trembling hand.

I picked up a biscuit, took a bite—it was about as tasty as dried Polyfilla—and washed it down with a sip of lemonade that
was ice-cold and refreshing and so sour that my lips were sucked down into my throat.

Juliet ignored both food and drink. “It must have been devastating,” she said, “when they returned the verdict on Myriam.
The death sentence.”

I winced at the bluntness, but Ruth took it on the chin. She nodded. “It was hardest for my father,” she said. “He had to
meet people every day, and he felt as though they were all looking at him differently, as though they saw Myriam when they
spoke to him. He said”—she hesitated and shook her head as though denying the words even as she spoke them—“he said that it
would have been better if she’d never been born.”

“That’s a terrible thing for a father to say,” Juliet observed. I made a mental note to ask her in a calmer moment if she’d
ever had one herself. After all, if she was somebody’s sister, then presumably, she was somebody’s daughter. A baby Juliet
was a scary thing to contemplate.

“Yes,” Ruth answered, still sounding calm and almost detached. “It was a terrible thing. But it was like him. My father was
a very cold man.”

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 anymore,” 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 of 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, Mr.— I’m sorry, I can’t remember your name.”

“Castor. Felix Castor.”

“Mr. 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?” She 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 mealymouthed 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,” Ruth 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 took more than he could handle. I gather
that’s easy to do.”

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

“How long ago did these things happen, exactly?” I asked, breaking the strained silence.

“A long time,” said Ruth. 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, Mr. 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 examining them for scars or imperfections. “Somebody had to come and save me. And somebody did.”

She paused, but she didn’t seem to have finished speaking, and neither I nor Juliet jumped into the gap. After a few moments
Ruth 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 recognized 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 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 the door out of my hand 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 up with her.

“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?”

“I’ll tell you in the car.”

We retraced our steps in silence, back to our bloodied, bowed Cobalt, and I unlocked the doors. When we were inside, we sat
in silence for a moment. Then, since Juliet didn’t speak, I started the car and got us out onto the road. There was no way
we’d make it all the way back to Birmingham in this undead heap, but we could drive into Brokenshire and then make some calls,
see where we had to go to drop it off, and pick ourselves up another ride for the homeward leg of the journey. Best pick another
road, though. The one we’d come on was probably still blocked.

    
Eighteen

T
HE WAITRESS AT THE GOLDEN CAFÉ HAD CLEARLY TAKEN a fancy to Juliet. The fried-chicken platters she brought us were huge even
by American standards, which meant that for a Brit like myself, with a delicate constitution, they were a little way short
of a suicide note. I picked fastidiously while Juliet talked.

“The blond man from out of town,” she said. “The one who killed Tyler Seaforth, the first brother.”

“Yeah.” I ran the conversation through in my mind, placed the reference. “The guy in the ice-cream suit. What about him?”

“He wasn’t just from out of town. He was from England. London, in fact. That’s why Ruth almost had a heart attack when she
heard your accent.”

That made a lot of sense, now I thought about it. I’d figured at the time that the mention of Myriam had made Ruth weak at
the knees, but there couldn’t be many other reasons
besides
Myriam why strangers would come calling, so that hadn’t made a whole lot of sense. In a different way, though, this didn’t,
either.