The Ballad of Frankie Silver (46 page)

Spencer stopped and listened. He heard the trill of a bird far off in the branches of the distant trees, but otherwise he had no sense of being anywhere except in a moist, cool forest on a summer morning. “Can we get to it?” he asked his companion. “If I help you down, would you be willing to take me there?”

“If you are bound and determined to go,” said Nora Bonesteel, sighing. “We’ve come this far. We might as well see it through.”

He eased his way down the embankment of the logging road, a three-foot slope of mud and weeds. Bracing his foot against a bush at the bottom, he reached up and took the old woman by the hand, helping her gently down the muddy bank. “Will you be able to find it in all this underbrush?” he asked her, looking at the unbroken tangle of woods. No remnant of a farmstead remained.

She nodded. “It will be near the creek. I’ll know.”

He stepped aside to let her pass, and then fell in behind her as she made her way through the woods as if she were following a path. She deviated from a straight line only to make her way around a bush or to skirt a fallen log. Spencer scanned the ground around them for snakes and wondered if they would ever find the site. He could have asked Mr. Silver to come with them, but he hadn’t wanted to share the experience with a stranger. Either he would feel foolish embarking on this journey with Nora Bonesteel or else he would learn what he came to find out by a means that would not bear explanation. Either way, he knew that he would never talk about this journey to anyone else.

They were just beyond sight of the road in a clump of beech trees interspersed with tall yellow-flowered weeds when Nora Bonesteel turned to him and put her hand on his arm. “Here,” she said.

The canopy of leaves was so thick that it seemed to be twilight where they stood, but Spencer’s eyes were accustomed to the dimness now, and he began to pace slowly through the weeds, looking for some sign that Nora Bonesteel was right. He had not ventured more than a few yards away from her when he found the rocks. “It’s here!” he called, motioning for her to come.

A wide, flat rock lay half buried in the black earth, nearly covered by the branches of a shrub growing beside it. “This must be the hearthstone,” said Spencer, kneeling down to examine it. “There are no logs or traces of wood that I can see. I had heard that the cabin burned.”

Nora Bonesteel nodded. “What else could they do?” she said. “The blood had soaked into the logs, into the earth. No one would have lived there.”

It was a crime scene, Spencer told himself. In twenty years, he had seen hundreds of them. You approached each crime scene in the same way. Picture the scene on the night the incident occurred, and try to work out what had to have happened. “December 21, 1831,” he murmured, thinking aloud. “The snow was knee-deep. The river was frozen. According to Frankie Silver, her husband Charlie had been to George Young’s place to get his Christmas liquor. But he came home. Yes. We know he came home.”

Spencer paused, expecting Nora Bonesteel to say something, but she did not, so he went back to his musings. “Christmas liquor.… Everybody said that Charlie liked a good time. Liked music. Liked to dance.… He’s only nineteen. He’s had quite a lot of George Young’s brew before he gets home. Of course he has. He comes home stinking drunk, and Frankie gives him hell about it. He hasn’t done his chores, and he’s been out partying, leaving her home alone with the baby. They get into a shouting match.”

“They were children themselves,” murmured Nora.

Spencer barely heard her. He was reenacting the crime now, as he had learned to do over the years in his own cases. “Why doesn’t Charlie storm out when the quarrel begins? Because it’s a bitter cold winter night. Deep snow. Frozen river. Nowhere to go. They’re trapped in that tiny, cold cabin. Two angry, shouting adolescents. Maybe the baby is crying. Maybe she’s sick, or colicky, or just plain hungry, and she won’t hush up.” The dark shape of a cabin had begun to appear in his mind, but he knew he wasn’t seeing it in the sense that Nora Bonesteel saw. The old woman had the Sight, but the picture in the sheriff’s mind was constructed out of cold reason. Cops did it at every crime scene. Medical examiners did it when faced with the map of injuries on the body of a victim. Cast your mind out into the possibility of what might have happened, and search with your educated instinct until you can determine what must have happened.

He plunged on into the narrative. “They’re teenagers. Not much self-control.” Trapped. Miserable.
If you don’t shut that kid up, I will.
He had seen it before. Often. This might as well have been a run-down trailer in a shabby backcountry park. A drunken good old boy, an angry young wife, a screaming baby. Nowadays they pick up the phone and call 911, and then he or LeDonne or Martha would have to go out and try to talk sense into them. Sometimes, to end the danger, they would have to take the raging husband away in handcuffs in the back of the patrol car. But the night that the Silvers fought it out—December 22, 1831—there was no one to call. No time. No time.

If you don’t shut that baby up, I will, Frankie!

“He picks up the gun.” Spencer was staring at the ground now, at the forlorn slab of hearthstone lost in a thicket of weeds. “He doesn’t mean it, really. He’s drunk and cold and the crying has driven him past reason. But he would have killed her. I’ve seen a dozen Charlie Silvers. A hundred, maybe. He would have cried all the way to town in the patrol car. He would have found God in the jail cell before the trial. But as sure as I’m standing here, he would have killed them both. He has a gun. It’s over in a second. You can’t take it back.”

He paced the black earth between the stone and the beech trees. “So she takes him out. She has to. He has the gun pointed at—her? At the baby? She has a split second to react, and she does. She picks up the first thing to hand, and she takes him out.” He looked at Nora Bonesteel, doubtful for the first time. “An ax?”

She nods. “I think it must have been. It’s metal and heavy.”

“So he goes down, like a poleaxed steer. She gets him just above the ear. That’s in the indictment. He’s lying there on the floor, not moving. It’s quiet all of a sudden. Even the baby has stopped wailing. And Frankie looks down at the body of her husband, and she feels—what?” Spencer looked at Nora Bonesteel, unsure of his ground now that emotions were called into play.

The old woman shook her head. “I’d be guessing,” she told him. “I think she would be feeling shock first. And then mortal terror. She has killed a man. But I’m not feeling anything from her in this place. She’s not here.”

Spencer looked at her, interested, suspending disbelief. He had role-played scores of crime scenes, but he sensed that what Nora Bonesteel was talking about was a different kind of seeing. Every mountain family had someone with the Sight, but if your job is modern law enforcement, you prefer to overlook the old ways. You deal in facts and evidence and cold reason: things that will stand up in court. Still, what could it hurt to ask her about the Silvers—this case had been closed for more than a century. He simply wanted to know. “What do you feel?”

Nora Bonesteel closed her eyes for a moment and nodded, as if confirming an earlier impression. “Sorrow,” she said. “Deep, wordless sorrow. Great loss felt but not spoken.”

Spencer blinked. Sorrow. Someone grieving? “Not Frankie?”

“No.”

“Charlie, then.”

“I don’t think so.” Nora Bonesteel closed her eyes, shutting out the here and now and reaching for that remnant of past emotion. “It feels, but it has no words,” she said. “I think it is the child.”

Spencer dismissed the thought. “Oh, the baby. Nancy. It can’t be her. She lived to grow up.”

“Yes, but on that night, little Nancy Silver was a toddling child without any words for what she had seen. That is what has been left here, burned in the air. It doesn’t matter what became of her later on. What I’m getting is the emotion she felt on the night her daddy died. A deep, wordless sorrow. The anger from that night is gone. I feel no fear anymore. Just that great, heavy sadness.”

“The baby saw it happen,” murmured Spencer, taking up the thread again. “Of course, she did. She had to. It was a one-room log cabin, and her parents are shouting loud enough to wake her.” He nodded to himself, recapturing the feeling of being there. “The baby is watching. Mama and Daddy are arguing, and then suddenly Daddy falls down and he doesn’t get up. He’s asleep. What happens then? What does Frankie do?”

Nora Bonesteel said softly, “Frankie is only eighteen years old. A likely
little
woman, folks said. Not five feet tall. Not ninety pounds.”

“Right.” Spencer nodded, picturing the girl in his mind. “She can’t handle this alone. She’s in over her head. She’ll want her daddy.”

“Daddy is in Kentucky on a long hunt.”

“Her mother, then. Someone who will believe her; someone who will be on her side. She goes home to mother.
I’ve killed Charlie, but it was an accident, Mama.
” Spencer looked around at the tangle of woods. “The Stewarts lived on the other side of the river. Where is the river?”

“Across the paved road,” said Nora Bonesteel. “Did you see the dirt road across from the logging trail? Likely that takes you down to the river. From where we’re standing it might be a mile or more.”

“The Stewarts lived on the other side of the river. The land on this side belonged to the Silvers. There’s no bridge. It’s the dead of winter.”

“She can walk it. The river is frozen. The snow is knee-deep.”

Spencer nodded. He felt cold in the pale sunlight that filtered through the Silvers’ woods. “It’s night. Bitterly cold and dark. Frankie has to walk through the deep snow and across the frozen river to reach her mother’s cabin. It will take her more than an hour, but she has to go. She’s terrified. But … but…”

“She can’t take the baby,” Nora Bonesteel finished softly.

“No. The night is too cold, and the snow is deep. She must hurry. She can’t take the child with her. It would slow her down. So she leaves it in the cabin in the woods. No one will hear it cry while she’s gone. The baby is alone and afraid—”

“Because Daddy won’t wake up.” The old woman shivered. “Even now I can feel that little child’s bewilderment and sorrow.”

It felt right. Spencer could see things falling into place. It must have happened this way, he thought. Of course Frankie would go for help. She was eighteen years old.
I’ve killed Charlie, but it was an accident. What must I do?
He began to pace again. “And what does her mother say? She’s shocked at first, but she’s angry, too, that Charlie would get drunk and try to kill Frankie and the baby. Barbara Stewart doesn’t waste any tears over him. If only her husband were home. What a time for him to be gone! But Kentucky is days and days distant. There’ll be no help from him. They must see to things themselves.”

“If Mr. Stewart had been home, we wouldn’t be here now,” said Nora Bonesteel.

“Right. We wouldn’t be out here because there’d have been no legend of Frankie Silver to draw us in. She’d have got away with it! She would have said that Charlie didn’t come home from the Youngs’ place, and no trace of him would ever have been found. Her father would have seen to that. A strong adult man—a trapper and a woodsman—would have been able to hoist up Charlie Silver’s body like a sack of flour and haul him away. Into the deep woods perhaps. Or he could have broken the frozen ground and buried the body whole. But Isaiah Stewart wasn’t there that night. Neither was the oldest son, Jack. All Frankie has to rely on is her mother, and her brother Blackston, who can’t be more than thirteen.”

“But they have to do something.” Nora Bonesteel understood what the sheriff was doing now. She saw that she needed only to nudge his thoughts along and he would reach the conclusion on his own. It was all there. You had only to picture the scene and it all came clear, whether you had the Sight or not.

He nodded. “They have to do something. They don’t trust the law, and they don’t understand that self-defense isn’t considered murder. They think they have to hide the evidence that the death ever took place. Two women and a young boy can’t lift the dead body. At least not easily.”

Nora Bonesteel said, “The snow is knee-deep and the river is frozen.”

“Lord, yes. If they try to take the body out of that cabin, they’ll leave tracks through the snow that a blind man could follow. Besides, there’s no way to dispose of the body once they get him outside. The river is solid ice. They don’t have shovels—a pick, maybe, but it’s hard to dig frozen ground with a pick. It would take too long. Even the wild animals and the scavengers can’t be counted on to devour the remains in deepest winter. So the Stewarts are limited to what they can do with Charlie’s body inside the cabin.” Spencer ticked off the impossibilities on his fingers. “Can’t drag him away to the woods without leaving tracks. Can’t bury him. Can’t dump him in the iced-over river.
Burn him!
”

“It was bound to occur to them,” said Nora Bonesteel. “They were desperate.”

Spencer sighed. “I wonder if they knew how useless it was to try to burn him. Probably not. People think of fire as all-consuming. They wouldn’t have known that a body is mostly water.”

“They ran out of fuel, I expect,” said Nora.

“I think so. Yes. One of the legends is that shortly after Charlie disappeared, Frankie asked her brother-in-law Alfred to chop some wood for her, and Alfred replied that he’d seen a whole cord of firewood stacked by her cabin a day or so earlier. The Stewarts used up that cord of wood trying to burn the body, but they ran out of wood before—”

“Before they ran out of Charlie.” Nora Bonesteel permitted herself a grim smile.

“That’s why the body was cut up. It wouldn’t all fit into the fireplace in one piece.” Spencer stepped away from the hearthstone and closed his eyes for a moment.
There.
They cut him up
there. And fed him into the fire piece by piece.
Who did? He turned to his companion. “You know, there has never been a case—not one that I can find—
anywhere
—of a woman younger than thirty, working alone, dismembering a human body post-mortem. Not one case.”