A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [68]
“I was there. Before they moved it. Half the town came to look. I couldn’t believe he was dead. Not after going through the war unscathed.”
“Oddly enough, that’s what Royston said.”
Wilton nodded. “You sometimes meet people who appear to have charmed lives. There was a pilot in my outfit who was at best a mediocre flier, shouldn’t have lasted a month, but he was the damnedest, luckiest devil I’ve ever known. Invisible in the air, the Germans never could see him for some reason, and he’d find the field in any weather, instinct almost. Crashed five times, and walked away with no more than a few bruises. I’d thought of Charles as having a charmed life too. I knew my own chances for surviving were slim, but we’d plan to meet, Charles and I, in Paris on our next leave, and I always knew he’d be there, waiting. Whatever happened to me.” Wilton shrugged. “That was comforting, in a strange way—certainty in the midst of chaos, I suppose.”
Rutledge knew what he meant. There had been a Sergeant in one company who always came back, and brought his men back with him, and men wanted to serve with him because of that. The Sergeant’s reputation spread across the Front, and someone would say, “It was a bad night. But Morgan made it. Pass the word along.” A talisman—bad as the assault was, it hadn’t been bad enough to stop Morgan.
He’d asked the sergeant once how he’d managed it, when he ran into him on a mud-swallowed road out in the middle of nowhere, moving up for the next offensive. And Morgan had smiled. “Now, then, sir, if you believe anything hard enough,” he said, “you can make it happen.”
But by that time, Rutledge had lost his own will to believe in anything, and Morgan’s secret wasn’t any help to him. He often wondered what had become of the man after the war….
Wilton looked at the light through his glass, almost as if it held answers as well as liquid amber, then said quietly, “I was as surprised as anybody when I made it through to the end of the war.”
Rutledge nodded in understanding. He himself had gone from being terrified he’d die to not caring either way, and then to the final stage, wishing it would happen, bringing him to a peace that was more desirable than life itself.
Returning to Charles Harris, as if he found murder an easier subject than war memories, Wilton cleared his throat and went on. “As I said, I had to see for myself. My first thought was, My God, Lettice, and my second was, I still don’t believe it’s true—”
He stopped. “Sorry, you can ignore that,” he went on, when Rutledge made no comment. “I wasn’t trying to sway your judgment.”
“No.”
Wilton took a deep breath. “I hear that Hickam is dead drunk at Dr. Warren’s. Or ill. The story varies, depending on which gossip you listen to.”
“What else does gossip say?”
“That you haven’t found much to go on. That you’re floundering in the dark. But that’s not true. I know what’s in the back of your mind.” He smiled wryly.
“If you didn’t kill Harris, who did?”
“The comfortable answer would be, ‘Mavers,’ wouldn’t it?”
“Why not Hickam, who claims he saw you speaking to Harris—arguing heatedly with him, in his words—in the lane? Why isn’t it possible that he knew where to find a shotgun, and decided, in that confused mind of his, that he was off to shoot the Boche? Or to kill an officer he hated? He wouldn’t be the first enlisted man to do that. In fact, he might just as easily have chosen you as his target as Charles Harris. A toss-up, given his drunken state.”
The look of stark surprise on Wilton’s face was quickly covered, but it told Rutledge one thing—that Hickam’s story might very well be true, that he’d seen the Captain and the Colonel quarreling. For Wilton had taken the bait without even questioning it. He’d immediately recognized the twist that could be put on Hickam’s evidence, and his mind had been busily considering that possibility just as alarm bells had gone off reminding him that—in his own statement—Hickam hadn’t witnessed any meeting at all, angry or not.
“I suppose I’d never thought he was capable