The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [166]
These men, followed by several others, climbed the high front yard and the high porch of the Monday mansion. The sheriff spoke first: “Good morning, ma’am, and Mr. Monday. I see y’all have done already read the paper.” Neither of them responded, although her father nodded when the sheriff said to him, “We’ve got to ask the young lady a few questions, if it’s okay with you.”
They asked her more than a few questions. But she maintained, truthfully, that she had not expected Nail Chism’s escape. Of course she felt that his conviction and incarceration were wrongful, and he certainly deserved to be out of prison, but she knew nothing about his escape other than what she had just this moment read in the newspaper. She was aware that he had been imprisoned and tormented by the threat of death as long as he could stand it, so she could certainly understand how he might be desperate for freedom on the eve of an unprecedented fourth attempt at executing him; but still, his escape came as a total surprise to her.
“You have no idea where he might of could gone?” the sheriff asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” she said.
“Ma’am, my guess,” the sheriff said, “is that you just might be hiding him up in your house somewheres. Mind if we look?” He addressed this question to her father, not to her.
And her father, bless his heart, said, “No, but you will have to get yourselves a search warrant to go into my house.”
“We done already thought of that, sir,” the sheriff said, pulling the search warrant out of his hip pocket and showing it to her father and then to her. She felt some panic. Would they find the canvas bag? Or, for all she knew, maybe they would find Nail: maybe he had reconsidered her offer to hide him in her attic and had already hidden himself up there. She did not want these men to go into her house. The sheriff looked at her again and said, “If you’ll just lead the way, ma’am.”
Her mother and Cyrilla and Dorinda were having breakfast in the kitchen, and the servants, Ruby and Sam, were also there, and the lawmen just said, “Excuse us,” and went in and out of the kitchen quickly, and spent little time on the first floor of the house before heading for the stairs. They gave only a perfunctory search to the bedrooms and closets of the second floor before the sheriff asked her father, “Where do those doors go?” Her father explained that one door led to the attic storeroom, and the other two led to the south turret playroom and the north turret, where Viridis had her studio. The sheriff instructed his deputies to split up and try all three doors. He himself would accompany her up the north turret stairs, to her studio.
There were no closets or cubbies or hiding-places in her studio. Just her easels and her supplies and the cabinet in which she kept her drawings, its flat drawers much too narrow to conceal anybody, but the sheriff pulled them out anyway, one by one, and asked, “What’s all this stuff?”
“Do you mind?” she said, not answering him. “You won’t find Nail Chism in there.”
The sheriff moved around the room, looking at its contents; he studied her most recent painting on its easel, a winter landscape of Stay More done from her sketches. She expected him to ask her if that was the village of Stay More, but apparently he did not recognize it as a village or as a landscape. His glance moved onward and came to rest upon the canvas bag, loosely closed atop her table. He picked it up, hefted it, asked, “Mind if I look in this?” and started to open it.
She did not have to lose her temper; it lost itself. “Sheriff Hutton! You have a warrant to search for a man, not to pry into my personal effects!” She lowered her voice: “Especially not items of…of feminine hygiene.”
“Of which? Oh.” The sheriff blushed and gingerly replaced the bag. “Sorry,” he said. He moved on around the room. “Never can tell,” he said. He headed for the stairs and went back down.
As the men were leaving the house, having satisfied themselves