Cassandra Khaw
IT began with a murder in the late summer, which is to say it started with a natural repudiation of the act. When news came forward of what had transpired—the woman, tidily flayed and bolted to a tree in the adjacent village—the village of Asbestos woke with rage. How dare their neighbors. Rural living was already besieged by sneering gossip about how cousins would marry their way into monstrosity, allegations of nonconsensual coital relations with the livestock, claims that its parishioners lacked both education and adequate hygiene routines, had bad politics and worse music and nothing like common civility.
It did not need this.
To add homicide to their dossier of purported sins; it was unthinkable.
Like Asbestos, the township of Cedarville was incensed. Mr. Carpenter, who, despite his family name, had no facility with timber but made up for such inadequacy—at least in his own head—by having more than a passing gift for people, sent out little personalized letters to each of his constituents. As the mayor, it was his responsibility to provide order, dispense reassurance, and sustain morale. What happened in the village wasn’t just shocking, it was disgusting too, a reminder of how flimsy civilization was, a veneer under which still rutted and writhed all kinds of paleolithic barbarisms. To be human, Mr. Carpenter believed, was to work relentlessly from dawn to deep dusk, perpetually vigilant against the shadow-self.
If any of you hear of such repugnance, wrote Mr. Carpenter, please make use of official council channels to inform us of what you’ve discovered. Your anonymity, of course, will be preserved.
The channels in question were, in actuality, a small bird box installed outside the local arboretum, much too small to fit every one of the township’s missives, but luckily only a handful of the population were properly civic-minded. Over the years it had been a square of farmland, a community garden, a green house, a short-lived manor torched to its bones by the young daughter of the last family to inhabit its walls, several pubs, a graveyard for the pets of the township’s rich, and, prior to the inauguration of the arboretum, a corner store operated by an immigrant pair. Cedarville had especially fond memories of the last. Mr. Wong and his late sister were, though no one would admit such feelings in sober company, novelties. Up until their arrival, Cedarville was comprised entirely of Irish, French, Russian, Swedish, and German immigrants, all of whom produced children who then enjoyed romances with one another, creating a population who were, to a man, a heavily dilute salmon in color.
To see that much melanin and the refugee gods the Wongs brought with them, wages of a superstitious life unburdened by Christ, was invigorating. It was a reminder there was a world outside the fishbowl of Cedarville, lives outside the schedules of almanacs and shipping routes, places to go and things to do that did not require going home and were far, far from even the scrutiny of the things that lived on Mr. Richardson’s farm. Exotic, the township of Cedarville understood, was an egregious description when applied to another human being.
Mr. Wong and his sibling were very exotic.
No one else in the township kept a shrine in memory of a deceased relative. At most, the local Catholics lit votives while murmuring sheepish orisons, aware the baptized dead had absconded to a better place. Mr. Wong, his round face ablated into a massif of grief, jowls and haggard cheeks hanging low as his spirits, brought his late sister—six years younger than him once, and only sixty-two when she died—food, too: soft white buns, spiced cakes, austere bowls of sour vegetables, white rice, ladders of fatty pork belly.
And incense.
Always those joss sticks to be lit with her morbid repast.
The people of Cedarville knew to anticipate Mr. Wong by the smoky attar of camphor, which clung to him like a malaise of the spirit. Not that anyone saw him with any regularity anymore. Loss had converted Mr. Wong into a hermit, and regressed his life to native pleasures: ethnic cooking, calligraphy, foreign movies, Allegra the postwoman said, which cost a fortune to import. He avoided his neighbors, lived frugally on the profits from the sale of his store, reserved his chatter for the altar over which a monochrome portrait of a teenaged Ms. Wong— nineteen, with a stratospheric bouffant, and makeup too old for her gravely cherubic face—presided.
I think they were lovers, came an anonymous note, printed on periwinkle cardboard and neatly sleeved in a long cream envelope. Were it not for the daub of rose perfume, a wet storm-tossed summer scent, Mrs. Gagnon might have kept her identity secret. But like so many others in Cedarville, she was an animal of habit. It’s why they never married anyone else. Fifty years of living here and neither of them could find a spouse? They must have been fornicating.
The use of the word “fornicating” was a very Mrs. Gagnon thing, Mr. Carpenter noted, as were her lavender fascinators with their taxidermized nightingales, as was her insistence the Old Testament provided better instruction than its successor, and the way she took sacrament like a harlot traversing her wedding night: with gusto, without hesitation, with the pleasure of years of practice. Mr. Carpenter and Mrs. Gagnon were not friends but Mr. Carpenter trusted in her instincts and carefully inventoried her indictment of Mr. Wong. If nothing else, it was proof that Cedarville had at last acclimatized to Mrs. Gagnon.
For years, it was Mrs. Gagnon who was hounded by the gossips. Over fifty years ago, she had come to Cedarville like a portent: thrice divorced, a pageant alumni, richer than was courteous, a woman to be envied and thus, one to resent. Now? Now, she was part of the body of Cedarville, holied by their church, distrustful as any native of foreign intrusion.
Mr. Carpenter made a note to relay his congratulations. It was nice to see Mrs. Gagnon finally accepted among her peers; he liked it when good things happened to deserving people, “deserving” being the operative word here. Mr. Carpenter, though he understood such ideology was unpopular, even untenable in the current epoch, believed virtue was a currency. Kindness should not be extended to those who did not provide commensurate payment. Love, divine or otherwise, was a privilege to be earned. And that was the problem with the world these days. People expected too much for too little and that avarice, Mr. Carpenter believed, was the reason they’d all be found one day nailed to a tree, throat and temples and trunk woven with a stigmata of thorns.
The days yielded to weeks. Summer fallowed to autumn and Mistress Smith’s dogs grew restive in their kennels, eager to be done with the soporific heat and set loose on their annual hunt. Traders came and went. The township fattened with imports. Cedarville was beginning to forget what had occurred in that little village to the west when a man from Asbestos arrived. He was not a tall man, not a handsome one save when he smiled, stocky in that way farm boys often got, with a genial face and clever green eyes, a flurry of soft black curls for hair, the kind in which hearts and fingers so often become entangled.
Mr. Carpenter met the man—Mr. Jacobson—at Cedarville’s only gas station.
“Harvest ain’t for weeks,” he said. “I didn’t expect anyone from Asbestos to be here so early.”
“The harvest?” said the man, clearing his throat. “No, no. I’m not here for that. I came by to offer some news from Asbestos.”
Mr. Carpenter cocked his head. “News?”
“News,” said Mr. Jacobson.
The two shared a quiet like a last cigarette, night ashing the dusk sky, that glorious wine-gold leaching into a dead man’s grey. The gas station squatted beside the bridge which led into Cedarville, scabrous with rust, a spindly thing still waiting for permission to die.
“What kind of news?” said Mr. Carpenter, when it became clear the man would not speak unless prompted.
“Well, Asbestos had a meeting several weeks ago and we discussed what’d happened, you know?”
Mr. Carpenter nodded. “Yes. We all know.”
“We figured,” said the man. “It had to be an outsider. One of those truck drivers who pass through sometimes. The guy who comes by twice a year to buy ceramics from Mary Sue. The rich couple with that big cabin in the woods. Someone like them.”
“But not,” said Mr. Carpenter with the care of a man fording barbed wire, “someone like Mr. Wong.”
“Probably not.”
A non-answer but not unexpected.
“Could be the teenagers who come for their yearly retreats. They’re feral at that age.”
Mr. Jacobson nodded and scratched under his chin, his nails raking florid rows down the white road of his throat. They were filthy with what could have been grease or gore, a deep jammy dark that seeped softly along the cuticles. Exactly like blood, Mr. Carpenter thought. But Asbestos, though starved of good farmers, had slaughtermen and butchers and ranchmen. The blood, if it was blood, likely had justifiable cause to be there. And if it did not, there were ways to deal with a murderer so striking.
“Maybe.”
“So how does Asbestos plan to deal with this revelation, then?”
“Well,” said Mr. Jacobson, and Mr. Carpenter wondered if the man sang when he was not in the abattoir, entrails gnarled along his forearms, a slop of red scudding along the floor beneath his feet, greasing the drains so the chum from his work escaped with ease. No reason for him to not sing in the knacker’s yard; entertainment wasn’t sacred, not like the grain or good earth. “We decided it wouldn’t be a bad idea to close off Asbestos for a few months. Make certain whoever it was who did it knows we won’t stand for such behavior. That they’re not welcome here.”
Mr. Carpenter waited. He could tell a request was coming.
“Anyway,” said the man. “We were wondering if you’d do the same. Show of solidarity and all that. We’ll give you discounts on meat and wool.”
“Could even try setting up some kind of barter system,” said Mr. Carpenter. “Meat and wool for cider, pies, preserves, whatever else you want from our orchards.”
“And your fields.”
Mr. Carpenter bobbed his head. “Depends on if you can talk Mrs. Taylor into coming around to check our generator every now and then. The turbines are starting to fall apart.”
“What happened to Mr. Smith?”
“The repairman?”
“Mm.”
Mr. Carpenter said nothing further until the man took the hint.
“I’m sure we can figure out something. Between you, us, the other communities in the county, we should be able to keep ourselves going for a while,” said the man.
Mr. Carpenter thought on this, aware that when he spoke, he spoke for two thousand and fifty-six other individuals, and that he held this responsibility because none of them desired any culpability in municipal affairs; that he was, in some respect, an effigial figure, something to burn should the winter linger past its welcome. It was a knowledge that had left him anchored to cowardice for too many decades.
But today felt different.
Today felt like an occasion for change.
Months from that pivotal instant, Mr. Carpenter would replay the encounter in his head, wondering how he’d come upon the epiphany, if his subconscious had received instruction from the dying summer, some sign necessitating rebellion. If he had read those augurs in his morning oatmeal, in the calamities listed in the morning news, in the flight of the crows of Cedarville, who had always been uncommonly large and eerily astute. Regardless, whatever possessed him did so with a vigor that’d become alien to him, and Mr. Carpenter, there in the ruin-sodden dark, said to the man, vehement for the first time since his youth:
“I think so too.”
* * *
It was easier than anyone thought it would be.
A few calls made in an apologetic tone, citing half-true excuses and old sins, altercations between Cedarville and this truck driver or that. A number of emails dictated to the Elliots’ oldest daughter, a brittle melancholic girl precociously married to the manners of mid-age, then sent through the only computer in the township’s solitary school. A single somewhat obsequious letter, mailed to those in charge of the county; more formality than anything else. Both Cedarville and Mr. Carpenter could not recall the last time the administration even took note of their existence.
The matriarchs of the church ran bake sales like wars, organizing them with autocratic pomp, all manners of kitchens conscripted into the effort and not one allowed the freedom to refuse. This was about community. There was no opting out. So for weeks, Cedarville smelled warmly of butter and baking pies, gingerbread and blackberries cooked down to syrup, mulled wine steeping in vast stock pots, their surfaces pitted from long use.
Men and women and giggling children came from adjoining communities, bringing with them money and other oblations, the latter far, far more precious to Cedarville than currency. After all, there would be amnesty from the outside world. No point to money if it can’t be spent to acquire things you couldn’t trade for, luxuries like Parisian coffee grounds or fresh books.
Slowly, a frenetic joy developed through Cedarville, spreading as gossip might, and all at once, before anyone knew how, there were wreaths on every door, windows garlanded with red, fairy lights threaded along the roofs, and a nightly choir who sang hymns in lieu of carols, most of them in languages Cedarville still spoke. It felt like Christmas although Christmas was still a few months away, and also something older, something old enough that it could not be named, only observed as an absence. Some of the younger people joked about agrestic paganism and how memory could be held in the marrow, how bucolic practices were often scaffolded on grisly traditions, and wasn’t it true that everything Christian has its beginnings in blood? Perhaps it was that.
But no one looked too deeply into their postulations, not even them. No point in doing so when there were dances to attend, visitors to entrance, meals to share, drinks to sip and guzzle and splash onto one another, whether in ecstasy or rage or some amalgamation of the two. By the time winter arrived, cauling the branches with frost, everyone was convinced they could do this forever.
Except Mr. Wong.
Where the rest of Cedarville was nourished by the recent changes, Mr. Wong withered. The fat slicked from his small frame. He no longer brought food to his sister’s altar, migrating the paraphernalia into the cottage he’d shared with her. He avoided his neighbors; he shrunk. As much a wraith now as the memory of his sibling, Mr. Wong, for a while, seemed like he would grow smaller and smaller, until at last he was nothing but a faint unhappy noise.
Then, Mr. Carpenter made the error of calling a town hall, six weeks after he brokered a deal with Mr. Jacobson, the man from Asbestos. It was not the first of such meetings, but it was the largest, the most officious of the lot. Everyone came, dressed in their festive best, and they stayed even if they could not find room to fit into the church, haunting the windows. The children, Mr. Carpenter thought, were especially darling. Though Cedarville was enjoying a surfeit of largesse, it remained a pragmatic township, taught at the crib to ration and take care of how it made use of its bounties; the winters here could be cruel. As such, most of the finery was reserved for the youngest, and how radiant they were under a patina of such doting! The girls wore embroidered bonnets, the boys damasked waistcoats, and there was satin for accents and goose-down in the lining of their velvet coats, and mother-of-pearl shining from their buttons. Mr. Carpenter, who’d never wanted his own offspring, ached nonetheless at the cherubic vision, full of pride, filled with saudade for the life that ended with his wife’s own. Had the Devil provided him the option of being preserved here, in the thick resin of this moment, Mr. Carpenter would have begged for him to take his soul.
It was perfect up until Mr. Wong spoke.
“This is wrong.”
His voice, rarely discerned save as a mumble, was atonal and clamorous. It skidded along the higher registers, becoming shrill, but was otherwise arthritic in the way typical of the aged. But for all its thinness, Mr. Wong’s voice was not lacking in volume. His declaration boomed through the chatter, and Cedarville collapsed into a watchful quiet.
“Sorry,” said Mr. Carpenter from his vantage at the podium. “But how so?”
Mr. Wong strode down the corridor, a finger jabbed at Mr. Carpenter, or perhaps the wizened Christ looming behind the latter. The town halls were, by and large, held in the settlement’s only church. Whoever had commissioned the building had worshipped authenticity, and so the Messiah, starved to his pith, possessed not a beatific expression but one of pained ecstasy, the Holy Spear still jutting from beneath his ribs, viscera unspooling from the wound while stained-glass angels gaped longingly.
“This is wrong,” said Mr. Wong again. “Closing the borders like this. It’s wrong.”
“It sends a message,” said Mr. Carpenter calmly.
A hoarse bark of laughter. “What message? That we are stupid? If there is a wolf here trying to eat us sheep, what do you think it is going to do? It is going to laugh. It is going to be so happy to know that the sheep won’t make contact with their shepherds.”
Mr. Carpenter decided then that what grated at him was neither Mr. Wong’s diatribe nor the content of his soliloquy, but the architecture of his grammar, his sentence construction, the lack of flow in his speech. His delivery was stilted for all its passion, his enunciation lamentable. It troubled Mr. Carpenter as Mr. Carpenter believed elocution was a vital practice, and if one wanted to speak in public, one owed it to their audience to speak well and with great charm.
“The authorities believe the murderer has moved on,” said Mr. Carpenter. “Unless you have reason to believe differently.”
The furnaces kicked in. A low hum suffused the church and to Mr. Carpenter, made briefly superstitious by his vexation, it seemed like the building despaired of Mr. Wong’s presence too. Why, Mr. Carpenter could not be sure, although the more he interrogated the notion, the more ill-ease he experienced. To a great degree, he understood this to be subconscious projection, a trick of the mind, much like the movement of the seraphs in the corner of his eye. Nonetheless, it is impossible to witness a holy place passing such sour judgment on an individual and not feel a frisson of caution.
Mr. Carpenter said none of this, of course.
“I think the killer could be a local,” spat Mr. Wong. “You people don’t need to look at me like I’m crazy. You know it’s true.”
“Our county is small,” said Mr. Carpenter, so very carefully. “And we are blessed for that reason. We know each other and we know one another to be good.”
The crowd murmured agreement.
Mr. Wong swore loudly, in a tongue none but him and his dead sister spoke. Then, in English again: “Fuck off. Fuck off with your stupid ideas. You think you’re all saints? I know who you all have been fucking. I know what you do. I know which of you beat your children and which of you cheat the tourists. Don’t think I haven’t been paying attention.”
Had that bitter statement been spoken under different circumstances, Cedarville might have done nothing but scrunch down, abashed to have its fabrications and its pretenses at genteel behavior so bluntly shucked. But there, in the church, amid those festive days, with so many of them garbed like country kings, a very different emotion took root. It was not horror that burgeoned in the breasts of Cedarville’s finest, not self-loathing, not guilt, not introspection or mawkish repentance; no, nothing constructive at all.
It was rage instead, subtle yet consuming, even righteous in its timbre. Rage at the insult of being laid bare without consent. Rage at being coerced into examining old sins when the wise knew better than to exhume the past; at being named for what they were. Spouses glanced warily at their partners while adulterers looked meekly to old lovers. Parents glowered at their brood, daring them to author complaint, to suggest that the punitive measures they’d doled out were disproportionate to the error. Liars smoothed the creases of their fine suits. Cedarville’s wealthy, what few there were, consoled themselves with a familiar paean: that there were occasions when they had been kind, that they were, at least, more pious than their neighbors. And all of them, they kept a sliver of their fury for Mr. Wong, for without him they would not be made so uncomfortable.
This was his fault. This unwanted accounting of misdeeds, their sudden uncertainty, the crumbling of their faith in not just each other but themselves. This was Mr. Wong’s doing and some manner of reparations would need to be made.
“These are serious allegations you’re levelling against the community. Your community,” said Mr. Carpenter, mouth pinching. “Unless you think yourself better than us somehow.”
Mr. Wong drank in the unhappy crowd. He had lived in Cedarville for so long, the memories of his birthplace felt like an abstract, a story told to him and misremembered as his own. He understood this thought as false but fact had little to do with reality. Truth was merely raw material. It was the story, the consensus belief, that mattered.
“I think,” said Mr. Wong, aware things would be very different by the end of the sentence. “That I am more honest than the rest of you.”
* * *
The first month of isolation bore a celebratory air despite the blizzard which came as escort. Cedarville kept its houses bedecked with decorations, though by the second week there was no one to admire their colors, not with how the ice grew in sheets, laminae of glass pressed thickly to the walls and the pavement. The municipal committee tried at first to salt the walkways, only to have their work undone in minutes, and after that consigned themselves to reserving their supplies for emergencies. There were many more days of this algor weather to survive. Likely, there would be tragedies too: people to unearth, the ailing to migrate from home to hospital. They would need the salt then to ward against slippage.
The blizzard howled on.
Snow rose to the knees of the rare few who persisted in trudging their way through the biting cold. Then it went higher, barricading families within their homes. The mood remained jovial, nonetheless. Children sang from second-story windows. Their fathers gossiped for hours on the phone as their mothers clumped in the kitchen, straining for news, for anything, the barest gasp of change, from static-plagued radios, half-filled mugs of lukewarm tea spread over every surface. This was a strange time, a new epoch, one without apparent compass, and Cedarville moved rudderless through each pale week. If not for what happened with Mr. Wong, they might have felt an incursion of despair. But Cedarville persisted, propelled by something not dissimilar to hope.
However, even optimism requires feeding. The congeniality ebbed as the blizzard seared away to blue sky. In the beginning, Cedarville regarded this as a reprieve. Though the temperatures were too arctic for anything to melt, snowfall at least was no longer accumulating. But it was cold in a fashion it had not been for decades and the air lacerated skin. To breathe was to abrade lungs, leave mouths bloodied from the kiss of the chill. Cheeks did not pink but inflamed. And it hurt to be outside so people withdrew indoors, burrowing close to their radiators and their fireplaces, wrapping themselves in promises this would be over soon.
For this reason, it took a week for Mrs. Gagnon’s body to be found.
The corpse was discovered crammed into a woodshed, propped upright against the back wall so that, from afar, it appeared as though Mrs. Gagnon was surveilling the stacked timber, and perhaps disapproving of what she saw. The old woman bore no wounds; her death was prescribed to exposure. What no one could answer was the why of the circumstances leading to Mrs. Gagnon’s passing. She had no cause to be in the woodshed and while foul play was not improbable, it seemed a negligible hypothesis. When Mrs. Gagnon’s cadaver was extracted, it had worn a small thoughtful frown: the expression of a woman grappling with an inconvenience rather than her murder.
But if not murder, then what drove Mrs. Gagnon to squeeze herself into that dark space and wait there until her blood blued under her skin? And wasn’t that the same look that dressed the face of the corpse they had found in the homestead? That poor woman with her similarly frost-smudged stare, mouth bloodied into a new shape; she had been beaten first—tenderized—before being affixed to the tree by the hems of her flayed skin. It had been ritualistic and cruel and inhospitably strange, even here where farmers talked sometimes of black dogs in the woods, hounds with a corona of headlight eyes floating where they shouldn’t. Despite what had been visited on her body, she had looked more thoughtful than tortured, even melancholy. “Pitying,” someone had told Mr. Carpenter, who wished immediately he had not been told such; it unsettled him to think of a corpse despairing over the fortunes of the living.
As much as he found such thoughts alarming, what troubled Mr. Carpenter more were the maudlin rumors seeping through Cedarville. He foresaw misfortune coming for the township if he did not mitigate their transmission. So, as best able, Mr. Carpenter steered the bavardage, first to the notion that Mrs. Gagnon, weary of an illness she’d kept private, might have killed herself; and then, when that failed to take hold, to the idea her demise could be attributable to whoever was responsible for the travesty in the neighboring homestead. The thought brought no comfort but that was not its purpose. Mr. Carpenter’s intention had been to circumvent any belief that the culprit, if there was indeed one, might have been one of Cedarville’s own, and at this he succeeded.
A new energy shortly possessed the township, replacing the malaise. When Mr. Jacobson returned, bringing with him meat in exchange for produce, he was run out of the township before he could cross the bridge to Cedarville, chased back down the road by a coalition of laughing youth with beautiful antique rifles and the chatter of the latter’s spent casings upon the shining ice. No one chastised the boys—and they were boys, could not be anything but boys, their sisters having lost too much sleep counting the dwindling cans in the pantries to come out—when they returned. Instead, the girls queued at their windows to wave, as though it were war heroes they were welcoming home.
Mr. Carpenter wrote letters to his constituents the following day, reminding them there were deer in the forests, elk and fat grey rabbits, turkey even—for those lucky enough to spot what rare few remained following the harvest culling. If such game wasn’t sufficient, there were fish under the ice of the lake: fat trout, walleyes, needle-teethed pike, all dreaming sweetly of summer. Cedarville’s larders would stay filled if not fat from Asbestos’s tithing. It was unfortunate, yes, but Cedarville, he noted, had survived worse recently: the tragedy of Mrs. Gagnon’s passing, for one, and the more regrettable elements of what happened with Mr. Wong. Things would be well.
Then the phone lines went.
The constable quickly established the damage as natural, the wires a casualty of the blizzard. Ice had toppled several utility poles, taking with them a snarl of cables. Satellite service continued to function, albeit at reduced capacity, and Mr. Carpenter wrote again to the residents of Cedarville, suggesting that the community take this period of inconvenience as an opportunity for reflection, a chance to interrogate one’s interiority as the year shambled to the solstice. It was so easy to deprioritize family, to forget oneself and one’s values in the capitalistic existence espoused by the urban elite. This new silence, even if flawed, should be treated as what it was: a homecoming of a kind, a reversion to a more naturalistic state.
In support of this, the church began hosting Mass daily. When the pastor, Mr. Lambert—soot-haired, despite his advancing age, but spry still in that way some men became when sapped of youth’s insecurities—grew too hoarse from the new schedule, the municipal council enlisted volunteers to create a rotation, and the nature of the services—although never deviating from Christian phylum— diversified infinitesimally. The residents of Cedarville, between boarding up their properties, brought tea cakes and book clubs, ad hoc celebrations to the church, and for a few weeks things were as Mr. Carpenter prophesied: they were well.
Up until the Sunday when they discovered Mr. Lambert pinioned to the Christ in the church, belly split from the floor of his throat to the roof of his groin, his entrails the same festive crimson as the decorations limply garlanding the gutters trimming the roof outside. There were no messages, no meaning in the butchery, no calling cards, no clues as to who might have killed him or why; only a knife on the ground beneath where his viscera drooped. Flies clotted his flayed body and sang as piously as any choir. The Elliots’ oldest daughter, who had been the one to find Mr. Lambert’s corpse, said she saw a woman’s silhouette flickering in the window of the dead man’s office. She claimed too that there had been a smell: incense, thick as what clung to Mr. Wong’s skin.
But the old man was gone, as was the altar he had built for his sister, and the house in which he lived alone with her ghost was gored of its contents; its doors were locked, strung with police tape. As such, it was a surprise to Cedarville when a pack of teenagers, looking for privacy, discovered the body of the Elliots’ oldest daughter dangling from a rope lashed to a ceiling beam, her expression pensive and unexpectedly relieved.
Mr. Carpenter called an immediate assembly. The township gathered to comfort the Elliots, who endured the knowledge of their daughter’s suicide with a pragmatic silence, husband and wife clinging to one another, neither shedding tears. Their sons stood in a line behind them. Like their parents, they did not cry, although their eyes gleamed wetly in the wan grey light of the afternoon. Upon delivering his condolences, Mr. Carpenter proceeded to warmly remind his constituents that they were not alone, that the church still operated, that there were neighbors, that there was no cause to succumb to grief as that poor girl had, and that he himself was there and available at any hour, ready to provide company to anyone in need.
At the close of his speech, Mrs. Elliot rose from her seat.
“What happened with Mr. Wong wasn’t right,” she said. Mrs. Elliot had lived in Cedarville for twenty-five years, but her accent was still that of her bayou past. “The woods know it. It’s punishin’ us for that.”
Mr. Carpenter, who believed in nothing save the tangible, nodded. “Sometimes, tragedies happen.”
“It wasn’t right,” said Mrs. Elliot with more insistence. “My daughter’s dyin’ wasn’t right either.”
Mr. Carpenter nodded again. “You have our condolences.”
The woman went silent. She tucked grey curls behind a small round ear, looking to her husband for support, before speaking up again, this time with oracular diction, her expression grave.
“We’re going to die for what happened.”
“Mrs. Elliot.”
She shook her head. “It’s just how it is. We did wrong. It’s going to make it right.”
“Mrs. Elliot,” said Mr. Carpenter. “I understand that it is easy to catastrophize during moments of such grief, but, believe me, there is no magic adjudicator waiting invisibly to pass judgment on us.”
The woman laughed then, a bitter noise. “Naw. Of course not. S’because it already has.”
“Mrs. Elliot,” said Mr. Carpenter for the second time.
“We’re going to die,” she said, as though the statement alone was sufficient explanation, and sat down again. “And it said you’re next.”
No one said anything after that.
The postwoman, Allegra, found Mr. Carpenter the next morning, with the door to his cottage slightly ajar. He sat slumped, very delicately, in his favorite armchair, a bloom of grey brain coating the wall behind him. The interior admitted no evidence of robbery. It stood as neatly as the bowl of cold oatmeal, the glass of milk, the gun, and the stack of unopened letters atop the late Mr. Carpenter’s desk. Like Mrs. Gagnon, like the Elliots’ oldest daughter, like Mr. Lambert, like Ms. Wong when they dragged her from the water all those years ago, he was found adorned with a small, thoughtful frown.
The constable died the subsequent day.
Then the Elliots, immolated in their farmhouse.
Then Mistress Smith, whose corpse supplied one last meal to her hounds.
As Mrs. Elliot had predicted, the deaths continued, inexorable as time.