originally published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

by Kathy Lynn Emerson
©2005

The body fetched up against the pilings of the covered bridge at the upper end of Harlow Street.

A physician, as well as one of Bangor, Maine's coroners, Dr. Benjamin Northcote was accustomed to grievous wounds. As remains went, these were less stomach-turning than most. He gave the corpse a cursory examination, fully expecting to determine that the dead man had drowned.

He probably had . . . but that did not explain the oddly-configured hole in his back.

Once the deceased had been loaded into a wagon for the trip to Ben's surgery, he returned to the bank of Kenduskeag Stream to study the rapidly moving current below. With the first spring thaw of 1888 had come flooding, and on this bright morning in early April, the water level was still high.

A short distance downstream the Kenduskeag joined the Penobscot River. Upstream there were rapids. Every year about this time some damn fool got drunk, tried to paddle a canoe through them, and ended up going over Six Mile Falls upside down and backwards. The fortunate ones came away from the experience with nothing worse than a good soaking. Ill-fated paddlers were thrown out onto the rocks and more than a few had died as a result.

That was not what had caused this man's death.

Constable Mayhew, one of Bangor's nine newly-elected city marshals, came up beside Ben. "Had a watch and some change on him," he said in a laconic drawl. "Musta been a suicide."

They shared a humorless smile at the familiar rule of thumb: bodies found floating in Kenduskeag Stream or the Penobscot River with empty pockets were assumed to be victims of robbery and murder; those who still had their possessions had usually taken their own lives . . . or fallen into the water and drowned while under the influence of drink.

"Did you notice the way the dead man was dressed?" Ben asked. "His clothes were in every particular the attire of a woodsman—gray kersey trousers, two red flannel shirts worn one on top of the other, and high spiked boots. The only thing missing was the little black felt hat. If he'd been found in the Penobscot, I'd have wondered if he might have perished in a log drive."

The river drivers—called "Penobscot men" in these parts and "Bangor Tigers" by people from away—were a breed apart from ordinary woodsmen. They risked their lives countless times every year to get their heavy, slippery product to market. Ben knew that the days of bringing twenty-foot pine logs to Bangor sawmills were long past, but even the four-foot lengths of spruce used to make pulp for paper could do a lot of damage if a man slipped and fell into the water among them.

"Too early," Mayhew said. "The drive hasn't started yet. Besides, nowadays, by the time they get to the last stretch before Bangor, all the logs are lashed together into rafts and piloted in."

Although Ben had lived near the Penobscot River all his life, and could tell when the spruce arrived by the pungent perfume in the air, he had to admit he didn't know much about the process of getting logs to market. River drivers and other woodsmen inhabited a world far different from his own. Their paths did not usually cross unless one of them needed medical attention.

"This fella prob'ly come in from one of the camps," Mayhew mused. "Been woodsmen down in the Devil's Half Acre for the last couple of weeks."

"Any serious incidents?"

"No other bodies. Just the usual brawls. The drive can't begin till ice out and she's still frozen along the West Branch. Got to figure a few river drivers use the time between the end of cutting and the start of the drive to visit the groggeries and whorehouses. Looks to me like this fella was one of them. Prob'ly got into a fight, got killed, and whoever done him in dumped his body into the stream to get rid of it."

"Why not throw him into the Penobscot, then? That way there'd be a chance the body would be swept out to sea."

Mayhew thought for a moment, then shrugged. "Killer was too drunk to figure that out, maybe. Killed him up this way, so he threw him in here."

Ben was thoughtful as he walked back to his office on Spring Street. Mayhew's answer didn't satisfy him. "Up this way" was an area of houses, mills, lumber yards, and the occasional factory—not the usual haunt of the woodsmen. As Mayhew had said, they tended to congregate in the Devil's Half Acre, the waterfront area where the Kenduskeag and the Penobscot met and small hotels and boarding houses catered to woodsmen and sailors, giving both groups plenty of opportunity to spend their hard-earned pay on delights of the flesh. *

It was some time before Ben could devote his full attention to the cadaver. He'd had a waiting room full of living patients whose ailments needed to be seen to first. When they had all been tended, however, he closed himself into his surgery and took a closer look at the man they'd pulled out of Kenduskeag Stream.

Most of the bodies that came Ben's way presented no mystery when it came to cause of death. A wife had been beaten to death. A man had been shot in the head or the heart. An old woman had expired because some bloated and diseased organ had finally stopped functioning. This autopsy yielded nothing but more questions.

Ben had some familiarity with stab wounds and with the marks left by a hatchet. This injury had not been caused by either knife or ax. He took careful measurements, but they brought him no closer to an answer. He had no idea what kind of weapon had been used. Something thick but sharp, thrust in with considerable strength. His mind called up an image of a medieval pike, but that didn't quite conform to the dimensions of the injury either.

More peculiar still, the unknown weapon had not passed through either layer of the victim's well-worn shirts before it plunged into flesh, nor had it pierced his suit of underwear. There were a few gray strands in the wound. They did not match either fabric.

Ben had removed all the man's garments and now examined them with care. The underwear had once been vivid scarlet in color but the wool had faded to a whitish red and had been patched with what looked like bits of old mittens sewn neatly over the holes.

Given the wound in his back, Ben concluded, the victim would have been incapable of changing his clothes after he had been stabbed. Therefore someone else had put him into these distinctive garments.

Ben went back to the body. There was enough damage around the victim's face and neck, most of it due to striking rocks in the stream, to make it impossible for him to tell if the fellow had also been hit on the head before he'd gone into the water. He did notice that the cheeks and chin were close-shaven and that, although there was some slight tanning, the skin was not sunburned.

Frowning, Ben glanced at the man's hands. Instead of hard, reddened knuckles and an abundance of calluses, he found unblemished skin and neatly trimmed fingernails. A winter's worth of hard outdoor work would have left signs. Whoever this man was, he had not spent the last few months of his life cutting down trees and stacking them on river ice.

When he examined the victim's feet, he had further confirmation of his conclusion. There were several healing blisters but no evidence the man had suffered from the one constant complaint in logging camps—wet feet.

He turned to the victim's boots and sniffed cautiously, but he smelled nothing worse than unwashed socks. Stories he'd heard from other doctors led him to believe that all woodsmen coated their feet in lard, in an attempt to keep them dry. When their toes got scaly from being constantly wet, they doctored them with white lead. He found no trace of either substance.

On the other hand, the big, buckled boots themselves seemed genuine, their soles bristling with wrought steel calks. The traffic of hundreds of woodsmen wearing boots just like these left Bangor's wooden sidewalks a mass of splinters every spring and put pockmarks in the floors of every barroom and hotel.

The boots fit the victim. The way they conformed to the bunion on his right foot suggested that he'd been wearing them for some time. And yet there was something not quite right about them.

An hour later, Ben completed his notes, covered the body with a sheet, and took off his heavy canvas apron. Although he could simply have scheduled the coroner's inquest and been done with the matter, instead he sent a message to Constable Mayhew, asking him to come to the surgery first thing in the morning and bring a photographer. *

At home that evening, Ben checked on a private patient—his brother, recovering nicely from an unfortunate incident a week earlier—before joining his mother for supper.

"The official cause of death is drowning," Ben told her as they sipped postprandial coffee. He'd already recounted all the details of the case. "That appears to be the only thing I can say with certainty."

"An interesting puzzle," Maggie Northcote murmured. "Why don't you bring the body here so I can have a look at it?"

"I don't think so, Mother. Besides, the office is more convenient for what I have in mind. I plan to ask Mayhew to round up all the woodsmen in town to see if any of them recognize him."

"The one who killed him will, but I doubt he'll want to help you investigate the crime."

Ben took a sip of the coffee, found it too hot, and set the delicate china cup aside. "What if our victim wasn't a woodsman at all?"

"You think someone dressed him up to look like one?"

"Sounds preposterous, I know."

"Was the victim a good looking man?"

The question surprised him, but he answered her seriously. "Passable. Keep in mind I did not see him at his best. Medium height. Broad shouldered. Somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties, at a guess."

"Unless he was grotesque, and perhaps even then, you must look for a lady, my dear." She grinned at him. "A woman, at least. I believe female companionship has always been one of the two reasons Bangor is so popular with woodsmen in the spring. The other is white eye."

Taking her coffee with her, she left the dining room for the parlor. Ben followed, a reluctant smile tugging at the corners of his mouth at her use of the popular term for rum. The smile widened when he saw that she was waiting for him posed next to a newly installed bookcase. On the shelves were five volumes bound in Moroccan leather, their titles picked out in gold leaf.

Ben reached past her to take Tales of Terror off the shelf. On the front was the embossed crest of the Bathory family, from which Maggie herself claimed to be descended. The same crest glittered in intaglio from a ring on her index finger. "Excellent work," he said, smoothing one hand along the binding.

"The collected works of Damon Bathory deserved no less," Maggie assured him. "This body of yours might make a good story," she added after a moment.

He knew he shouldn't encourage his mother's morbid interest in murder, but he was curious. "If it were, do you see a woman merely as the cause of this man's death, or would she be the killer?"

"Oh, certainly she killed him. Just look at where the body went into the stream."

"We don't know where—"

"You must brush up on your local history, Ben." She gave him a pitying look as she interrupted him. "Have you never heard of Lovers' Leap? That is the spot from which two Indian lovers, forbidden to marry, leapt to their deaths rather than be separated."

Ben frowned, recalling that there was a cliff upstream from the bridge. Situated on the east side of the stream, it rose perhaps a hundred and fifty feet high. A man tumbling into the Kenduskeag from that height and at that point might well end up where this one had been found.

"I like it," Maggie said, more to herself than to him. "I would not cast a woman of ill repute in the role, of course. Instead, I see this bounder using and abusing some sweet young thing until at last she can take no more and fights back. She seizes a kitchen knife—" Maggie grabbed the fireplace poker—and stabs him in the back. Then he returns from the dead—a zombie, I believe, is the proper term—and stalks her. Naturally, the handsome city coroner—that would be you, my dear—saves her life. They live happily ever after . . . and provide his poor old mother with grandchildren."

"Mother, this is not one of Damon Bathory's horror stories, nor is it a piece of romantic twaddle. This is real life. And I've already found the woman I intend to marry," he added as an afterthought.

"That solution is too obvious anyway. You know I prefer convoluted plots."

This masterpiece of understatement forced a laugh from him. "I do thank you for your suggestions, Mother. I'll keep them in mind. But allow me to hope that the real answer is the least complicated of explanations." *

Ben spent most of the following morning in the surgery with the body. After Mayhew and the photographer left, the procession of woodsmen began.

They came singly and in groups of two and three, distinguished by a glint in the eyes and a certain swagger in the walk. Most of them wore clothes similar to the dead man's, though a few had spruced up for their visit to the city by donning broadcloth suits or new shirts and trousers.

Ben was beginning to despair of ever knowing more about the victim when one woodsman, after viewing the body, cast an appraising glance Ben's way.

"Do you recognize him?" Ben asked.

"Seems to me I might have seen your man when I first got to town."

"Go on, Mister . . . ?"

"Name's Knapp. Roscoe Knapp." Knapp, who was broad shouldered enough to make a living felling trees, had a considerable paunch that argued against that occupation. It was less apparent in the gray broadcloth suit he wore than if he'd been in typical woodsman's clothing, but it was still the first thing anyone would notice about him. The jacket of the suit had been let out to accommodate it.

"What did you see, Mr. Knapp?"

He hesitated. "If it was him, he had a friend. A woman."

"What did she look like?"

"Red hair. Irish, maybe."

"How was she dressed?"

"Don't remember."

"Do you remember where you saw them?"

"Pickering Square. It was during the day. She might even be respectable." His grin said he doubted it. "If it was him, he was dressed like a salesman. Nice suit. Shiny collar. Porkpie hat. Carrying a sample case."

"Anyone else see them?"

He bristled instantly. "What do you mean by that? You think I'm lying?"

Ben held up a placating hand. "I only meant that someone else might have noticed more details. Or seen where they went."

"I was on my own. The rest of my outfit's still in camp." The back of Knapp's neck reddened, as if he were embarrassed. "Got myself hurt and had to leave early. Burnt my arm."

"Burns can be nasty. If you want, I'll take a look at it. No charge."

"No need," Knapp said quickly, backing away. "It's much better now."

Ben let him go. Knapp wasn't the first big burly fellow to exhibit an unnatural fear of doctors. Besides, more woodsmen had arrived.

None of them had any idea who the dead man was and only one, the last of the lot that Constable Mayhew could locate, expressed any curiosity as to how the victim had died.

"Huh," said Musquash Crowley when Ben showed him the wound. He chewed harder on his wad of spruce gum.

"Any idea what kind of weapon would do that?" Ben asked. He'd already ruled out everything he could think of, including kitchen knives and fireplace pokers.

The gaunt old woodsman, fifty if he was a day, adjusted a tiny pair of eyeglasses perched on the bridge of a red-veined, somewhat bulbous nose. From the scars on his cheek and neck, Ben surmised he'd been a brawler in his youth. The marks, known as "logger's smallpox," came from being kicked with calked boots during a fight.

"Looks to me like he was done in with his own peavey," Crowley said.

Ben stared at him, too surprised to speak, but the moment the word "peavey" passed Crowley's lips, Ben knew he'd identified the weapon.

"Know what a peavey is, don't you, boy?"

Before Ben could tell him he did, Crowley had launched into the story of how Joseph Peavey, a blacksmith in a town just north of Bangor, had been standing on a bridge, watching the rivermen below drive logs down the Penobscot. Their only tool was a swivel hook on a pole with an iron spike attached to the working end. Peavey got the idea to add a clasp, so that the hook could move up and down but not sideways. Thirty years after its invention, the peavey was used by woodsmen everywhere to push over trees, break log jams, roll logs, pry up rocks, tighten chains and, apparently, make large holes in the backs of unknown victims.

"You listening to me?" Crowley demanded. "That's the trouble with young people today. They never listen."

"I'm listening, Mr. Crowley, and I am in your debt. In fact, I wonder if you could help me with one other thing?" He indicated the victim's clothing, laid out on a nearby table. "Is there anything peculiar about these things?"

Crowley sneered at the boots. "Damn fool left 'em too close to the fire. Cracked the leather. Need to keep 'em on. Seen a pair fly to pieces when they dried too fast. Even if they just crack, it's hard to get 'em back on."

"So you sleep with your boots on?" Ben asked.

Crowley nodded and tipped his foot up so Ben could see the gash at the toe. "That's to let the water out."

"And the slashes around the top?"

"That's the tally of this season's work."

Since the last of the woodsmen had now filed past the body, Ben closed his office and paid a visit to the Bangor Edge Tool Company. They produced twelve thousand peaveys a year and were happy to sell one to Ben for $1.50. Back in his surgery, he needed only a few minutes to confirm that this common woodsman's tool had been the cause of death.

Hefting the pole, Ben considered whether this was a weapon a woman could use. He had difficulty imagining it, but it was not impossible. That meant he could not rule out his mother's suggestion of a lover's quarrel that ended in murder, especially now that he had a possible sighting of the victim with a red-headed woman. He set the peavey aside and considered what to do next. *

Ben's brother Aaron was an artist of some renown. Although currently bedridden and under Ben's careful medical supervision, he was capable of making a sketch of the dead man's face from the photographs taken of the corpse. Aaron drew him with eyes open and in the suit and hat Knapp had described.

Armed with this likeness, Ben started at Pickering Square and worked his way outward, knocking at doors. He'd annoyed forty or fifty people by the time he rapped on the oak panels beneath a discreet sign at eye level that read "GENTLEMEN'S WASHING TAKEN IN. Mrs. Agnes MacGowan, prop." As euphemisms went, it was better than most.

"Mrs. MacGowan?" he asked when a sleepy-eyed female in a flowered wrapper opened the door. Untidy tufts of bright red hair showed beneath her nightcap. "I wonder if I might have a moment of your time?"

"You selling something?"

"No. I'm looking for this man." He whipped out the sketch. "Do you know him?"

Her gasp was answer enough. Then she seized the piece of foolscap in both trembling hands, staring at it long and hard before she lifted worried eyes to meet Ben's. "What did he do?"

"You know him then?" He didn't wait for an answer. "I'm sorry to have to tell you, Mrs. MacGowan, but the man in this portrait is dead."

She swayed. He reached out to steady her but she recovered herself before his hand touched her arm. She backed up a few steps, stopped to look at the sketch again, then dropped heavily into the room's only chair.

Ben closed the door behind him. "I'm Dr. Northcote, the city coroner, Mrs. MacGowan. That man drowned in Kenduskeag Stream. There was no identification on the body."

She continued to stare at the dead man's likeness. "His name was Phineas P. Englewood."

"Did he live here?"

She looked up at that, her eyes narrowing. "What business is it of yours?"

"None at all, I suppose, except that I'd like to find out if there is any family to notify."

"I'm the closest he had to family."

"If you say so. Do you know where he lived?"

"He had a room somewhere." She was staring at the sketch once more.

"When did you last see him?"

"I don't remember."

"Do you recall what was he wearing when you last saw him?"

"A gray suit."

"Did he have money or jewelry with him?"

She shrugged.

"How about a sample case? Was he a salesman?"

She lifted her gaze from the portrait but didn't answer.

"Any idea why he was dressed like a woodsman when he was found?"

Her eyes locked on his and went wide with surprise. "You sure you got the right man? Finn was a gentleman. He wouldn't do any kind of manual labor."

"You recognized him from the sketch. Do you want to see the body?"

She shook her head.

"Someone needs to make arrangements for his burial," Ben said in a gentler voice.

"Don't suppose anybody else will claim him," she murmured. "Guess I could spring for a coffin, seeing as I'm his heir and all." The sly look she sent Ben's way seemed to ask for confirmation of her claim.

"If you're his heir," Ben pointed out, "that means you had a motive to kill him."

Her face abruptly lost all its color. "He was murdered? You didn't tell me that!"

"Can you account for your time the night he died?"

"I don't know what night he died!" A bubble of hysterical laughter broke free but she quickly got control of herself again. "Get out, Dr. Northcote. I've got nothing more to say to you."

He went, but not far. In addition to the building that housed Mrs. MacGowan's "laundry," Washington Street boasted a bank, a boarding house, a saloon, and Samuel Golden's employment office. Ben had no trouble hiring a man to keep an eye on Agnes MacGowan until the constables got around to questioning her. He did not know if she'd killed her lover or not, but he was certain she was keeping something from him. *

Most saloons stank of beer and whiskey, overlaid with sawdust and tobacco. The groggeries in the Devil's Half Acre reeked of rum and the molasses from which it was made. Ben started the evening on Broad Street, on one side of the Kenduskeag, and by midnight had worked his way down to a particularly disreputable guzzling shop on the other. It was located in the basement of what was, during daylight hours, a respectable Exchange Street clothing store.

No one had admitted to recognizing either the photograph or the sketch of Finn Englewood, but as Ben leaned on the grubby white pine bar, waiting for his drink, he spotted Musquash Crowley and Roscoe Knapp sitting with two other men who had visited the surgery earlier in the day. When he'd paid the bartender, Ben took his white eye and sidled closer to their table.

"Heard you got tossed out of camp again, Hamlin," Roscoe Knapp said to a tall, pale-faced, spindle-shanked fellow. "Which rule did you break this time?"

"Got too many rules these days," Crowley complained, although Knapp had not been addressing him. "No gambling. No drinking. No cigarettes. Not that I care about tobacco. Give me a good clear tit of spruce gum any day over a chaw of B&L." He chuckled. "And either one of them is a sight better than that home-grown shag the Canucks bring with them to the camps."

Hamlin glared at Knapp while Crowley rambled on. When he could get a word in edgeways, he answered with a question of his own. "Heard you left with no wages. Somebody take off with the payroll or did you just spend more at the wangan than you made?"

Knapp glowered back. "Pay was right on time, just like always. And I've got no need to buy things from the company store."

"More likely payroll came in a day late and a dollar short," Crowley opined. "Every man jack of us is working dirt cheap this year. If your outfit all together earned more than two thousand dollars, I'll eat my hat."

"How the dickens would I know how much they made?" Knapp asked in an irritable voice. "Camp clerk like Hamlin there might. Cookee like me's got other things to worry about." He swallowed the dregs of his drink and reached into a deep pocket to pull out a small piece of wood and a whittling knife. Within seconds he'd begun to transform it into the miniature figure of a bear.

"Nobody makes decent money these days," Crowley continued. "Work hard eleven hours a day, six days a week, and for what? Hardly anybody takes home more than ten dollars a month anymore, not when they're docked for time the weather's too bad to work, or for being sick or injured, like O'Malley here."

He waved a hand in the direction of the fourth man, whose sun bleached hair and eyelashes and peeling nose would have given away his profession even if his size and his attire had not. On closer inspection, Ben saw that the weatherbeaten face had a haggard look and that O'Malley held one leg stiffly out to the side of the battered table.

"One bad patch and you end up in debt to the company," Crowley continued. "Now in the good old days, an axeman could get two dollars a day."

He seemed about to drift into even more detailed reminiscences when O'Malley spotted Ben and recognized him from the surgery. "Do something for you, Doc?"

"I was thinking to offer Mr. Crowley and Mr. Knapp a drink. Why don't I buy a round for all four of you?"

No one had any objection to that, and they quickly found him a chair, but Knapp wanted to know what he and Crowley had done to earn it.

"You both helped me out with that little matter of the body."

"You knew him?" Knapp looked at Crowley with some surprise.

"Know he never worked in the woods. Not unless he was a cookee or a clerk," he added with a twinkle in his bloodshot blue eyes.

Both Hamlin and Knapp took umbrage, but Ben interrupted before either could express their outrage. "The boots were his, but he was put in woodsmen's clothing after he was stabbed with a peavey. The clothes may or may not have been his own."

"The killer stole the shirt off his back?" O'Malley was so startled he spilled part of his drink.

"Or got rid of it."

"Who'd go to so much trouble?" O'Malley wanted to know.

"Perhaps someone who didn't want the authorities to discover who the victim was?"

"Had a fella in a camp once who was using another fella's name," Crowley said, and launched into a convoluted tale with the same theme as everything else he said—life had been better in the "good old days."

Well before the story came to an end, Knapp placed the finished figurine of the bear on the table. He sent a sideways glance at Ben. "You find that woman?"

Ben nodded. "A Mrs. MacGowan. She takes in gentlemen's washing."

He snorted.

"She identified the corpse as Finn Englewood, but we don't know where he came from or where he was living while he was in Bangor or who might have wanted him dead."

Ben had promised himself he'd leave it to Constable Mayhew to try to solve those mysteries. Ben had already done more than his obligations as coroner required. He wasn't sure what had possessed him to venture into the Devil's Half Acre tonight, except that he had hoped to find someone else besides Agnes MacGowan who had known the victim. Saloon keepers, he'd thought, might talk more freely with him than to one of the city marshals.

"Englewood?" Knapp repeated, fishing in his pockets for another piece of wood. "Never heard of him."

"I expect the verdict at the inquest will be murder by person or persons unknown," Ben said, "but at least now we can bury him with a name."

Knapp was carving again, his fingers moving with skill and dexterity to shape the block of wood.

"How's the burnt arm?" Ben asked.

Knapp shrugged. "Well enough. What happened to me is nothing compared to most of the accidents in the woods. Fall out of a tree or have one land on you and you pretty much end up dead. And the rivermen—well, they're just plain crazy. You couldn't pay me enough to spend my days out on the water, balanced on a log!"

Since Crowley had just finished a story, the other three men at the table overheard this last comment. The sentiment was sufficiently inflammatory to provoke a profane protest from O'Malley.

"Craziest log driver I ever did see was on the Connecticut River back in '76," Crowley interrupted.

Ben finished his drink while he listened to the old man reminisce. Crowley was a born storyteller, even if he did work a lot of complaints into every tale. *

At ten o'clock the next morning, Agnes MacGowan stormed into Ben's office, parasol waving and face beet red with anger. The man Ben had hired lurked just outside on Spring Street.

"Give it back," Mrs. MacGowan demanded. "Give it back right now!"

"Give what back?"

"The money you stole. The money in the sample case. It's mine now."

"So he did leave something with you."

"I want it back."

"How much?"

"How—? You know how much!"

"No, I don't. And if you want my help recovering it, you'll have to tell me just how much money we're talking about."

Her eyes blazed with fury as she spat out the amount. "Eighteen hundred dollars."

Ben gave a low whistle. "That's a good deal of money, Mrs. MacGowan." And the amount was significant. "It's just about right," he murmured, recalling part of the previous night's conversation, "to be the entire payroll for a crew of woodsmen."

It took some doing before Ben could convince Mrs. MacGowan that he didn't have her money and that she needed to talk to Constable Mayhew about it. Only when she'd finally left his office was he able to go out and question the guard he'd hired.

Truthfully, Ben had not expected the man to stay on the job once Constable Mayhew had visited Mrs. MacGowan. The fellow had continued to watch the woman's rooms in the hope of additional pay for additional hours. Under other circumstances, Ben would have remonstrated with him and paid him perhaps half as much as he claimed he was owed. In this instance, he handed over the sum without complaint and even added a bonus.

The information was worth every penny. Just before Mrs. MacGowan's enraged scream had issued from an open window, Ben's man had caught a glimpse of someone carrying a sample case. The figure had darted out of Mrs. MacGowan's building and into the nearby Downtown Savings Bank. *

Ben had lived in Bangor all his life. There were few people in the business community he did not know, and many had been acquaintances since childhood. He'd first met Ed Kershaw, treasurer of the Downtown Savings Bank, when they'd served on a committee together.

When Ben entered the slightly shabby interior of the bank, Kershaw recognized him at once. Hoping to gain a new depositor, he was more than happy to show off the two safes in the vault area and boast a bit about the bank's holdings in cash and U. S. Savings Bonds. Then the two men went into Kershaw's office and closed the door.

"What do you really want, Northcote?"

"Information. Does the sum of eighteen hundred dollars ring any bells with you?"

"I can't give out information about the bank's customers." But Kershaw's expression verified Ben's guess.

"If you won't talk to me, you may find yourself answering questions for Constable Mayhew. That money was stolen, Kershaw, and I think time may be of the essence in capturing the man who took it."

It was just a theory, but Ben felt certain that Englewood had been murdered for what was in his sample case. The killer had probably expected to find the cash on Englewood's body, or in that room he had "somewhere" in Bangor. Instead, the money had been left with Mrs. MacGowan. Thanks to Ben, the murderer had located it and taken it. And for some unfathomable reason, he had then deposited it in this bank.

Kershaw looked uncomfortable, but Ben's sincerity must have impressed him. "I opened an account with almost exactly that amount just this morning. Seventeen hundred and sixty dollars."

"I don't suppose you could tell me who deposited it?"

"I shouldn't have told you that much."

"We can call in the city marshals," Ben reminded him. And then, too impatient to wait while the banker waffled, added, "It's not just robbery, Kershaw. It's murder. Do you want a killer to get away?"

The other man blanched. "I can't help you. I don't know the man's name."

"What do you know?"

"The account was opened for the Fairweather Woodsmen's Association. That's been worrying me, if you want to know the truth. The Penobscot Log Driving Company brings down all the logs from the north. Even when the job goes to a low bidder, PLB doesn't do business this way. It's a payroll account, you see. I've got a list of names and amounts. The woodsmen are supposed to come in and collect what's due them."

"Can you describe the man who deposited the money?"

Kershaw had to think about it. "He was very ordinary, even in his dress. A plain gray broadcloth suit. He was average height. Brown hair. Brown eyes. He did have a paunch."

"That's our man," Ben murmured.

"Oh, and he had quite a few nicks on his fingers."

Any remaining doubt vanished. Kershaw had described Roscoe Knapp. The whittler. The man who'd seen Englewood with an unidentified woman. The man Ben had told how to find that woman. The man the camp clerk, Hamlin, had heard left the woods without his pay.

Somebody take off with the payroll? he'd asked. *

Ben's quarry wasn't hard to find. In fact, when he opened the door of his room in a cheap boarding house to Ben, Knapp looked resigned. When he waved Ben in, Ben saw he'd been packing.

"Going somewhere, Mr. Knapp?"

"Back to the woods, Dr. Northcote."

"Mind if I ask you a few questions first?"

"Sit yourself down, Dr. Northcote. I'll answer what I can." Knapp tied up the old mealsack in which he carried his gear, first removing a bit of wood and his whittling knife.

"You've been wearing that gray broadcloth suit every time I've seen you," Ben began. He glanced at Knapp's feet and was not surprised to see calked boots, though they hardly went with the rest of the outfit. "I'm thinking that if I examined the back of your undershirt, there'd be a hole, or perhaps a patch, since you're obviously handy with a needle, in the same place you've added a strip of fabric to let out the back of that jacket. Very clever of you to cover up the hole and bloodstains that way."

"Let me spare you the trouble of asking," Knapp said. "I did kill that scoundrel. He stole our payroll. I got it back."

"Why you? You said you were the cookee. What's that? Assistant to the cook?"

Knapp nodded. "I carry the food into the woods for the men. We drew lots and I won the right to go after the thief. We knew who took the money. He'd only been with us two weeks. Said he'd been sent to help the clerk."

For a moment Ben couldn't think what to ask next. There were too many unanswered questions. "Why a peavey?" he blurted at last.

He chuckled. "Why not? Seemed appropriate."

"Why kill him at all? You knew who he was. The marshals—"

"Didn't set out to kill him," Knapp interrupted, taking a vicious swipe at the small block of wood with his knife. "I just wanted our money back. I spotted him with that woman one day, but I lost them in the crowd in the square. The next time I saw him he was alone. I followed him. He wasn't staying anywhere near where woodsmen would be. Had a room in a farmhouse near the ice houses on Valley Avenue. Guess he figured he'd be safe there."

"You confronted him?"

Knapp nodded. "The old couple that owned the farmhouse weren't home, so I just followed him inside. He went in through the back. I caught up with him in the shed. The minute he recognized me, he knew the game was up. He was reaching for a scythe when I stopped him."

"With a peavey?"

Knapp shrugged. "What can I say? It was just sittin' in the corner. Handy for pulling stray logs out of the stream for firewood, I expect."

His mother, Ben thought, would be certain cosmic forces had been at work, enforcing poetic justice. He simply found the coincidence ironic.

"What happened then?"

"I left him where he fell and went to look for the money. I found his room, but it wasn't there. By the time I got back to the shed, I could tell he wasn't going to be talking to anybody ever again. So I got to thinking about that woman I saw him with. What if the police thought she'd done him in? They'd look for her. Find her. Most likely find the money, too. I figured it had to be with her, and I was right. Once the police had it, I thought, then any of the men on the woods crew could have come forward to explain how it had been stolen and lay claim to it."

"So you decided to throw him off Lover's Leap."

Knapp nodded. "I heard that story years ago. I figured folks who live here year round would surely know it."

"Why change clothes with him?" Ben could see now that the two men had been about the same size, but he still didn't understand why Knapp had wanted Englewood to look like a woodsman.

"Guess I wasn't thinking too clearly by then. I looked at him in his suit and I thought that if he was wearing that, people would think he was respectable. They wouldn't look in the right place for the woman. I knew she must live in the Devil's Half Acre, but I didn't want to call attention to myself by asking around after her. Figured I'd let the constables do that. Worked out even better when you took an interest. The police aren't always honest, you know."

Shaking his head in disbelief, Ben studied the man in front of him. Defiant, even a bit proud of himself, Knapp met his gaze.

"The money's in an account in a bank. It'll go to the men who earned it. Englewood hadn't had time to spend any. I took my own wages out, but otherwise it's all there."

"There's no excuse for murder, Knapp. The moment you located the thief, you should have turned him over to the marshals."

"Too late now," Knapp said, setting aside his finished carving. He held onto his little knife, thoughtfully testing the blade. "So what are you going to do about it, Doc?"

"I wish I knew."

"I'll save you some trouble, then," Knapp said.

In spite of the sudden appearance of a reckless gleam in the other man's eyes, Ben never saw the blow coming.

Knapp was long gone by the time Ben regained consciousness. Nursing a sore jaw, he reported what had happened to the city marshals.

"I was watching the knife he was using to whittle," Ben ruefully confessed. "I never thought to look out for a roundhouse punch."

"Stick to your doctoring," Mayhew advised him. "Coroner's not supposed to be a law enforcement officer. It's not your job to catch murderers." *

Some months later, Casey Ballard, the man listed as camp clerk on the payroll of the "Fairweather Woodsmen's Association," paid a visit to Ben's office.

"Constable Mayhew said I should repeat to you what I just told him," Ballard said. "Roscoe Knapp is dead. Came back to camp all full of himself. Figured he was some kind of hero for getting our money back. Must of went to his head because the next thing you know he decided he was big and brave enough to be a log driver. Had that same devil-may-care outlook down pat, but he never did learn how to keep from falling off a log."

Ben leaned forward, elbows propped on his desk, fingers steepled under his chin. Knapp's words, that night in the saloon, came back to him: You couldn't pay me enough to spend my day out on the water, balanced on a log.

"I wonder . . . could you provide a few more details?"

Ballard seemed to relish the idea. "You ever see rivermen at work? No? Well, log drivers, they stand on a surface that looks as solid as a cement floor, hauling and prying at a jam for hours. Then, all of a sudden, it commences to creak, and the surface settles a bit. Most of the men take off for shore, because what comes next is a mighty crash they can hear in the next county. A great gushing water spout comes up as the first tier of logs spills into the current and then it's as if the whole river is moving."

Ballard paused to fish in his back pocket for a tin of chewing tobacco and stuffed a wad into his mouth.

"The men on shore, they lean on their peaveys and watch for jams. They try to catch problems quick to prevent a plug. But some men, well they like the danger. They wait to jump till the logs break loose and land on a log floating just ahead of the rest. Perched on that, anchored with their peaveys, they float downriver. I've heard it compared to riding a horse that ain't broke yet, only I think this is more dangerous. One slip and you're dead."

"Is that what happened to Knapp?"

"Not exactly." Ballard looked around for a spittoon. "This jam kept the logs inshore and they'd got piled up pretty deep. Knapp and two other men tried to pole them out into the river. They got 'em pretty well cleared before the logs in the rollway got loose. They was headed right for the three of them. Those fellas run over the floating logs, trying to get to the middle of the river, and two of 'em made it, but Knapp, he landed wrong. Got his foot caught between two logs. Just like a bear trap, it was, and there he stuck while the logs came thundering down the skids and landed right on top of him. They filled the river ten feet deep before they were done."

"Was the body recovered?" Ben shifted slightly and used a foot pedal to open a bronze cuspidor shaped like a turtle. The other man sent him a grateful look and spat.

"Found what was left of him a mile below the jam. Buried him beside the trail. Hung his boots to a maple tree, like we do for all the drivers we lose on the Penobscot. There are worse ways to go."

"Indeed there are," Ben agreed, and rose to walk his visitor to the door.

When Ballard had gone, Ben walked to the bookcase behind his desk to study the small carving he'd placed on the top shelf back in April.

They were a breed apart, these woodsmen. He could imagine Knapp's reasoning—better to leave his boots hanging from the branch of a tree than to dangle by the neck at the end of a hangman's rope. Even better, he'd think, to have a friend tell a tall tale to convince the authorities that the killer they sought was dead.

It was the carving Roscoe Knapp had left behind that persuaded Ben the man was alive and well and had gone off with his share of the payroll to start a new life. The little figure was a fox. And it was smiling.