Albritten plucked at his sleeve. “Let it be, Bayard, let it be. She’s right, after all. I did hear, not from Emerald but from the young man. Doris had sent them away. He went back, maybe to collect that piece of computer. The thumb piece. He saw her body on the kitchen floor and ran. I told him to make himself scarce, him and Emerald, too. I didn’t want him turning up dead in the middle of Massachusetts Street, shot by the first white deputy to see him. I wanted to let them hide at St. Silas, but Bayard was right: those old cellar rooms, they’re full of mold and who knows what all.”

“Where did they go?” I put every ounce of pleading I possessed into my voice.

Albritten shook her head. “I wish I could tell you, but I can’t.”

“Can’t? Or won’t?” I asked.

“Over the line,” Clements repeated, but Albritten said, “She’s not asking out of spite, Bayard. She wants to help. Can’t, Detective. I can’t tell you. I don’t know.”

I had to be content with that. I asked if August had said anything about the dirt they’d been digging up.

“No.” Her lower jaw worked. “We didn’t have a conversation. August was frightened, and I was frightened for him and for my girl; neither of us was thinking clearly. But one of the women from Riverside Church, over across the bridge, Barbara Rutledge, I ran into her at the farmers’ market, oh, maybe a month ago. She told me I’d just missed Doris. And Doris was upset because someone was planting on her land. So I called her at the farm, and Doris said she rented out all the land now, that she couldn’t look after it herself, but she’d driven over there in her pickup, looking to make sure the fences and all were being kept up. She thought someone was planting on her land, where they shouldn’t have been.”

“Would she have brought Emerald down from Chicago just for that?” I asked doubtfully. “Isn’t that something her lawyer could handle for her?”

Albritten gave a ghost of a smile. “You don’t know us old Kansas women, city girl. We’d rather dig our own graves than pay the undertaker to do it for us.”

28
Disappearing Act

I didn’t need Bayard Clements’s prodding to get to my feet: Albritten was clearly at the end of her strength. I waited in the front room while he escorted her to her bedroom. The pictures on the television had been rearranged, I noticed idly; the one of the women joyously celebrating St. Silas’s 150th anniversary had been removed. Curious.

Clements reappeared. He said he’d walk to St. Silas with me, show me the church’s undercroft so I could see for myself it didn’t harbor any fugitives.