Page 61 of By Any Means

There was a straggler blueberry bush at Laurie’s feet, ignored by the harvesters because it was out of the way or perhaps because of bears. He plucked off three blueberries, ate them—definitely better not a season old and sun-dried—then observed the fresh purple stain dotting his fingers like bruises. “Huh,” he said. He touched his lips. Probably just as blue.

He pulled off another blueberry, smashed it between and over his fingertips, the pads, the nails, then sucked his fingers clean. The stain left behind was stark. It looked like his hand was dying.

He cursed. “Of course.” Blueberries. Was this how August had faked his death?

He laughed, though sobered fast.

“I found him,” Raberding had said.

“I saw nothing but his beautiful, cold face, his blue lips, firm like wax already. Like a corpse, Laurie, with no paint. I cannot even tell you what he was wearing. If he was clothed. But—oh. His hands were the same, purple-blue just on the ends and beneath his fingernails. As cold as ice. … Not that I wanted to touch him more. I’m sorry to say I fled.”

And Laurie, later, to the same man, with more suspicion in mind: “You know what’s said of those who find the body.”

He reframed it now: August hadn’t been killed. So, what was said about the person who’d found the “body” now? For the “body” had been there for a purpose. Blueberry stain, the accomplices, all for a purpose. Surely, that Raberding had been the one to find August was significant in that purpose somehow. The demi-mondaines would’ve done the job of reporting his “death” just as well.

Could it have been intentional for August’s lover to find his body?

Had August faked his death and done so precisely where he was sure his lover would find him? Had gone to elaborate lengths—blueberry stain, ice-cold skin, demi-mondaines paid to scream—to ensure Raberding, in particular, thought he was truly gone?

The police didn’t matter. They’d obviously been paid off. Too, the coroner. The papers—they mattered because they had spread the story, but neither blueberries nor ice had been necessary to sell his death to those.

Could it be that Raberding’s firsthand “knowledge” of August’s death had been the most important purpose of all?

Either August was unreasonably cruel... or he’d been desperate, with no other recourse. Laurie hadn’t met him face-to-face, but Chary didn’t seem like a man to lie to protect an unreasonably cruel brother. Less so to admire him as he so obviously did.

Laurie had known Tjofabier Raberding was cruel from first kiss.

Why would August not simply move himself to Maine? Because his lover could follow, and keep following him, with the inexhaustible resources of wealth, anywhere on earth he went.

What would Raberding do if he learned his trophy lover was alive and half-naked in a cabin with someone else? Laurie didn’t especially want to find out, and he wasn’t August. Raberding’s grief had seemed sincere, but his possessiveness equally so.

If all this turned out to be the truth… Chary Wright, darn it all, had had a damned good reason to lie to him. To be terrified of Laurie’s newsman presence in his home and in his life, no matter what Laurie said about confidentiality.

Laurie turned away from the fields, fresh with guilt and revelation. He didn’t think he could bear to deceive Chary with more of his petty, childish ways and means. Not this morning. But the pickers had half a morning’s work left yet, and so, he had some time before they would leave the barrens. With August accounted for and occupied, getting his physical “workout” in, Laurie decided to indulge his curiosity about the man’s hideaway cabin.

He found it quicker than he expected. The path there and back was clearly marked now he was looking for it; not looking for it, the path could’ve passed for an overlarge deer trail. Perhaps a caribou trail, if they hadn’t yet been poached to extinction by rich men. (Laurie had observational basis for this assumption, not just his own bias: in the train dining car, he’d heard a pair of businessmen loudly grumble about the recent Maine law in force that prohibited hunting the beasts.)

Up close, the cabin looked to be at least two centuries old. A fur trader’s cabin or a very early settler’s; Laurie wondered how much blood the thing had seen, animal and human. Was it French-built or English? How many times had it housed men of industry and bloodshed? The loggers who sold to plantation owners, the shipbuilders who built the ships for slaves, the settlers who fought and killed to stay rooted on stolen, blueberry-covered ground?

The glass in the windows was modern, thick and clear plate, four-paned: Chary’s doing, maybe. On the house tour, the man had revealed a small glass furnace in the cellar, which at last bore fruit to that morning in March, when he had brought home a wagonful of silica-feldspar. Chary’s hobbying had produced baskets of eyes and paperweights, sheets of stained glass and jars and bottles, all done under a perfectionist’s eye; a windowpane would probably be no more than a moment.

Laurie pushed aside the shutters, cupped his hands, and peered in. Dark, dusty, and empty. The not-a-butler Brasher wasn’t a butler there, either.

In the tradition of rural houses everywhere, the door was not locked. Laurie earnestly doubted he’d find much interesting there unless August were careless. Laurie always tried to check for carelessness, though, given the chance—humans were chronically lazy and often forgetful. In the event carelessness were found to be lacking, that spoke of something too: paranoia. Both paranoia and its younger brother caution had their reasons.

He shut the door behind him. It was immediately cool and damp inside, a haven in summer and probably fairly warm in winter; that was thanks to the wattle-and-daub plastering. Dusty though it might have been around the corners and on the windowsills, no mice skittered away across the plank floor. There was a bed, a table with basin and mirror, and two chairs. A clothes, or maybe blanket, chest, cedar. A cold cast-iron woodstove had been fitted after the fact into a stone hearth. Beside it was a pantry-box, steel, welded in the new electric-arc way by someone who knew what they were doing. This wasn’t locked either, probably because it was both latched and heavy enough to be effective against anything other than humans, or perhaps raccoons. Laurie hinged it open.

Jam: jars and jars of it, home-canned. “The hell?”

He picked up one jar. They didn’t look like the jars Chary had iterated upon beside his cellar-bound furnace; those had been regular Masons, which even Laurie could recognize. These were little jars shaped like miniature, squat milk bottles, with no screw threads but a significant lip and a glass lid. The face of it said in glittering all-caps: Heracles Strongneck.

What had Raberding said? The jar-canning seals August had stolen had failed utterly?

These had not. The lids were clear glass, round, sandwiched beneath their rim with rubber. A steel wire bail held all three pieces—jar, seal, lid—together tight and snug. The jam inside was perfect and glossy; it sloshed thickly when Laurie tipped it. He undid the wire bail, daringly, and the seal remained. Surprising. But worth killing gaffers for? He wasn’t sure.

Raberding said Brooklyn Glass had gone back to tin screw-ons. That the trade secrets August had stolen were useless.

He closed the pantry-box lid. Who’d lied and to whom? Raberding to him, or August to Raberding?