Chapter 7 #2
"Because I have got a great deal to answer for," Kestrel said, "and I have known since the fourth day of nineteen that I was never going to be able to stand up in a room and answer for it,
and a man who is going to lose a vote he cannot even stand up for is a hard thing to have lying on your table for six weeks."
"So you went out to die."
"I went out to stop being your problem."
"That's a coward's version of a decent thing," Maddie said, from the wall.
"Yes it is," Kestrel said.
Nobody had expected him to agree and it took the room a second.
"I have thought about it a great deal since," he said, "and it is exactly what you said, and I would like to say out loud that Mrs. Maddie is right and that I am ashamed of it, and that is the only thing I am going to say about myself today."
Davey looked at him a moment.
"All right," he said. "Now the road."
"The road."
"You went south eight hundred yards in a line. You did not wander. You did not go to the woodpile. You went south across open ground and sat down in a ditch and then got up and kept going south."
"Yes."
"Why south."
And Kestrel said, "Because that was where the smell was."
The room went quiet.
"Say that again," Stuart said.
"Woodsmoke." Kestrel's wrapped hands moved on the blanket. "I have been nineteen days on a crust with nothing in me and there is a thing that happens to a man's nose at about day eleven and I do not know why and I would not have believed it before. Everything goes away and smoke does not."
"There is smoke in this town."
"There is smoke in this town and it is behind me and it is twenty-six chimneys and it smells like a town," Kestrel said.
"And there was one more out to the south and it was one fire, and it was a mile and a half off, and it had been there every night I lay on that table with the wood door on the south side of the building."
Stuart stood up.
"Every night."
"Every night since the ninth," Kestrel said. "That is what I was going to tell you on Wednesday and then Davey took you off me."
Davey's face did a thing.
"He's right," he said.
"Davey."
"No, he is entirely right, and I made that rule and I made it for a good reason and I am going to have to sit with this." Davey put his hands flat on the table. "Go on, son. You smelled a fire. Why walk to it."
"Because I had four hours of life left and the man who was going to kill this town was sitting at it," Kestrel said, "and I thought that if I came into a fire in the dark with no coat and no gun and nothing at all in my hands, at the very worst they would shoot me,
and I was going to be dead in four hours anyway."
"And at the best?"
"At the best I would see who it was."
Camille said, quietly, "And did you."
Kestrel looked at the ceiling beam for a while.
"I never got there," he said. "I got to about eight hundred yards and my legs stopped. I did not fall down, exactly. They just stopped working and I sat down and I was still sitting up when the dogs came."
"Tell me about the dogs."
"There were five. They came out of the brush on my left downwind and they came fast and I thought, well, that is that, and I put my arms down because I was not going to fight five dogs with wrapped hands."
"And?"
"And they stopped," Kestrel said.
"How far."
"Nine or ten feet. All five. They came out of a run into a stop in about two strides, all five together, like a hand had gone down."
"Did you hear anything?"
"No."
"Nothing at all? No whistle? No call?"
"Nothing at all," Kestrel said, "and I want to be careful here because everybody is going to want me to have heard something. I heard nothing. There was no wind and it was dead quiet and I would have heard a man cough at four hundred yards and there was nothing."
"Then it was a hand signal in the dark," Stuart said, "at four hundred yards, to five dogs at once, and the dogs were watching for it while they ran."
"Is that possible," Davey said.
"It is possible for one dog," Camille said. "I have seen one. Five is not a thing I have ever heard of anybody doing."
"Five is not a thing anybody does," Stuart said. "Five is a thing an institution does."
They let him rest an hour and then went back.
"What do you remember after the dogs."
"Nothing in order." Kestrel's mouth twisted.
"I have been trying since about six this morning. There is a piece where I was moving and there was a shoulder under my arm, and there is a piece where I was warm and it hurt, and there is a piece where somebody was doing something to my foot and a woman told me to hold on to the edge of the table."
"A woman."
"A woman."
"Young? Old?"
"Old," Kestrel said. "Sixty. More. She had an accent."
Stuart and Camille looked at each other.
"What kind," Stuart said.
"I do not know. I am not good at that. It was not from here."
"Say a word she said."
"She said, hold, and she said, it is nearly done, and she said something else that was not English and it was to somebody else in the room and it was short."
Camille had gone the color of paper.
"Could it have been French," Stuart said.
"I do not know," Kestrel said. "I am sorry. I want to help you and I am not going to make something up. I was on a table with a hot iron on my foot and I do not know what language anybody was speaking."
Davey wrote it down anyway, the way he wrote everything down.
"Then the man," he said.
"The man came at the end."
"Describe him."
"I never saw him," Kestrel said. "That is the part I have been dreading telling you. He stood behind my head the whole time and he never came around, and I could not turn over, and I am nearly sure he did it on purpose because he stood there for a long time."
"His voice."
"Ordinary. Not old. Not young." Kestrel stopped. "No. That is not true. I want to correct that. It was a man of fifty or sixty with a smoker's voice and he spoke slowly and he used all of his words, and he sounded like a man who had been to school."
"What did he say."
Kestrel closed his eyes.
"He said, you are going home," he said. "He said, we have done what we can for your foot and you will keep it. He said, we did not take you off that flat to hurt you, and you can tell them that, and you can tell them we could have left you."
"Go on."
"He said, when you get there, you tell Stuart Redman a name, and he said the name, and he made me say it back four times until I had it, and then he said the other part."
"It is not the dead one."
"It is not the dead one, he will know what to do with it, and if he does not, tell him to go and ask the Frenchwoman." Kestrel opened his eyes. "And then he said one more thing and I have not said it to anybody yet and I have been deciding for six hours whether to say it at all."
The room went still.
"Say it," Stuart said.
"He said, tell him we are not the Ninemile," Kestrel said.
"Tell him we have been trying to get somebody to come and look at the Ninemile for two years and nobody will, and tell him that a man who walks two hundred miles for a dog will walk eleven for a hundred and eleven people, and that we are counting on it,
and that it is the only thing we have left to count on."
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
"That's a recruitment," Maddie said.
"That's a recruitment," Stuart agreed.
"It is a very good one," Camille said.
"It is an extremely good one," Stuart said, "and I want everybody in this room to notice that it is aimed at exactly one man and that it is built out of things that only work on him, and that is the part that has me on the floor."
He got up and walked to the end of the Hall and stood looking at the wall.
"They know what I did in April," he said.
"They know why I did it. They know about the dog and they know about the note and they know the sentence at the bottom of it, and they have built a sentence of their own off the same pattern,
and they have put it in the mouth of a boy they saved from dying so that I would have to hear it from somebody I cannot doubt."
"Then it is a trap," Davey said.
"It might be."
"Stuart."
"I said it might be," Stuart said. "I want to be very careful here, because there are two things in front of us and everybody in this room is going to want them to be the same thing and they are not."
"Say them."
"One. There is a place called the Ninemile with a hundred and eleven people behind a wall and a list in a book, and it is real, because a boy copied it in October and walked nineteen days with it."
"Two?"
"Two. There is something a mile and a half south of this town with a fire and five trained dogs and a surgeon and a man who knows my name and a name out of Camille's family," Stuart said, "and it has been sitting there since at least the second of January, and it has not done one hostile thing."
"Not one?"