She looked coldly at her questioner. “I guess it had to be,” she said. Again Bosworth felt the chill down his spine. He tried to dissipate the sensation by speaking with an affectation of energy.
“Can you tell us, Mrs. Rutledge, how this trouble you speak of shows itself ... what makes you think...?”
She looked at him for a moment; then she leaned forward across the rickety bead-work table. A thin smile of disdain narrowed her colourless lips. “I don’t think—I know.”
“Well—but how?”
She leaned closer, both elbows on the table, her voice dropping. “I seen ’em.”
In the ashen light from the veiling of snow beyond the windows the Deacon’s little screwed-up eyes seemed to give out red sparks. “Him and the dead?”
“Him and the dead.”
“Saul Rutledge and—and Ora Brand?”
“That’s so.”
Sylvester Brand’s chair fell backward with a crash. He was on his feet again, crimson and cursing. “It’s a God-damned fiend-begotten lie....”