“You must be real sick,” she said. “Is your throat sore maybe? What hurts you?”
“Oh, I killed him,” Theodosia cried out again. She could feel the strange rhythms tearing her body in orderly stabs of pain. “I stabbed his throat with a harness knife. I cut his throat.”
“You never did no such thing. You’re clean out of your head. I better send for Dr. Muir.”
“I stabbed his throat with a harness knife.”
“How do you know it was a harness knife? How comes it you know so much about it?”
“I did it,” Theodosia said. She sank back to the bed then.
“It’s curious you know how it happened. But it was a black woman, Lethe, stabbed him. Everybody knows it.”
“Lethe stabbed Lou, but I killed Ross. I cut his throat open.”
“Lethe tells how it happened. She’s in jail now. She’s confessed and there’s no question about who did it. She did it. She went after Lou, seems like, but when Ross defended Lou she killed him. Out at the brick-yard it happened, about midnight they say. Lethe’s in jail now and she’ll maybe go to prison for ten years or so. Ross was her husband, but he went off after Lou, and so the court will likely give her a light sentence, they say. Ten years or fifteen, but that’s not light, goodness knows. Anyway she won’t hang, or is not likely, they say.”