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“Yes, but it also gives young Colden a free hand. You know he’ll be busy in your absence.”

“It doesn’t matter how busy he is if Levi Weeks couldn’t have got to the well and back,” said Alexander firmly.

Chapter Eight

I live opposite Ezra Weeks’s lumber yard, and on the night when the deceased was lost, I heard the gate open and a sleigh or carriage come out of the yard about eight o’clock. It made a rumbling noise, but had no bells on it, and that it was not gone long before it returned again.

—From the testimony of Susanna Broad at the trial of Levi Weeks

New York City

January 20, 1800

“You’re sure you saw a sleigh come out of Ezra Weeks’s yard.” Cadwallader tried not to bounce in his enthusiasm. Respectable assistant attorney generals weren’t meant to bounce. But Cadwallader felt like bouncing.

A sleigh. He’d never considered a sleigh.

“Running without bells it was.” The lappets on Susanna Broad’s cap nodded along with her. “It was the night that girl went missing, round about eight o’clock.”

“You’re certain it was about eight o’clock?”

The lappets swayed again. “My son and daughter was gone to meeting and meeting is always done about eight o’clock. I saw the sleigh right about when they came home.”

“And you’re sure it had no bells.”

The elderly woman gave him a look that had undoubtedly intimidated stronger men. “If it had bells, I would have heard them, wouldn’t I? There was no bells on that sleigh. Proper hazard it was,” she said darkly, “running about on a dark night with nothing to let folks know they need to get out of the way.”

No one took a sleigh out at night without bells. It was the common courtesy of the road. Unless, of course, someone wanted to travel unremarked. A man eloping. Or a man on his way to do away with an inconvenient encumbrance by strangling her and flinging her in a well and hoping no one would see.

Cadwallader could have capered like a boy, but for the fear that Mrs. Broad would undoubtedly thwack him across the calf with her sturdy walking stick, which rested next to her chair. Besides, it would be unbecoming the dignity owed to his office.

On the outer edges of town, the Broad house was one of the few with a view of Weeks’s home and lumber yard. Cadwallader had called in the faint hope someone might have seen Levi walking back from the direction of the well. He had never expected anything like this.

“What about a light?” he asked, trying to control his excitement.

“No light.” Mrs. Broad pursed her lips. “It’s a wonder they didn’t trample some poor soul. Lots of folks on the street that time of night, coming back from meeting. I’d have been at meeting myself but I can’t get about the way I used to—not like you young folks, gadding this way and that, picnics in the meadow, turtle feasts, don’t know what all.”

“Yes, yes.” Not that he was that young, really. Only in comparison with his learned opposing counsel. He was thirty-two, a time at which a man should be trusted to make a name for himself—and he felt increasingly confident he might. “Mrs. Broad, can you show me where you were when you saw this sleigh?”

Mrs. Broad groped for the handle of her stick. Cadwallader obligingly handed it to her. “You might lend me an arm.”

Cadwallader suspected that if he’d lent her an arm, she would have asked for her stick, but he obliged her all the same, supporting her uneven steps toward the Dutch door of the house. At her directive, he unlatched it and pushed it open.

Mrs. Broad leaned her elbows on the bottom half, resting her weight on the sturdy wood. “I like to set here and watch for my boy to come back from meeting. Make sure he gets home safe. He’s still my boy even if he’s a man grown.”

Cadwallader looked out over her white head. Nothing had ever been as beautiful as the winter-blasted landscape: the muddy, pitted road; the pigs rooting in the garbage by the side of the street; and a clear view straight over to Ezra Weeks’s lumber yard, workshop, and stable.

“That’s the gate over there? The gate you heard open that night?”

“And what other gate might it be? The pearly ones?” She cackled at her own wit. “I’m not aiming to see those yet for some time, my boy. Those are the gates, right enough. You can see ’em with your own eyes.”

“How often do they take the sleigh out at night?”

“I can’t say as how I’ve heard that gate open at night before. That’s why I remarked it. And then when I went to help poor Catherine Ring lay out that poor drowned child, and that man who lodges with ’em was telling us how Levi Weeks had done led her astray, I bethought me of that gate.”

“That was very astute of you, Mrs. Broad. Very wise, I mean.” Cadwallader’s brain was racing. “Did you hear the sleigh come back again?”

“The way that gate creaks? I should say I did! It wasn’t gone long before it returned again.” She looked significantly at him. “Short trip, it was.”