The Last Confession of Penelope Foote

Short Fiction - Historical/Speculative

Greetings, Talebones Readers!

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately about Washington State’s history as a blossoming Territory in the 1850s, and—as these things go—my reading about real-life things yielded some odd and intriguing ideas that I wanted to play with in fiction. Here are the results of that play!

I hope you enjoy this short historical speculative tale!

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Photo by Alireza Jalilian on Unsplash

On the morning of Penelope Foote’s hanging, Sheriff Bartholomew Harris walked alone down the narrow main street to the Mount Olive Jailhouse. The modest town clinging to the rocky edge of the cold bay was quiet yet, only a handful of folk passing to and fro in the unique freshness of a newborn spring dawn. The wind off the water carried a tidal chill.

Despite the promise of a beautiful day, the sheriff’s shoulders were bowed as under a great appraising weight, his face tight and pinched under the brim of his hat. It was a dark business, execution. He did not relish it. Maybe it was his age, advancing past sixty and into a certain weather-worn softness, but he felt as though justice was an old friend whose face he barely recognized anymore.

As he walked, he looked at the burgeoning business district around him, the new wooden faces of shopfronts, merchants, livery. Mount Olive—once a tiny lumber town in a vast wilderness—was growing, catching the notice of a blossoming Territorial government, and in talks to be the county seat. While everyone seemed keen to compete with nearby Shelton, Sheriff Harris couldn’t help but find the whole thing tiring. He hadn’t stepped into the role of sheriff all those years ago for the love of politics, that much he knew. But the world that had given him that authority was vanishing, and a new law was rising to take its place.

As he neared the jailhouse, the sheriff passed under the gallows. It was new, hand-built by the town’s men from local oaks, casting a long west-stretching shadow over the road. Within a few hours the gallows would be surrounded by onlookers, ready to watch the drop, the hush afterward, justice served.

Harris paused to look up at the noose, his stomach giving an uncharacteristic hitch. He blamed it on the pre-execution whiskey he had taken the night before, a dark little ritual, and walked on to the jailhouse’s front door. It was a small building, old and outdated. Just a temporary holding-place while the new courthouse was being built across the road. For now, the new building was only an undignified skeleton of framing and canvas, but it would clearly tower over the old building when it was finally finished.

The sheriff entered the jailhouse. He passed his locked office door and continued into the three-cell jail, peering in. The night-deputy sat in his chair, leaning against the wall, arms crossed over a cold shotgun on his lap. He tipped his hat to the sheriff as the older man looked in. The left and right cells were empty, their iron doors yawning open, but in the middle cell was Penelope Foote herself. She was sleeping on the low bench, her back turned to the door, with only a dark spill of her curls visible above the blanket.

The night-deputy stood, left his shotgun on the chair, and stretched.

“Morning,” said the sheriff. “How is she?”

“All quiet,” the night-deputy replied, yawning. “No trouble.”

Sheriff Harris nodded approval. “Good to hear. Off you get to bed.”

“You want me to come back for the hanging, Sheriff?”

The older man shook his head. “Not necessary. I’ll have Briggs and Carter with me, and I’m not expecting any problems. You go and get some sleep now.”

The night-deputy nodded, collecting his coat and slipping it on, then taking up the gun. Before he left, he gave Penelope a quick glance and shook his head.

“It’s a damn shame,” he said, with an air of benediction, as if his judgment alone was the final word. “Thought she was a real nice girl.”

The sheriff nodded, shoulders sagging. “We all did.”

Sheriff Harris walked the night-deputy to the front door, waved him off as he left. He checked on Penelope again—still asleep—then unlocked his office door. He removed his hat and put it on the broad oak desk, draped his coat over the back of his chair, and settled his gunbelt on the coat rack. Then he sat down and rested his head in his hands, still mired in sleep and the fumes of that damned whiskey.

Dealing with a female criminal of any stripe was always an ugly business, but this case was especially unsettling. Penny Foote had never been any trouble. She was always one of the more good-mannered and well-thought-of girls at the saloon, with a steady reputation for satisfied customers. Born and raised just outside of town, just a local girl trying to get by. Lucky Penny, they called her.

The sheriff had never heard a bad word about her, not in the six years she’d been offering her services upstairs at the saloon. So when he was summoned from his bed by a breathless messenger one early morning and climbed the stairs to find Penny catatonic, soaked in blood, with a dead man in bed beside her—cut to pieces, broken glass everywhere from a terrible struggle—it was a damn sight more than a shock.

All through the investigation and the trial she hadn’t been willing or able to say a word in her defense. There was no one around to stick up for her; none of the other saloon girls saw or heard anything worth a damn. The dead man was a mystery; the Madam said he had been visiting Penny nightly for over a week, but discretion was the name of her game, and she never learned anything of note about him. He was a stranger in town, and now he was dead.

The whole sordid business carried a smell of rot, of hidden corners, and Sheriff Harris had wished to God he could just dismiss it all, let Penny recover and go back to her life, such as it was. There was a time when he might have been able to do so and no one would have said a word about it. But things were changing. The new judge—a young shit from Tacoma—intended to set the precedent early and thoroughly: law and order was real and alive in Mount Olive, and the whole region was watching.

We’re vying for the county seat here, Harris. History in the making. Can’t let those bastards over in Shelton have the honor.

“Hello?”

A thin voice called through the wall and Sheriff Harris startled. He rose from his chair and rounded the corner into the jail to see Penny sitting up, curls loose around her shoulders, blanket wrapped tight around her. Despite it all, her gaze was calm.

“Morning, Sheriff,” she said, quietly.

“Miss Foote.” He gave her a smile, trying to keep the pity out of it, but knew he couldn’t quite manage it. “Did you sleep alright?”

She nodded. “I did, thank you.”

He paused, suddenly a little shy. Young women made him nervous; they always seemed to see things that he couldn’t see. “Are you hungry?”

He expected she would refuse, but she nodded.

“I am, actually. Famished.”

He did not hide his surprise. “Well, then. I’ll have someone bring something soon as I can, alright?”

She nodded, looked down at her hands folded in her lap. “I appreciate it.”

A silence. Then, the sheriff said, “I’m real sorry about it all, Penny.”

She shrugged one shoulder. “You’re not to blame.”

“Still. This town is my responsibility, and that includes you. If that man was hurting you, you should have come to me. Or at least your Madam. You shouldn’t have felt you had to kill him.”

She was staring at an invisible spot on the floor, considering his words and her own. “He wasn’t hurting me. Not at all.”

A quick thrill passed through Sheriff Harris, a fire between his aching shoulder blades. He sat down in the night-deputy’s chair, suddenly eager for answers, amazed that she seemed willing to give any at all. “Did you know his name?”

She shook her head. “No. Never did learn it.”

“Madam says he visited you every night for over a week.”

“Ten nights.”

“He must have liked you.”

“I suppose.” She glanced up. “None of this makes any difference, and we both know that. I’m going to die in a few hours. That judge saw to it.”

“Sure. But if you’ve got anything to say…now’s the time.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Not even a good man like you. There’s not a soul on this earth who would believe me.”

She pulled the blanket tighter around her frame, knuckles paling against the rough wool, and the sheriff shuffled the chair closer to the bars.

“Ten nights,” he prompted, gently. “That’s a long time. Like I said, he must have appreciated your services especially.”

She sighed. “It’s not like that. He…he hired me to sleep next to him. That’s all. He didn’t want to be alone.”

The sheriff cocked a thick gray eyebrow. She had challenged him that he wouldn’t believe her, and it was true: he already didn’t.

“Just sleep? For ten nights?”

“He was true to his word, too. Never touched me. Just wanted someone to sleep next to him. From the start he was real jumpy, nervous. Like he was running from something. But it’s not often that a man has the money to hire one of us saloon girls for a whole night, let alone ten, so…”

Penelope let that drop to the floor. Lucky Penny, indeed.

Sheriff Harris pondered this. “Did he…speak to you?”

“Not at first,” she replied. “For the first four nights he just crawled into bed and slept, then left early the next morning. Clockwork. On the fifth he went to bed like usual, but woke up screaming in the middle of the night. Scared me half to death, I’ll tell you that much. When I finally calmed him down, he told me—”

She hesitated. The sheriff waited.

When she spoke again, her voice was hollow. “None of it means anything. It’s all going the same way, isn’t it?”

“What did he tell you, Penny?”

She studied her hands. “He asked me if I believed in…traveling backward and forward through time.”

This was the last thing the sheriff expected to hear. He shook his head, unbelieving. “I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t, either,” she said. “But I just listened. And he explained to me that he had discovered how to travel through time. Not with science or magic, he said, but with the mind. That he had come from some other time, and was only visiting this one.”

The sheriff looked hard at Penelope. Her face was impossible to read.

“You didn’t believe that, did you?” he asked, gently.

“No. I didn’t. But that was the story he gave me.”

“A time traveler.” Sheriff Harris chuckled, a soft sound. “That’s a new one on me.”

Distantly, he heard the door of the jailhouse open and close and a voice call out his name. It was Widow Matheson, from the church; he could hear the rustle of her many shawls.

“In here,” he said.

The widow appeared in the doorway with a bundle under her arm.

“Sheriff,” she said. “Miss Foote. Good morning.”

“Good morning, ma’am,” the sheriff replied, standing respectfully. “Just in time, too. Miss Foote could use some breakfast, if you’ve got the inclination to fetch some for her.”

“I surely do.” The widow set her bundle down on the floor.

“What have you got there?” the sheriff asked.

“It’s a clean dress for Miss Foote,” the widow replied, curtly. “Penelope’s soul may yet go to God, and she ought to look the part.”

The sheriff glanced at Penny, but she was looking off into the distance, in the direction of the gallows hidden from her view by brick walls. He was struck anew by her calm, her composure. He had seen grown men on the morning of their executions with far less poise.

Sheriff Harris took up the widow’s bundle while she bustled back out the door to get breakfast for Penny. He wasn’t certain that a change of wardrobe would convince the Good Lord to look the other way; that was above his station.

But there was a small part of him that hoped it could.

*******

After Penny had eaten a hearty breakfast of eggs, bacon, and biscuits, she changed into the new dress that the widow had brought for her. It was rather fetching on her, a simple sky-blue linen with a long skirt. She had her boots on. Practical, as if she was going on a journey. She pinned her hair up out of her face, pinched her cheeks to give them a blush of color, and sat primly in the cell, hands folded.

By the time she was finished with everything, there was less than an hour left until the hanging. Mount Olive was fully awake and alive, now, the road outside the jailhouse beginning to fill with onlookers, a fickle wind raising small whitecaps on the bay. The noose swayed over the platform, holding its shadow in place as the sun climbed over it.

When he knew she was finished with her ablutions, Sheriff Harris re-entered the jail and sat in the chair. He felt the ticking of the clock in his own veins.

“Anything else you want to say, Penny?” he asked. “It’s your last chance.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Like I said, it doesn’t matter now.”

“Satisfy an old man’s curiosity, then.”

“It won’t absolve you.”

Her words, though soft, sliced into him, a sore place under his ribs. He glowered at her. “Who says I need absolving?”

“It’s the eye of time on you,” she said. “It’s the weight of the town, the weight of change. You think if you hang me without knowing the truth it’ll haunt you the rest of your days. And likely it will. But call it guilt, then. Don’t call it curiosity.”

“Why did you kill him, Penny?” the sheriff asked, his patience thinning, threads snapping.

“I didn’t kill him. I think you know that.”

“Then who did?”

“I don’t know.” She wouldn’t look at him. “I don’t know what it was. But he knew what it was. He was so afraid. I didn’t believe his stories, but I believed his fear.”

She paused, again, gathering her thoughts. The tension in the air whispered like embers.

Finally, the words seemed to pour out of her.

“He was being pursued. When you travel through time like that, through the folds of her skirt, he said, it gets the attention of Something. It’s like snapping your fingers in a silent room. It invites the eye of that thing to watch you, like it can’t see you unless you’ve slipped through time. And as soon as it catches a whiff of you, it follows you. If you’re smart, and keep your wits about you, you’ll keep one step ahead of it by sitting real still and sliding back and forth, past and present, escaping its claws when it gets close. But it always follows after you, on your heels. That’s the price of traveling forward and backward. You’re hunted. Cursed.”

The sheriff stared at her. He didn’t know what to say.

She continued, unblinking, staring at nothing, “He told me that when you travel through time, you crack it. You leave a crease, like folding paper. And the eye of the universe bends toward smudging you out of existence. And he was so afraid…so afraid of what was chasing him…that he was trapped here. He couldn’t leave this time. His mind wouldn’t let him. He couldn’t get still enough, get calm enough. He couldn’t accept the inevitability of his death long enough to let it save him. Without that acceptance, that peace, he was caught like a wolf in a trap, one foot pinned to earth. And the Something could smell it.”

Suddenly, Penny’s eyes slipped to the sheriff’s, and though she was the one behind bars, she held him fast. “I heard it catch him, that final night. I heard it smudge him out right next to me. I got so close to time that I could smell her breath, Sheriff. It was sharp, like rust.”

“Sheriff Harris?”

The deep voice interrupted. The spell broke. Penelope dropped her gaze. The sheriff stumbled out of his chair and toward the jailhouse’s front door where Deputy Briggs was waiting.

“Nearly time, sir. We need you to come on out and give us the go-ahead.”

*******

Sheriff Harris inspected the gallows as if he was the one preparing for his own execution.

He checked the structure, the platform, the trap door. He checked the knot in the noose, the length of the rope, made sure there were no weak spots. He shook the hand of the man who would be pulling the lever, thanked him for stepping in. And finally, he gave the gathered crowd a fatherly wave and a short speech about how such executions aren’t entertainment. Not out here, not in Mount Olive. This is a civilized place, and such deaths deserve respect and dignity, and prayers that the soul of the deceased would find rest.

Within, his own prayers were more complicated. If he thought it would help, he would have prayed for a miracle. For a stay. For God Himself to come down and turn Mount Olive inside-out, if it would remove the shame of killing a young woman he believed to be innocent.

But on the outside, he spoke to the crowd with the authority he had exercised for so many years. He couldn’t be sure the people—his people—were listening. The shadow of the noose was cold on his shoulders under a noonday sun.

He descended the platform and looked across the road to the skeleton of the new courthouse, all timber and canvas, and—just for a moment—he saw it.

He saw the future.

And the terror weakened his knees.

With Briggs following behind him and Carter waiting at the gallows, the sheriff re-entered the jailhouse to prepare Penelope Foote for her hanging. He could feel his hands shaking.

Coward, he thought. Coward. She saw it right away. She saw right through your skin.

He passed his office and entered the jail where he stopped in the doorway as though frozen in place. He blinked, thinking perhaps he was seeing things.

The center cell was empty.

The iron door was still locked in place. The blanket was folded on the bench and the empty breakfast dishes were stacked neatly on the floor.

But Lucky Penny had vanished.

Behind the sheriff Briggs tensed, confused, and then let out a startled shout of confusion, but the old man hardly heard it through his own bewilderment.

“Where is she?” Briggs was yelling. “Where the hell is she?”

The sheriff didn’t answer. There was a scent in the air, faint, like the softness of a snuffed-out candle. Just a breath.

It was sharp, like rust.

As Briggs turned on his heel and ran outside to form the crowd of witnesses into a search party, to attempt to explain the impossible—“Where the hell did she go?”—Sheriff Bartholomew Harris remained in the old jailhouse with the locked cell, the hush, the miracle. His old shoulders lifted as the great, searching gaze shifted away from him and moved elsewhere.

Thank you for reading!

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