Quiet Dell: A Novel

by Jayne Anne Phillips

“I will say no.” He seemed slightly fatigued.

  Morris called out, “Is Mrs. Alice Bartlett here?”

  Sheriff Grimm spoke from the right side of the stage, behind the wings. “Yes, sir, she is here.”

  A short, full-figured woman walked onto the stage. Her calf-length dress, apricot brocade or satin, too celebratory for a court appearance, shone in the lights. She was fifty or so, very fair, with the blue eyes and pink cheeks of a bisque doll, her hair completely covered with a black cloche hat. The ruched V-neck of the dress drew the eye to her full, well-supported breasts. She gazed at Powers.

  Morris addressed him. “Mr. Powers, I will ask you if you know Mrs. Alice A. Bartlett, who is standing at your right.”

  Powers glanced at her. “I do not believe I am acquainted with the lady.”

  “Did you ever see her without knowing who she was?” persisted Morris.

  “I don’t recall,” Powers said.

  “I will refresh your memory . . . and ask you again if you attended the Boyd Robinson trial . . . and if you sat next to or near Mrs. Bartlett at that trial.”

  Powers looked about him, sensing that he must tread carefully. “What was this man, Robinson, charged with, and maybe I could recall it better.”

  Sheriff Grimm, standing just out of sight of the stage, called in, “Stealing chickens.”

  “I don’t recall,” Powers said, though Morris hadn’t asked.

  Morris dismissed him, and called Mrs. Bartlett to the stand. She waited as Powers took his chair, watching him openly, then moved forward to put her hand on the Bible and be sworn. She sat as though pleased, shrugging her cropped, dark coat to her shoulders. Her ample breasts moved in the dress. She wore a large oval locket on a beaded gold chain.

  Morris walked about the stage, asking her to recall the trial of the State versus Boyd Robinson, Criminal Court of Doddridge County, in the neighboring town of West Union, March term, 1930.

  Yes, Alice Bartlett answered. She did recall.

  Morris reminded her: this trial was one in which Mr. Robinson was accused of stealing chickens from the farm of C. O. Young.

  Law pushed back in his chair at the counsel table. “Objection! What have we to do with a chicken thief?” He opened his arms to Judge Southern, provoking ripples of laughter in the gallery.

  Southern glowered. “The court will be the judge of that. Overruled! Proceed.”

  “Exception!” proclaimed Law, writing.

  Morris established that Alice Bartlett lived in West Union, and asked why she took an interest in the Robinson trial.

  She went by herself to the trial that afternoon, Mrs. Bartlett said, “because I met Boyd Robinson’s sister on the street and she remarked to me that she felt so bad that none of her neighbors, or none of the women she knew, was taking any interest in the trial.”

  And where was Mrs. Bartlett sitting in the courtroom? Morris asked.

  “I was not sitting very far back,” she said, “in the place reserved for the audience.”

  Morris approached her, his hands clasped behind his back. “I will ask if you know the defendant, Harry F. Powers?”

  “Well,” she replied, her hand at her neck. The gold locket gleamed up at her clavicle. “I saw him there that day; I recognized him from the newspapers, as being at the trial.”

  Did she mean that she saw Powers in March 1930, at the Boyd Robinson trial? And recognized Powers in his newspaper photo, and so came forward, to testify here today?

  “Yes.” She looked at Powers, across the room. “He is the same man, and he was at the trial that day.”

  “Where did he sit, with reference to where you were?”

  “He came in and sat right down by the side of me.”

  “Mrs. Bartlett, I will ask if either of you started a conversation.”

  Alice Bartlett leaned forward. “He did. The first thing he said, he asked me if I was a witness, and I said, ‘No,’ and then he said, ‘Rogers is my name.’ He says, ‘I am very well acquainted with the Youngs.’ He says, ‘I buy lots of stock of them.’ He says, ‘I have a big stock farm and store, and I am manager for an electric sweeper company.’ And I turned around and remarked to him, ‘That is nice,’ and when I turned around to make him that answer I saw he had laid his arm on the back of my seat, and I moved toward the edge of the seat, and then he reached over and asked me my name. I replied by asking him to take his arm down off of the back of my seat, and I said, ‘See now that you do it.’ ”

  “Did either of you move away from the other?” Morris asked.

  Alice Bartlett pulled at the fingertips of one gloved hand with the other. “He took his arm down then and only remained a very short time . . . until he got up and stepped to the back in the courtroom, or went out, I don’t know where. I did not see no more of him.” She touched her throat. The gold locket winked as she moved; it was large, nearly two inches round, and set with a stone, a diamond, from the catch of the light.

  “Mrs. Bartlett,” Morris said. “Are you sure of your identification of the defendant?”

  “Yes, sir. I identified him in the papers, and he looks like the man today.”

  Powers would have noticed the locket, Emily knew, and Alice Bartlett was the right age and weight, and dressed expensively, despite her country grammar. She’d married up; perhaps she was widowed, with the time and inclination to attend a trial on a weekday afternoon, a favor to a female friend, an entertainment for herself.

  Morris paused and said he had one more question. Her locket was lovely. Did she wear it every day?

  Why yes, she told him, it was her late husband’s gift, a family heirloom—

  “Objection!” Law thundered. “Immaterial!”

  “Sustained,” Judge Southern replied. “You may cross-examine the witness.”

  But Morris had made his point. The locket had attracted Powers’ attention, if her breasts did not. And Emily thought not.

  Law stood and walked back and forth across the stage, fixing the attention of the crowd. He spoke in clipped, angry phrases, as though insulted. “Were you summoned as a witness in the case, and if so, when?”

  “Yes, sir, I was summoned today.”

  “To whom have you talked with regard to this conversation before you were summoned?”

  “Oh, to several people . . .” Alice Bartlett looked about her, as though to find them on the stage.

  Law stopped before her. “How did the information get out, and how were the prosecution told, that you recognized Rogers?”

  “Why,” she said, “I let the law here know it.”

  “Who did you let know it?”

  “Sheriff W. B. Grimm.”

  Law turned to face the audience. “Where did you talk to him?”

  “To let him know? I just wrote it to him.” She looked at Law as though he lacked sense.

  “What purpose did he have, this defendant here, in giving you a name, Rogers?”

  “I don’t know.” Alice Bartlett widened her blue eyes. “You will have to ask him that.”

  There was murmuring, even applause, in the audience. Law stalked back to his table, shouting, “Dismissed!”

  The gavel banged. Emily put her hand to her forehead, and turned to Eric. “I must file. I have the story nearly written.” She stood and stepped past a number of male reporters, to the end of the row, and moved quickly up the carpeted aisle to the lobby. She went to the press corps office, across the street, rather than to the Gore, and approached the counter. No one was in line; the trial was still in session.

  She sat to handwrite several sentences incorporating Bartlett into the first graph. Her headline was interrogative, for she could only insinuate. She read the words over quickly:

  Killer Powers Cites “Charlie Rogers” as Friend and Love Mentor: Are “Rogers” and Powers the Same Man? Clarksburg, WV, Special to the Chicago Tribune, by Emily Thornhill:

  In breaking developments today, witness Mrs. Alice A. Bartlett, local resident, testified that a man she identifi
ed as Harry F. Powers introduced himself to her as “Rogers” in March of last year “owner of a large stock farm and manager of an electric sweeper company.” Accused killer Harry F. Powers has cited his friend Charlie Rogers as acquainted with Asta B. Eicher, murdered widow, and testified that Rogers introduced him to Northborough, Massachusetts, victim Dorothy P. Lemke, pointing out her name as the most suitable correspondent listed by the Friendship Society of Detroit, a matrimonial agency.

  Clarksburg police have received numerous letters suggesting that other unsolved cases of missing women may be traced to Powers. One in particular mentions Charlie Rogers by name. The letter comes from C. S. Brown of Iowa Falls, Iowa, concerning the death of his daughter, Miss Golda Brown, 37, a trained nurse working in Cleveland, Ohio; her father expresses the belief she was murdered and that Powers was involved. Official records state that Golda Brown died after taking poison on July 26, 1929. At her death, her father received a night message alerting him to the tragedy, signed by “Rogers.” No “Rogers” turned up when the father went to Cleveland to identify his daughter’s body, but Brown says that a short, stocky man fell into step beside him as he emerged from the morgue: “He asked me if he could do anything and I inquired if he knew of a man in Cleveland by the name of Rogers, who was from Pittsburgh. He advised me to take the body and ‘get to hell out of here.’ ”

  Brown’s letter claims the supposed suicide note left by his daughter “is no more her handwriting than that of a two-year-old child.” Golda Brown’s father believes Rogers and Powers are the same man.

  Arrest halted Powers’ correspondence with over 200 women. Letters arrived to Cornelius O Pierson’s P.O. Box 227, Clarksburg, West Virginia, at the rate of 20 a day. Dozens of women’s photographs found in Powers’ possession were simply inscribed to “Connie, dear,” a pet name Powers employed. The names of other possible victims will likely remain unknown, and their lives go unremarked, but in the grieving hearts of those who still search for them.

  Emily went to the counter and called to the dispatcher. “Sir? Would you send this immediately, please, to the Chicago Tribune?” She handed over her copy and stood by the window to wait. Crowds, discouraged by yesterday’s storm, were back in front of the opera house; closing arguments were expected today. She saw the crowd jostle, and police holding up billy clubs, directing human traffic. It was the lunch recess. Hundreds were making their way outside. She saw William striding free of the throng, crossing the street, and flung open the door of the press office. “Mr. Malone! Over here!” She was about to rush into the street, but he saw her and walked toward her.

  “Miss,” called the dispatcher. “Your copy!”

  • • •

  The opera house was packed for closing arguments. Law swept his gaze over the aisles, the balconies and gallery, questioning the motives of the state’s witnesses, one by one. He condemned the public’s sad fascination with gruesome detail and clutched the sides of the counsel table, decrying the base desire for public spectacle, even when a man’s life hung in the balance. The lights onstage seemed to dim.

  “Law has paid someone to dim the border lights,” Emily told Eric. “Why doesn’t Morris object?”

  “Best not to interrupt. Morris will use the trick to his own ends.” Eric put a finger to his lips.

  Law spoke in ringing tones of the love of mankind. Even the state admitted to a wholly circumstantial case, he claimed, and reasonable doubt must always exist in the absence of hard evidence. He pleaded that the jury “remain firm in their convictions,” for the true consideration here was the question of the sane men in the jury killing another, less fortunate, misbegotten man, a man mired in ill fate and bad judgment. Law stood before the jury box to quote the Gospels from memory: cast the first stone; judge not lest ye be judged. There but for God’s grace, he intoned, lifting his long arms; the jury alone might exercise compassion and pity, for compassion, so desired by all of us in our darkest hour, was the epitome of human blessing. Tears streaming down his face, he urged the jury to apply the spirit of Jesus: “sympathy, justice, and mercy.” Powers, as though moved by Law’s plea, looked pointedly at the painted backdrop of the church behind the judge, and lifted his face to display the tracks of tears.

  “Well played,” Eric whispered.

  But Morris did not disappoint. He appealed first to reason, pounding on the stenographer’s desk, reviewing the state’s inexorable chain of evidence point by point, for nearly an hour. Then he took his turn at center stage, declaiming like a town crier. Indicted but not charged! He pointed at Powers, and called the names: Asta Buick Eicher. Her children: Grethe Eicher, fourteen years old; Hart Eicher, twelve years old; Annabel Eicher, nine years old. Indicted and charged! Dorothy. Pressler. Lemke.

  Morris had silenced the hall. There was no Johnson, no Rogers, he told them. Harry Powers, after Dorothy Lemke helpfully struck match after match to light his mechanic’s chore on a darkening road, drove her, in the same car, less than two miles to his death chamber. Mercy? Her death was not quick, he reminded the jury. Let us walk with her, every step; surely she was owed that much, for she found no compassion, no help in that long night.

  Certainly, he was using the lights, which seemed to have dimmed further. Emily heard women softly weeping. She only hoped Gretchen Fleming was not here, that she’d left after her grueling testimony.

  Morris went on, commanding the hushed crowd. She died not once but twice, for the rope broke and she plunged deeper into darkness . . . before he wielded the strap.

  There were gasps and stifled cries.

  Morris finished: “The state demands nothing less than a verdict carrying the death penalty for the first mass slayer the county has ever known!”

  It was 3:20. The jury retired to a guarded opera house dressing room.

  • • •

  Emily and Eric walked out onto the snowy streets, away from the crowd, and waited for William. The three drifted slowly into the lightly falling snow. A mere two blocks away on a parallel street, the city was quiet. Few came and went.

  “How long?” William asked.

  “They will stay out an hour at least,” Eric said, “to be taken seriously in such a publicized capital case.”

  “What a show.” William pulled his scarf up about him. “Morris had final say, at least, to offset Law’s histrionics. He made the truth dramatic, but I wonder if he went too far.”

  Emily brushed the snow from his shoulders. “Too far, my darling? As you say, it was every word the truth. And he didn’t cry.”

  “The state does not cry, Emily.” Eric smiled. “Not Morris’ style, in any case.”

  “Powers, weeping,” Emily scoffed. “I didn’t think he could. Perhaps they practiced.”

  “Cousin, I remind you. He sniveled and cried in fear of the lynch mob, in September.”

  “I don’t believe it’s genuine.” Emily led them toward the park. “He does not feel fear; he calculates and postures. He will show no emotion at his hanging. I would bet money on it.”

  “Law’s appeal was staged philosophy and biblical allusion, and the jury are likely religious.” William stopped and looked into the snow. “Might they actually recommend mercy?”

  “We will know immediately,” Eric said. “The verdict will read ‘guilty as charged in the indictment,’ which means he hangs, or they will add the phrase ‘further find that he be confined in the penitentiary,’ which means life in prison, because that is what Southern will sentence him.”

  “No,” Emily said, “it must be over.”

  Eric pulled off his gloves and took a cigarette from his pocket. He signaled them to stand near while he lit a match.

  “Eric, you’re smoking.” Emily watched the fire in his cigarette glow bright orange in the blue afternoon.

  “Settle my nerves. I filched a few from the complimentary box in the Gore smoking room. I knew I’d want one just now.”

  “Give me one then,” Emily said. “William?”

  “No, though
I’d like a bourbon. I’ll have a stiff one when it’s over.”

  “So shall we all.” Eric leaned in to light her cigarette with his own, and caught her eye.

  Charles. The drop moment. “Thank you, cousin,” she said.

  “In any case,” Eric continued, “Law will gather up his overruled exceptions and request a new trial. He will appeal beyond Southern, but he will fail.”

  “The sentence must be carried out no sooner than thirty days after sentencing,” Emily said. “The execution should be mid-January, at the latest.”

  William pulled her to him as they walked, for they were out of sight of the crowd. “And these other cases, brought to attention. In the unlikely event that he is not hanged, might other charges be filed?”

  “No.” She drew in, watching the languid smoke of her cigarette ascend. “It is all hearsay, and much weaker circumstance, and the trail is cold.”

  “He is strangely contemptuous of it all,” William said, “and no real alibi, as though he might exonerate himself with lies alone.”

  Eric threw down his cigarette, burning a hole in the snow. “That is freedom, that a killer might range over a territory for years, no one watching. And with Luella and her sister the perfect cover on home ground, asking no questions, he maintained anonymity.”

  “He didn’t plan on getting caught,” Emily said. “Lone women might disappear with a man, and their relations seek information, but until Powers was famous, no one knew whom to ask, or where to write. He was caught because he killed the Eichers. Whatever he’s done or would have done, their deaths have ended it.”

  “That at least is true.” William pulled her closer.

  Emily held her gloved hands open, catching flakes that fell on a slant, like soft rain. “Such snow. It stops and starts at intervals, as though looking away and coming back to us, dancing or raging. Is it always like this here in winter?”

  “Parrish says such heavy snows are not usual so early in December, but he is my only authority.” Eric leaned across her, toward William. “Emily, William and I have made plans. The sentencing will be tomorrow morning, Thursday.”

  “You do want to go home, don’t you, Emily?” William looked at her as though truly asking. “We made train reservations, two days ago, for Friday, to be sure there is room for the four of us, as scores will be leaving at once.”