Dead as a Dodo

by Jane Langton

  Oh, stop. You don’t get it. You’ve got this light shining in your eyes, this giant floodlight right in front of your face, and yet you keep saying—

  Light? What light?

  Exactly! That’s it exactly! I knew you’d say that! What light? The light of the stars, the light of Venus shining alone in a crystal sky, the light of the sun streaming through a hole in the clouds. And don’t forget the fur on a dog’s back, the curve of a shell, the look of falling snow, the flash of lightning and the crash of thunder, the shape of an egg, the feathers of pigeons, the spiral arms of galaxies, the beauty of women, the ripeness of blackberries in wild thorny tangles at the edge of a field, the light of the moon on the Oxford Canal—

  Now, see here, I can explain all that. Why don’t we start with the beauty of women? What’s all that lusciousness for? You know damn well what it’s for. It’s for sex and reproduction. It’s for another generation of bawling babies. It’s as plain as the nose on your face, and listen, my friend, you’ve got a big nose.

  Okay, okay, of course you’re right, you’re absolutely right, but I’m right too. Shut up and listen, because I’ve got more items to report. There’s no end to the list, and I’m going to push it in your face if it takes all week. Quantity is something, after all, even without definitions and explanations and meanings. Take it without meanings, take it for the sake of gasping. It’s gaspability I’m talking about, the gasp-arousing nature of the universe. Oh, and I forgot to mention the scales of snakes, the gills of toadstools, the tails of swallows, the ears of bats, the smoothness of stones. Gasp, man, go ahead and gasp.

  But Homer’s articulate adversary had melted away. In defeat? No, probably in boredom. There was only the water moving slowly under the bridge, wintry-looking and cold, hiding a few drowsy fish. Loose sheets of soggy paper were disintegrating in the shallows, washed up against the riverbank. They were all that remained of Professor Dubchick’s lost printout, dropped into the river farther up the Cherwell by the abominable Mark Soffit. They meant nothing to Homer Kelly. Turning away, he started home to Keble.

  It wouldn’t be home much longer. Tomorrow the word home would mean familiar places on the other side of the Atlantic—the rivers and woods of Concord, and winter fields the color of a lion’s back.

  Next morning Homer stepped out of a cab at the car-rental place on the Botley Road to pick up the Mitsubishi that was waiting for him. The salesman led him to the end of the pavement beside the frozen ditch. “Here’s your key, Dr. Kelly. Would you like to see some of our hire-purchase models from last year?”

  “Oh, no, thank you. We’re returning to the United States today.”

  The salesman went away. Homer started the car and drove it cautiously out of the lot. He did not look at the ditch and the milky ovals of ice on the reed-filled water. If he had stood on the bank and looked down, he would have seen only a few stiff stalks bending in the cold wind.

  But three months later, back in Concord, Massachusetts, while Homer and Mary Kelly watched the disappearance of the ice on Fairhaven Bay, and looked down their basement stairs at snowmelt from the hillside coursing through their cellar, astonishing things were happening in Oxford on the tangled bank beside the Botley Road. The roots of the weeds that had surged up last fall were once again sending up colonies of spotted stalks. Ugly as sin, they galloped up the bank and invaded the field behind the car-rental company.

  The owner of the field complained to the local agricultural board, and they sent out a field botanist. “My God,” said the botanist, shaking his head, “I never saw anything like it. If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe it.”

  “It’s a plague,” said the farmer. “What are you doing to do about it?”

  “Well, we can try one or two things.” But the botanist was more interested in his scientific discovery than in the farmer’s problem. Enthusiastically he took a few stalks back to his laboratory, and wrote up a paper for the Joseph Hooker Society. “I think we can say with confidence that we have a new species here, which I have named Phragmites oxoniensis.”

  The poor farmer was thrown back on his own devices. He tried mowing the thing down, but it sprang up thicker than ever. He tried pesticides, but none of them worked. Within a couple of years Phragmites oxoniensis had swept its hideous stalks over the roadsides and riverbanks of Oxfordshire, and romped over market gardens and fields of hay.

  It was a classic case of natural selection, the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life. The farmer wasn’t happy, in fact he cursed the day he was born, but Phragmites oxoniensis didn’t care whether the farmer lived or died. Unthinking, uncaring, it prospered and survived.

  AFTERWORD

  Once again, fact must be separated from fiction. The Oxford University Museum on Parks Road in Oxford is a large and splendid fact, with its courtyard, its statuary, its glass roof, its towering iguanodon and its dodo. The Darwin crabs are real too, and some of them are indeed missing. It is not true, however, that the missing ones have turned up. I was greedy to purloin the grandeur of the Hope Entomology Room for my zoologists, but in truth the entomologists have never abandoned it. The three red notebooks of Darwin’s Catalogue for Animals in Spirits of Wine are still on loan to the library of Cambridge University and have not been returned to Down House. There is no community called Nightingale Court, although it somewhat resembles the council estate of Blackbird Leys. The stately home called Windrush Hall does not loom up on the banks of the Windrush River, and there are no memorials to members of the Clare family on the walls of the Burford church.

  The warmest of thanks are due to Museum Administrator Stephen Eeley, who generously allowed this interloper to park her folding stool anywhere in the museum and draw to her heart’s content. John Cooke of the Technical Support Staff took me up staircases and down ladders to see the roof with its three pyramids of glass, the storerooms for butterflies and animal skins, the racks of twisting animal horns, the shelves of bottled specimens in the Invertebrate and Vertebrate Spirit Stores, and best of all, the two small drawers of Darwin crabs. Dr. Jane Pickering, Assistant Curator of the Zoological Collections, showed me other secret places, answered my amateurish questions, and corrected mistakes in my story. (The remaining ones are my own fault.)

  Other kindly readers were my magnanimous hosts on Charlbury Road, Anthony Cockshut and Gillian Avery, and my Cambridge friends Jill Paton Walsh and John Rowe Townsend.

  A happy final note: that accursed new botanical species, Phragmites oxoniensis, does not, thank God, exist.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Homer Kelly Mysteries

  Part One

  Ah, poor child … whither have you come? You are in a murderer’s den.

  —The Brothers Grimm,

  “The Robber Bridegroom”

  Chapter 1

  Once upon a time a poor fisherman caught a magic fish. “Throw me back, good fisherman,” cried the fish, “and I will grant anything you desire.”

  At once the fisherman threw him back in the water, saying, “Thank you, Lord Fish, I want nothing.”

  But when he went home and told the story to his wife, she said, “You fool! Why should we live in this miserable hovel? Go back! Ask the fish for a palace!”

  Wishes are tricky things. In folktales, when they are fulfilled, when every greedy request has been supplied, they often turn sour. The old storytellers understood very well that granted wishes were in defiance of the natural order.

  And yet Annie’s seemed safe enough. She had earned her dream. She had worked for it, she had paid for it herself. It did not depend on any other human being in the whole world. Her wish was for a house. Not an entire new house, because she already had a house. What Annie wanted was a new wing on the east end of her house, to replace the tumbledown shed.

  “My God,” said Homer Kelly, slowing down his car on Baker Bridge Road and staring across the field, “Annie said it would be big. It’s big.”

  “Wow.” Mary star
ed at the house too, as a car behind them blatted its horn.

  Homer pulled over and parked beside the stone wall. “Big doesn’t come cheap. She must have her mouth right under the faucet.”

  “Well, her picture books are selling very well. Jack and the Beanstalk made her fortune.”

  They sat in the car and gazed at the clean new wood of Annie’s house. Across the cornfield, through the bare branches of the November trees, they could see the small figures of carpenters climbing ladders and kneeling on the roof.

  Mary Kelly’s interest in Annie’s house was not merely passing curiosity. Anna Elizabeth Swann was her niece, the daughter of her sister Gwen. Mary had watched the girl grow up, and then she had stood by Annie during her teenage nuttiness, her insane marriage and awful divorce. Annie’s mother and father were often away in India or Pakistan or Nepal, supervising the planting of fruit trees for miscellaneous maharajahs and state agricultural schools, leaving Mary to act as a substitute parent in one crisis after another. Now, at last, Annie’s troubles seemed to be over. It was a relief to enjoy her success.

  What Homer and Mary could not foresee, as they stared across the field at the rising rafters and listened to the thunk of the nailing machines, was the misery that was about to descend on Annie’s house, and the notoriety to follow.

  If they could have forecast all these things in a crystal ball they might have seen themselves inside the enchanted glass along with Annie—because her long-suffering Uncle Homer was about to be drawn on again. Several times already in Annie’s checkered career he had lent a hand, first in disentangling her from that bastard Grainger Swann, second when she was arraigned for possession of cocaine, third when she was picked up for drunk driving.

  Poor old Homer. Once again his past life was about to catch up with him, those distant days before he had started teaching, the old days of his youth, when he had been a lieutenant detective in the Office of the District Attorney of Middlesex County. Since then, by some weird fate or astral influence, Homer had made a habit of stumbling over one dead body after another. Again and again he had been forced to set aside scholarship for the pursuit of psychopaths all over the state of Massachusetts, and in places as far-flung as Florence and Oxford.

  “Well, she’s a funny girl,” said Homer. “Headstrong. Likes to get her own way.”

  “Well, of course she does. So do I. So do you.” Mary watched the first clapboards going up on the east wall of the new wing, and thought about her niece. Annie was a big-boned tall woman with ample breasts, a slightly hooked nose and a mass of chestnut hair spraying out from a clasp at the back of her head. She looked more like an allegorical figure on a pediment—Peace, or Justice, or Bountiful Nature—than anyone’s cuddly little friend. And yet for a piece of monumental statuary she was surprisingly excitable and apt to go off halfcocked. “You know, Homer,” said Mary, “she’s my niece, not yours, but it’s amazing the way she’s so much like you.”

  “Really?” Homer smirked. “You mean brilliant and good-looking? A breaker of hearts?”

  “No, no, that’s not what I mean at all. She’s big and noisy, rash and impulsive. And obsessive. She gets an idea in her head and won’t let it go. She’s like a dog with a stick. That’s Annie. That’s you. There’s a truly remarkable resemblance.”

  “Well, gee, thanks a lot.”

  “Of course, you don’t have anything like Annie’s artistic talent. She gets that straight from her great-grandmother. Oh, Homer, you should have seen my grandmother’s cakes. Five layers high with confectionary swans and castles and three-masted ships, all in spun sugar. She was amazing.”

  Homer gave one more glance across the field as he turned the key in the ignition. “You know, that’s a hell of a big house.”

  “Well, she’s just going to live in the new wing. She’s already rented the old part to a family named Gast. Nice people, she says, with a couple of little kids.”

  “Well, good, maybe the rent will pay her taxes.”

  As they drove away Mary caught a last glimpse of the bright new boards heaped on the ground beside Annie’s house, until they were hidden by the trees around the conservation field. Then she saw only the tractor that was turning under the remaining stalks of corn, and a couple of crows flapping low over the ground, looking for morsels turned up by the plow.

  Chapter 2

  There were three ravens sat in a tree,

  Down adown, hey down, hey down….

  Old English song

  There were crows too around another house, twelve miles away, in the village of Southtown. Months had gone by. It was March, not November, a warm melting day with puddles in the ruts of the driveway.

  When Pearl’s brother got out of his car and moved toward her front porch, four or five of the crows were settling in the trees, harshly cawing, as though they had flown up all at once and were just coming back down. There was no other sound but a faraway cheeping like squeaking wheels, the chatter of birds on the rusty towers of Fred Small’s sand-and-gravel company, over there to the south, beyond the farthest reach of Pearl’s land. The birds were stopping to rest on their way north, fluttering from the gravel-sorting hoppers to the crushers and back, taking possession of the abandoned quarry.

  When Joe entered the house he sensed at once that something was wrong. There was a shivering in his skin, the vibration of a noise still battering the walls. With his heart in his mouth he raced up the stairs and threw open the bedroom door upon a scene of carnage.

  They were both bleeding. Small held his left arm high over his head, doctoring himself with a scarf, tugging at one end with his teeth. There was no way of doctoring Pearl. She lay folded up on the floor, face down in her own blood.

  Joe fell to his knees beside her, and put his hand in the bushy tangle of her yellow hair. “Pearl,” he said, “oh, Pearl.” Then he rolled her head to one side and cried out, because there was nothing left of her face but a bloody hole.

  Springing to his feet, he threw himself at Small. But Pearl’s husband had finished knotting the scarf around his arm. His right hand held a revolver. Joe recognized it as the little Ruger he had bought for Pearl from a good-natured goon in an East Boston bar. He stopped short and backed up, his throat bursting with sobs.

  “I thought you’d turn up,” whispered Small. “It was your idea, right? Give her a gun, she’ll kill me while I’m asleep? That’s what women do, you’re asleep in bed, they blow you away. Well, you should have done your own dirty work.” Small’s eyes were large and shiny, gleaming with miniature reflections of the bright panes of the window. “Because she made a mess of it. She stood beside the bed sniveling and crying, so I woke up, and then she couldn’t handle the fucking firearm, and she shot wild. So I grabbed it and defended myself. What else could I do? And guess what?” Small’s expression changed. He grinned and brandished the firearm. “She signed that piece of paper. Did you know that? She signed it.”

  “She didn’t. She couldn’t have. You’re lying.”

  Frederick Small’s wild whispering stopped. On the highway a truck went by, then another. Small lowered his wounded arm and steadied the gun. A spasm jerked in his face, and he fired.

  The crash sent the crows up again from the trees, flapping their dark wings and frantically cawing.

  The one of them said to his mate,

  “Where shall we our breakfast take?

  With a down, deny, derry, derry down, down.

  Chapter 3

  Once more the fisherman rowed out into the sea. Leaning over the side of his boat, he cried, “Oh, my Lord Fish! I am sorry, but my wife wants a palace.”

  At once the fish rose from the water and said, “Go home, my friend. She has her palace.”

  The new house was finished, and it was perfect, because Annie had designed it all by herself. For months she had worked on plans and elevations. It had been a year since she had made a single drawing for a new picture book, but that could wait. Jack and the Beanstalk had made her a lot of money, and th
e royalties from The Owl and the Pussy-cat were still pouring in. The new addition to her house had been expensive, but Annie was still a wealthy woman. Wisely, she had consulted her old boyfriend Burgess, that swashbuckling freelance investment broker who knew all there was to know about the stock market. She had followed his advice, and now she was set for life.

  Of course, her new house wasn’t really a house, it was just a wing attached to the old farmhouse she had bought from her brother John and his wife two years ago. But the new part was complete in itself. Annie had transferred all her furniture, emptying the house for the tenants who were moving in tomorrow. There were five compartments in the new wing: an enormous room with a kitchen at one end and four additional small spaces—a bedroom, a laundry, a bathroom, and a hall.

  Money, how wonderful it was! Last summer Annie had indulged herself in Caucasian rugs, straw-seated chairs, a long table with massive feet like cannonballs, and a plaster bust of Hermes from some Victorian parlor. It wasn’t greed on her part, surely you couldn’t call it greed? After all that labor, surely she deserved a little self-indulgence? It had taken her ten weeks to complete the picture of the beanstalk, with all the birds and animals hiding among the leaves, and she had spent two months on the speaking harp and the rich border around it, entwined with weasels and stoats. If her books sold well, if Curtis Publishing kept right on sending her large checks, and if she gave big chunks of the money to various good causes, why should anyone blame her? Why couldn’t she wish for the world’s most wonderful room, and design it herself and live in it happily for the rest of her life?

  Actually, it wasn’t quite true that Annie had designed the house all by herself. In the end she had hired an architect to make working drawings. It had not been a happy connection. The architect had been wary of do-it-yourself designers. He had looked suspiciously at Annie’s paper model, eager to show this woman she didn’t have a clue. “Look here, you haven’t got any windows on the north side. That’s a big expanse of blank wall.”