“The John Doe,” I prompted.
“Yes.” He blinked owlishly at me. “It was in the winter sometime.”
“January 12, 1995,” I suggested. “At least that’s the date inscribed on the John Doe’s niche.”
“January 12, 1995 it is, then,” Dr. Womble said. “What a wonderful memory you have. Yes, and we were expecting rather a big snowstorm. I went to visit all my shut-ins, partly because I knew it might be a few days before I could get out to them again, and partly to make sure they had everything they needed to ride out the storm. And it took rather longer than I expected. Of course my shut-in visits usually do for some reason.”
Actually, pretty much everything Dr. Womble did took longer than expected, even for those of us who were accustomed to his absentmindedness and distractibility. Books were usually the reason—books and conversations.
“It was very late—perhaps ten o’clock. I was coming back from Mrs. Petworth’s house, and trying to decide whether to stop by Trinity to make sure everything was ready for the snow or just go straight home before the roads got worse, when I ran into Archie.”
“Literally?” I asked.
“Very nearly. He was stumbling along the middle of the road a few blocks from Trinity and … well, he wasn’t quite himself.”
“Was he on drugs?” I asked.
“Only drink that day, as far as I could tell,” he said. “Not that alcoholism is that much better than drug abuse, of course, except for the fact that you’re not actually breaking the law when you buy spirits. And of course, the drug use followed all too soon. At that time he’d only been out of prison a few months, and a few of us were trying to help him make a new start. Not very successfully, as it turned out.”
His face fell as if Archie’s plummet from grace were entirely his fault. I thought of telling him it wasn’t, but sensed that the question could very well spark a long, philosophical discussion on the nature of responsibility that, however fascinating, wouldn’t bring me any closer to knowing what had happened either thirty years or two days ago. Fortunately I’d had some experience steering Dr. Womble back on track.
“So what did you do when you almost ran into Archie in the middle of the snowstorm?”
“I stopped, of course,” Dr. Womble said. “And coaxed him into the car. I tried to find out where he was staying—his mother had died a year or two before he got out of prison, so he couldn’t have been staying with her. He was rather vague about his plans, and after a bit, I came to the realization that perhaps he was embarrassed because he apparently hadn’t made any arrangements about where to stay and had no money for either a room or a bus ticket out of town. He ended up in our guest room for a few weeks until I managed to get him into a residential substance abuse program.”
A few weeks? Dr. Womble was a very good man, but Emma Womble had to be a saint for putting up with him all these years.
“At the Inchness Center?” I pointed to the return address on Archie’s letter.
“It might have been,” Dr. Womble said. “I’m afraid I don’t remember. It was so long ago—and only the first of many such stays, unfortunately. Such a sad story—a young man you’d have thought would have a bright future ahead of him. And yet his whole life was blighted by one unfortunate mistake.”
I was tempted to suggest that the fake jewel robbery probably wasn’t Archie’s first or only mistake, not by a long shot. Or that attempting to organize a complicated if unsuccessful plot to defraud an insurance company of several million dollars wasn’t exactly the sort of mistake that a basically honest and well-intentioned young man would stumble into all that easily. And to point out that Archie’s involvement with substance use appeared to have preceded the jewel robbery, since the person he originally tried to recruit to perform it was his drug dealer. But none of those comments would get me any closer to getting an answer to my question. And did all this have something to do with the John Doe, or had Dr. Womble forgotten my question and veered back onto Archie?
“Very sad,” I said, “but I don’t quite get what this has to do with John Doe being buried at Trinity.”
“Oh, yes.” Dr. Womble frowned and sat up straighter in his chair as if making a strenuous effort to get himself back on track. “Well, Archie was quite agitated. Kept calling me a good Samaritan and babbling about being attacked on the road to Jericho and killing fatted calves and—well quite a mishmash of vaguely Biblical-themed ravings. He did look as if he’d been in a bit of a scuffle, but unfortunately I made the understandable assumption that he was speaking metaphorically, and that in reality he’d gone a few rounds with the asphalt roadway.” He smiled wryly.
“Why unfortunately?”
“Because he was, after a fashion, telling the truth. Apparently he’d gone out to Trinity to visit his mother’s grave. This was before we started worrying about vandalism and locking up the columbarium. In fact, it was right after this that we did start locking it up—I thought that way people would have to come to the office in the daytime to get the key, and we’d have less chance of people tripping and hurting themselves in the churchyard.”
“Or being mugged there,” I suggested.
“That too.” He nodded. “Anyway, Archie told me that while he was leaving the crypt after visiting his mother’s grave, and somewhat distracted with grief, someone waylaid him in the graveyard; they’d fought, but Archie was able to escape. He was so … agitated and incoherent that at first I assumed he’d hallucinated the attack—he seemed rather confused about whether it was a man who had attacked him or a polar bear. And the next day he woke up so hysterical that for a while we thought he was having delirium tremens. He was quite obsessed with fear that the man who attacked him could have followed us home. So to calm him I went down to Trinity. I expected to find absolutely nothing—and instead, I found an unidentified man lying dead in the graveyard. A rather large man in a bulky white down jacket.”
He stopped and stared into the distance, as if seeing it all over again.
“What did you do?”
“Called the police, of course. And then, God help me, I went inside, called Emma, and told her to reassure Archie that he could rest easy because his assailant was dead.”
“And how much of this did you tell the police?”
“Almost none of it. I reported finding the body, of course. But for the rest—I thought I’d wait and see.”
“Wait and see what?”
“Who the man was. And how he’d died. I was afraid that if they knew Archie was involved, they’d jump to all sorts of conclusions. Assume the worst. He was out on parole, you see, and they might have sent him back to finish his sentence. Even if they didn’t, I was afraid the experience would derail him just as he was trying to make a new start. So I decided to wait, at least until the medical examiner had finished his autopsy and announced the results.” His face was drawn and anxious, as if he was still waiting for the autopsy.
“And what did it reveal?”
“Accidental death.” His face cleared slightly. “He’d been somewhat intoxicated, which probably caused him to stumble. He’d hit his head on a headstone, lapsed into unconsciousness, and frozen to death. So Archie wasn’t to blame.”
I wondered if he’d ever considered that the medical examiner might have reached an entirely different verdict if he’d known Archie had been there. Would John Doe’s wounds still have looked like accidental death if the medical examiner knew the deceased had been fighting with someone? Tripping and hitting your head on a gravestone was one thing; getting shoved into it was another. And who had been medical examiner in Caerphilly back then—had it been someone like Dad, who was almost too ready to suspect homicide? Or someone who would be quick to close the book on what looked like the accidental death of a drunken vagrant? Yes, if Dr. Womble had revealed what he knew, Archie would probably have been questioned and might even have been charged with … what? Self-defense? Justifiable homicide? Involuntary manslaughter? Not being one of those many family lawye
rs, I had no idea. But he’d have been charged with something, and maybe the charges would have been valid.
I could understand why Dr. Womble had worried about derailing Archie’s efforts to rebuild his life. But by the sound of it, Archie had managed to derail himself just fine without any help from the Caerphilly PD.
I suspected Dr. Womble had already thought of these points. Even if he hadn’t, what good would it do to reproach him with them after more than twenty years?
“You don’t think maybe Archie could have helped figure out who the John Doe was?” I asked instead.
“I showed him the picture,” Dr. Womble said. “He didn’t know the poor man. Even so, the shock of being attacked and then learning that his assailant had frozen to death had a profound impact on him. It shocked him into … well…”
“Sobriety?” I suggested.
“Well, no. But into a recognition of the need to make serious changes in his life. So I did everything I could to get him into a decent treatment program. As I said, I can’t remember if it was at Inchness or someplace else, but I made sure it was a very reliable place. That helped me get over the guilt.”
“Guilt about what?”
“That I hadn’t managed to save that poor unknown soul.” Dr. Womble looked stricken. “If I’d been more diligent about my stewardship of Trinity—I should have gone there to check that everything was battened down before the storm. Or if I’d done a better job of getting information out of Archie. In either case, maybe I’d have found the poor man before he succumbed to the elements.”
“Since Mrs. Womble was probably already worried sick about you being out in a snowstorm, I think you did the right thing by going straight home,” I said. “And maybe if you had stopped by the church, some other less careful driver would have literally run over Archie. And don’t expect me to give you a hard time about letting a poor drunk sleep it off unmolested. How were you supposed to know that someone’s life depended on a bit of information hidden in an alcoholic’s fuzzy brain?”
“You sound like the bishop.” Dr. Womble chuckled softly. “And yes, I understand that it’s a little morbid of me, dwelling on it like that. I don’t usually—or I didn’t until recent events brought it so forcefully back into my mind. But you did ask me why I arranged to have the poor dead man buried here at Trinity. It seemed the least I could do. And when I told Archie about it, he insisted on contributing what he could.”
“I gather that wasn’t much.”
“Not really.” Dr. Womble shook his head. “Sadly, his mother lost all her money before her death. Archie did have some income thanks to a trust fund from his grandfather Van der Lynden, but that was quite modest even thirty years ago.”
“And I doubt if old Mr. Van der Lynden made provision for inflation,” I said.
“Probably not,” Dr. Womble agreed. “Though he did make provision for Archie’s … feckless character. The trust was set up so Archie could never touch the principal. Not if he lived to be a hundred. So as the cost of living increased, he struggled until the maintenance job at Inchness came through.”
I found myself wondering if Dr. Womble had had something to do with the maintenance job coming through.
“What about Paul Blair?” I asked. “Who returned to Caerphilly as P. Jefferson Blair. You arranged for his niche, too, didn’t you?”
“Oh, yes.” Dr. Womble nodded. “It was the least I could do. I wasn’t able to save Jeff, you see. He was so unhappy—the estrangement from his family, the ruin of his intended career. The loneliness—he assumed no one would want a relationship with someone who had a prison record, and wouldn’t give anyone chance to change his mind.”
“The police report said he was killed by accident while cleaning his gun.”
“And even I know better than to take that at face value. No, it was suicide, and I failed to prevent it.”
“So you paid for his niche.”
“No, actually the college did. I suppose you could say I blackmailed them into it.”
He looked curiously pleased with himself.
Chapter 27
“Blackmailed the college?” I liked his style. “How?”
“I found the syllabus of a class he was teaching that semester—I think it was called ‘The Literature of Despair.’ Every single writer on the reading list was someone who had committed suicide. Thomas Chatterton, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Richard Brautigan, Carolyn Heilbrun, James Tiptree Jr., Virginia Woolf—I forget who else, but you get the idea.”
“Sounds like a cry for help,” I said.
“And one the college completely ignored. So I talked to the dean of the English Department and implied that I’d be talking to an attorney about the possibility of legal action. They managed to find the money to bury him properly and pay off his debts so his family wouldn’t have to.”
He smiled beatifically.
“How did you ever think of that?” I asked.
“I didn’t, actually. A friend of Jeff’s did.”
“Let me guess—Professor James Donovan.”
“How did you know?” Dr. Womble beamed. “Such a loyal friend. Of course we had to keep his part in it secret. He was working to get tenure, you see.”
Yes, I could see. And even today Donovan might not be all that crazy about having his part in it revealed. Well, his secret would be safe with me.
“Look,” I said. “You need to tell the chief about all this.”
Dr. Womble looked stricken.
“Why?” he asked. “It’s all ancient history. How can any of it have anything to do with poor Mr. Hagley’s murder?”
“It may not,” I said. “But what you’ve just told me could clear up a lot of the chief’s unanswered questions. Questions that he’s spending valuable time to answer when he could be spending that time on things that are related to the murder.”
There was also the possibility that some of it might have everything to do with the murder. I couldn’t see how, but then I wasn’t the chief.
Dr. Womble still looked unhappy.
“How about if you let me tell him?” I suggested. “I could explain that it all came up in our discussion over what to do about everybody’s ashes, and you had no idea any of it might be related to the murder.”
“I suppose that would do,” he said.
“And if Archie gets in touch with you, please see if you can get an address or a phone number for him,” I said. “Or at least tell him we’re trying to reach him. I need to confirm what he wants done about his mother’s ashes, and the chief wants to talk to him so he can clear him of any suspicion in the murder.”
Or see if he was implicated in the murder, but no sense worrying Dr. Womble about that.
“I’ll try,” he said. “Did I hear correctly that they found some of the missing jewelry in the crypt?”
“We found a ring,” I said. “No idea if it’s one of Mrs. Van der Lynden’s jewels or a piece of costume jewelry someone dropped, but I suspect the chief’s eager to talk to Archie about that, too.”
Dr. Womble nodded.
“And I’ll let Dad know you’re eager to talk about the Bounty.” Probably a good idea to distract him before he had second thoughts about sharing information.
So I endured twenty minutes or so of Dr. Womble’s new enthusiasm. Under any other circumstances I’d have said enjoyed rather than endured, but I was impatient to share what I’d learned with the chief. So, fascinating as I found Dr. Womble’s thoughts on the difference between jackfruit and breadfruit, the sinister connection between the Bounty’s mission and the slave economy in the West Indies, and his assertion that the mutineers who escaped hanging appeared to have done so less by proving their innocence than by hiring persuasive attorneys and using their aristocratic contacts—I was relieved when Emma Womble appeared to announce that Father Shakespeare had arrived to see him.
“I’ll dash right out to welcome him.” Dr. Womble suited the action to the words, and would have overturned the lemonade
pitcher if both Mrs. Womble and I hadn’t reached out to steady it.
“Father Shakespeare?” I queried. “Is that a real name?”
“Seems to be,” she said. “He’s tomorrow’s supply priest—and an old friend of Rufus’s. He’s going to stay the night with us. They’ll be up all night, talking over their exciting days in Selma and Montgomery.”
“Wow,” I said. “I remember hearing that Dr. Womble was active in the Civil Rights movement. I didn’t know how active. He didn’t tell me a thing about it when I tried to interview him for the parish newsletter a few months ago. Maybe I could get enough out of Father Shakespeare for another article.”
“Catch him after services tomorrow,” she said. “Right now he’s taking Rufus fishing. And I’d better get a casserole ready, in case they spend so much time talking that they forget to bait their hooks.”
I thanked her for the lemonade, and made only a token protest when she gave me a tin containing several dozen cookies for the boys.
Then I hurried back to my car. I picked up my phone to call the chief—but no. This merited an in-person visit. I called Michael to warn him I’d be a little later than planned.
“No problem,” he said. “Ferreting out the town’s most sensational secrets is bound to take a little time.”
“Yes, and maybe not even possible, considering that most of the people who might know anything are dead.”
“True—what was it Ben Franklin said? ‘Two can keep a secret only if one of them is dead.’”
“Actually, what he said was, ‘Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.’ Trust me; I once won a family trivia competition with that, and it’s stuck with me.”
“‘Two can keep a secret’ is catchier. Although not all that apropos, I suppose—you’ve run into way more than two people keeping secrets, and most of them are dead now. Besides—no Josh, we’re not talking about the toucan. We’re talking about Benjamin Franklin.… No, that’s Ulysses S. Grant. Franklin is on the hundred-dollar bill … Okay, I’ll show you, the next time I have both a fifty- and a hundred-dollar bill in my wallet.”
Toucan Keep a Secret Page 17