The Memorial Hall Murder

by Jane Langton

  “I won’t stand for it.” Jonathan Pearlman was shaking Vick’s arm. “She’s back. That crazy old lady. You know, the one Ham squeezed into my second-violin section last year. I tell you, I won’t take it lying down. Not again.”

  “Oh, no, not Miss Plankton?” Vick looked around in dismay. There she was, Jane Plankton, that funny little old lady, pulling her fiddle out of its scuffed case, her hair ribbon bobbing, her cheeks bright pink. Oh, it was incredible. Ham had sworn he would get rid of her. Because the poor dear could hardly play at all, and she was always downbow when everybody else was upbow. She had no business being in the orchestra anyway, even if she was an old ’Cliffie of the class of aught nine or something. What was the matter with Ham? Why didn’t he do something?

  And then Vick saw Jennifer Sullivan. She ran up to Jennifer and took her by the shoulders and stared at her in mock horror. “Jennifer, I didn’t know.” Because Jennifer was pregnant, really bulging.

  “Oh, never mind,” said Jennifer. “Just never mind. I don’t want to even talk about it. And if you want to know who the father was, it was just some guy I know, I mean I don’t care, I mean it doesn’t make any difference. I’m staying with Ham. I mean, they wouldn’t let me have a baby in the dorm, so Ham said I could have it there at his house on Martin Street. So shut up. Just tell me where you want the sopranos. Over there? Hey, Betsy, the sopranos are over there.”

  But Betsy wasn’t listening. Betsy Pickett was riding around on the back of Jack Fox, screaming to be let down, and the new people in the chorus who didn’t know Betsy were staring at her. You’d never think Betsy was a prize-winning student in the Classics Department, you’d just never believe she was writing an honors thesis on some old Roman poet. Betsy’s boyfriend, Tim Swegle, was dragging at her from the rear. Tim had a firm grip under Betsy’s fat shoulders, but Betsy was hanging on to Jack’s neck with her little hiking boots and shrieking with rapture, and Jack was choking and clawing at his throat. Vick smiled and sat down with the cellos, then looked up as a tall big-boned woman bent down to speak to her. “Where do you want the altos?” said the woman. “I’m new. My name’s Mary Kelly.”

  “Oh, hi, there, Mrs. Kelly,” said Vick, beaming at her. “The altos are over there on the left side. And, say, I just met your husband. He’s really great. I sure wish I could take your course.”

  Ham was on the podium, tapping his music stand. Instantly disorder became order. Betsy was in her place with the sopranos. Jack Fox struck a note on the harpsichord. A threadlike piercing A escaped from the oboe. The orchestra tuned up, and then Ham pulled something out of his pocket and waved it in the air. “Peanut brittle,” he said. “Did everybody get some of Mrs. Esterhazy’s peanut brittle?” Mrs. Esterhazy’s basket was passed around once more. Then Ham stepped aside and Jack Fox, the manager of the chorus, talked about the quartet trials that were still to come. Newcomers who had passed their preliminary auditions trembled. Jack talked about attendance. Ham stepped back on the podium and talked about the music, turning slowly to face the orchestra on the stage and the chorus on the benches.

  “There are some things I’d like to say about Handel’s Messiah before we begin. As usual we will be performing it at Christmastime. But it was never intended solely as a Christmas piece. The text is concerned not only with the birth of Christ, but with his suffering, death, and resurrection, and the resulting redemption of all mankind. It could just as well be a Good Friday or an Easter piece. Handel himself first performed it in Dublin on Good Friday. Now, the soloists will as usual be drawn from our own forces. Mrs. Esterhazy, of course, will sing the contralto arias.” (Cheers for Mrs. Esterhazy.) “Mr. Proctor will be our bass.” (Cheers for Mr. Proctor.) “The tenor part will be sung by our own Tim Swegle.” (Whistles of amazement for Tim, whose voice was still a little thin and shaky.) “And last but not least, our soprano soloist will be Betsy Pickett.” (Applause mingled with insane shrieks from Betsy.) “Now, before we begin, I have a poem I would like to read.” (Shouts: “Oh, no, spare us!”) Ham took a piece of paper out of his pocket and read aloud.

  “There once was a young girl named Vick,

  Whose favorite expression was ‘Ick.’

  Whenever you kissed her,

  She said, ‘Listen, mister,

  Don’t touch me, you make me feel sick.’”

  Vick reached out past her cello with her foot and kicked Ham in the shin, and the chorus and the orchestra laughed loudly, even the newcomers who didn’t know who Vick was. Ham said “Ow” and rubbed his leg, and then he made a joke about Vick’s striped shirt, and lifted his stick at last.

  The noise died down. The thick volumes of music were riffled open. “All right now, you good Rats,” said Ham, “let’s begin from the beginning with the overture. The chorus can just sit there and enjoy it. We’ll get to them in a minute. We’ll do as much of Part One as we can get through this morning, but we’ve got to finish up right on time. I’ve got to meet somebody promptly at eleven-thirty.” He stroked a great upbeat, and the orchestra struck the E-minor chord and sailed serenely up, the violins trilling mournfully on D sharp and then landing on the G for three solemn dotted notes. “Upbow, Miss Plankton,” shouted Ham.

  Vick’s music was part of the bass-line carried by the harpsichord. Moving her bow across the D string, drawing from it steadily the half note on E from which the voices of the other instruments sprang, she smiled up at Ham. It was good to be starting again. He knew what she meant, and smiled back.

  “He had to meet somebody at eleven-thirty,” said Vick. “Isn’t that right, Mary? He said he had to meet somebody.”

  “He did say ‘somebody’?” said Homer. “Not ‘I have to meet a man,’ or ‘I have to meet a woman,’ or ‘some people’?”

  Vick and Mary shook their heads. “No,” said Mary. “He said, ‘We’ve got to finish on time, because I have to meet somebody at eleven-thirty.’”

  “And the bomb went off at eleven thirty-five,” said Homer. “I know, because I’d just made a joke, and the students all laughed, and I began to relax for the first time, and I wasn’t scared of all those kids any more, only I was horrified to discover that I had less than half an hour to cover nine-tenths of the lecture. And then there was this big noise and the whole room shook and everybody started yelling and I ordered everybody to go outside.”

  “And then, you big dumbhead, instead of running outside with the rest of us, you disappeared completely,” said Mary. “You really gave me a turn.”

  “Well, I was looking for a shortcut. I got lost in the basement for a while, and then I found a little secret stairway and it took me up into that enormous cavern of a room, and from there I could cut right through into that big memorial hallway where the bomb went off. What about you, Vick—where were you?”

  “Still in Sanders. I did some more practicing, and then I had to put away all the chairs again. I mean, Mr. Crawley is supposed to do it, but, well, I told you, he’s pretty hopeless. So I was hauling chairs to the back of the stage, one by one, when there was this big boom, and it sounded sort of dull but tremendous, and I was lifted a couple of feet in the air, and I fell into the chairs, and I didn’t even feel anything, I was so astonished. And the first thing I thought of was my cello, because it had fallen on its face on the floor, but I just lay there in the middle of the chairs for a minute, trying to get myself together. I mean, I could hear all the glass crashing outside, and huge noises as if the whole place were falling down. And I got scared and thought maybe it might all fall down on top of me, so I picked myself up and stumbled out into the hall, and it was raining out there, and I saw the firemen, and I saw you, Mr. Kelly, and—”

  “Homer. Call me Homer.”

  “And I saw the sole of somebody’s shoe and this big shape on the floor with just black shreds of clothes, and I went to look, and it was—” Vick’s face began to come apart again.

  “Now, look here,” said Mary Kelly, taking her firmly by the hand. “I’m absolutely starved. I’
ll bet you are too. You’re going to come home with me right now and have lunch. I made some soup with the last of the vegetables we grew back home in Concord last summer. You just come on home with me. We’ve got a nice apartment on Huron Avenue. It’s the top deck of one of those big comfortable three-deckers, all lace curtains and overstuffed upholstery and a nice view of the back yard and the laundry hanging out on the back porches next door. You’ll like it.”

  “Mr. Kelly?” An officer wearing the insignia of the Harvard Police was beckoning at Homer. “They’re going to search the tower now.”

  “Oh, good,” said Homer. “Listen, you two, save me some soup.”

  Chapter Eight

  Homer walked into the memorial corridor by way of the north entry and stopped beside the hole in the floor. It didn’t seem possible that a gap in the flooring only fifteen or twenty feet wide could have dropped that much debris into the basement. But of course the explosion had blown out all those walls downstairs too. That would account for some of the mountains of plaster dust and shattered marble and broken timbers, and all the rubble of brick and concrete block. Jerry Crawley, the building superintendent, was blundering around in the hole, wearing a hard hat, getting in the way of Captain McCurdy and one of McCurdy’s men from the Bomb Squad.

  “I see you’re hard at work with that fine-tooth comb of yours, Captain McCurdy,” said Homer.

  McCurdy looked up, his face gray with plaster dust. “That’s right. Tom and I just have to make sure there isn’t anybody else buried down here in all this mess. And then Frank Harvey will take over. He’ll sift through everything, see if he can find pieces of the explosive device. So far we think it’s just dynamite. Tom found a piece of the cap. Fulminate of mercury. Just a bundle of dynamite, that’s all it was, with a fulminate of mercury cap.”

  “Sort of run-of-the-mill, eh? No imagination? No creative spark? Ha ha, no joke intended.”

  “You should of seen President Cheever,” said Crawley, looking up at Homer, his rheumy eyes alight. “He was sick to his stomach. Honest, I thought he was going to throw up. They didn’t clean up the blood yet, you know? It was laying all over the place, and he slipped in the blood. Had to hang on to that other guy. Tinker. You know.”

  “Tinker?”

  “Some big guy way high up. Sloan Tinker. I don’t know who the hell he is. Cheever had to go in my office and lay down. I got this sofa in there. President Cheever almost threw up on my sofa.”

  “Well, congratulations. That would have been an honor indeed for your sofa.” Homer moved rapidly away from Crawley and climbed over the remnants of the shattered door to the great hall.

  “Whatsamatter with him?” said Crawley. “Queasy, I guess. Some people got no stomach. Can’t stand the sight of blood. Me, it never bothered me none.” He picked up a brick from one pile of rubbish and moved it slowly to another. “Like once I saw this accident. There was four, five people laying all over the road. I pulled my car over to the side—”

  “Hey, Crawley,” said Captain McCurdy, “have you got the key to that room there? Room 196? It’s the only one down here that didn’t get its door blown off. We’ve got to get in there and look inside. You’ve got the master key?”

  “Right, you bet I do,” said Crawley. He felt around his neck for the key on the string. It wasn’t there. He patted his shirt pocket. “I got it right here someplace.”

  A head appeared at the edge of the hole and said hello to Captain McCurdy. “Oh, Bert, there you are,” said McCurdy. “Good. You can take over now. Tom hasn’t had any lunch and I’ve got to go up in the tower with Maderna from Buildings and Grounds. Now look here, Bert. Take it slow and easy. And that room there, with the locked door—take a good look in there. Crawley, here, he’s got the key.” McCurdy climbed up the ladder, followed by Tom, and Bert climbed down.

  Mr. Crawley was feeling cheated out of his story about the bodies on the highway. “I was just telling those guys about this terrible accident I saw on Route 128. There were these people all over the road, dead bodies.”

  Bert looked at the door of Room 196. “You’ve got the key to this room here?” he said to Crawley.

  “Jeez, it’s on me someplace,” said Crawley. “I know I got it here someplace.” He felt feebly in his pants pockets. Then he looked at the locked door of Room 196. “Oh, 196,” he said. “That’s right; 196 is okay anyways. I already looked in 196. Now, as I was saying, there was all these corpses—”

  “You already looked in there?” said Bert. “You mean, it’s all cleared out in there? What’s that sign mean on the door: Ethiopian Literacy? What the heck is that?”

  “Damned if I know. They got all these organizations here downcellar. Yeah, I already looked in there. See, that room isn’t even under the hole. The ceiling didn’t even get blowed off.”

  Bert shrugged his shoulders and began shoveling plaster dust and brick rubble out of Room 197, which had once housed the Harvard Sci-Fi Comics Library.

  “Hey, look at that, will you,” said Mr. Crawley. He reached over and picked a dusty comic book out of Bert’s shovel. “An old Flash Gordon comic. What do you know?”

  Bert dumped his shovelful of plaster dust against the door of 196. “You swear you looked in here?” said Bert.

  Jerry Crawley leaned against the ladder and turned the pages of his comic book. “Oh, sure, I swear,” he said. He sealed his oath with a mighty belch.

  Chapter Nine

  His great-aunts were gone, but the pain in his head was still there. He could feel it pulsing and throbbing in the dark. Why he should be on shipboard he didn’t know, but there he was. It was a small creaking wooden ship, some explorer’s ancient sailing vessel, trying to find North America, wallowing uneasily around in a heaving sea in the middle of the night, and he was wedged in the hold like a piece of cargo, and far over his head he could hear the distant shouts of the seamen on deck. He wanted to tell them they were off the coast of New Jersey, because after all he came from New Jersey, and he knew the coast of New Jersey like the back of his hand. He could even smell the wild grapes on the shore and hear the shore birds cry. But the damnfool captain was yelling, “Port! Port your helm!” and the ship was coming about. They were missing the mainland altogether, heading in their doomed boat back out to sea.

  Chapter Ten

  It was an expeditionary force that assembled on the second balcony above the great hall. Fire Chief Campbell was there, and Frank Harvey from Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and Oliphant from the Cambridge Police, and Peter Marley, Chief of the Harvard Police, and Donald Maderna, the mechanical foreman from the Buildings and Grounds Department for the North Yard, and a swarm of men from Captain McCurdy’s department in Boston. Then McCurdy himself came puffing up the second flight of stairs.

  “We found a belt buckle,” he said, “and some melted plastic credit cards, and a fulminate of mercury detonating cap. That’s all so far.”

  Donald Maderna led the way up the third flight of stairs to the door at the summit of the ceiling, where the arching hammer beams met nearly a hundred feet above the floor. Homer climbed the last stairway slowly, looking down, feeling a pleasant sense of vertigo, enjoying the panorama of the colossal chamber. It had once been a dining hall, he knew that, but now it was more like an empty unused attic or lumber room on a stupendous scale. The wooden walls were a clutter of dusty hangings, marble busts, painted portraits of officers in the Union Army, electric fans, old radiators, and, wires meandering from here to there. Shriveled balloons hung from the ridgepole, left over from a freshman mixer. The room was as long as a football field, a cavernous, yawning, empty space. The stairway led to a series of empty rooms, one above another, in the turret at one side of the north entry. There was a mattress on the floor of the uppermost chamber. “What’s that doing here?” said McCurdy.

  “Maybe somebody used to live here once,” said Homer. “Nice room. Great stained-glass windows. Terrific view. All the colors of the rainbow.”