A Deadly Snow Fall

by Cynthia Gallant-Simpson

  “Okay, are you ready?” They nodded their bobble heads. “All right, here goes. I read it through twice just to be sure I didn’t miss anything important. He had only written a hundred and two pages, so it wasn’t that daunting.”

  “Okay. So, how many great scandals did he expose? How juicy were the secrets of those dudes back in the forties when a milk toast novel like Forever Amber got banned as porn, eh? I mean, after all, compared to what people get away with today, how bad could their behavior have been?”

  My Mona Lisa smile lingered too long and my audience jeered.

  “Come on. Don’t do this to us, Liz. Spill the beans.” Daphne.

  “Hey love, before I grow too old to laugh without cracking a rib, please.” James.

  “Daphne, James, I am here to tell you, the first people to hear it, that after two readings I declare the work of Edwin Snow III to be….”

  “A masterpiece? The great American biography? What, Liz? Come on, you are killing us here. Sock it to us, girl.”

  “Gibberish. Total, unqualified rubbish. The ramblings of a very disturbed mind. Not one iota of scandal or secrets, just on and on, ad infinitum grumblings about all the insults and unfair treatment, rebuffs and snubbing he’d received over his lifetime in Truro and Provincetown.”

  Groan. “Damn, Liz, what an anticlimax. Aren’t you disappointed?”

  “Not really, I guess it is what I sort of suspected, all along.”

  “Ruins my day, let me tell you. Such a long wait for this; nothing juicy at all. Damn that old man; he could have given us something to talk about.” Turning to face James, Daphne asked him, “So when will the DNA test come back to prove conclusively that Edwin was Emily’s PaPa?”

  James looked confused. “There won’t be a DNA test. Doesn’t seem necessary since everything checks out. Why would you think it necessary with all that we have to support her story, that we need a DNA test, Daphne? Edwin admitted his paternity when he sent that million to Rosita for their daughter. ”

  I blurted out before Daphne could respond.

  “Blimey, Daphne, you are so right. Why didn’t I think of that?”

  James looked from Daphne to me, totally mystified.

  I reached out and put my hand on his. “James, when Rosita named her baby daughter Edna she might have named her for either Edwin Snow or Edward Granger. Without positive scientific proof we will never really know.”

  James looked perplexed.

  “I suppose it doesn’t really matter. What difference would it make at this point? If Emily’s lawyer manages to get her off with something less that a manslaughter charge, she will be a very rich woman. I doubt that it will matter to Emily. Oops, sorry, Edna.”

  The bobble heads shrugged.

  Epilogue

  Dear, sweet, grandmotherly Mary Malone spent six weeks in a private, very up-scale, well-respected mental hospital north of Boston where she underwent observation. It was determined by the experts that she had suffered a complete breakdown that had erased every memory of everything that had happened. In fact, Mary, on a daily basis, believed that she was an assortment of different characters. A new personality emerged nearly every day. At various times, Mary had told her doctors and the other patients that she was Betty Grable, Harpo Marx, Abraham Lincoln and Raggedy Anne, among others.

  From there she was transferred to a hospital in up-state New York where she passed away gently, in her sleep, a month later. Her home was sold to a nice young couple from California who’d always spent their summers in Truro. They opened a homemade ice cream shop, Ye Olde Penny Candy and Ice Cream Shoppe in the vacated Fairies in the Garden shop space. A pretty old-fashioned name for such new age flavors as cinnamon-bacon, celery-ginger-raisin and lavender-macadamia.

  Patton came to live with me as did Emily’s cat Jasmine. They were often seen sitting side by side or lying close to one another; their friendship obvious to anyone. If cats and dogs share a secret language, as I hoped they did, they appeared to be entertaining themselves on some good old stuff.

  Daphne, however, was sure that there was more than friendship at work. “Don’t you see, he, Patton, was Emily’s father’s dog and she, Jasmine, was Emily’s cat. Thus, since Patton was, in effect, Emily’s half-brother and Jasmine, in that same vein, Emily’s child, Patton’s would be Jasmine’s half-uncle. There is a real family bond there. Particularly since they both ended up rootless.”

  “Right.” Best not to encourage Daph when she went off on a tangent like that, I’d learned.

  Emily’s case dragged on and on. She went through four lawyers until she found just the right one. In the end, it was determined that when she’d reached out to Edwin in his distress after the long climb, her intentions were to be helpful to the old man. In addition, her latest lawyer stressed the fact that when Emily raced down the stairs after Edwin’s tumbling body she truly meant to try and save him if she could.

  Where the judge came down hard was on the matter of Emily deceiving old Edwin with the promise of a journal awaiting him up in the top of the Pilgrim Monument. Naturally, this strenuous climb resulted in his death. Or had it? That became a slightly shady area that helped the little woman escape a far more dire fate.

  On the stand, both the coroner and the medical examiner concurred. Edwin was pretty much a dead man anyway when he climbed all those icy steps. He could have refused but he hadn’t. Nearly ninety and in frail health with a serious heart condition and a tumor pressing on a vital part of his brain, he might not have lived another day one way or the other. Not that this totally washed away Edna’s aka Emily’s guilt regarding tricking the old man. (I don’t think I will ever get used to calling her Edna.)

  The coroner stated that “The man suffered a massive heart attack in unison with the explosion, in laymen’s terms, of the tumor pressing on his brain. Either occurrence alone would have been fatal.”

  Neither of us had attended any of the trial before the final day. Life had been hectic in busy Provincetown and we’d both been far too busy. In fact, neither of us had even read the newspapers’ accounts of the trial during that time. Coming out of our caves in early November, we decided to drive up-Cape to Barnstable to hear the summation of the murder trial of Emily Sunshine aka Edna Gonsalves Snow.

  As I said, Emily went through lawyers like Grant through Richmond and on that day we were there to witness something that it took us months to fully digest. In fact, we were still talking about it a year later and were no closer to understanding if it had been pure coincidence or something else. There are those who believe that there are no such things as coincidences. I, however, disagree. I had learned, since coming to Provincetown, that even the most earnest scientist must be open to quirks, now and then, in the fabric of space and time.

  The latest lawyer had come on the scene just days before, but she’d inserted herself into the picture like she’d been born for the role. Sitting in the courthouse waiting for the judge to make his appearance I picked up a Boston newspaper that someone had left beside me on the bench. The front page article on the trial that was due to finish up that day, all but the sentencing, pulled it all together neatly for me.

  “The tall, attractive female attorney,” the reporter explained, “has turned this trial around as if wielding a magic wand in the eleventh hour.” As he said, “The defendant Edna Snow has rejected a handful of lawyers in the course of this case, but she appears to have made the correct choice this time. What appeared, until just days ago, to be a hanging jury, this legal eagle has softened into twelve kinder and gentler adjudicators.”

  We all stood as the judge appeared and the final arguments and sentencing proceeded. Of course, everyone believed that a case so complex would take days for the jury to bring to a final verdict. Everyone had been dead wrong. Instead, the jury marched out and eighteen minutes later, returned with their verdict.

  Emily was given a three year parole and five hundred hours of community service. She eventually went to work at the Land’s End Wal
k-In Medical Clinic. There, she impressed even the best doctors with her ability to diagnose ailments, either by holding a patient’s hand or looking into theirs eyes. Of course, she was just a volunteer receptionist there, but even before a patient saw the doctors, Emily/Edna wrote down her prognosis on a pad she kept at her desk. Later, she’d compare her diagnosis to the official record and only occasionally missed. Some people have a sixth sense. Emily/Edna was such a person. Eloise might have been hidden under the desk but she seemed to be gone forever.

  After the trial, Edna built a new house on the site of the Snow mansion using her inheritance. I offered to give her cat back, but she decided that Jasmine was best living with her close “relative.”

  She slipped right back into her old status of a pleasant, albeit quirky, little lady. After all, Provincetown’s leit-motif is nothing if not quirky. Just one more proof of the cohesiveness of that idiosyncratic, eclectic village.

  Oh, yes. I must include the fact that Chet Henderson retired as Police Chief and James Finneran was appointed Chief. Two weeks after his retirement, Chet and Edna had their first date. He continued to call her Emily. They were married three months later and were off to their honeymoon in Puerto Rico. While there, Emily purchased a new crystal ball from a local “healer.” By the time they got back to Provincetown, Chet was pretty much pain-free. The new crystal ball sat in a place of prominence across from their bed in Emily’s new house.

  On the drive back down-Cape from Barnstable, Daphne and I chewed over what we had learned that day in court. Finally, we concluded that it was best to simply forget what was obviously just one of the strange tricks the universe sometimes plays on us mere humans. Otherwise, we’d probably drive ourselves balmy.

  The name of Edna Gonsalves Snow’s amazing defender was Attorney Eloise Ballantine. As Daphne said, “Go figure!”

  ###

  About the Author

  Cynthia Gallant-Simpson was educated in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and attended a small college west of London, England. She began her writing career as a journalist for a small, south of Boston, daily newspaper. From there, she moved on to writing sailing, cruising and galley provisioning (recipe) articles for U.S. and Canadian cruising magazines.

  It was during her time in England that Cynthia became “addicted” to British mysteries and later added cozies to her list of favorite reading material. She is the author of numerous adult mysteries, illustrated children’s books, two chapter books for middle readers and--more recently—spends her time writing cozies. She aims to write painterly stories whose descriptions “paint pictures in the mind’s eyes of my readers.”

  She is also a painter of maritime narrative Americana Primitives--full of ships, whales, lighthouses and mermaids. Relying on the combination of her lifetime love of maritime history, lots of research, and what she refers to as her “historic eye,” she easily slips back into the days of “iron men and wooden ships.” Her work is shown in fine galleries and private collections from Nantucket and Cape Cod to New Zealand. One piece even resides in the permanent collection of the Tokyo, Japan, National Art Gallery.

  Cynthia and her husband are dedicated sailors and in 2005, the couple sold their antique sea captain’s house and furniture in Brewster on Cape Cod and moved to a 44 foot boat, thereby simplifying their lives for their shared pursuit of writing and her painting. However, with friends and family still on Cape Cod, they return home there every summer to live on their boat and spend their winters in North Carolina and traveling.

  Published by www.cozycatpress.com