A bucket of ashes

by P. B. Ryan

  And of course, a husband with whom to share him.

  Nell touched her forehead, saying, “In nomine Patris,” before remembering that she was a Protestant now, more or less, and Protestants didn’t make the sign of the cross.

  She hesitated, then made it anyway, just for good measure. “Jesus, son of David, have pity on me,” she whispered. “I may have sinned to get this baby, but don’t punish him for that. Don’t let him be fatherless. And don’t let me lose Gracie, I beg you.” She started to say, “Amen” before realizing she wasn’t quite done.

  Summoning up the words she’d said over the bodies of her brothers and sisters, her mother, and far too many others over the years, she said, “Absolve, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the soul of thy servant James Murphy, whether he be my brother or not, that being dead to this world he may live to Thee, and whatever sins he may have committed in this life through human frailty, do Thou of Thy most merciful goodness forgive. Through our Lord Jesus Christ Thy Son who with Thee liveth and reigneth in the unity of the Holy Ghost, world without end. Amen.”

  Chapter 3

  You’re his sister?” asked Chief Constable Phineas Bryce skeptically.

  “If you’re wondering why I’m not in mourning,” said Nell with a glance down at her pewter silk day dress, “I’m holding off on that until I’m sure that the James Murphy who died in that fire was, indeed, my brother.”

  “Actually,” said the thickset, steely-haired constable, “I was wondering how a fella called Murphy could have a sister named Sweeney. It is Miss Sweeney, isn’t it?”

  Nell hadn’t even thought about that. Dr. Greaves—Cyril—sitting next to Nell in front of the constable’s big, paper-strewn desk, evidently had. “Miss Sweeney is Mr. Murphy’s stepsister,” he said. Nell was surprised that the principled Cyril Greaves could utter such a facile lie so smoothly.

  “If it was a different James Murphy who died in that fire,” Nell said, “I shall be on my way.”

  Chief Bryce got up and retrieved a small pasteboard box and a hefty volume from a bookcase. He opened the box and handed it across to Nell, saying, “These here are the personal effects salvaged from Murphy’s remains by the coroner, Mr. Leatherby, before the autopsy Monday night—except for the key to the Cunningham house, which was in his pocket. That’s how we know for sure he was one of the men that burgled the place and shot the wife.”

  Inside the box were a belt buckle, a gold coin, fragment of handkerchief linen, a pocket knife, a tortoiseshell comb, and a pair of spectacles with cracked lenses, all scorched.

  “Jamie doesn’t wear eyeglasses,” Nell said. At first glance, she took the coin for a five dollar piece, given its size and the eagle and shield imprinted on it. Finding it odd that a half-eagle should be nestled in this box rather than in the pocket of one of Chief Bryce’s “boys,” Nell lifted it to examine more closely. It appeared to be made not of gold, but of brass, with the legend WAR OF 1861 along the upper edge, in which a hole had been punched.

  “That’s an identification tag,” Cyril said. “Turn it over.”

  Nell did so, finding, in lieu of the liberty head she would have expected, a flat disk stamped with lettering.

  JAS MURPHY.

  CO. E.

  9TH REG. INF.

  MASS. VOL.

  BOSTON.

  Cyril said, “It was always a challenge, during the war, trying to identify the dead. If a soldier was getting ready to go into battle, he might buy one of these from the sutler who sold them their provisions, and wear it around his neck—just in case. Some veterans hold on to them as good luck tokens, or mementoes.”

  “He’d been wearing it on a string around his neck,” Bryce said. “Course, the string mostly burned away.”

  “I doubt very much that the man this belonged to was my brother,” Nell said, returning it to the box. “Jamie isn’t the type to have enlisted.”

  “Even with all the patriotic fervor at the time?” Cyril asked.

  “It wouldn’t have affected him,” she said. “He’s irresponsible, devil may care.”

  “How old was he the last time you saw him, Nell?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Well, then, isn’t it possible he—”

  “You didn’t know him,” she said. “He was such... such a child. A real charmer, but he never cared about anything except getting something for nothing. Getting money without working for it, getting girls to...” She glanced at Chief Bryce, thumbing through the big leatherbound volume. “Grant him their favors without offering so much as a pair of glass ear bobs.”

  “This should settle it,” said Chief Bryce as he leafed through the book, with its thick, strangely stiff pages. “This here’s our ‘Rogues’ Gallery.’ It’s pictures of the hard tickets we’ve put away these past few years, the worst of the lot, anyway. Some of them we just tore out of the Police Gazette, but we’ve got a fella in town that owns a photograph parlor, and we pay him to makes photographs of the bad pennies, the ones we keep arresting over and over. James Murphy was one of them.”

  He thumped the open book down on the desk facing Nell and Cyril. The page on the right was inked with handwritten notes. That on the left was a folio with an oval cutout bordered in gold that served to frame a photograph of a blond, bespectacled young man in a rumpled jacket and limp bow tie.

  Nell heard a despairing moan as the air rushed from her lungs. She sat forward for a better view of the photograph, which had a slightly washed-out look to it except for the eyes, those crystalline eyes that had always managed to look both guileless and devilish at the same time. “No,” she whispered.

  “That’s not him?” Bryce said.

  “No, I think it is,” Cyril said quietly.

  Nell tried to pull the book toward her in order to see it better, but it was heavy. Cyril lifted it and held it at an angle over her lap. Scrawled in a bottom corner of the photograph was Mar. ‘69, which was more than ten years after the last time Nell had seen him. Jamie’s boyish face had grown sinewy; whiskers glinted on his jaw. His right eyebrow was bisected by a faint scar coursing diagonally across his forehead, disappearing into a shock of unkempt cornsilk hair.

  Nell whispered his name, shaking her head. “I thought... I thought it couldn’t be him. I didn’t want it to be him.”

  “I know,” Cyril said. “I’m sorry, Nell.”

  The notes on the right-hand page were written in several different hands:

  James Killian Murphy

  b. Feb. 12, 1844 ~ Murphy is Five Feet 11 inches tall, slim built, fair hair, blonde complexion, blue eyes, clean-shaven with short side whiskers, high forehead with knife scar. Wears spectacles. May seek employment as laborer or dockhand.

  Sept. 15, 1959, robbed livery driver Julius Finch of a pouch of bank notes belonging to Falmouth Nat’l Bank. Sentenced Nov. ‘59 to 18 months hard labor, Plymth. Hse. of Corr.

  Dec. 4, 1864, robbed Yarmouth-Woods Hole stage with accomplice David Quinn, both sentenced to 3 years hard labor, Plymouth House of Corrections.

  Mar. 27, 1869, attmpt’d theft of ladies reticule from coat hook in Babbitt’s Choc. Shop, East Falmth, sent. in May of that yr. to 8 mo’s Plymth. Hse. of Corr.

  July 19, 1870, with accomplice murdered Susannah Cunningham of Boston, aged 37 yrs., in course of armed burglary at Cunningham summer home at 175 Grand Ave., Falmouth Heights. Burned to death while a fugitive from justice July 31, 1870, aged 26 yrs.

  Nell re-read the last entry with a kind of woozy horror. Murdered Susannah Cunningham of Boston, aged 37 yrs.... Burned to death...

  “The accomplice is still in hiding?” Cyril asked the constable.

  Bryce nodded. “Davey Quinn, that’s who we think it is, on account of him and Murphy been pulling holdups together for years, and I’ve never known either one of them to team up with anybody else. My boys have been putting up placards with Quinn’s picture on them, and we’ve had some nibbles that make us think he might still be on the Cape—which is the last place he should be, seei
ng as he’s a wanted man here, but you’d be surprised, some of the dumb things some of these pugs do. Quinn, he’s not only dumb, he’s a hothead. Your brother was the voice of reason in that particular partnership, and the brains, too—but even he stayed on the Cape. There’s no accounting, but then, who knows the way their minds work, these gutter prowlers.”

  “Which one actually shot Mrs. Cunningham?” Nell asked. “My brother or this Davey Quinn?”

  “We don’t know, but it’s not really important. Under the law, if somebody gets killed during the course of a crime, all the hoods involved are guilty of felony murder, and they’ll all hang. It doesn’t matter who actually pulled the trigger.”

  It mattered to Nell. It mattered very greatly. She said, “I’m afraid I know very little about this crime, Constable. What can you tell me about it?”

  Sitting back in his chair, Bryce laced his fingers over his burly chest. “It happened Tuesday, July nineteenth, around dawn. The cook was the only one awake at that hour, ‘cause she had to start the coffee and what-not. So, she’s in her room on the second floor of the carriage house, getting dressed—that’s where the servants bunk, the carriage house—and she hears a scream from the main house that she knows has to be Mrs. Cunningham, on account of she was the only one who’d slept there that night.”

  “Her husband wasn’t there?” asked Cyril. “Does he just come down from Boston on weekends?”

  “Nah, he’s been there the whole summer, along with the wife. He likes to sail—got a forty-foot sloop he’s real proud of. He calls it the ‘Oh, Susannah,’ after his wife. It’s his pride and joy, and the envy of all his neighbors in Falmouth Heights. But he’d gotten called away to New York on business—he’s in shipping. He’d left the day before, and he was due back at the end of the week. And they didn’t have any kids, so it was just the missus in the house.”

  Cyril said, “I’m surprised he left her there all alone while he was gone.”

  “He didn’t mean to,” Bryce said. “She was supposed to spend that week at her sister’s place on Martha’s Vineyard, but a bad storm blew in over Vineyard Sound that afternoon, and they had to cancel the ferry.”

  “So the cook heard a scream,” Nell said.

  “Closely followed by a gunshot. She looked out the window and saw two men run out of the house and drive off in a wagon that was parked out back, but it wasn’t light enough yet for her to make out their faces. She woke up the driver and the butler, and the three of them went into the house and found Mrs. Cunningham laying there in the entrance to the library with a bullet hole smack in the middle of her forehead and the carpet soaked with blood. They sent for us, and me and a couple of the boys had a look around. From what we could tell, the only thing that had been disturbed was one of those display cabinets, a big one, about five feet square and two feet deep, made out of mahogany and plate glass. Inside, there’s this whole collection of antique nautical instruments—sextants, quadrants, chronometers, compasses... There’s even a three hundred-year-old, what do you call it, aster, astro...”

  “Astrolabe?” Cyril said.

  “Yeah, it’s the jewel of the collection, according to Cunningham—the husband, Frederick Cunningham. We cabled him with the news about his wife, and he came back that day. He was sobbing when he got off the train at the Falmouth depot, and he didn’t stop till we’d poured about a pint of brandy into him. When he’d calmed down enough to talk, he told us about the collection. He said the astrolabe had been on Magellan’s ship when he went around the world.”

  “My God,” said Cyril. “It must be worth thousands.”

  “Many tens of thousands, Cunningham said. He said the collection as a whole had been appraised at close to six figures. His wife’s great grandfather had put it together, and she’d had a strong sentimental attachment to it. He says it had been against the east wall of the library, but when we got there, it was near the door that let out onto the back porch. Those fellas—your brother and Quinn—were obviously trying to drag it outside so they could put it in their wagon. It would have taken them a while to get it as far as they did, ‘cause it was heavy, with all those brass instruments inside. That’s how we knew Murphy must have had a partner. Me and the boys could barely budge the damned—’scuse me, miss. We could barely move it.”

  “Then why do you suppose they didn’t just open up the case and take the instruments out?” Nell asked.

  “That’s what I asked Cunningham,” Bryce said. “He said the instruments were bolted to the shelves, and that the case was sealed shut to make it airtight. I asked him if there was anybody with a grudge against him who might have a key to the house, ‘cause there was no sign of forced entry. He said he didn’t have any enemies, and there were only three keys to the house—one for him, one for the missus, and a spare that he kept under a sundial in the garden. Only, when he went to look for it, it was gone. Somebody’d pinched it. Come to find out your brother had been doing yard work for the Cunninghams for a couple of weeks before the burglary, but of course we didn’t make that connection till a couple of days ago, when we identified the burned body and asked Cunningham if the name James Murphy rang a bell.”

  Of course? Had Nell been in charge of investigating this case, her first move would have been to question Mr. Cunningham as to who might have had access to their property.

  “Obviously,” said the constable, “your brother figured out that the stuff in that case was valuable, so he stole the key—which he stumbled across while he was working in the yard—so he could slip into the house and make off with it. He would have brung Quinn along just to help him move the thing, and he would have chosen a time when he thought nobody was home—not knowing that the wife had had to cancel her trip to Martha’s Vineyard because of the weather. They wouldn’t have made too much of an effort to keep quiet, thinking they were in an empty house. The carriage house is pretty far away. But then Mrs. C. hears a noise and comes downstairs, one of them pops her, and they flee the scene. They split up and went into hiding. Your brother found the cranberry shed at the Gilmartin farm, or maybe he already knew it was there, and that’s where he decided to hole up.”

  “Was he there the whole time he was in hiding, do you know?” Nell asked.

  “He would have to have been there for at least a week, ‘cause one of the boarders told me—”

  “Boarders?” Nell said.

  Bryce said, “Yeah, Mrs. Gilmartin rents out rooms ‘cause the cranberries aren’t enough to support them, but she’s got this great big farmhouse for just her and her daughter. This boarder, fella named George, told me things had gone missing from the house the Sunday before. They’d been at Mass, the mother, the daughter, and all the boarders. There was an ice cream social afterward, so they all stayed in town but the daughter, who went back home to get a lamb stew started for supper.”

  “Doesn’t seem quite fair,” Cyril said, “making her miss out on the festivities.”

  “George said she offered, on account of she had a stomach gripe, so she didn’t want any ice cream. When they came home later, she told them she’d found some of the shortbread gone that her ma had made that morning to go with the stew, and some blueberries. There was some ham loaf missing from the ice closet, and a meat knife from a hook on the wall. A quart of milk, too. They started looking around and found an old quilt and a blanket and a pillow gone from the beds. There was some other stuff, I think. I can’t remember it all.”

  Because you didn’t bother to write it down. “Then, a week later,” Nell said, “the cranberry house caught fire.”

  “Any idea what started it?” Cyril asked.

  “Maybe he fell asleep with a cigarette in his hand,” suggested the constable with a negligent shrug.

  “Jamie didn’t smoke,” Nell said.

  “Not when you knew him,” Cyril said, “but perhaps—”

  “And there’s no match safe in there,” she said, nodding toward the pasteboard box.

  “A candle fell over, then,�
� Bryce said. “Or a lantern. The shed goes up in flames, the daughter raises the alarm...”

  “After getting trapped in the fire herself,” Cyril interjected.

  “What?” Bryce said. “What are you talking about?”

  “I treated her for smoke inhalation yesterday morning,” said Cyril. “She just barely made it out of that shed alive.”

  “Didn’t she tell you?” Nell asked.

  “She wasn’t around when I was called over there the next morning,” the constable said. “I think the mother said she was up in her room. I never even seen her.”

  Nor, obviously, did he seek her out.

  “Did she mention what she was doing in the shed when you treated her yesterday?” Nell asked Cyril.

  He hesitated, looking grim. “She said she’d heard a man screaming for help.”

  Nell sat back, her eyes shut, very sorry she’d asked.

  Cyril rested a hand on her shoulder. Quietly he said, “Don’t think about it, Nell. Don’t torment yourself.”

  “In any event,” the constable continued, “The shed burned down. Well, not completely. They managed to get the fire put out, thanks to the boarders. They formed a bucket brigade from Mill Pond to the cranberry shed. Got it put out pretty quick, so the shed’s still standing, but there’s not much left of it. I came out with a couple of fellas from Packer’s Mortuary here in town, to look things over and get the body out of there. It was in better shape than I expected ‘cause of how quick they got the fire put out—charred and all, but just on the front,” he said, patting his chest, “‘cause he’d been laying on his back on a folded-up quilt.”