by Jane Langton
“Exhaust fumes,” said Pete Terry sadly. “Leaking up inside the car through all those holes in the floor. I told George that old car would be the death of him. I should have taken away his sticker so he couldn’t drive.” Pete closed his eyes in chagrin. “I blame myself.”
Now he was going to have to pass the bad news on to Mrs. Tarkington. Informing wives that they were widows was not Peter Terry’s idea of a good time. He wouldn’t call her, he would go right to the door. But first he would stop at the house of the Tarkingtons’ minister, Joseph Bold, and persuade him to come along.
Joe was dismayed at the news. He stood on his front porch, galvanized with shock. Then he pulled himself together and got into the chief’s car with Pete. Together they drove to the Tarkingtons’ house and knocked on the door.
When Hilary saw them standing solemnly on her doorstep, she cried, “Oh, no,” and burst into tears.
34
One day we are in the busy scene of life and the next we are spoken of only as the things that were.
James Lorin Chapin
Private Journal, Lincoln, 1848
The continual succession of funerals in Old West Church was spoiling the Christmas spirit, just as people were trying to whip up their lagging enthusiasm for another annual orgy of festive insanity. George Tarkington’s funeral was followed almost immediately by Eloise Baxter’s. Eloise was found dead of kidney poisoning by a neighbor who noticed that her house was still snowbound long after the snow had stopped. The news of her death sped around the parish house during the Christmas Fair and cast a pall over the bright booths and the counters piled with home-baked food and potted plants and hand-knitted baby blankets. It was not so much shock that people felt anymore as a kind of numbness. It had been obvious to everyone that Eloise had been in peril for some time. Lately her trips to the dialysis machine in Boston had been increased to three every week.
Geneva Jones was beside herself with remorse. Geneva had been Eloise’s best friend. She stood behind the table of homemade Christmas decorations and berated herself to Barbara Fenster. “I didn’t call her. Oh, why didn’t I call her? My nieces and nephews were with me, and I was busy, but I certainly could have called her.”
Barbara struggled impatiently with one of Betsy Bucky’s crocheted candle ornaments. “Was it the storm? Oh, I wish we had known. Charlie could have driven her to the hospital.”
But Mary Kelly shook her head. “No, it wasn’t the storm. Ed Bell says she just didn’t want to go on. She’d had enough. She gave up before the snow began to fall. Look, Barbara, I think you’re supposed to tie them on. What a pest.”
“Oh, aren’t they darling!” cried Mabel Smock, pouncing on Betsy’s handiwork. “I’ll take six.”
Flo Terry went from the Christmas Fair straight to her husband’s office in the Town Hall and told him about Eloise. “You’ve got to do something,” she said to Pete. “It’s a plague. It’s catching. It’s never going to stop.”
“What can I do?” said Pete helplessly. “I can’t arrest a dead woman for failing to go to the hospital.”
“But some of those people were murdered in cold blood. Remember what you told me about Carl Bucky?”
“I only said what Homer Kelly said.” Pete looked gloomily at his wife. “He said Carl’s wife fed him to death. You want me to arrest Betsy Bucky? You want me to go over there and knock on her door and say, ‘Sorry, madam, I’m taking you in on suspicion of being a good cook?’”
“What about Arlene Pott?” said Flo relentlessly. “Arlene was murdered in her bed.”
“Well, that’s right,” agreed Peter solemnly. “And her husband is now serving a life sentence in Walpole State Prison. If this were Florida, they’d execute him with a lethal injection. Would that satisfy you? Why don’t you go live in Florida?”
“That’s two,” said Flo, determined to carry on, holding up a third finger. “And Rosemary Hill, she was a suicide.”
“That’s true. The poor woman was suffering from cancer of the bowel.”
“Four, Phil Shooky. Five, Thad Boland. Six, Agatha Palmer. Seven, Percy Donlevy. Eight, Bill Molyneux. Nine, Claire Bold. Ten, George Tarkington. Eleven, Eloise Baxter. Eleven people in Old West Church since September! What if it never stops? Suppose it goes on and on until there aren’t any parishioners left?”
“Well, then they could use the church for a bowling alley,” said Peter heartlessly. “Or the Baptists could take over. Why not?”
But Flo’s nagging wasn’t the only pressure on Peter Terry. One day the editor of the local paper, the Nashoba Bee, called him up.
“It’s just these obituaries, that’s all. So damned many of them. I had a letter the other day, a letter to the editor, only I suppressed it. Some fundamentalist wanted to know why all the humanists were dying off. I think she was hinting it was a judgment of God. But, you know, I can’t help but wonder myself if something’s wrong. Do you think all those people passed away from natural causes?”
“You’re just like my wife,” said Peter, leaning lazily back in his chair. “She thinks somebody’s trying to wipe out Old West Church systematically. You know, picking them off one by one, until everybody’s gone.”
“Well, maybe she’s right. I have a suspicious nature myself. I just thought I’d ask.”
“Well, don’t you worry. I’m looking into it,” and then Peter hung up the phone and opened his desk drawer and took out his lunch and ate it thoughtfully.
The undertaker, too, was jogging his elbow. Ralph E. Benbow was a clever and observant man, and a certain similarity among the corpses assigned to his care had not escaped him. Five of them—Agatha Palmer, Bill Molyneux, Phil Shooky, Thad Boland, and Eloise Baxter—had been marked with pinpricks in the same places on their right arms, just above their wrists on the inside.
“Eloise Baxter, too?” said Peter, surprised. “But she died from her own poisons, didn’t she? Because she couldn’t get to the dialysis machine in that big snowstorm? Or else she was tired of the whole thing, that’s the rumor. I was there in her house afterward, and I can tell you there wasn’t any hypodermic needle anyplace in that house.”
“Well, maybe somebody else administered a fatal dose of something,” said Ralph Benbow.
“In the middle of the snowstorm? But there weren’t any footprints going and coming, just ours and that neighbor woman’s, the one who discovered the body.”
“Maybe somebody came in during the first part of the storm, and finished her off and went away again, and then the storm went on and the footprints were covered with fresh snow. She had a Bible, too, isn’t that right? Like Agatha Palmer and Phil Shooky?”
Peter was feeling more and more unsettled. There had even been discreet inquiries from a couple of insurance investigators, who had wanted to be reassured that their policyholders had perished of natural causes. The Paul Revere Insurance Company had gone so far as to hold back its first payment to Judy Molyneux because of “unresolved difficulties.” Outraged, Judy had stamped into Pete’s office demanding a signed statement, and then she had stamped out again, heading for the hospital and a signature from Dr. Spinney. Judy was really mad.
As a police chief, Peter Terry was no ball of fire. But now, after all this prodding, he sought out Homer Kelly in the basement of Flo’s library and asked him what he thought about the eleven funerals in the Old West Church.
Homer professed himself ignorant as a newborn babe. He didn’t know what was going on. A lot of coincidences, as far as he could make out.
“But they keep happening. Do you think they will ever stop? This parade to the graveyard? My wife is giving me a hard time. She thinks I should do something about it. But what can I do? Stand up in church in my uniform and wag my finger and say, ‘Naughty, naughty’?”
“Oh, I suspect it’s all over,” said Homer uncomfortably, and Pete thanked him and apologized for interrupting him in the course of his researches, and went away.
But Homer wasn’t altogether sure the continu
ous procession to the cemetery had come to an end. There was still one member left alive in the Merciful Society of the Blessed Dead—Ed Bell. What if Ed were sick too? Would Ed Bell be found asleep one of these mornings, so profoundly asleep that he couldn’t be waked up?
Homer cornered him the next Sunday after church and asked him point-blank. “Listen here, how are you?”
“Me?” said Ed, looking at Homer with surprise. “Oh, fine, I’m just fine. How are you?”
“How am I?” Homer was nonplussed. “Well, as a matter of fact, I haven’t been feeling too well lately.” Homer put a pitiful hand on his shirtfront. “Tendency to, you know, digestive upsets. Belching, that kind of thing.”
“Belching?” Ed tapped Homer sympathetically on the necktie and told him about his own prescription for excessive belching, a mixture of baking soda and whiskey. “Sure cure,” he said wisely. “And your good wife? She’s well, I hope?”
Then Ed turned away, and Homer watched him move among the after-church crowd, while faces lit up at his approach, and hands reached out. None of those good people had the least idea that Ed was a fellow conspirator in the deaths of all those longtime members of the congregation. Suddenly Homer felt his insides clench and tighten, his sphincters squeeze shut, his digestive apparatus convulse in constipated spasm. Everything was rigidifying, coalescing. Peristalsis had abruptly ceased.
Homer groaned. He knew what was happening. It was a physical response on the part of his body to the new strictures he was laying on his mind, in his determination that no one must find out about the existence of the Merciful Society of the Blessed Dead. From now on he must make a mighty effort to keep his suspicions bottled up, to become a monument of impassive stone. Eyes, mouth, all bodily orifices must be sealed. No one must guess Ed’s part in the long succession of funerals.
“Oh, Lord,” whimpered Homer, clutching his vitals, picturing Ed Bell sitting in the dock while some hardened prosecutor for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts accused him of multiple murder.
Poor Ed, the angel of mercy, the saint of Old West Church!
35
Can we be indolent? Shall we not exert ourselves?
Dr. Ezra Ripley
Concord, 1792
If Homer Kelly was determined neither to see, nor speak, nor hear any evil, Flo Terry was just as determined in the opposite direction. Flo was opening her eyes and ears as wide as she could; she was talking a blue streak. If her husband, the chief of the Nashoba police department, wasn’t going to do anything about all the funerals in Old West Church, and if Homer Kelly, the famous detective, wasn’t even curious about what was happening, then she, Flo Terry, a reference librarian by trade, was going to put to use her expertise at tracking down stray bits of information. It was something she was good at. Why shouldn’t the facts she was looking for be sought in the minds of living people as well as in dusty old books on a shelf?
Self-righteously, Flo set out one Saturday morning to talk to all the bereaved husbands and wives. She would go straight to the heart of the matter by trying to find some common thread in the lives of the deceased.
“Tell me about Bill,” she said to Judy Molyneux. “I don’t even know what he did for a living.”
Judy was glad to talk to Flo about her husband. She opened up right away. “He was a technical writer at Digital, in Maynard,” she said. “He graduated from Bates and then he took a special course at Wentworth Tech in word processing. What else can I tell you? Oh, of course, he loved ballroom dancing. Well, we both did. We used to win prizes before he began to get so sick. He played jazz piano. Let’s see, what else?”
“He was a member of Old West Church,” prompted Flo.
“That’s right. He was on the Parish Committee for a while. Lately he’d been going to church meetings at Ed Bell’s house on Sunday afternoons.”
“What sort of meetings?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Social concerns, I think. Picking out charities for the church to give money to.” Then Judy’s face lighted up. “Stamps! He collected stamps. You want to see his collection?”
At the Shookys’ house, Flo drank a cup of Deborah’s orange-blossom tea and learned that Phil had earned his veterinarian’s degree at Cornell after spending the Second World War wading ashore under fire at various islands in the South Pacific. He had been crazy about animals, from a child. He was especially fond of German shepherds, which he had been breeding for forty years. And of course there were the meetings of the local kennel club. Phil had been vice-president. “Before that he was president for years and years,” said Deborah Shooky. “Oh, and the church, of course. He really believed in going to church Sundays.”
“Did he do anything in the church?” said Flo. “Wasn’t he an usher, lots of times?”
“He was head usher. He was supposed to arrange a regular schedule for the ushers, but often it was easier for the two of us to do it ourselves. And lately there was that Sunday-afternoon group at Ed Bell’s. Bible study, I think they were doing. You know. The Epistles of Paul. Things like that.”
For information about Arlene Pott, Flo Terry had to call on Arlene’s neighbor Ethel Harris. Ethel apologized for knowing so little about Arlene, even though they had been good friends. “She loved her garden,” said Ethel. “But everybody knows that. You should have seen her out there working on it every day, all through June and July. There wasn’t a weed anywhere. It was neat as a pin. And she grew the most beautiful vegetables. Oh, poor, dear Arlene.”
“She was really regular about church attendance, wasn’t she?” said Flo. “How about Sunday afternoons? Did she attend something else on Sundays besides church in the morning?”
“Not as far as I know,” said Ethel, wrinkling her forehead, trying to remember. “No, of course she didn’t, because Fred and I used to drop in on Wally and Arlene Sunday afternoons, and the boys would watch football or baseball on the TV and we girls would sit in the kitchen and talk.” Ethel’s eyes widened. “Oh, if I’d known we were socializing with a murderer! Poor darling Arlene!”
Hilary Tarkington, like Judy Molyneux, was glad to talk about her dead husband. She went on and on, grateful to spill it all out. Talking about George was like dedicating a small memorial to him, it was prolonging his memory a little farther in time, it was doing him honor of a kind. So it just gushed out of Hilary.
Flo listened and scribbled it all down in her notebook—engineering degree University of Michigan, forty-two years employment with Ma Bell, Mason Third Degree, organizer Nashoba Little League, drinking problem, Alcoholics Anonymous, heavy smoker until five years ago, church work, school committee, Mr. Fixit, carpentry, car repair, his brother in the nursing home, Sunday-afternoon committee meetings on purposes and goals for the church at Ed Bell’s house every week.
Flo’s pencil stopped. She looked up. “Purposes and goals? Are you sure that’s what they talked about?”
“Well, no, but it was something like that,” said Hilary Tarkington.
Maureen Donlevy had been so shocked by her husband’s violent death on Route 2 that she was still in a traumatized condition. But by probing very tactfully, Flo was able to garner a few facts about Percy. She learned that he had been an investment counselor by day and an enthusiastic member of the Nashoba Players by night, specializing in grandfathers, patriarchs, and old geezers. “He just loved to clap on an old hat and snap his suspenders and talk like an old cowpoke in some Western saloon,” said Maureen tearfully. “He was always trying to get a drama group going in the church, but nobody was interested.”
“They just didn’t have his talent,” said Flo sympathetically. “What else did he do in the church? Didn’t he sing in the choir?”
“Oh, that’s right.” Then Maureen remembered something else. “And there was the Sunday-afternoon retreat. He always went to Ed Bell’s house every Sunday afternoon.”
“A retreat? He called it a retreat?”
“That’s right. You know, they got together and had sort of spiritual discussions
.”
“Oh, I see,” said Flo, writing it all down.
Agatha Palmer’s spouse was less forthcoming. Bob Palmer’s principal regret about his wife was obviously that she had lost her figure early in their married life and given birth rather carelessly to seven children. Flo suspected he was casting his eye around for a new girlfriend. Relentlessly she made him rummage in his memory for recollections of poor departed Agatha.
“Church work?” said Bob, in answer to her question. “Oh, gee, I dunno.”
“Wasn’t she director of the Sunday school at one time? What about more recently? Did she ever go to meetings at Ed Bell’s house on Sunday afternoons?”
“Oh, sure, Sunday afternoons, you’re right, that’s right. She used to drive over to the Bells’ house Sunday afternoons. I don’t know what the hell for.”
Bob Palmer was a dreadful man, decided Flo, leaving his house in disgust. But Betsy Bucky was even worse. Betsy was gleeful rather than mournful on the subject of her life-partner’s recent demise. “What did he do with himself?” she said scornfully, repeating Flo’s question. “Nothing, that’s what he did with himself. He just sat around wasting his time, that’s all he ever did.”
“But he went to church, didn’t he?” protested Flo, wanting to stick up for Carl. “What about Sunday afternoons? Did he go to any sort of meetings?”