by Jane Langton
“They were all there together, you see,” said Flo. “Five of them anyway. Phil, George, Bill, Agatha, and Percy. And they all died within a few weeks of each other. Isn’t that strange?”
“Well, I don’t know,” whined Homer. “They all went to church together too. I’ll bet they all had toast for breakfast. Maybe they all had the same favorite hymn.” Lifting his anguished face, Homer raised his voice in musical pleading, “Open now thy gates of beauty!” Then, suddenly excusing himself, he shot out of his chair and disappeared in the direction of the men’s room.
Baffled, Flo made up her mind once again to pursue the matter on her own. She would go to the Bells herself. Poor old Pete, he had been overawed by the shining reputation of Ed Bell as a sort of chevalier sans peur et sans reproche. Well, Ed’s wife was no saint. Lorraine Bell was an ordinary human woman. Flo homed in on Lorraine as if she were a book in the library or a standard resource like the microfilmed New York Times, or the Harmony of the Gospels, or Bartlett ‘s Quotations, or the Dictionary of National Biography.
“Lorraine,” said Flo, waylaying her at Gibby’s General Grocery among the boxes of dry cereal, putting her finger on the bosom of Lorraine’s parka as if to mark her place on the page, “what was that Sunday-afternoon meeting all about, that group that used to meet at your house last fall? Who was in it?”
But Lorraine was a book without an index, an encyclopedia with a missing volume. “I don’t know anything about Ed’s meetings,” she said firmly, looking past Flo at the Rice Chex and Sugar Smacks. “I had things of my own to do every Sunday afternoon.”
“What things?” said Flo suspiciously, flipping Lorraine’s pages, looking for the right paragraph.
“Volunteering at the hospital, for one thing,” said Lorraine, giving her basket a strong shove so that it sailed down the aisle in the direction of the housewares department and knocked over a wastebasket full of mops and brooms.
So of course Flo pursued this clue to its primary source, the director of volunteers at Emerson Hospital, and the director corroborated Lorraine’s story. Oh, yes, Lorraine Bell was one of their steadies. She had worked in the hospital lunchroom most Sunday afternoons last September, October, and November.
So that was a dead end. But Flo refused to give up. She had a small breakthrough when she remembered that Rosemary Hill’s good friend Marigold Lynch was back in town, having spent the first two weeks of January in the Virgin Islands. Marigold didn’t know what Rosemary did on Sunday afternoons, but she knew she did something. “We used to play golf every Sunday afternoon, and then she couldn’t make it anymore, so we stopped. I assumed it was because of her illness. We got together Sunday nights instead, to have supper and watch television.”
Flo was pleased. It was a small success, but it encouraged her to try to run down the friends and acquaintances of Thad Boland and Eloise Baxter. She had no luck finding anyone who knew what Thad had done on Sundays, because Thad had been pretty much of a loner, and even his daughter didn’t know whether he was at home or not on Sunday afternoons. But Geneva Jones knew a lot about Eloise Baxter. “We used to get together on Sunday afternoons, but after a while she stopped being available, and I thought maybe she was mad at me. But whenever I asked her to go to the movies in the evening, she always said yes, so I felt better about our friendship. I mean, she was my oldest friend!”
“So that’s seven out of the eleven,” declared. Flo to her husband, Pete, pounding on his desk during her lunch hour. “What do you make of that? They all met at Ed’s house every Sunday afternoon and they all died mysteriously from things they weren’t sick with, even though they were all terminally ill. It was a conspiracy, some kind of conspiracy. It was some kind of death pact. The whole parish may be in danger. Who will be next? You’ve got to look into it.”
If Flo had been anyone but his wife, Pete might have taken her warnings seriously. But a prophet is sometimes without honor in her own country, and Pete had been withstanding Flo’s energetic pestering so long, it was second nature to resist. “Do you want me to accuse Ed Bell of murder? Is that it? Do you want to see him behind bars? Just because he comforted a lot of dying people on Sunday afternoons?”
“Comforted them? How do you know he wasn’t killing them? They had help, Arthur Spinney said. Somebody stuck a needle in them and then took the needle away. That’s what he told you.”
“No, he didn’t. He didn’t say that. He said they had needle marks on their arms, that’s all. But desperately ill people are always having blood samples taken. The needle marks don’t mean a thing.”
“That’s not the way I see it,” said Flo darkly. “Well, never mind.” Stalking grandly out of Pete’s office, she turned dramatically at the door for a final statement. “I will pursue this investigation all by myself.”
Pete stood up and made an ironical bow. “Go right ahead. Be my guest.”
39
A very fine, and excessively warm day, so that I have taken off all my flannels.
James Lorin Chapin
Private Journal, Lincoln, 1849
Winter in New England is not a level plain of cold. First there is the freezing ascent of November and early December, followed by a dangerous assault on the tinseled plateau of the Christmas season. Then all cautious travelers must negotiate the treacherous ice of the last week on the calendar, only to stub their toes on the new year and plummet into the glacial crevasse of January. The months of February and March are a slow struggle upward with rope and pickax, until at last everyone surfaces on the spring hillside of April and runs gladly down into May.
Flo Terry spent the entire month of February and the first two weeks of March exasperating Arthur Spinney, ruffling the fragile composure of the bereaved friends, husbands, and wives of the deceased, and exacerbating the tortured physical condition of Homer Kelly, whose thirty feet of constipated bowel were linked in some mysterious and abominable way with his clenched jaw.
On the next to last Saturday in March, the sun struck warmly through the trees as if summer had come at last like a perpetual balmy bower of flowers, as if the rest of the spring would not be a mixed bag of sun, sleet, hail, rain, drizzle, and show. All over Middlesex County pale-faced people who had been housebound all winter burst out-of-doors to ramble on the yellow grass or stroll along the sidewalk, their spirits rising with the temperature, their bare arms white as celery stalks. On the surface of Walden Pond, the last floating pieces of ice grew smaller and smaller, until nothing was left but sparkling ripples on the water. The little brooks that rose in Nashoba’s swamps and rocky hilltops ran downstream to Bateman’s Pond and Quarry Pond and Icehouse Pond in rushing torrents.
Flo Terry, too, experienced a fresh eruption of energy, a spurt of renewed zeal. She rushed out of her house, plumped herself into her car, and took off for Ed Bell’s house. She would confront him directly, decided Flo; she would ask him the questions that were teeming in her breast. Saint or no saint, he would have to look her in the eye. She couldn’t understand why she hadn’t had the courage to face up to him before.
But when she drove up beside the Bells’ house and looked at the purple crocuses under the laundry line and walked up the cement path and mounted the porch steps and knocked at the door, there was no answer. From behind the house she could hear tunking, clanging noises. Flo went around to the garage and found young Eleanor and the Harris boy working on a car.
Eleanor seemed vague and faraway. When Flo asked her when her parents would be back, she didn’t seem to know.
“Is it okay if I wait inside?” said Flo impetuously, suddenly seizing a golden opportunity.
“Oh, sure,” said Eleanor. “Just go right in.”
Thus Flo Terry found herself alone in Ed Bell’s house, the very house in which the conspiracy to bring to an end the lives of seven-people had been hatched. For a while she sat by herself in the living room, looking around inquisitively. Then, after peering out the window to be sure Ed and Lorraine were not driving up, she nipp
ed upstairs and explored the two bathrooms. Then she examined the bedrooms. Then she looked out the window again and ran down two flights to the basement.
The basement was large and cavernous. In the middle loomed the huge old-fashioned coal furnace, with large dusty pipes growing out of it like the branches of a tree. Beside it stood the small oil furnace that had taken over the job of heating the house. Beyond the two furnaces was a workbench. Flo looked everywhere among Ed’s tools. She looked in the drawer where the hammers were stored. She pulled open the drawers labeled SCREWDRIVERS, PLIERS, C–CLAMPS. She examined the coffee cans in which Ed stored miscellaneous nuts and bolts.
She found nothing. Frustrated, she stood in the middle of the basement and looked around for the last time, ready to give up and go upstairs. Then, struck by a thought, she approached the coal furnace and opened the heavy cast-iron door into which coal had once been shoveled to keep the fire burning, tons and tons of it in the old days. Ed had probably shoveled a lot of it himself.
The interior was dark and cold, but something showed white within. Bending over, Flo saw a white plastic jar and a package wrapped in polyethylene. Excited, she reached in and extracted them. The package contained plastic syringes. The jar held some kind of liquid. It slopped invisibly inside the bottle when she shook it. Her heart began to beat quickly. She had found what she was looking for.
At Fairhaven Bay, Homer Kelly walked slowly along the shore, trying to keep his mind off his physical dilemma. In Pleasant Meadow he stood on the bank of the little stream and watched enviously as the water tumbled over the amber stones on its way into the river. Everything was flowing, running, splashing, squirting, gushing, surging, loosened at last from winter’s icy grip. Only Homer himself was still blocked and cramped, grappled by sluggish intestinal stagnation.
He looked up as Mary hallooed at him. She was accompanied by Flo Terry. Flo was scrambling from one grassy hummock to another, waving something over her head. As she drew closer, Homer’s heart sank. She was brandishing a bottle of some kind and—what were those other things? Not syringes? Please God, not hypodermic syringes!
“He had them in the furnace,” cried Flo. “I told you, I told you! I found them in the furnace. Ed Bell, he’s got this old furnace in the cellar.”
“Oh, God,” cried Homer. He clutched at his wife. All his juices had suddenly begun flowing at once, like the water in the brook. Mighty volcanic forces were suddenly releasing inside him the pent-up surge of his frozen intestinal tract. The dam had burst. “Oh, Lord in heaven,” cried Homer, leaping across the brook and galloping for home. “Oh, Christ. Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus X Christ.”
40
… by sin, we an fallen from Cod and our happiness; have incurred his holy displeasure, and deserve his wrath.
Reverend Daniel Bliss
Concord, 1755
Peter Terry had to admit himself defeated. He had never felt more wretched in his life.
“All right,” he said, “all right. We’ll have the stuff analyzed. Can you wait until then to destroy the finest guy in town? My God, Flo, I don’t understand you. I just don’t see what’s got into you.”
Flo threw up her hands, calling upon heaven to witness this folly on the part of her husband. “Even now? Even now you don’t understand? You who are responsible for the health and safety of all the citizens of Nashoba, Massachusetts? You don’t understand why we have to stop someone who is killing his fellow men and women? Who is ready to do it again? Why didn’t he throw those things away? He’s keeping them handy, that’s why. He’s ready to use those needles again.”
“But the man is a saint,” grumbled Pete. “You want to make him a martyr? That’s what he’ll be, a martyred saint.”
“A saint?” cried Flo. “A saint? Some crazy kind of saint, to be taking God’s power into his own hands. You call that being a saint?”
Then Pete accused the wife of his bosom of being no better than Pontius Pilate, or those people who had burned Joan of Arc at the stake. Flo’s feelings were terribly hurt.
Next day the promise of Saturday’s basking warmth was repeated in the mild dawn of Sunday morning. Homer and Mary Kelly paid an early pre-church visit to Ed Bell. Homer sat down with Ed in his living room and told him gloomily what Flo Terry had discovered in his basement.
Ed seemed more amused than anything. “Oh, she found them, did she?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Clever girl. I must say, I thought her husband let me off far too easily.”
“But, Ed, do you know what this means?”
“Oh, I can imagine.” Ed smiled at Homer genially. “And maybe in the long run it will make a point. At least maybe some people will begin to think about it.”
Homer looked at him solemnly. “Isn’t the loss of your freedom a high price to pay for making a point?”
“I don’t know, Homer.” Ed looked at Homer candidly. “I’ll find out, won’t I?”
Out-of-doors Mary Kelly and Lorraine Bell stood in the bald sunlight of mid-March, watching Bo Harris work on his car. The Chevy had been rolled out of the garage, where it had spent the winter while Ed’s car sat outside in the snow and cold. Bo had been unable to work on it through December, January, and February, but now he was coming down the homestretch. His repairs were almost done.
Lorraine stared at Bo’s feet, which, as usual, were sticking out from under the Chevy, twitching and jerking as he struggled with something under the chassis. Then she looked suspiciously at Mary. “What are you people here for? What does Homer want with Ed?”
Mary hesitated, unable to tell a comforting lie. Looking up at the back porch, she said, “May we sit in the kitchen? I’ll tell you what he told me.”
As they walked up the steps, Paul Dobbs came out on the porch. He was running a comb through his hair. He said good morning cheerfully to Mary and Lorraine, then bounded briskly down the steps and stooped to look under the car at Bo. “Hey,” said Paul, “when you going to finish this pile of junk?”
“Pretty soon,” said Bo, crawling out from under. “I’m just bleeding the hydraulic system.”
“Gimme a break,” said Paul. “You been bleeding the whole goddamn car for a year. That heap’s never going to get on the road. Who you kidding?”
“Next weekend,” promised Bo, springing to his feet. “Just a couple more little bitty details, that’s all.”
Eleanor came out on the porch and leaned on the railing, dressed for church in an outfit of pink bandannas. She had run it up quickly on the sewing machine yesterday after finishing at the copy center. Then last night she had braided her hair in dozens of pigtails, and this morning she had undone all the pigtails, and brushed them out so that now her hair was a bright tangled thicket, pouring over her bare arms. Her lips looked wet because of the varnish in her lipstick.
Paul whistled, appreciating the result of all her hard work. Bo Harris didn’t even look up.
Eleanor was in a queer mood. Stumping across the driveway, she stood in front of Bo, forcing him to look at her. But instead of a pink-and-gold vision staring him in the face, Bo saw only what was in his mind’s eye, the gritty underside of the Chevy and a hoped-for bead of brake fluid on the hydraulic nipple. The bead of fluid would mean the air had at last been exhausted from the system. So far there had been no little drop of fluid. He would have to try again. And there was a crack in the hydraulic hose. He needed a new hose. Was the Icehouse Garage open on Sunday?
Eleanor had knocked herself out for nothing. “Take me for a ride,” she said.
“Oh, no,” said Bo. “Not yet. This car’s not ready to go yet.”
“But it’s been so long.”
“It’s just the brakes. That’s all. And the muffler. And the hand-brake cable’s shot. And then I’ve got to get the car insured. I’ve got to go to Watertown, get a license at the registry. And the whole thing has to be inspected. I’ve got to get a sticker.”
Eleanor was angry. She felt goaded out of herself. This morning she wa
s someone else entirely, carried beyond herself by her grievance, by the thought of the summer and fall and winter she had spent making herself beautiful for Bo. All those cold Sunday afternoons in the freezing garage trying to help, all those Saturdays in the copy center earning money for makeup and clothes to dazzle Bo Harris, who cared for nothing but his stupid car, who never saw her at all, who treated her like a stick or a stone! To Bo, she was only a pair of hands to shine a flashlight on something, or extra arms for carrying the other end of the transmission, or an extra foot to hold down the accelerator while he checked a connection under the hood. He never saw the person to whom the hands and arms and feet belonged. He never saw the girl whose name was Eleanor Bell. He never saw what Eleanor saw in the mirror every day, a pretty girl, a pretty, pretty girl—everybody said so! She was really, really pretty! And Bo didn’t see it. He didn’t see her at all.
“Listen,” said Eleanor, her voice tight in her throat. “You could drive around the school parking lot. Why not? Nobody would see you on the road. It’s only a mile away. Why not? Why not? Take me for a ride.”
But Bo was back under the car, taking a last loving look at the brake shoe on the left side. Hauling himself out again, he stood and picked up his bicycle. “I’ve got to find a hose. I’ll be back sooner or later.” Putting one foot on the pedal, he coasted gracefully down the driveway standing up, then put the other leg over and floated onto Acton Road, poised on the light frame of his bike. Once again Eleanor stared at his disappearing back, her face burning. She wanted to scream.
“Big jerk,” said Paul, looking sympathetically at Eleanor. “Listen, you want a ride? I’ll give you a ride.”
Eleanor looked at Paul. “But he said—he said something isn’t finished yet.”
“Oh, sure, he said. He doesn’t want to give you a ride. First time out in that car, he’ll take some other girl. What do you want to bet? After you been helping him all this time, he’s not going to give you no ride.”