The Transcendental Murder hk-1

by Jane Langton

  "You are, dearie," said Homer.

  *32*

  I cannot even whisper my thanks to those human friends I have ... And why should I speak to my friends? for how rarely is it that I am I; and are they, then, they? We will meet, then, far away... —Henry Thoreau

  Homer Kelly sat in Jimmy's office in the police station on Walden Street, waiting for Mary. It was Saturday, her day. What was she late for? He twiddled his ballpoint pen, then started chewing the end of it. The phone rang.

  "Homer?" said Mary. In the background he could hear the children of the Hand household and a great clatter of dishes. "Gwen had to take Grandmaw into town for some new glasses, so I'm going to stay here with the children. I'm sorry."

  "Oh, hell," said Homer testily. Damn the girl. She seemed to be public property. Any old body could call on her for any old thing any old time.

  "Was there anything special? Could I do anything for you here?"

  "Well, I wanted to go over Teddy's journal with you. There are some things in it I thought you might understand that I don't."

  "Why don't you come by for lunch, and bring it with you?"

  Be brusque. Step on the flowers. "Hmmm. Will all those kids be there?"

  "I'm afraid so."

  "Well, okay. But shut 'em up, will you?"

  So he was that kind of man, thought Mary. Hated children. They would probably whine and fight all the time he was there. She hoped they did. Anybody that hated kids deserved what he got.

  She was still slicing cucumbers when he came by a little early. "Goodness, where did you get that dreadful tie?" said Mary. It was a chaste green silk affair.

  "Rowena Goss gave it to me," said Homer, looking down at it. "She doesn't like my taste in ties."

  "Whatever can be the matter with her?" said Mary. She picked up three cucumber slices and arranged them on his tie like buttons.

  Homer looked down at it admiringly. "What about some sliced olives scattered around in between?"

  "Freddy's banana!" said Annie. "I'll cut it up for you!" She snatched it from Freddy. Freddy hollered. Annie squeezed the banana behind her and wouldn't give it back. Homer settled the argument with surprising tact, giving Freddy back all of his banana except a small piece, which Annie cut up and arranged carefully on his tie. "There now," he said, "what's for lunch? Or do we just eat our clothes?"

  Lunch was canned ravioli. It was the children's favorite. (Mary had been darned if she was going to prepare something special for him.) Homer ate it gracefully and meekly asked for more.

  John looked at him and pointed. "How do you like that plate?" he said.

  Homer goggled at his plate. "Fine," he said. "It's fine."

  "Isn't it clean?"

  "Yes, sir, it's clean all right. Did you wash it?"

  John nodded. "Annie did the breakfast dishes, and I helped her. She didn't even have to wash that one." He picked up his own plate, which was covered with ravioli juice and held it in front of his face so that it dripped, and licked it with his tongue.

  See?" he said. Mary watched in dawning horror. John's tongue went around and around, thoroughly and efficiently. The plate was artistically, beautifully clean. Homer looked down at his own plate, his face lighting up with appalled understanding.

  "John, you didn't!" Mary fell back against the wall and laughed. She couldn't stop. She went limp. Homer stared at her, then he snatched up her empty plate, licked it all over, spooned up a big helping of peas and dumped them on it. John and Annie got into the act and licked each other's knives and forks. Freddy understood the joke and licked his chair.

  After lunch Mary put Freddy to bed for his nap and cleared the dishes off the table. Homer put Teddy's journal on it and sarted leafing through it. "I feel sticky all over," he said. "Now, where are we? Look, right here. Entry of April 6, this year. He starts out: 'Only one month more______' See those dashes? Then there's a quote, I guess from Henry Thoreau: 'For joy I could embrace the earth; I shall delight to be buried in it.' Then he goes on in his own words. (Look at his spelling.)

  Why can't I delight in it? Alas, I cannot. If I could only find thatt which I seek I would give itt all upp gladly. (And if I could onnly be sure that Goss can be silenced. That is an addittional thorn in my side). That star that I worshipp from afar will shine on when I am gone, as though this speckk on a disttant planet had never been. Her light will be as raddiant as ever, when I am no more.

  "I think I understand his spelling," said Mary. "You see? He doubles consonants. Maybe it's because when he's stammering through a word it seems to have more than one B or P."

  Running down the sides of each page were marginal lists of the birds and wildlife seen each day. Mary read some of them. They were highly abbreviated and hard to decipher. She turned the pages slowly. The main part of the text was full of quotations. It occurred to her that Teddy had used Thoreau's journals as a kind of gloss on his own. Everything he did was seen in the light of something Henry had said or done. It was like her own movie music. She understood it very well.

  "What do you suppose he means by that—'only one month more'?" said Homer. "What was he waiting for? His month isn't up yet, even now. Only one month till what? It sounds as though he felt doomed, as though he had some sort of incurable disease or something. But Dr. Cosgro hasn't seen him, nor any other doctor in town. He hasn't been to Emerson Hospital for a checkup or anything. Nor to any Boston hospital or clinic, at least not under his own name. We even tried using the name Henry Thoreau, feeling like idiots. No luck. Do you suppose he had TB? With that cough... But why would he say, 'Only one month more,' as if he knew for certain just how much longer he had to go? It's a queer thing. And who do you suppose his shining star was? Some Concord girl?"

  Mary had a sinking feeling. She was afraid she knew. Then they found the answer. Homer put his big finger on a line, and looked at her peculiarly. The passage recorded their own visit to Teddy's house, when he had been working on his birdbath.

  She likes my new birdbath. She understands everything I say or do.

  I satt next to her in the car, and she was sorry about my cough.

  "It's funny," said Homer. "A girl that's as big and homely as you are and all. What do they see in you, anyway?"

  "Oh, shut up." Mary shook her head in sorrow. Poor, poor Teddy.

  "Look here," said Homer, "where he goes on about 'that which I seek.' This time he seems to be looking for a 'him.' "

  I thought today, just for a minnute, that I had found him. No such luck. Am I doomed to die without him? Sommetimes I have believed that he might take me up to heaven with him, if he could...

  "Homer, you don't suppose—I know this is silly, but you don't think Teddy was looking for Henry Thoreau himself? Up there on Annursnac Hill? It's crazy, I know, but then Teddy was..."

  "I wonder. Crackpot notion. He doesn't sound as daft as all that in this journal. But maybe—after all, who else could Teddy's 'he' be?"

  *33*

  It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner till there is none at all ... We are not the less to aim at the summits, though the multitude does not ascend them... —Henry Thoreau

  A stony old road ran up Annursnac Hill. At the bottom was an old orchard of broken, bristling apple trees and a fallen wire fence like snarled bedsprings. The side of the hill was densely packed with blueberry and juniper bushes, and cedar trees standing like pikestaffs. At the top was a reservoir and a rocky pasture where the wind turned the white sides of the grass up in billows. Birch saplings with trembling new leaves grew along the barbed-wire pasture fence. Mary looked at them and found herself thinking of what Emerson had said about the mighty and transcendent Soul... tenderly, tenderly does it woo and court us from every object in Nature (from those trembling shiny leaves, opened only this morning, from those dried-up heads of sumac, from these wild strawberry flowers. Careful now, don't betray yourself).

  "Wow," said Homer, "this is a swell pla
ce. Just look at that view."

  It was the second day of May, and almost hot. Mary took off her jacket and sat down. Far below them they could see the hazy treetops bordering the Assabet, and Tom's cornfield, still dark brown, showing no sign of life. There was a green field next to it, with a blue puddle in the middle, and some white birds in the middle of the puddle. Next to the field they could barely see the complex rooftops of the Gosses' house, nearly hidden in its surrounding hemlocks, and far off to the right the tower of the Concord Reformatory. Homer lay down on his back and wondered what would happen if he were to put his arm around Mary. Or he might just tickle her a little in a friendly way...

  "What do you suppose Teddy saw from here?" said Mary. "What could you see if you had binoculars?"

  Oh, the hell with it. Homer sat up. "You'd see the souls of the Transcendentalists floating around over Concord. You could just sing out to Henry and he'd fly over and take you right up to Hebb'm."

  "There are a lot of birds down there. You can see such a lot of sky. It's like a big blue soup tureen, not just that teacupful we see from under the elm trees down there." Mary glanced down at something shining beside her feet, then bent forward to pick it up. "Oh, Homer, look. I've found something."

  "By God, it's a staple. Teddy must have sat right here and popped a gusset." Homer stood up, his brown hair rumpled upwards on the back of his head, and gestured at one of the state policemen who were searching the hilltop. Then he pulled Mary to her feet. "Say, I wonder how fine a fine-tooth comb Jimmy's men used when they went over the area where Goss was shot? Let's go see. If Teddy was there he may have come unstuck at the seams all over the place."

  "If you had one of those back-and-forth hats you'd look just like Sherlock Holmes."

  Homer was leaning over the path that led to the Minuteman, staring around through Mary's reading glasses, which he held halfway between his eyes and the ground. There was a group of tourists gawking at the grave of the British soldiers, telling themselves that they could still see where Ernest Goss's blood had left a stain. A small boy jabbed his father with his elbow. "Look at the detective," he said.

  Homer played to the grandstand. "It's elementary, my dear Flotsam. Egad, sir, look at that lollipop stick. Lemon-lime, I think I can say positively, sir, that the flavor was lemon-lime."

  "Query," said Mary, "which suspect has a passion for lemon-lime? In case you don't have a plan, Mr. Holmes, I have a plan."

  The boy had a good idea, too, and volunteered, "What you could do is, you could have a whole lot of flavors in a dish, and then you pass it around and see which one ... aw, you're just kidding me."

  His father prodded him, and they moved away. Mary followed them across the bridge and looked up at the Minuteman. There he stood in his brazen calm with his bronze nose and ears and tricorn hat and his bronze buttons and the bronze wrinkles in his stockings and his bronze fowling piece and plow. Mary stared at the gun. What if the murder weapon was like the purloined letter, and the murderer had just stuck it in the Minuteman 's hand where everybody could see it? The bronze gun was just like the one Ernest Goss had kept in his cabinet, even to the engraved pineapple on the bottom that showed it was British made. The flint mechanism was all there, with the frizen down over the powder pan. Mary called herself an idiot, but she reached up anyway and touched the stock. It was bronze, all right, not wood. And of course the murderer would have had to saw off the bronze one, and then get rid of that. Mary stood back and admired the monument, feeling a nudge again of that awareness of the reality of history, that awareness she found so hard to come by. It had all really happened. The Minutemen had looked very much like that, they had left their plows and taken up their guns and stood together in straight rows just over there, and the British had lined up across the river in columns for street firing, the first row kneeling and firing, then peeling off to the rear...

  Homer spoke roughly behind her. "Look here." He had a little pile of staples in his cupped hand, three or four of them, folded over on themselves.

  "Where were they?"

  "On the little hill where the obelisk is. You know what Thoreau said? 'Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.' "

  *34*

  We are embarrassed with second thoughts ... we are lined with eyes; we see with our feet. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Jimmy was feeling testy. His expense account was worrying him, and the nationwide search for Teddy Staples was going badly. No picture of Teddy had turned up anywhere. The official description called for an itinerant stonemason about five feet eight inches tall, weight one hundred and forty pounds, brown hair, bad cough, peculiar-looking, poorly dressed. Across the broad face of the land the police had turned up plenty of five-foot-eight-inch, one-hundred-and-forty pound, brown-haired, peculiar-looking derelicts who had such atrocious health habits that they had coughs; but only a few of these were itinerant stonemasons. Jimmy had been called up three times in the middle of the night by excited members of far-flung police departments. "He denies it, of course," the voice would squeak, "but it's Staples, all right."

  Twice Jimmy had turned them off with a suggestion given him by the Audubon Society. "Just one thing more," he would say sleepily. "Just mention sort of casually that you saw an evening grosbeak pulling up a worm in your back yard. If he disagrees with you, call me back. You heard me, an evening grosbeak. That's G, R, O..."

  That had got rid of two of the suspects. But the third five-foot-eight-inch skinny itinerant stonemason with a bad cough had turned out to be a birdwatcher, too, and, glory be, he had boggled at the worm-eating grosbeak! "Hang on to him," shouted Jimmy over the long-distance line, "I'll be right there." There had been a thousand miles away in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and to Jimmy's intense chagrin the man under suspicion had turned out to be a deacon in the Baptist church and the father of seven daughters.

  This particular wild-goose chase had cost $172.53, and it looked terrible, really terrible on the tally sheet.

  The next afternoon Homer Kelly snatched Mary out of her library early and marched her along the street to the little brick temple with the putty-colored columns that faced down Walden Street. It had once been a bank, but now it provided office space for insurance men and lawyers. Among the lawyers were Philip Goss and his partner George Jarvis.

  "The heck with Teddy," said Homer. "I'm going to get back on the main track. Who was it the Boy Scout thought he saw a split second after the murder? One of the Goss boys. It's about time I started chivvying them around."

  Philip's small office might have been on Beacon Street. There was a Turkish rug on the floor and the bookshelves were filled with old volumes in calf bindings. The roll-top desk was a piece of pleasant affectation. Philip was smoothly at their service. So was George Jarvis, who appeared out of nowhere and sat quietly in the background.

  Homer wanted to know what it had been like to grow up in the Goss household. "Is it really true that your father dealt more harshly with Charley than he did with you?"

  "My father's attitude toward Charley has always troubled me. My earliest memories are of shielding Charley from my father's displeasure."

  "Why? Why was your father so hard on Charley?"

  "I wish I knew. I think it was a tendency he had to see things only in black and white. Like in politics—everyone in Democratic Party was assumed to be a knave or a cutthroat, there were two sides to anything, one was dead wrong and one was right. He had two sons. One was good and one was bad. The same with his daughters. Of the two sons, I was the lucky one. I was the heir to the throne, the white hope, the serious student, the one who had his little nose pointed at Harvard from the beginning. Charley must therefore be the opposite of me. He was supposed to be unreliable, dreamy, wild. It's my personal belief that Charley isn't really so different from me at all. but he just hasn't been let alone, the way I have, to do what came naturally. He had to be made to fit this square hole they'd provided for him. So he was the one who always landed in the way-
out progressive school, where you messed around with fingerpaint and got rid of your aggressions with drama therapy or some damn thing."

  "But isn't it true that Charley has turned out to be a very different kind of person?"

  Philip turned away to the window that looked down on the T-shaped crossing of Walden and Main. Patrolman Bob Loftus was standing in the middle of the crossing beckoning a pair of old ladies across the street. Who was that weird-looking character standing in front of Richardson's Drug Store, looking this way? Philip turned away from the window abruptly and glanced at Mary. He had seen that fellow with her. Was he waiting for Mary to come out? What right did he have to...? After all, some day Mary was going to be Philip's girl...

  "You were saying...?" said Homer.

  Philip struggled to remember the question. "Well—as the twig is bent, so grows the tree, I suppose."

  "So they say. Well. Let's go into this mutual-confession pact you boys had with each other. When did you start doing that?"

  "I don't know. It wasn't a pact. It was just something we did, without ever thinking about it, as long ago as I can remember."

  "Why didn't you carry through on it this time?"

  Philip flushed. George Jarvis made a demurring noise.

  "Well, forget it," said Homer. "Tell me this. What was Charley's attitude toward you throughout all the years you were growing up? Did he show any natural jealousy toward you because you were his father's favorite?"

  "Yes, I guess he did. How could he have helped it?"

  "And you had nothing against your father but his unfair treatment of your brother?"

  Philip hesitated. George Jarvis answered for him. "You told me you had nothing beyond that."

  "What about your mother? Did she show the same kind of partisanship?"

  "Mother? Oh, she wasn't ever really 'there.' She lived in some sort of world of her own..."

  She wasn't ever really there ... That was it. Yes, that was just the way she had always seemed to Mary. Just a set of formal motions and gestures, with no one really inside. When you knock, said Henry, no one is at home...