The Transcendental Murder hk-1

by Jane Langton

  Homer spoke softly. "Do you think Charley murdered your father?"

  Philip looked wretched. His voice rose in pitch until it was almost a whine. "What else am I to think, for God's sake?" He collected himself then, and dropped his eyes. His question about Charley's prospects seemed mere formal politeness. Homer answered noncommitally, which was the way he felt.

  Out on the Milldam again, Homer caught sight of Roland Granville-Galsworthy, and he took a firm grasp of Mary's arm. "It's almost five o'clock," he said. "I'll drive you home, and then you can repay me for my kindness by giving me a drink. Do the Hands have any gin? I'd better pick some up at my place. By rights I ought to bring some glasses, too. I don't trust the sanitary level you people put up with out there."

  Half an hour later there was a cold pitcher on the round oak table under the Angelus, and Mary, Homer and Gwen were listening to old Mrs. Hand talk about her great-uncle George who had written "Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys." The pitcher was almost empty when Tom stuck his head in the door and hollered in, "Who left six bushels of apples right where I'd fall over them in the cider shed? Where in hell did they come from anyhow?" He glared at Mary, who shook her head and said, "Not me." Then he stalked across the room and yelled at his wife. "I dam near busted my head open. Did you put those apples out there?"

  "No, dear," said Gwen. "Why don't you use them to run off some cider? We're all out."

  "Cider!" Tom strode to the door and went out and slammed I it. Then he opened it again and marched back in. "As if I didn't have enough to do, with all those trees to spray every time I turn around and fifty acres to plant and harrow and my machinery breaking down and those golblasted committee meetings and kids that don't do their chores and on top of everything I woke up in the night with the goldamedest charleyhorse you I ever saw. All we need this year is a real whooperdo of a hurricane. That's all we need. Besides, those apples are tired old winter-stored Macs. And nobody never made cider with them kind of apples."

  "Nohow." Mary was sympathetic.

  So was Homer. "The time for makin' cider is in cider-makin' time."

  Tom was mollified. "Sorry if I shouted kind of loud," he mumbled and went outside again.

  "Sorehead," said Gwen.

  Grandmaw shook her head. "He always was an old fuss-budget, from a child."

  *35*

  That sacred Closet when you sweep—

  Entitled "Memory"—

  Select a reverential Broom—

  And do it silently. —Emily Dickinson

  "Did it ever occur to you," said the District Attorney of Middlesex County on the telephone to Concord Police Chief Jimmy Flower, "that you're hanging an awful lot of your investigation on the word of that Boy Scout? How do you know he's telling the truth? I suppose you've ruled out the possibility that he bumped off the old boy himself, sort of as his Bad Deed for the day?"

  "I wish you could see this kid," said Chief Flower, who had developed a really violent distaste for poor Arthur Furry. "He's so honest it's disgusting. We've talked to his scoutmaster, his teachers, his Sunday School teacher, his neighbors, everybody we could think of, and they all find him a bit lazy and not very bright, but about as far from being a juvenile delinquent as you can get."

  "I hope you're being nice to him then. If his parents should take it into their heads not to let him testify..."

  "What kind of nincompoops do you think we are? Chief Parker over there in Acton calls on them all the time, and takes Arthur out in his Chief car with the siren going, and he gets rides on the fire engine, rings the bell and I don't know what all. Thank the good Lord he lives in Acton, and not in Concord."

  "Let's see now," said the D.A. vaguely. "I had another question ... Oh, thank you, Miss O'Toole. Yes. What about the mother, Mrs. Goss? Is she still unfit for giving evidence?"

  "As a matter of fact Homer Kelly was over to see her this morning. She was still as crazy as a coot."

  "Miss O'Toole suggested—that is, I wondered if even in her ravings she might say something that might be significant."

  "Homer said she wouldn't even talk. When she saw him she dodged down the hall and peeked at him around the corner, wouldn't say a word. She's dyed her hair bright red and she goes around in this white nighty. She seems harmless enough, apparently, but there's no hope of getting anything sensible out of her. We thought we'd try the house again, though. Kelly wants to see for himself that there aren't any letters tucked away in some corner of the Goss place we haven't thought of yet."

  Rowena Goss was playing her violin when Mrs. Bewley let them in. Mary suspected that Rowena had just whipped it out when she saw Homer's car turn up the drive, because her music was upside-down. She made a lovely picture, anyway. "Certainly, dear," she said. "Look around all you want. I wish we had some secret panels for you to discover, but I'm afraid we don't. I'll just go on with my practicing."

  Jimmy and Homer wandered off to the cellar and started rooting around. Mary, with Rowena's "dear" sounding unhappily in her head, climbed the stairs and went back to Elizabeth Goss's bedroom. Downstairs Rowena was playing "Liebestraum." She played with plenty of vibrato and when she got to the end she started over again. She played it through six or eight times. Mary closed the door and began to look around.

  The bookcase—the bed—the flower prints—the draperies—the dresser—the carpet. Everything seemed to fit the image of the woman Elizabeth Goss had been before she had gone out of her mind. Tasteful and uninteresting. Go around again. The bookcase—the bed—the flower prints—the draperies—the dresser—

  The dresser. There was a chest on the dresser, a small black box. Mary moved closer and reached out to touch it. That wasn't black paint on the surface—the wood itself was very dark, nearly black. She lifted the lid and looked inside. There wasn't much in it. Jimmy's men must have examined the contents already. Sentimental keepsakes, most likely. Like that old dried-up daisy at the bottom—the memento of some girlish romance? (He loves me, he loves me not.) There was a small jewel case in the corner of the chest, half hidden by a fat envelope. Mary groped the case out of its corner and opened it. Inside it was an old ring with a purple stone, set in an antique fashion. Mary took the ring out of the case and held it to the light. Amethyst, probably. Now what about the envelope? Across the front of it someone had written, "great-grandmother's." She had to open it carefully because it was swollen from its contents and brittle at the edges. Why, it was hair, a braided mass of auburn hair—great-grandmother's? But it was as beautiful and shining as if it had been cut and braided only yesterday. She drew it out and held it in her two hands. It was wound in an intricate pattern, and Mary found her fingers picking at it, trying to find the beginning. She shouldn't be doing this, she shouldn't be doing this at all. But she went right on pulling at it. She just had to see. As she twisted it loose from its braiding, the hair sprang loose in deep ripples, like the silky fur of a spaniel's ears. Beautiful, it was beautiful. Awestruck, Mary lifted her right hand gently and let the hair fall over her left arm in a shining waterfall. She had forgotten that human hair could grow so long...

  Then Mary shook herself and began to struggle with the problem of getting the hair back into the envelope. It was like trying to pour a river into a glass. She would have to braid it all up again. Furtively she glanced at the door. Rowena was still sawing away downstairs. Mary struggled to separate the cloudy mass into threes. What a job. It would take a good five minutes. Her fingers worked hastily. Left over right, right over left...

  Red hair must run in the female line in Elizabeth's family—from great-grandmother to Elizabeth to Elizabeth's children. There was a picture downstairs in the dining room, painted in the style of John Singer Sargent, that showed Elizabeth as she had looked when she was married. She had been a redhead, all right, like her children, with a pretty, bushy bob. But not this color, surely? The hair in the portrait was a light red like Rowena's, not this deep, lustrous red-brown, the color of a sorrel horse...

  Then Mary was struck
by a thought, and her fingers shrank from the hair she was twisting. There was an old wives' tale (or was it true? perhaps it was true!) that the hair of a dead man goes on growing in the grave. A picture blossomed in her mind before she could stop it, a picture of a beautiful young corpse in a flowing white dress, with a pale pre-Raphaelite face, her white hands folded on the heliotropes of her breast, and her dark coffin filling and filling with the ever-lengthening coils of her glorious ghostly hair...

  *36*

  How martial is this place!

  Had I a mighty gun

  I think I'd shoot the human race

  And then to glory run! —Emily Dickinson

  The D.A. had finally come out to Concord. He didn't do anything in particular while he was there except spend an hour in Jimmy's office, whining. Miss O'Toole was away on vacation, and the D.A. felt naked and defenseless. And it was a misty night. He hadn't liked the way the trees had hung over the road on the drive out. The country was spooky, with those huge barns, probably jam-packed with cows, and those trees, brrrr.

  And the newspapers were at him again. A district attorney * as supposed to come through with brilliant solutions to crimes and spectacular prosecutions. And here he was, getting nowhere is usual, the "Do-Nothing D.A." again. Well, they couldn't arrest the wrong man, could they? Then the papers would have at them for sure. And they couldn't arrest Teddy Staples, because they couldn't find Teddy Staples. Where in the hell was Teddy anyway? Brrrr, those trees!

  After the D.A. left, Homer sat with his knees wedged into the kneehole of his desk, playing idly with his tie. He rolled it up from the bottom and then let go. As it unrolled, Mary and Jimmy Flower could watch the girl who was diving off the diving board go through the various positions of a swan dive and end up with a big splash at the bottom. "Holy horsecollar!" said Jimmy.

  "It would look a whole lot better on a horse," said Mary.

  Homer wasn't listening. He looked up from his tie slapped the desk. "I know one place we didn't look for th letters, or that gun or the missing hat—the Gun House."

  "The Gun House?"

  "Where the Concord Independent Battery keeps its cannon Come on. How can I manage to be so everlastingly dumb?"

  Mary squeezed out of her chair and loomed up behind her card table. "Well I never," she said. "Homer Kelly being humble. What a nice change."

  Homer laughed a huge basso laugh and lifted Jimmy right out of his chair. He dandled him up and down. "Well, if a person knows he's the cat's pajamas, why try to cover it up?"

  "Ow," said Jimmy. "For Chris'sake, lemme down."

  Jimmy didn't have a key to the Gun House, so they drove or by Harvey Finn's farm on Lowell Road and picked him up. The Gun House had been erected in the field next to Emerson's house by a patriotic town, the popular subscription taken up in a few days. Outside it a sign hung on a pole, displaying the crossed cannon insignia of the Battery. Harvey Finn opened the side door and turned on the light. The single room was like a big garage with a high beamed ceiling. Around the walls hung the harnesses for the horses. The two gleaming guns, copper-cent color, faced toward the big front doors, with the high-wheeled limbers behind them, their shafts resting on the floor. Homer stood between the guns and looked at them.

  "What's today? May 6th. They won't be used again until Memorial Day, right? Suppose Ernest Goss was looking for a temporary place to stick his letters where he could get at them any time he wanted to. He had a key to the Gun House, didn't he? He might have planned to take them away again before Memorial Day. He didn't expect to die in the meantime."

  Homer was stooping over, peering into the muzzle of the right-hand gun. He took out his flashlight and pointed it inside. "Nothing here." Then he tried the other one. "Oh, hell." He sat back on his haunches and scratched his head.

  Mary tried the ammunition boxes on the limbers. They were empty, too.

  "It was a cute idea anyway," said Jimmy Flower.

  "Harvey," said Homer. "Show me how they work. You use blanks to start them with?"

  "That's right. See, here's the box that holds the charges, black powder in little red bags. The powder monkey puts it in the muzzle, the rammer rams it home, and the thumber, he stands in back and puts a blank cartridge here under this little screw (it used to be a thumb-hole) like this. Then the lanyard man pulls the rope on it when I yell 'fire.' Like this." There was a colossal BLAM. Mary shrieked, totally unprepared.

  "Hey, hey," said Homer. "M-my God, man."

  "That was just the blank. There wasn't any charge in it."

  "Even so. Jesus. Say, what's in that bucket there, with the rag on top?"

  Harvey Finn lifted up the rag and glanced underneath. "Oh, it's just..." He put the rag back hastily. "It's not anything."

  "Well, what is it?" said Jimmy. He picked up the rag. The bucket was full of empty beer cans. Harvey Finn snickered. "Some of the boys must have had a party. Well, it's not like the good old days, though. We've really reformed since then. Don't forget, we're not a dry Battery..."

  "I know, you're a wet cell."

  No point in staying any longer. Harvey Finn walked around the big room, straightening a harness, patting a wheel-rim. He had the look of a housekeeper fussing about her parlor. Mary got a strong whiff of the feeling the members of the Battery had for their gear. It was an affectionate pride, a boyish pleasure in anything noisy and slightly dangerous. They were an easygoing unmilitaristic outfit that liked to have fun on the boys' night out.

  Homer drove Harvey Finn home and then Jimmy Flower. Jimmy lived on Lexington Road in a tidy little house that had ice-cream-scoop hedges around the front porch. Isabelle Flower invited Mary and Homer in for coffee. She gushed over Homer and gave him a big squeeze around the stomach, which was all she could reach. "Boy, Homer," she said, "are you my type! I'll bet you make hay with all the girls. Say, wouldn't we make a cute couple?"

  "And here it is, spring, and all," said Homer.

  "How do the girls keep their hands off you?"

  "They don't seem to find it difficult."

  "For gosh sakes, Isabelle," said Jimmy. "Lay off of Homer."

  *37*

  One need not be a chamber to be haunted,

  One need not be a house;

  The brain has corridors surpassing

  Material place...

  Far safer through an Abbey gallop,

  The stones achase,

  Than, moonless, one's own self encounter

  In lonesome place. —Emily Dickinson

  "This isn't the way to my house," said Mary. Homer's car was turning up Bedford Street.

  "Oh, come on. How would you like to go for a spooky walk in Sleepy Hollow cemetery? We'll just walk up to Authors' Ridge and pay our respects to the immortals. Come on."

  The street lights were propagating rectilinearly, making straight paths through the mist. The elm trees had leafed out, and the shadows under them were black and huge. Homer waved his large hand overhead. "Thoreau called them chandeliers of darkness, when he walked under them of a summer night."

  Mary looked at him sideways. He had almost sounded... Was he giving way at last to the spell of those old dead words, made alive again in Concord's elms and rivers and fields? But it couldn't be. Not the man who had condescended to Emerson and trampled on Margaret Fuller. No.

  It took them fifteen minutes of fumbling along the misty paths with the help of a flashlight before they stumbled on the steep rise of Authors' Ridge. They climbed to the top and looked around.

  "Look," said Mary. "That's Bronson Alcott's stone, the fancy one. And this little marker is Louisa's." They stood a minute looking down at it. Then Homer moved away, groping for the iron chain around Emerson's big piece of quartz. Mary knelt down and touched the simple marker that said L.M.A. She thought of Louisa's bust in the library, with the gentle plaster face and the heavy chin and the enormous coil of plaster hair hanging over the collar in back. Then she thought of the rows of dead, lying side by side beneath her feet—Louisa and her sisters
, her mother. Was their hair still growing and growing in the grave—their long, long hair?

  Mary struggled to her feet, and looked around in the dark. She began to feel panic-stricken. Oh, now look here. Don't be idiotic. But—where was Homer? If he didn't come back soon, she would be compelled to call out for him, and she was determined not to do that. Mary stood still, trying not to tremble, trembling all the same. She could hear his steps crunching on the gravel, off to the right. But he had gone to the left, to see Emerson's grave. Suddenly Homer took her hand, and she jumped spasmodically, jerking her hand away.

  "Mary," he said huskily.

  Mary began to babble. She had just had an extraordinary idea. "What day did you say it was?"

  "What? I don't know, for heaven's sake. It's May sixth."

  "That's what I thought you said, that's what I thought. Homer, do you know what today is?"

  "Darned if I know. Your birthday? Happy birthday."

  "No, no, not mine, it's Henry Thoreau's birthday. I mean it's the anniversary of his death. He died a hundred years ago today, in that house on Main Street. I knew that, and then I forgot. They're having a big celebration in New York at the Morgan Library."

  "Well then, all the more reason for paying Henry a call. So it is—so it is—well, well. A hundred years since he lay there in the front room, dying of TB and failure of the legs, with spring breaking forth outside his window ... And somebody (who was it?) asked him if he had made his peace with God. 'We have never quarreled,' says Henry. I like that."

  "Wait, wait," said Mary. "Listen!" There was that crunching sound on the gravel again. "It's over there where Henry is buried. Homer, he's walking."