What did he know about murder and murderers in any event? The rocker creaked again. He could never understand why some people chose to steal from other people, or drink more than they should, or hit one another. It’s God’s will, some people said, like war or pestilence. Other people said it was part of man’s nature. But what did that mean, for heaven’s sake? Daggett had sworn to keep the peace. His duty was to maintain law and order. That meant keeping people out of trouble. Well, he had failed. Or they had.
VII
WILLA TOOK EDITH’S hand to help her over a large fallen log, then held it for a moment, drawing her attention to their surroundings.
“Can this be the way they came, do you think?”
It was doubtful, Edith thought, but still possible. The log made negotiating the trail difficult, and once they were on the other side, the trail seemed to disappear altogether. Of course, this sort of thing happened all the time in the woods. Storms and high winds often rearranged the trees, fooling even hikers who knew the trails well. Willa and Edith long ago developed a routine for these occasions, the one behind stopping at the point where they lost the trail, while the other one scouted out and around. One opening in the trees looked very like another, the light slanting in the same direction, wildflowers blooming in similar clusters beneath the pines and scrub oak.
“No sign of twigs broken or undergrowth disturbed and no sign of the trail on this side,” Willa called far off to the left.
The noise from the brook had grown loud or soft as the trail approached and drifted away. Now its sound had almost disappeared with the trail. Willa and Edith were heading inland toward the road, the brook on their right. They had crossed it twice. Edith sat down on the log. Her left shoestring was untied. She glanced back in the direction they had just come. The trail was fairly evident there, so perhaps someone coming in from the road would not have missed it. Edith knew from experience that this was the best of numerous trails leading inland from the waterfall. They had taken it before, several times, stopping for picnics along the way. The brook afforded countless picnic spots and swimming holes. Dipping pools, Edith corrected herself. Even though Cobus built new dams every spring, none of them were large enough for an actual swim, and the water in the brook was generally too cool for anyone to linger.
Eel Brook
Refreshing, Cobus called it. Edith chuckled. Willa’s niece was shocked the first summer she visited.
“Those ladies just took off all their clothes in broad daylight and jumped in the water,” Mary Virginia’s voice rose almost to a squeal. “I didn’t know what to do. So I did it, too.”
Willa laughed and laughed.
“That’s just Cobus,” Edith finally intervened. “Cobus thinks it’s healthful to bathe where the water is bracing.”
“Yes,” Mary Virginia said slowly, then glanced at Willa, whose efforts to contain her laughter were beginning to appear painful, “I expect it is.”
“You did exactly the right thing,” Willa finally managed to say, “though heaven only knows how you came by such good sense.”
Willa put an arm around her niece’s shoulders and hugged her close to make sure Mary Virginia understood just how good she had been. Thirteen was a difficult age. “You should have seen your mother the time we took her with us to the Wind Mountains. Horrified, all the time, horrified.”
Edith smiled at the way Willa pantomimed Jessica’s horror and at her own first response to the Wind Mountains. Edith and Willa discovered Wyoming and the Wind Mountains at different times, but all Nebraskans eventually went west for camping and east for culture. Edith fell in love with the mountains the moment she arrived, but Willa’s sister Jessica, who was the same age as Edith, paid more attention to her own appearance than she did to the world around her. Jessica despised the mountains and hated tents.
“Animals, she called us. Animals. And she called your uncle Douglass a he-goat.” Willa threw back her head to bray like a donkey, “He-goat. He-goat.”
At that Mary Virginia, Edith, and Willa caught the giggles and Willa was unable to continue until tears streamed from her eyes.
“That’s when your uncle Douglass called your mother Jessicass,” another wave of laughter bubbled over, “and the name stuck,” Willa wiped her eyes.
Mary Virginia’s lips formed a large O.
“Oh, she hated the name. And she hated us,” Willa threw her hand to her forehead to assume the pose of Patience Betrayed.
“From then on Jessica was Jessicass, and Douglass was Billy Goat Gruff. And I tried out for the role of the Troll,” Willa’s grin deepened and she contorted her face and swung her arms and gallumphed several steps backward.
When their laughter subsided and Willa straightened up and shed her silly Troll grin, Mary Virginia was sitting on the ground where the giggles had dropped her, her arms draped across her body, still holding her sides.
“Momma can be a cross to bear,” Mary Virginia’s face expressed a certain surprise. She had never before said a word of criticism about her mother.
“Mothers are, sometimes,” Willa nodded and reached down to help her niece up. “Like a thorn that never lets loose.”
EDITH glanced over to see what progress Willa was making in her search for the trail. Amidst all that laughter, she realized, had been a hint of Willa’s early turmoil with her own mother and a glimpse of the gargoyle-like character Willa was just then creating in her new manuscript about daughters. She called the character Blinker.
Family, Edith smiled to herself. Mary Virginia still had so much growing to do. Edith remembered her own coming to consciousness and the difficult struggle to define her own footing. Willa’s passage had been similar. But independence, they finally realized together, did not have to mean eternal defiance or standing alone or stepping out of one’s place in the human family. Memory held, if nothing else did. And all that youthful stomping and strutting about to assert one’s place in the world, Edith snorted out loud. That was the chimera.
Ties that bind, and ties that set free. Edith finished tying her shoestrings and resettled herself on the fallen log, then glanced again at Willa, now on her knees checking something in the grass Edith could not see.
The focus of Willa’s manuscript had a great deal to do with their current circumstances. Edith’s mother and Willa’s father died within three months of each other just the previous year. Now Willa’s mother lay paralyzed by a stroke in Pasadena, where she had gone to visit Douglass. Edith’s father was also in California, under the care of Edith’s younger sister.
Life seemed suddenly fragile. Neither Willa nor Edith needed Mr. Brown’s final dive to remind them of that. But family ties held fast even past death. The more one strained against them, Edith guessed, the tighter they held. Tentacles, they felt at times, tendrils at others, as capable of choking life out as of bringing it in. The trick, Edith guessed, smiling at Willa, who continued to pat the ground around her knees, lay in staying easy in their grip. And, Edith supposed, in remembering that blood lines were not the only things fastening one to life and to each other.
“EYES like those,” Rob Feeney pushed away from his desk for the second time that afternoon, “don’t belong on Grand Manan.”
“What?” Jason Dobbs, the young man the shipping company had placed under Rob for training, looked up from his desk.
Rob realized he had spoken aloud. “That man Brown,” he said now, “he didn’t really belong on Grand Manan.”
“Brown?”
“Yes,” Rob rose to pull a paper cup from the dispenser on the wall behind his desk and fill it with water from the cooler. “He had the look of a man who knew death,” Rob swung back to his desk, the cup in his hand, “knew it and didn’t mind it.”
Jason put down his pen and frowned.
“Oh, never mind me,” Rob settled in his chair, grinning at the confusion on the young man’s face. “I’m just thinking out loud. I saw him, you know, on the passage over.”
“Oh, right,” Jason turned
back to his work. He had learned some time ago that Rob Feeney occasionally talked to himself and that when he did, he didn’t really want to engage in conversation. He was just turning things over. Personal things. Memories of his father. A tough guy, Jason had heard, who died at sea. Memories of the war. Jason didn’t much know what to do about those and didn’t want to know. His own life took all his energy.
“LOOK what I found,” Willa rose and came back through a cut in the trees, one hand extended, palm up and cupped. Edith slid off the log and trotted over to see.
It was a button. The right size for a shirt and a crimson so rich, it was almost burnt carmine.
“It would go well on a red shirt,” Edith held the button for a moment in her fingers. “Where did you find it?”
The button had been lying by itself just a few feet beyond where the trail once again became obvious, then split immediately to encircle a thicket. The two paths seemed equally well traveled. The button had been on the path to the right, lying just off to the side, cushioned by decaying leaves. Willa prodded the area with a stick while Edith slipped the button into her pocket. She stood for a moment working it like a worry bead, letting her fingers sense what they could from its shape, size, solidity, and smoothness, before letting it drop into the safe confines of her pocket.
Tell me about your owner, Edith’s fingers pressed the question. The button grew warm but remained silent.
“AFTER Willa discovered the button, we searched hard all the way back to Whistle Road,” Edith assured Winifred Bromhall later that evening, “but the button was all we found.”
“And what do you think of Miss Briggs? Is she a likely suspect, as everyone seems to think?”
Winifred was picking the scallions out of her salad and placing them on the edge of her plate. Winifred can do anything she wants and be beautiful doing it, the thought flitted across Edith’s mind.
“Certainly not,” Willa’s answer was unusually brusque.
“But what if Miss Briggs had known this Mr. Brown from the city? What if he threatened her somehow … her livelihood, you know … with blackmail or something.”
“Rubbish. Nonsense,” Willa refused to speculate.
Edith watched the knife and fork separate a scallion from the red fluted edge of a lettuce leaf. They worked like miniature pinchers in Winifred’s relaxed grip. What must it be like to live on the inside of such elegance, Willa said just the other day. Willa was right, Edith smiled at Winifred. But then, Willa was usually right. And she didn’t like to gossip.
“Where exactly did you come out?” Margaret Byington’s soft alto interrupted Edith’s reflection.
“Come out?” Edith turned to look at Margaret, who was in the process of settling into the fourth chair at their table. A sturdy, direct woman with dry wit and wonderfully deep laughter, Margaret always made Edith feel somehow warm and pleasureful.
“Just this side of the old logging road into Ashburton Head. You know the place,” Willa at least had been paying attention.
“On Whistle Road,” Edith smiled. “You’re late,” she observed, passing the mashed potatoes.
Margaret nodded, “We got lost on the way to Indian Beach. Too many trees downed by storms blocking the trail. Confused us. It took forever to get there and another forever to get back.”
Ethelwyn Manning, Margaret’s partner in the misadventure, glanced over from a neighboring table where she also had filled a fourth chair. “You should have heard Margaret trying to bargain a fisherman into rowing us home. She tried everything to avoid climbing the steep grade to Eel Lake.”
“I had no money with me,” Margaret laughed, reaching for the haddock, “and he had never heard of credit. Said it must be an American thing.”
“Too bad so many Americans have heard of it,” Willa pronounced. “Just last week The New York Times ran an enormous list of bankruptcies. And they are constantly publishing advertisements for liquidation auctions. Why, there was even one recently for exclusive lots around a golf course in Rye,” she shook her head. “No money for farms, no money for land, no money for homes. But for stocks,” she shrugged, “that’s another story.”
“From what I hear, too many people play the stock market on borrowed dollars,” Margaret’s eyes grew momentarily serious.
“Gambling, you mean,” Winifred’s British midlands accent was engagingly droll.
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Margaret agreed, helping herself to the haddock, “trying to win what there’s no way to earn.”
“It takes money to make money, they say,” Edith cleared a space in the center of the table for the haddock.
“Middle-class greed, I say,” Margaret pressed on. “That’s what happens when robber barons become heroes, and everyone tries to become part of America’s new royalty. Let’s join the Mellons, the Morgans, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, the Roosevelts,” Margaret beat time with her fork as if she were the drum major at the head of a marching band. “And now there’s H.T. Parson,” her fork went even higher, “a man from whom we’ve not heard before. The Times says Mr. H. T. began life as bookkeeper, rose to take over the crown at Woolworths, and is now planning to build himself a million-dollar mansion in Paris,” her fork plunged for a new note, then rose again in crescendo, “as soon as he finishes erecting his first million-dollar mansion in Long Branch, New Jersey.” Her fork rose again with “All-American boy makes good, builds many mansions,” and made its final flourish with, “Castles in the Air, compliments of Horatio Alger.”
Edith and Winifred laughed. Willa shook her head.
“You are right, though,” Margaret lowered her fork to fill it with potatoes, “it does take money to make money.” Having conceded Edith’s point, she went on to make her own, “It would just be a whole lot better for everyone if investment dollars weren’t robbed in the first place from the working class. Hardly anyone makes a living wage anymore.”
“It would also be better if they were not borrowed by the middle class,” Edith frowned, “especially to be put into the stock market.”
“Now there’s a silent thief for you. And you do it to yourself,” Willa nodded. “I’m in favor of old-fashioned robbers myself. Let’s hear it for Robin Hood the Good, a man who robbed only the rich,” she grinned.
“Here, here,” Margaret seconded her motion.
WILLA enjoyed Margaret as much as she did, Edith guessed. A forceful woman with a new perspective and a first-rate mind. Until this year, Margaret had been too busy working for the Red Cross to take summers off, but now she had taken a job teaching at Columbia, and her summers were free. Ethelwyn Manning and her great friend, Katherine Schwartz, were old friends of Margaret’s, going back to 1908 when Manning and Margaret both spent a year in Pittsburgh. Manning, just graduated from Smith, was in training at the Carnegie Institute to be a librarian. Margaret, several years beyond Wellesley with a masters in sociology, was in Pittsburgh doing research on the devastating effects of factory policies in the neighboring mill town of Homestead. Margaret’s study turned out to be a milestone, the first of its kind to focus on working-class women and to count their unsalaried labor—taking in washing and putting up boarders—as part of the general economy.
Willa, who had been ambivalent about Pittsburgh the ten years she lived there, was as fascinated by Margaret’s findings as Margaret was by Willa’s experience. Willa had lived on both sides of Pittsburgh’s economic divide, putting up in boarding houses during her early years as a newspaper reporter and then, while she tried her hand at teaching English and Latin at Allegheny High School, luxuriating in the comfortable surroundings of the wealthy McClungs. As a permanent guest in the McClungs’ solid home on Squirrel Hill, Willa had found a second family and a place to write. Long after Willa left Pittsburgh, until 1916, in fact, when the Judge died and Isabelle decided after all to marry Jan Hambourg and sell the family home, Willa returned annually for long visits, partly at first to write and then, once she and Edith had settled into their Bank Street
apartment, to keep up with old friends.
But no one in Pittsburgh, least of all Willa Cather, was ever far from the steel mills, even on Squirrel Hill. Especially on Squirrel Hill, Willa once declared, and proceeded to point out that Isabelle’s brother may have married the girl next door, but her name was Mellon, and Isabelle’s father had acquired his reputation as a result of the strike at Homestead. When Judge McClung sentenced Alexander Berkman for attempting to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, their neighbors began calling the Judge the man who saved Pittsburgh—and the world—from anarchism. But how safe was a world, Willa would add, where power and poverty colored men’s minds the way the flames from mill furnaces burnished their nights and ashes darkened their days. Willa probably never would write about class wars and western Pennsylvania, not directly, not in a novel, Edith guessed, but they both loved listening to Margaret talk about the households of Homestead. Lately, Edith had noticed a renewed attention to domestic detail and occasional touches from Margaret’s stories slipping into the background of Willa’s new novel.
Willa always depicted the power of the feminine principle at work in the universe, though Edith realized most of Willa’s readers would be shocked to find that out. And these days, feminine had to do with women’s appearance. Period. People did not realize what Willa was up to. Men certainly didn’t. Men read Willa’s books because she wrote about interesting men. And Willa encouraged them, Edith almost chuckled out loud. Recently, in fact, Willa seemed to be ignoring women altogether, but that was deceptive, just like the emphasis on religion in Death Comes for the Archbishop. People thought Willa was Roman Catholic after that. Fiction. Pure fiction.
Anyone who really knew literature or myth or history or art would recognize that the Virgin Mary was the main force in that novel, and behind the Virgin, the feminine principle. But these days, it seemed, the only people who knew literature and art were the artists themselves. And a few scholars, Edith granted, all of whom were men. With a few exceptions—Edith glanced at Margaret, deep in the midst of explaining economic theory to Winifred Bromhall—but the exceptions were mostly in professional schools. Social work, librarianship, education. Women’s professions. Those women couldn’t be expected to analyze fiction, but Willa’s novels spoke to them, whether or not they ever heard of the feminine principle. Men posed a different problem. Men only read about men, and Willa wanted them to read her novels, to take seriously what she had to say. Ever since the War, when men had destroyed so much— all in the name of making the world safe—Willa had increasingly focused on men and their moods. She wanted their attention.
On the Rocks: A Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mystery Page 7