by Ed Ifkovic
Johnny backed up. “I’m glad you’re having a good time, Aunt Millicent. But the fact remains that your friend Carlotta was a known whore. And soon she’ll be declared a murderer on top of it.”
“Think about what you say to folks, Johnny.”
“I’ll get to the bottom of it. Somehow.” He glanced toward the street. “There’s a murderer out there.” But he seemed hesitant to move, as though he couldn’t decide his next step. He scratched his head. Finally, twisting around, he grabbed his hat. “Goodbye.” And then, preposterously, he said to me, “Don’t leave town, Miss Ferber.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
He backed out of the room. I could hear him letting himself out the kitchen door. In seconds the engine of an automobile roared, too loudly, revving that was making a statement, and through the front window I saw dust flying. Johnny Marks, speeding away, up the lane.
Millicent sighed. “So sorry about that, Edna. Johnny is never . . . up to doing the right thing. He’s my blood, though thin as vinegar.”
I bit my lip. “He’s a pathetic man.”
Millicent nodded. “Well, he is that. But he’s one of many. Shall we exile them all to the Far West?”
“How about Oklahoma?” I added.
Millicent showed yellowed, broken teeth. “You see, Edna, Johnny is my only relative not yet entombed in the ancient Congregational graveyard by the town green. And he’s made it clear around town that he’s waiting for me to die. I’m taking much too long, he’s been known to tell others when he’s had too much to drink with his cronies. I should have died years back. He wants this house and my possessions, and the feeble little cash I have in the bank. This magnificent house is what he’s after. He’s at me all the time—wants to turn it into a bed and breakfast.” She shrugged her shoulders. “And he shall have it, but on my own terms. The main one being that I’m totally dead. In another ten years, perhaps. After that, who cares?”
“He’s hard to like,” I said diplomatically.
“No one likes him,” Millicent said. “What’s to like? He’s brash, ignorant, bigoted. Yet he keeps coming back.”
“Tell him to stop visiting.”
“I can’t do that. He’s blood, though tainted. And I’m a lonely old woman who can’t leave her house any more, a lady who can only take ten steps before she has to sit down. A woman always losing the cane she depends on. He’s, well, diversion.” She paused. “And if I ask him to, he’ll make me a fire, carry in wood, and brew me a cup of tea. Those are decent qualities in a man.”
“People obviously talk about Johnny right to his face.”
“Yes, and that was cruel of me,” Millicent confided. “But I felt necessary. He can be dangerous because he’s dumb. I don’t believe he wants to be trouble—he just doesn’t know. Short-tempered, irresponsible men are made lethal when society pins a badge on them. Every past injustice is made current.”
“But why is he a law officer?”
Millicent chuckled. “It’s a title, really. No one else wants the job.”
I sat back. “Millicent, how do you know Carlotta did not kill her sister?”
Silence in the room: the rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner.
Millicent’s voice was tight. “I don’t, Edna. I don’t. I pray she didn’t. But I don’t.” She closed her eyes a second, then opened them. I saw cold hard steel in those black eyes. “That’s why I need you, Edna. I believe you will be the voice of reason out there.” She pointed to the backyard. “Obviously some people have made their minds up already. You will have to temper those voices.”
I started to protest, but Millicent looked so tired, sitting there.
My mind raced. I was in the middle of a novel that did not budge. My penthouse apartment awaited me. My portable typewriter. My notes. Orrange Oakes. Tamor. Truck farms. Tobacco sheds. Rocky soil. Polish women working the fields. Murder—I didn’t write about murder. Murder is . . .
There was yelling from the backyard, and I rushed to the kitchen, opened the back door. I looked over the heads of the men still searching the yard until I found the face of Trooper Wolniak, who was walking back from Hemlock Ridge, out of the shadow of the evergreens that lined the left side of the property. I called to him.
The man Wolniak was with, dressed in a rumpled suit, veered off toward a truck, but Wolniak approached the doorway. “Miss Ferber, you are everywhere.”
Acid in my voice. “So I’ve heard from Johnny Marks.”
He looked toward the man in the suit, and so did I. The man yelled something to Wolniak, who didn’t respond. “What is it?” I asked.
“Well, we’ve found the murder weapon.”
I sucked in my breath. “What is it?”
“A simple red brick, could have come from anywhere. Jenison”—he nodded toward the man who was carefully depositing something into a container—“found it off the trail, under some piled leaves, deep in the hemlocks, just back toward the River Road.”
“A brick? How do you know . . .”
“Because, Miss Ferber, it was covered in blood,” he said, “and someone tried to conceal it.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Overnight the temperature dropped, so I woke to a chilly morning, a spider’s web of frost coating my bedroom windows. Just as the sun rose and the haze burned off the crystalline lawns, I bundled up with heavy jacket and scarf and began my mile walk. I walked out the kitchen door, around the side, and into the front yard where, startled, I saw Eben Travers standing in the middle of the lane. Unmoving, he stared at the Inn with his arms crossed.
“Is there a problem, Mr. Travers?”
“Nope, ma’am. Just taking in the morning.”
I started to pass him, but stopped. “These are sad days in the household.” I looked into his face.
Eben unfolded his arms and actually stepped closer to me. His mouth twisted and suddenly, turning his head aside, he spat a wad of chewing tobacco a distance of six or seven feet. Looking at me, he grimaced, an unpleasant, obnoxious repositioning of his mouth muscles, so much so that I saw broken teeth, black stained, a gaping hole. I turned away. “Good day, Mr. Travers.” I walked on.
“Yes,” he spoke to my back, “Martha sure is a loss.”
I turned back. “A loss?”
He answered in a thick voice, too loud for the quiet morning. “You know, you never even thought about her being around you, like she was invisible. When invisible people die, somehow you notice them even more. Suddenly you can see them right in front of you.”
“Interesting observation.”
“I don’t know how interesting it is, but it’s a fact of life.”
“Would you have said the same thing had the victim been Carlotta?” I asked, and waited.
“Not likely. When the noisy ones go, however, they leave a rumble, like distance thunder. So’s you know a storm might be brewing.”
“Interesting.”
“Is that your favorite word?” He folded his arms again, resumed his blank stare directed at the Inn.
“For the moment. I only use it when things are, indeed, interesting. I don’t use words as small talk.” I looked at him. “Some are saying that Carlotta was the intended victim. After all, she was the one who usually brought supper to Millicent’s. And darkness had fallen . . .”
He scratched his head. “If you need to, ma’am, you can see in the dark. Animals can.”
“Did you see anything, well, interesting, Mr. Travers? In the afternoon?” I looked up the lane, uncomfortable as I was lingering in the center of the road. Not, of course, that there was a fleet of passing vehicles, streaming toward town, honking at me and the old Yankee to skedaddle out of the way.
“I mind my own business, Miss Ferber.”
“That’s not what I asked.” Impatient. “Did you see anything that afternoon?”
“Why you need to know?”
I raised my voice, hardened my edge. “You know, Mr. Travers, I’ve noticed that it’s a curiou
s and not very pleasant characteristic of some New Englanders to answer a question with another question.”
“Why is that?” Stony, eyes narrowed.
“You play me, sir.”
He actually smiled. “That fool Johnny Marks grilled me until I said I’d only talk to the state police. That Polack fellow. You see, I knew Johnny when he was a lad, as pesky as a horse fly and even more stupid, if that’s possible.”
“Did Trooper Wolniak talk to you?”
“That’s between him and me.”
“Good day, Mr. Travers.” I started to walk away, headed toward Hemlock Ridge and the lane that ran through the block of trees.
“You know, Miss Ferber,” he called after me, causing me to turn and face him. “You know, many’s the time I sat in front of my house or even walking through the Inn doing some chore and I heard Miss Carlotta threatening to kill her sister.”
I approached him. “That’s a rather strong statement, sir.” He didn’t answer. “And dangerous to announce.”
“You seem to want to know what I think.”
“True, but don’t you think that’s a little inflammatory?”
“I ain’t saying that’s what she done, mind you. All I’m saying is that Martha was always getting on Miss Carlotta’s nerves, bumbling like, purposely failing at some task, just to drive Miss Carlotta crazy. Like dropping an old heirloom dish. To the point, many’s the time, that Miss Carlotta snapped and said Martha be better off dead. And threatened to do the act herself, wringing that neck herself.”
Curious, I thought: Martha was Martha, but Carlotta was Miss Carltota.
“Are you saying Carlotta killed her own sister because of some family spat?”
“I’m just saying it wasn’t Martha never doing the planned killing.”
“Sir,” I said, shaking my head, “if you knew how often I have deliriously contemplated—and more than once expressed out loud—my own desire to kill my older sister Fannie, a woman God put on this earth to annoy, to needle—well, I’d be up on charges.”
“Someday you might just do it—in a rage.”
“All my rages, sir, are verbal. And totally justified.”
“Just takes a crazy moment.”
“And Martha gave that moment to Carlotta?”
“Not so far’s I know. Frankly, Miss Carlotta ain’t capable of such a murder like that, laying in wait like a coward and clubbing in the dark.”
“And just why is that?”
“’Cause Miss Carlotta don’t do nothing without there being an audience nearby.”
Eben walked away from me, picked up some clippers near a hedge, and began trimming the foliage. He was ignoring me, but I walked closer.
A shimmering glow rose on the fall landscape, spread across the fields and hills.
“You’re a morning person, too.” I spoke to his back, hoping to engage him in conversation.
He turned to face me. He smiled, showing those broken teeth. “Morning’s when you can see what’s what.”
“What does that mean?”
He shook his head. “Means that the light is good and clean as far as the horizon.”
“You’re a poet, Mr. Travers.”
He shook his head. “Ma’am, I’m a farmer.”
“The air is crystal clear.”
“Indian Summer,” he said, as if stating the obvious, fiddling with his clippers, anxious to get back to work.
I hesitated. “Your people have been here on this land, this soil, since colonial days, I understand.”
He nodded. “Fact is, got me an ancestor come over on the Mayflower.”
Who doesn’t? I thought to myself. “Well, that’s something to be proud of.”
“No, it ain’t,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Anyone can jump onto a ship when they’re feeling crowded in and gotta get out.”
“But the Mayflower . . .”
“Horse thieves and religious crackpots.”
“But they settled the country, they . . .”
“There was farmers, too, on that boat.” He smiled.
“I understand your family was one of the first to come to Rawley’s Depot.”
“Yep. First to Windsor, up on the Connecticut River, Hartford way, then down here. Town called Rawleyville before the railroad. Then Rawley’s Depot. Big fight over that name. Folks don’t like change.”
“Well, with the Rawleys, Smalls . . .”
“Fought the Indians, they did, my folks.” He wasn’t listening to me. “Indians is no trouble. White men are the ones to watch.” He grunted, looked toward the Inn, sitting quiet and peaceful in the early morning sunshine. The sun was rising in the hazy, foggy sky, filtered through the oak trees, like light reflected off polished crystal.
“You mentioned that the Inn belonged to your family,” I began, goading him.
He started to turn away, sizing up the hedges, then looked back at me. “My folks fell on bad times, way back when, and what should have been rightfully mine fell into the hand of scheming folk.”
“The Smalls?”
He grunted.
“What does that mean?”
“I ain’t say nothing. Ma’am, I grunted.”
I smiled. “Your grunt communicates displeasure.”
His neck got scarlet and his fingers tightened against the clippers. “Ain’t got nothing against nobody.” His eyes blinked rapidly, nervously. “Miss Carlotta been most kind to me, seeing as I had no home left.”
“And poor Martha?” I asked, confused.
I saw his lips tighten, the eyes get dull and hard, a jerking of the head, involuntary. “Don’t like to speak ill of the dead.” He shot me a dark look. “I mean, she changed a bit over the years. It’s wrong to speak ill of the dead. As I say. But she used to be a tyrant, that one. When she was schoolmistress, one town over.”
Martha, of course, had been school administrator at a private school for young ladies, mostly farmers’ or local merchants’ daughters, occupying that position for twenty or so years before leaving some years back. Carlotta had once told me, during one of our chats in the city, at lunch at Sally’s on Lexington, that Martha had been a taskmaster, a woman who frightened the sensible and refined daughters of the local gentry, so much so that she’d been compelled to resign her position. She retreated to the Inn, bringing her anger and disappointment with her. “Now,” Carlotta told me then, “she orders me around like I’m an errant twelve-year-old girl who refuses to erase the blackboard.”
So now I said to Eben, “You don’t approve of strict schoolteachers?”
He didn’t answer at first. Then, after a heartbeat, “Teachers should stick to teaching the ABCs.”
“And she didn’t?”
Fury covered his features. “She took my daughter away from me.”
With that, he turned away, mumbled a curt goodbye, and focused on the hedges, snapping at the helpless branches with the anger of someone who could not control his rage. I walked away.
Resting at the top of the Caleb’s Rise, catching my breath and sitting on a stump, I watched Stanley Lupinski as he strolled by. Deep in thought, biting a nail absently, he jumped when he saw me, shielded as I was in the cove of thicket, briar and vines.
“Morning.”
He nodded. “Morning.”
“Mr. Lupinski, right?”
He smiled. “No secrets in this here village.” I started to introduce myself, but he cut me off. “Everybody in town knows you’re here. You’re a book writer.”
“That I am.”
“Well, I don’t read books.”
“Neither do most reviewers at The New York Times, sad to say.” He simply stared at me, confused. “I’m here to work on a new novel.”
He started to walk on.
Hurriedly, I added, “It’s about the Poles in Connecticut, immigrants like you who bought the old desiccated Yankee farms and . . .”
He stopped walking. “Why?”
“Why not? The industrious Poles buy the old decrepit farm
s and infuse them with life and vitality, with . . .” I stopped because he was shaking his fingers at the Sugar Maple Inn, down below. “What?”
“There ain’t no story in that,” he said. “Maybe there once was. I don’t know. Look at the Inn. Two simple ladies who let the land so soft and weed-filled. Don’t value dirt . . . acres, fields. Dead farm land. And now one of them is dead. Murdered, they telling everyone.”
“Did you know Martha well, Mr. Lupinski?”
He grumbled. “Not a bit. Prefer it that way. I live in that house by myself. My children couldn’t wait to run away from it.”
“You have a beautiful home.”
“I got a place where I sleep. Too old to farm it by myself.”
I leaned in, uncertain. “I understand your son married Eben’s daughter, Julia.”
He watched me, eyes narrow, cold. He seemed to be debating whether or not to answer. Finally, summing up, “And what a mistake that was. More lives ruined on this rocky soil.”
“I take it you don’t care for Carlotta. Or for Eben. And probably not Martha.”
He chortled, coughed a bit. “‘Don’t care’ is real mild language, ma’am. Carlotta seems set on driving me outta here.”
“But you’ve lived here for years.”
“Don’t matter. She keeps talking of hiring a lawyer to harass me out of here.”
“Why?”
“Claims I violated some town ordinance when I built me that shed near the edge of her property, my land, frankly. A place for chickens and ducks. Claims it blocks her view of the river. It’s all bull, let me tell you. She’s as mean as a spitting squirrel, that one. Sent me a letter, years back, told me to move the shed. Just harassment. Hoping I’ll sell the place.”
“And you have no intention of selling?”
“I’ll see her dead before she touches one inch of my property.”
“Well . . .”
“Look at the Inn.” He pointed to the building below us. “Peaceful, quiet, real quiet-looking.” He looked back at me. “That place is filled with anger and cruelty. It seeps outta the rotten beams. Probably the only one around here not surprised that there was a murder there is . . . me, ma’am. That place was waiting for a murder to happen.”