Aspen Allegations - A Sutton Massachusetts Mystery

by Kasi Blake

  Chapter 8

  The afternoon sun drifted with a pale blue light through the layers of clouds that coated the sky like a gentle blanket. The promised additional snowfall for today had never materialized, so we were left with the three inches which fell yesterday, now coated with a crusty top layer, like the glazing on a crème brûlée.

  I gazed out my back slider with a smile at the frosting of white that now blanketed the landscape. Only two days ago my kayak was ready for another trip on the pond. And here we were, seemingly submerged in the heart of winter, with a flurry of birds making swooping visits to my various feeders.

  I looked again at the snow. It had been said the Eskimos knew a hundred words for different types of snow. Of course that had been proven to be an exaggeration. The Inuit simply interlace words like we do in English, to have soft, wispy snow and hard, crunchy snow and everything in between. Still, it was an interesting thought. How many identifiably unique types of snow could there be?

  Well, yesterday’s three-inches had been a gentle snow – when you stepped in it there was no crunchy surface to push through. But it did form a solid impression of where your foot had landed, and there were no gentle cascades along the edges once you removed your foot. So maybe this could be called an easy-walking snow. Your feet went in, came out again, and if you wanted to you could retrace your steps.

  Last night’s rain-snow mix had turned that snow into quite another form. The hard-topped-crunch snow was something to be more cautious of. Going down a slope, one had to be sure to give one’s foot an extra stomp to get through that hard layer, lest the foot slip and send the owner skidding down the hill on their backside. This would not be an ideal snowman-building snow, for example. Perhaps we would call this one-foot-stomp snow.

  I rolled out my yoga mat, delighting in the wonderful scenery that nature had provided. Not only did the world glisten as if fairies had visited, but the evident wealth of bird life was staggering. Out the side window to my left I could see the main sunflower feeder. A steady stream of chickadee, titmouse, and goldfinch came fluttering in and out. These patient birds each took their turn, removing just one seed and flying off to work on it.

  Suddenly a young male cardinal arrived, his muted brown feathers interlaced with the brighter crimson colors. He was less interested in sharing and took up residence on one side, glaring at any newcomers with a sharp, beady eye.

  Below the feeder a flock of stealth doves – my name for the grey mourning doves – poked around in the snow for fallen seeds. Over toward the large rock was a group of juncos, their white bellies matching the snow over which they hopped with quick agility.

  A movement on the two suet feeders on the maples caught my eye. Was that a fawn-brown nuthatch I saw, clinging to the tree? I’d never seen a brown nuthatch before! In a moment the bird hopped to a nearby branch, and I smiled. His stubby, cocked-high tail showed him to be a wren.

  I moved through my routine, buoyed by the delightful movements of nature around me. A downy woodpecker came to sample the suet feeder, soon joined by a nuthatch. Blue jays watched from high in the trees, fluffing their bodies against the wintry chill. As much as I loved hawks, I was thankful that I saw none gliding in silent watch overhead. There was a virtual smorgasbord of feasting options for them, but I was grateful the gathering was able to enjoy their meal in peace.

  When I was finished, I was loathe to leave the beauty that nature had brought to me. Instead, I fetched my laptop from the living room and set it up in the center of my natural-finish lauan dining room table. The walls were done with sage green paint, and the room featured a pine hutch. The stationary half of the sliding glass doors was fronted by a set of stainless steel shelves holding all of my porch plants. The large rosemary plant earned a top shelf location with its bushy leaves. Several jalapeño plants joined it there. I had once thought these were annuals, but an experiment proved that they thrived when brought in to winter. Even now they were creating green fruits for me. A rose plant on the corner delighted me with its delicate fragrance.

  Lower shelves held a variety of basil plants, from the standard Italian basil to cinnamon and Thai. The bottom shelf held several petunia plants. These were another set that I had once thought annual and was pleased to see that they would flourish if only given a bit of warmth, love, and care.

  I popped open the laptop and made a cup of Chanakara tea, laughing at a brief tussle between a red-bellied woodpecker and an enthusiastic chickadee. Sam’s reaction had interested me, and I needed to know more about this drowning before I went in to talk with Charles. In years past, doing my genealogy research, I might have delved into microfiche stacks, spending hours in a dusty room with hard-backed chairs. Now I was sure that everything I needed lay at the other end of a search engine.

  I googled, “Sutton MA Lake Singletary Drowning.”

  In less than a second my page was filled with results. I looked at the top one, and then blinked with surprise. The date on it was 1935. Intrigued, I clicked.

  FIELD, J. The defendant was indicted for the murder on July 20, 1935, of Alice D. Sherman, by drowning her in Lake Singletary. The victim was the wife of the defendant.

  I gave my head a shake. Wasn’t this the plot of A Place in the Sun in 1951, where the man decides to drown a woman rather than deal with the difficulty of having her around?

  The entry made fascinating reading. The page wasn’t even about the court case itself. Apparently Newell Sherman had been found guilty of drowning his wife and had written a confession stating that. The page I read said, on July 22nd, he allowed a newspaper reporter to photograph his signed confession. Somehow he was hoping that this mistake on his part was enough to get the court to overturn his guilty verdict.

  I shook my head. Even in 1935 it seemed people would grab at anything to avoid punishment.

  Hmmm, was there more to this? Now I tried googling “July 20 1935 Alice D. Sherman.”

  It sounded more and more like a movie plot. An entry I found on the murder explained how Alice was born in 1912 and died in 1935, when she was only 23 years old. Her husband, Newell, took her out in a canoe, serenaded her, and then deliberately capsized the boat. Unable to swim, she sank. After that, he simply swam back to shore.

  Apparently he had become enamored with a seventeen-year-old girl and wanted to run off with her instead.

  I took a sip of my tea and sighed. Was life truly like this, to have a woman ruthlessly drowned simply because of a new infatuation? How about the young daughter and son who were left behind?

  I offered a silent prayer for the innocent woman who had been slain and went back to my initial search. Eileen Hudson, who had been drowned in Lake Singletary in perhaps 1968.

  There, the results began to pop up. I clicked on one of the links.

  Eileen Hudson, aged seventeen - tragically drowned in a canoeing accident while out with friends. I began reading the names – and then stopped in surprise. John Dixon. Sam Sares. Charles Stone. Richard Watkins. The four hobbits. They had been out with her the night she had drowned.

  The story did not seem to report any foul play, perhaps only an adolescent penchant for cheap wine before the fateful launch onto the lake in a trio of canoes. The night had been dark, with a new moon, and the boys had looked for her for nearly an hour before coming to shore to call for help. The body had been found two days later after authorities dragged the lake.

  I pursed my lips. Here was something that others might not want to see the light of day. Sam had certainly seemed nervous enough when the topic arose.

  I soon discovered that there was an online copy of the 1967 Sutton School Yearbook, for a small fee of course.

  There she was, with sweet clear eyes which would never age. She wore her hair long and straight, as was the fashion of the times, and had a glow about her that would seem to lift her past any hurdle in life. She had not known, when she sat smiling for that photo in her paisley top, that fate would bring her to an untimely end.

  She belo
nged to the drama club, and all four boys were there too, their faces eager and alive. What hopes and dreams had they held deep in their breasts? What futures did they see unrolling before them into the distant future?

  The phone rang, and it was a moment before I moved to pick it up.

  “Hello?”

  “Morgan, it’s Jason,” came the voice, and I smiled. Funny how the mere modulation of air waves from a phone’s speaker could do that to me. “I’m at the Market Basket in Oxford. Care for some sushi?”

  I blinked. “How did you know I liked sushi?”

  I could hear the smile in his voice. “You have yellow origami flowers in a vase in your living room,” he pointed out. “As well as a Japanese kanji on the wall for tranquility. It seemed you might appreciate things Japanese.”

  I grinned. “All right, then, I adore sushi,” I admitted. “I would love some.”

  “Be there in twenty minutes,” he stated, and with a click he was gone.

  I fished out the lychee liqueur from the bottom of the hutch, separated out some frozen peaches, and by the time he had arrived I'd created a pair of Champagne cocktails with a delightfully oriental theme to them. He settled in at the table as easily as if he’d been joining me for years, and we toasted the delightful day.

  He took a bite of his tuna. “So, what have you been up to?”

  I explained to him the research I had been doing and what I had found. His eyebrows went up as I gave him the details of the 1935 murder, but he did not interrupt and let me finish with everything I had found out about the drowning in 1968.

  I turned the laptop toward him so he could see the images. “And here they are in the drama club.”

  He leaned toward the screen, wiping his fingers on a napkin. “A cozy bunch,” he observed. “There were only ten members of the drama club. I imagine those five became quite close.”

  “And Sam apparently still feels strongly about what happened, even decades later,” I added. “Maybe there’s more to it than what the newspapers reported.”

  “Well, we can see what Charles has to say tomorrow.” He shrugged. “He got out of town, at least for a while, going to school out in Kenyon, Ohio. He worked in Ohio for a decade after that before returning to Sutton to join OmniBank here.”

  My eyes lit up. “Apparently I wasn’t the only one doing research,” I gently teased him.

  He grinned at that. “I thought it might be good to go into the meeting with a bit of background,” he agreed. “I swung by the Sutton town hall. Everyone there knows everybody else in town, and their knowledge base stretches back decades. It’s a bit scary.”

  I popped the last piece of salmon into my mouth and gave a grateful sigh. “Thank you so much for the sushi. That was quite tasty.”

  My phone buzzed, and I leant back to pick it up off the kitchen island. I glanced at the message and shook my head. “Charles has cancelled,” I reported to Jason. “Says something came up.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “Think he has changed his mind about talking?”

  I gave a soft shrug. “I guess we’ll find out when I try to reschedule. Maybe I should try Richard instead?”

  He nodded in agreement. “It’s worth a try.”

  I typed in the message and sent the electrons flying off into the ether. “Well, nothing to do but wait and see what he says.”

  His eyes flickered toward the living room. “What else is on that DVR of yours?”

  “Well, there is the Blue Bloods from last Friday I haven’t gotten around to watching yet.”

  “Tom Selleck? You know, he is in a series playing Jesse Stone, a character created by Robert B. Parker –”

  I grinned. “I own all the DVDs,” I admitted. “I adore them. Jeff Beal’s haunting piano music and the misty atmosphere of living on the Massachusetts coastline is soulfully presented.”

  He paused, and the look in his eyes struck me breathless. Then, at last, he spoke again.

  “Shall we?”

  He stood, offering his hand. My fingers fit with perfect precision into the cupped warmth, and I felt the rightness of it in the depth and breadth and height of my soul.