by Jane Langton
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 the Democratic Party was assumed to be a knave or a cutthroat. If 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 …
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 darn 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 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 goldarnedest charleyhorse you 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.”
Chapter 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 …
Chapter 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 was supposed to come through with brilliant solutions to crimes and spectacular prosecutions. And here he was, getting nowhere as usual, the “Do-Nothing DA.” 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 and slapped the desk. “I know one place we didn’t look for those 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 out 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 D
ay, 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 …”
