The Transcendental Murder

by Jane Langton

  “Now don’t you go handling them,” said Jimmy. “We’ll let Campbell at Public Safety work them over. I’ll get them off to him right now.”

  “So if I’m right,” said Homer, “Goss wasn’t saying musket at all as he lay dying. He was trying to say something else entirely. And that’s why Arthur Furry didn’t really need to strain himself to remember a big gun. There was no big gun. No musket at all.”

  “Hold on there, not so fast. Don’t forget, he was killed with a musket ball and there’s a musket missing.”

  “But why should a dying man waste his last words on the weapon that killed him? That’s what’s bothered me all along. He didn’t even bother to tell the name of his murderer. Something else was more important to communicate—the whereabouts of the letters on which he planned to raise a big reputation. He wanted them found and saved and published and credited to his own glory.”

  “Well, could be. I don’t know. I’m not going to make up my mind yet. Say, how do you suppose Goss got the letters to Egg Rock? By boat?”

  “He probably just drove down Nashawtuc Road and walked over. And he could have left them there any time after he read them aloud to the Alcott Association, afraid they might be stolen if he left them around the house.”

  “But what did he pick that particular place for?”

  “I know,” said Mary. “It must have been an old haunt of his. He was a great arrowhead collector, don’t forget, and he must have scratched around there a good deal on the site of the old village, looking for Indian artifacts.”

  Mr. Campbell, the fingerprint man, made an informal report by telephone to Jimmy Flower. “Of course,” he said, “paper isn’t the best stuff in the world to get good prints from, but fortunately these didn’t dry out too badly, being out-of-doors the way they were. So the sweat prints didn’t fade too much for us to make some indentifications. Well, there’s two sets of prints on them, on all of them. Right thumb prints on the upper righthand corner of each sheet. That’s where you hold it to read it over after you write, or to read it for the first time if you’ve just received it. One set of prints is Ernest Goss’s, the other is his son Charley’s.”

  “Whose? Charley’s?”

  “That’s what I said. And Ernie’s appear to be on top of Charley’s in some cases, which makes it look as if Charley wrote them and Ernie received them.”

  (Charley’s? Mary, sitting at her card table in the corner, felt her heart sink. Another bad mark for Charley.)

  “What about real old prints? Like a hundred years old? You didn’t find any of those?” said Jimmy.

  “That’s a different kettle of fish. You have to use a different way of bringing them out. You see, the sweat prints evaporate after while, so you have to use a system that looks for acids that don’t evaporate. Well, we used it on these letters. It’s called the ninhydrin method. Of course we can’t be positive, since we never tried it on anything as old as these letters were supposed to be, but we didn’t turn up a single print.”

  “There was nothing on them, then, but prints by Ernest and Charley Goss?”

  “That’s right. Now, do you want me to send these down to the lab, so they can look into the paper and ink? They look to me like they’re all done with the same brown ink.”

  “Okay. But I bet we can get Charley Goss to talk. Say, what about the bait box? Where Charley’s prints on that?”

  “No, just his daddy’s. And of course about a million big huge blobs belonging to one Homer Kelly. Tell him from me he’s a great big overgrown blundering oaf.”

  Jimmy passed along the message, and Homer grinned. “Tell him from me he’s a dear boy and thank him very much.”

  Charley Goss had given up trying to find a job. He had planted a colossal vegetable garden behind the house and he was spending his time caring for it. He threw himself into it, hoeing and weeding and setting out branching sticks for the peas to climb on and tented stakes for the tomato plants. Only Rowena and Edith and Charley himself were left to eat the results, because Philip had moved into George Jarvis’s bachelor apartment on Thoreau Street. But the garden gave Charley something to do, and he gave most of his produce away.

  Mary looked at him guiltily, as he came into Jimmy’s office with Sergeant Shrubsole. Charley’s face was red and healthy-looking from the sun, but his eyes looked miserable. He glanced at her, and then looked away without speaking. She had tried to tell him privately that her time spent with the lieutenant-detective from the District Attorney’s office was an effort to help him. But Charley had merely looked at her with red eyes, and said, “Oh, sure.” Mary had bitten her lip and said nothing. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps after all her motives were not as clear as all that.

  Jimmy Flower brought out a chair for Charley and started talking. Charley listened to the facts about his fingerprints on the letters, and then confessed right away. “Sure,” he said, “I wrote them. But let me tell you how it happened.” He turned to Homer. “You know what a great practical joker my father was? A real joker. You saw him that night going after poor old Edith with that paper napkin. Well, it occurred to me (back in February I guess it was), after a particularly nasty trick he had played on me, that one way of getting back at him was to try it myself. Let him slip on his own banana peel. I thought it over for some time before I finally came up with this. The thing that made me think of it was an exam I had in one of those crazy schools I went to. They didn’t really have exams, just something they called CTPs, Creative Thinking Projects. The course was a sort of Renaissance History Seminar, or something. You were supposed to write an imaginary letter from Savonarola to Pope Alexander VI. Well, I had a wonderful time. I had Savonarola threatening to hire Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine and drop burning coals on the Vatican. Got a very good paragraph on my PCP. That is, my Personal Critical Profile. In other words, my report card.

  “But anyway, the point is, it gave me this idea of writing letters from one Transcendentalist to another, making them ridiculous but sort of superficially convincing. I did a whole lot of reading, and I even copied the handwriting, when I could find the originals. There’s a glass case there in the library with samples of writing by Emerson and Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott.”

  Homer shook his head. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Charley. You did a magnificent job. Works of art, all of them. What did you do for paper and ink?”

  “It was just good bond paper in various weights and sizes. And brown India ink. I left the paper in the barn a while to get weathered. Any even slightly scientific examination would show that it wasn’t old paper.”

  “What did you do with them when they were finished?”

  “Well, that took a bit of thought. I finally wrote another letter. This one was supposed to have been written by a sweet little old lady in western Massachusetts by the name of Miss Maria Fuller Alcott Emerson …”

  “Maria Fuller Alcott Em——Say, that’s the mysterious lady in your father’s will! Okay, go ahead, what was she for?”

  “She was supposed to be a genteel old lady in reduced circumstances, descended on both sides from Concord greats. She flattered my father up and down, going on about how much she had heard about his integrity and honor and all that bilgewater, and how her grandfather had known his grandfather, and how ashamed she was to be selling the souls of her great ancestors, so she didn’t want her name mentioned, but her poverty had reduced her to this extremity. So would my father publish these letters under his own name and divide the royalties with her, that was all she asked, some fraction of the royalties, and would he please memorize her address and burn this? Well, of course, Dad fell for it. He wrote her this big pompous magnanimous letter, agreeing to the whole thing, and then she sent him the letters.”

  “He really wrote a letter to some fictitious lady?

  “Oh, I have an old buddy out there in Springfield. He’s a postman. He agreed to send and receive letters for her. I guess he’s kept his mouth shut.”

  “Well,” said Homer. �
�It all worked just the way you hoped.”

  Charley flushed. “Not quite,” he said. “Of course I was delighted when I heard he had read them to the Alcott Association and that they had laughed at them. I thought that would be the end of it. I’d had my revenge. But I didn’t dream he’d go on taking them seriously after that.”

  “Didn’t that put you on the spot then?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your father did go on believing in them. That meant that there would eventually be a good deal of notoriety and investigation and damage to literary reputations, and it probably meant that the letters might be traced back to you. How would you have explained to the press, for example, your responsibility for such spectacular forgeries?”

  Charley was silent.

  “And your father. What would have been his reaction to the discovery that his own son had made a fool of him before the world? Had you thought that through?”

  Charley still said nothing. He looked down at the red backs of his hands, which were clutching his knees.

  “Isn’t is possible,” said Homer, “that you feared your father’s anger because you thought he might cut you out of his will? You hated him anyway. Isn’t it possible that you decided there was only one thing to do, to kill him? You arranged a rendezvous with him, again by letter, posing as a literary agent or a collector, or something. You also made arrangements to be sure that your brother would have no alibi for the time of the rendezvous. Then you killed your father …”

  “What arrangements?” said Charley. “How could I know Philip was going to leave the Rod and Gun Club and go out for a walk?”

  “We don’t have the whole story on that yet,” said Homer. “But his slip with the cannon firing that morning was just the break you needed, wasn’t it? You counted on the double confession you assumed he would make, on his opportunity to commit the crime and on his unlucky mistake of the morning to so confuse the police that they wouldn’t dare to arrest either of you, afraid of condemning an innocent party—the very same ruse you had practiced throughout your life to escape punishment at the hands of your parents. Your Sam Prescott outfit and your false ‘confession’ were all part of the trick. Isn’t that so, Charley?”

  “No, no,” said Charley, “that’s not so. That just isn’t true. It is true that I was unhappy about the letters when my father insisted on going ahead with them. But I didn’t think any reputable publisher would take them seriously. Then, I thought, he would drop the whole thing.”

  Homer made a church of his fingers, and opened and closed the front door that was his large thumbs. He shifted his ground. “I didn’t know your sister Edith was a horsewoman, Charley,” he said. “She denied it when we asked her, way back in April.”

  Charley was startled. “Why, yes. Yes, she is. It’s one of the few things she’s any good at.”

  “She rides your horse, Dolly?”

  “Sure. It’s the only one we’ve got. She likes to go out mostly at night. It’s kind of hard on Dolly, but, heck, it’s one of the few pleasures the poor girl has. Say, look, you don’t think that Edith …”

  “No, as a matter of fact, we don’t,” said Homer. He clapped shut his church doors like the snapping of a trap.

  “I mean, she’s just not strong-minded enough …” Charley stopped abruptly, and looked at Jimmy Flower. “Are you going to arrest me now?”

  Jimmy looked at Homer. Homer’s little eyes blinked. He rubbed his hair up the wrong way on the back of his head and leaned back in his chair. “No, Charley, you can go on home.”

  The door closed behind Charley. “What do you think?” said Jimmy Flower.

  “Well, with Teddy still missing, what can we do? Besides, it doesn’t really hold water yet.” Homer looked gloomy. “Do you suppose Charley and Teddy were really in it together, and afterwards Charley murdered Teddy to shut him up?”

  “In that case,” said Jimmy, “where’s the corpus delicti?”

  “That’s just it. Where is Teddy?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what I think, Teddy or no Teddy,” said Chief Flower. “I’m sick and tired of us being so clever. Here was somebody wearing Charley’s own bunny-suit, seen practically at the moment of firing the fatal shot. Charley had the opportunity, he had the motive, stronger than ever now, with these letters to hush up, and he was witnessed by a real live witness. Why do we have to think up all these ifs, ands and buts? I’ll tell you something else—all it would take to convince me is one more scrap of evidence against Charley—just one more little scrap.”

  Chapter 41

  What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner.

  HENRY THOREAU

  Tom and John were helping Gwen load her white elephants into the pickup. John had worried circles under his eyes. One of the white elephants was a huge mahogany-veneer loudspeaker cabinet, and John wanted it desperately. He sat beside it in the truck and followed it possessively into the vestry of the church, where Gwen was setting up her table. She had to shoo him out. “No customers till the bazaar opens at ten o’clock,” she said.

  “It seems awfully stupid to me,” said Tom, “to haul this thing all the way to church and then all the way back again.” But Gwen, who had a stern New England conscience, didn’t think it was moral to sell her elephants ahead of time.

  “Please, Mom, you won’t sell it to anyone else, will you?”

  “Whoever gets here first,” said Gwen piously. “It wouldn’t be right to hold anything for my own family.”

  So John hung on to the doorhandle outside the entry, scorning the pony rides that had started early. Mary stood beside him, and when the chairwoman of the bazaar opened the door, Mary managed to block a large crowd of greedy-looking children and let John squeeze in first. He streaked for his mother’s table.

  “Well, hello there, John. Anything I can do for you today?”

  “H-has anybody——?”

  “No, dear, of course not. It’s all yours.”

  Later in the day Mary walked back from the library to check on her sister. “Aren’t you tired?” she said. “Isn’t someone going to take over and let you get some lunch?”

  “I’m fine,” said Gwen. “Grandmaw’s going to come over after while and take my place. Do you know, someone actually bought that defunct ant-farm and the inside-out umbrella? They went the first ten minutes. Maybe I underpriced them. I’ve still got lots of lovely things, though. Don’t you want to buy something? We can always take it to the dump on the way home.”

  Mary looked the collection over, to see if there was anything less useless than the rest. She passed over the salt-and-pepper shakers shaped like drunks leaning on lampposts, the cut-glass pickle dish, the old phonograph records, the cracked dishes, the yellowed dresser scarves, the Donald Duck doorstop, the dented-in ping-pong ball … and her eyes came to rest on the tricorn hat.

  “Where did that come from?” she said. “It wasn’t here this morning.”

  “Mrs. Bewley brought it over. She brought the glove, too, and the half-harmonica and the rusty letter-opener and three pairs of broken sunglasses and this nice trylon-and-perisphere paperweight. She wanted to give me her neckpiece, too, but I made her keep it. I don’t think the First Parish should ask for that much of a sacrifice. She helped herself to a few things while she was here, of course, but I was glad to get rid of them anyway.”

  Mary bought the tricorn hat for a quarter, and looked around for Mrs. Bewley. She found her at the food table, swiping a cooky and being glared at by Mrs. Jellicoe. Mary clung to Mrs. Bewley’s bony arm, bought her a dozen brownies and then drew her out into the corridor. But the uproar from the Children’s Midway downstairs was so great that she had to lead her out of doors. Freddy was going by on a pony, with Grandmaw walking beside him, holding him on.

  “MRS. BEWLEY,” shouted Mary, “WHERE DID YOU GET THIS HAT?” She waved it at Mrs. Bewley and pointed at it.

  Mrs. Bewley clasped her hands. “THAT’S GOIN
G TO LOOK REAL NICE.”

  “No, no, Mrs. Bewley. WHERE DID YOU GET IT?”

  “WHAT?”

  “THE HAT. WHERE—DID—YOU—GET—IT?”

  “OH, OH, I SEE. LET ME SEE NOW, I WAS JUST COMING BACK FROM THAT PARADE, YOU KNOW, THAT THEY HAVE? AND I FOUND SOME REAL NICE THINGS. THERE WAS A NICE BEER BOTTLE, THE GREEN KIND, NOT THE BROWN KIND, I DON’T COLLECT THE BROWN KIND, AND A WALLET WITH TEN DOLLARS IN IT THAT BELONGED TO MR. RICHLEY, I COULD TELL BY THE PICTURES OF HIS FAMILY. WANT TO SEE? THE BABY’S ADORABLE.”

  “YOU MEAN THE APRIL 19TH PARADE? WAS THE HAT THERE AT THE BRIDGE?”

  “NO, NO, IT WAS IN THE FIELD THERE, OVER THERE ON THE OTHER SIDE.”

  “DID YOU SEE ANYONE THERE AT THE TIME? A BOY SCOUT? A MAN ON A HORSE?”

  “OH, IT DIDN’T BELONG TO A SOUL, IT WAS JUST LYING THERE ALL ALONE.”

  “THANK YOU VERY MUCH, MRS. BEWLEY.”

  “OH, DON’T MENTION IT.”

  Chapter 42

  ‘Miracles have ceased.’ Have they indeed? When?

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  “It’s the Prescott hat, all right,” said Chief Flower. “This strand of fiber that was stuck inside the band matches that cheap orange wig. But that doesn’t tell us whether it was worn by anybody else after Charley wore it the first time.”

  “You know,” said Mary, “this is probably a waste of time, but do you think there might be any point in our looking around Mrs. Bewley’s house? Maybe she picked up something else. You don’t suppose she carried home that great long gun, too?”

  Homer threw back his head, convulsed by the picture of Mrs. Bewley as a Minuteman. But then they went and paid her a call. She lived in a small house on Lowell Road, with an infinitesimal parlor, a miniature bedroom and a dollsize kitchen. Mrs. Bewley herself was quite large and angular, and she had to bend herself around her furniture. She was overjoyed to see Mary and Homer, and she shouted them in for tea. It was pouring rain outside and Homer and Mary were glad to duck indoors and take off their wet coats. There was no difficulty in getting Mrs. Bewley’s permission to look around. She adored exhibiting her Collection of Things.