The Transcendental Murder

by Jane Langton

  “We did,” said Homer. “And you’ll notice that the flint is missing.”

  “This must be the murder weapon, all right. Here, let’s give her a try.” Lieutenant Morrissey had made some balls from Ernest Goss’s mold. He took one of them out of a drawer, along with a patch cut from a piece of linen, a can of black powder and an oilcan. “There was a backwoods rule about powder. You were supposed to put a ball in your hand and pour a cone of powder over it just enough to cover it, and that was the right charge. And then you pour it in, like this. You were supposed to use bear grease or something on the patch, but I guess 3-in-l is good enough.” He oiled the patch, set the gun stock on the floor, laid the patch across the muzzle with the ball on top of it and pressed it down a little way with his finger. Then he pulled out the ramrod mounted under the barrel and used it to push the ball and patch gently all the way down. “Okay, stand back, here she goes.” He held the long gun up to his shoulder and pointed it into a barrel filled with cotton wadding. There was a great noise, and two puffs of smoke emerged from the powder pan and the muzzle. Lieutenant Morrissey grinned. He set the gun down and groped in the wadding for the ball. Then he brought it up, squinted at it and beckoned them to the other side of the room where there was a comparison microscope. He placed the ball in a holder and put it under one side of the microscope, and stared into the eyepiece for a minute, adjusting the focus and the light. “Here,” he said to Homer noncommittally, “you look.”

  Homer looked, and Jimmy looked. “Just a lot of miscellaneous scratches on both of them,” said Jimmy.

  “I told you you wouldn’t be able to match up the gun and the ball. You have to have rifling to do that. But, heck, you must be pretty sure this is the gun anyhow, aren’t you? Goss owned a musket, his dying word was ‘musket,’ he was killed with a musket ball, the musket was missing afterwards and here’s a musket that was obviously hidden near his house. What more do you want? And to top it off, this one has a missing flint.”

  “I wish that blasted Boy Scout had seen the thing,” said Jimmy. “Look at the size of it. He swore up and down he didn’t see it.”

  Mr. Campbell came in then, shaking his head. “No prints. Not a chance. If there were any there to begin with, the wet ground obliterated them all.”

  “So it could have been either Charley or Philip,” said Jimmy. “I suppose we could confront Charley with it and look grim as if the thing were crawling with prints and stuck all over with identifying bits of hair and microbes and so on, and see if he loosens up at all.”

  “There’s one thing we can be sure of,” said Homer. “Whoever hid that gun in Tom’s field had a sense of history and a feeling for the fitness of things. Tom Hand planted corn in that field every year on April 19th because old Colonel Barrett did it back in 1775. The murderer knew that, and he knew about the muskets Colonel Barrett laid down in the furrows, to hide them from the British. But that could mean either Philip or Charley.”

  “Or it could have been Teddy Staples,” said Jimmy.

  “Or Tom Hand himself, or Mary Morgan.”

  “If you’re going to get ridiculous,” said Jimmy sourly, “why don’t you throw in old Mrs. Bewley for good measure?”

  Chapter 45

  I know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.

  MARGARET FULLER

  Genius, that was it, a stroke of genius. It had occurred to Homer that there might be some reward in going over Teddy’s journal more carefully. He had brought it with him to the Minuteman Lunchroom and he had been eating his hamburger and working his way through the entry for April 19th again, when a passage rose up and hit him in the face.

  It wasn’t in the main body of the text, it was hidden among Teddy’s marginal observations on wildlife. April 19th began with a brief mention of the bluebird’s nest. Then it went on:

  Assabbett. Saw Tom Hand &

  Finggerling pl. corn …

  Who was Finggerling? There hadn’t been anybody planting corn with Tom except young John. Oh, of course, “Finggerling” was Teddy’s cute way of saying “one of the little Hands.”

  Bl. dk nstting. 6e, spekkled.

  Gossling digging corn. Gl. ind.

  Ch. Queer. Oriole’s nst …

  That was all for April 19th. And the passage was like a cryptogram, full of abbreviations and misspellings. Homer puzzled over it and stared at the page. “Bl. dk nstting. 6e, spekkled” might mean that Teddy had seen a black duck nesting with six speckled eggs. One of the goslings had been pecking at Tom’s com. But that didn’t make sense, did it? Ducks had ducklings, not goslings, and one of the ducklings wouldn’t be hatched and pecking for its own food if the rest were still eggs, would it? Then Homer felt the small hairs on the back of his neck rise up. If Finngerling meant a young Hand, could not Gossling mean a young Goss? In which case the extra S was not a misspelling at all! What about “Gl. ind. Ch”? Suppose the “Ch.” stood for Charley”? The “ind.” could be “indicated” and the “Gl.” could be “Glass,” or binoculars. Teddy had looked through his binoculars and seen Charley Goss digging in the cornfield. Burying the gun! What else could he have been doing but burying the gun? Homer slammed the book shut and looked up triumphantly. There were no two ways about it—he was a genius! Then he frowned. Straight ahead of him was that fool who was always tagging after Mary, Goonville-Ghoulsworthy or somebody. Goonville-Ghoulsworthy gave Homer an unhealthy-looking bucktoothed smile. Homer grunted something, and slid out from behind his table. He paid his bill, then put his head down and charged at the door.

  Mary Morgan was just coming in with Alice Herpitude, and for a minute they were all tangled up together. Miss Herpitude emerged white and shaken, groping for a chair. “Good heavens, Homer,” said Mary. Granville-Galsworthy made himself prominent, urging them to his table, pulling out a chair for Miss Herpitude. “Oi hope yew’ll join me,” he said. Mary bent over and looked anxiously at Miss Herpitude.

  Miss Herpitude tried to smile. “I’m all right,” she said. But she looked very ill indeed. Homer grumbled his apologies, feeling like an oaf. Maybe he’d better join them for coffee, to make amends. Then Rowena Goss spied them through the front window, and she came in and squeezed into the wall seat beside Homer. Granville-Galsworthy transferred his wet gaze from Mary to Rowena, and licked his lips.

  Rowena kissed Homer and started scattering her boarding school accent about. It was full of umlauts. “What a püfectly precious place …”

  Mary looked away in confusion. The kiss hadn’t been a warm one, that was the whole trouble with it. It was a sweetly possessive, almost wifely little peck. What did that mean?

  “Now, Homer, I want you to just drop whatever tawdry thing you’re doing and come up with me to the club for tennis. It’s a püfectly gorgeous day. See? I’ve got my Bümuda shorts on under my sküt.” She gave him a playful glimpse of a magnificent piece of tan meat. Roland Granville-Galsworthy goggled at it. Howard Swan went by on his way to the cash register, and he goggled at it, too. But Homer’s attention was transfixed by the sugar bowl.

  “I don’t play tennis,” he growled. He had to get out of here. He couldn’t very well tell her he was about to go out and arrest her brother, could he? What was the matter with the girl anyway? Didn’t it matter to her that her father was dead and her mother was in the looney-bin and that it was he himself, Homer Kelly, who was doing his best to clap her brother in a condemned cell? And besides, there was something strange about Rowena anyhow. She was a dish, all right, a real dish, but lately he had begun to have the queerest feeling when he was with her, as though something had been sort of pulled down over his head. She made you feel muffled or something, as though you had a scarf wrapped around you, or a gag shoved down your throat. Homer mumbled his excuses and made his escape, leaving behind him a clumsy assortment of people, crowded between the door and the cash register—one glamorous dish, one frightened old librarian, one bona fide slobbering sex maniac and one thoroughly mise
rable young woman.

  Chapter 46

  I will come as near to lying as you can drive a coach-and-four.

  HENRY THOREAU

  Mrs. Bewley was sweeping the steps when Jimmy’s official car rolled up the drive. When she saw Homer she beamed at him and pulled a batch of baseball cards out of her apron pocket. (Jesus had been sending her messages about the Red Sox and the Yankees.) “I’VE BEEN SAVING THEM JUST FOR YOU.”

  Homer thanked her profusely, pressed her hand and inquired for Mr. Goss at the top of his lungs. “IN THE BARN,” screamed Mrs. Bewley.

  The barn was back down the driveway near the road. They walked into the cool dark square of the open door and called for Charley, but there was no answer. Dolly, the big brown mare, stood in her stall, looking at them with her large eyes. Jimmy rubbed her nose and told her he wished she could talk. Dolly bobbed her head as though she understood, and stretched her neck and licked his face.

  Homer looked at Dolly. Then he slapped his brow. “Oh, for God’s sake, Jimmy, these old-fashioned Yankees. When I said ‘Goss,’ Mrs. Bewley thought I said ‘hoss’ …” They walked back to the big house and finally found Charley out in back working in his garden. He was pulling weeds. He gave a start when their shadows fell across the ground in front of him, and stood up. Homer looked at the honest dirt on Charley’s knees and had a misgiving. It just didn’t seem possible, there under the hot July sun, to put together the gardener and the murderer. But then he remembered that this gardener had been doing a different kind of planting on April 19th, and he put away the misgiving.

  Charley saw something in their faces. He started to talk before they could open their mouths. “You know,” he said, standing up beside his twigged pea vines with a bunch of weeds in his hand, “this reminds me of the times when Philip and I were kids, and we used to have to go into Boston to the dentist. I was always scared to death. And the worst part wasn’t having your teeth fixed, it was sitting in the waiting room, waiting for your turn. I couldn’t even read the comic books. So look here, Kelly, make up your mind, will you? I want to get out of the waiting room. These comic books are terrible.”

  Homer said nothing. Jimmy felt awful. He shifted his eyes to Charley’s garden. “What kind of a crop have you got here, Charley?” he said.

  “Oh, tomatoes, summer squash, scallions, carrots, oak-leaf lettuce, just the usual. Those are radishes over there. We don’t bother with corn because the Hands always let us help ourselves.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t plant any corn this year, Charley?” said Homer.

  Charley’s glance turned slowly from his radishes to Homer’s grim face, and met his accusing eyes. So it was true, he was out of the waiting room. But he made a half-hearted attempt to face it out anyway, convinced of failure. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we’ve been bringing in the sheaves, Charley, and one of them is a mighty funny-looking ear of corn. Tom Hand ran across your father’s old fowling piece when he was harrowing his cornfield. We have the testimony of a witness that you buried it there, Charley, on the nineteenth of April.”

  “You mean somebody saw me?”

  “Somebody did.”

  Charley gave up then. “Okay. I hate lying. I’m no good at it anyhow. Sit down.” He gestured at the grass and squatted cross-legged on it. “I suppose it was Teddy. I thought I saw him out there on the river. He had his binoculars on me, did he? Has he come back? No? Well, all right, I did bury the damn gun. Look, I’ll tell you every single thing I did and thought the whole day, start to finish. You saw me make my famous ride. Well, after that was over, I rode Dolly home, put her in the barn, walked up to my room and changed clothes. It was then about 11:30. I left my Prescott outfit there on a chair, all complete, hat, boots, wig, everything. And then I found this crazy note on my pillow. ‘Meet me in the gravel pit,’ it said, ‘between 12:30 and 1:30 …’”

  “Meet who? Who signed it?”

  “Does it matter? I destroyed it, anyway, the way it said to do, and then after lunch I spent that whole hour hanging around the gravel pit. Since nobody saw me and I saw nobody, it isn’t any good as an alibi anyway.”

  “Was it from Mary Morgan?” said Homer. “Your brother got one, too.”

  “He did? From Mary?” Charley looked up at Annursnac Hill, his face vacant. “Yes, it was from Mary.”

  “Then what did you do?” prompted Jimmy.

  “Well, I came in the house shortly after 1:30, and found my mother, weeping and having hysterics. She had just hung up the telephone. Some fool had called her up and told her that her son had killed her husband with a musket at the bridge and gotten away. She rushed up to me and screamed it at me. Well, I assumed, of course, that Philip must have had a fit and done something nutty. I didn’t know then that he had been wearing my outfit, and that he was actually trying to lay the blame on me. All I could think of was the danger he was in. I left my mother weeping in her chair and ran to the living room to see if the musket was there. It was still in its place in the cupboard. I didn’t see how it could have been the murder weapon because there it was. But I knew one thing that you didn’t know. You saw Philip fire the gun the night before, and then you saw my father clean the inside of the gun and wipe it all off on the outside. But I had seen Philip using that same gun that very morning. He came home from the sunrise salute in a sour mood, walked into the house, grabbed up the musket and went out again. Said he was going out to the gravel pits to whale away at a tin can. Said he had to get something out of his system.”

  “That would account for the missing musket balls. And the dirty barrel of the gun. Go ahead.”

  “Anyway, I knew he had been the last to fire the gun, and that his fingerprints were all over it again. So I decided to get rid of it.”

  “Why didn’t you just wipe the prints off again?”

  “I did. But I was sure there’d be latent prints, or something, or some way of tracing it to Philip—you people have such scientific methods now.”

  “You do us too much credit,” said Homer wryly. “So then you buried it in Tom’s plowed field.”

  “It was the first thing I thought of. I had seen Tom out there with the planter on my ride back home. If it had worked for thé Minutemen I thought it might work for me. I ran to the barn for a spade, and then I stood in the trees along the edge of the field to see if Tom was gone. He was, so I buried the gun.”

  “Why didn’t you dig it up again later? You must have known it would get plowed up again when the corn was ripe.”

  “This will sound silly to you, but I couldn’t remember for the life of me where I had buried it. All I had on my mind was the idea of getting it under fast. It was out in the middle there somewhere. And I kept the line of trees along the road between me and the Hands’ house. Anyway, my interest in saving Philip’s neck began to fade a bit, later on.”

  “Then you went back to the barn and hung up the spade and came running up to Jimmy as he drove in. Right?”

  “That’s right.”

  Homer’s small eyes darkened. “Isn’t it a whole lot more likely, Charley, that you were burying the gun you yourself had used to kill your father?” Homer picked up a stick and began drawing circles in the dirt and talking about Ptolemy and Copernicus. Jimmy couldn’t believe his ears. What was Kelly up to now?

  “Now here’s another diagram, Charley. Copernicus put the sun in the middle instead of the earth, and then everything became much simpler. Instead of Ptolemy’s crazy orbits with epicycles all over them, Copernicus had the planets moving in simple circles. It was simpler, you see, everything was simpler. Now suppose we do the same thing. Let’s take everybody else out of the center of suspicion and put Charley Goss in there. Instantly all confusion vanishes. Isn’t that right, Charley? You rode to the bridge a second time, wearing your own outfit, you killed your father and then came home and buried the murder weapon. So simple, like the system of Copernicus. But Teddy Staples saw you. Charley, where is Teddy? What have you done with Teddy?�
��

  Charley got up, all color drained from his face. He threw his handful of weeds to the ground. “I swear to you, I don’t know what’s happened to Teddy. I swear … But what’s the use? You don’t believe me, no matter what I say. It’s all gone to hell anyhow.”

  Homer went in the house to telephone the District Attorney. “Congratulations,” said the D.A. He paused to pass the word along to Miss O’Toole. “That’s great. And it just proves the rightness of holding off long enough. And I’ve got to hand it to you, pulling a confession with a scrappy piece of evidence like that Teddy’s diary. Yes, sir, Kelly, my boy, I’ve got to hand it to you.”

  “It’s not a confession. All he admits doing is burying the gun. But I’m about to detain him for a preliminary hearing. Is that all right with you?”

  “Sure, it is. Hey, no it isn’t either. Couldn’t you just hold off till tomorrow?”

  “No, I couldn’t. What for?”

  “Well, look here, Homer, old man. You know how the papers have been after me, you know me, ‘The Do-Nothing D.A.’? Well, here’s what I want those bastards to do. I want them out there on the front steps of the Goss mansion taking a picture of me, and of you and Jimmy, too, naturally, looking on while one of your boys clamps handcuffs on Charley. How about it? Let’s make those bums eat crow. Besides, I sure need a little glory, this being an election year, you know how it is.”

  “Well, come on out here right now, and bring them with you.”

  “Aw, Homer, it’s practically five o’clock. And you know me, I’m a family man. Besides, I bet it’s going to be one of those misty nights. Do those Gosses have cows? You know how scared I am of cows. What’s that, Miss O’Toole?” Homer, exasperated, could hear whimpering sounds from Miss O’Toole. Then the D.A. barked into the telephone. “You heard me, didn’t you, Kelly? Who’s boss around here, anyway? Put a man on Charley, and I’ll be out first thing in the morning.”