by Mark Dunn
Tad’s retort now elicited from his father a loud, inarticulate response seated largely in the throat.
“Granted, she has written the letter,” continued Tad, “but one must not discount the possibility that it may have been penned under duress.”
“You believe there could be that possibility?” asked Elizabeth, whose general wearying indulgence of her son had suddenly become supplanted by a genuine interest in his theory.
Tad nodded eagerly. “Because I have deduced the following: Ethel wasn’t happy with Longnecker. And Clara has confirmed it.”
Thomas sat down next to his wife. “Which Clara?”
Tad swung around in his chair. The deerstalker hat, which was two sizes too big for his small head, flew off and onto the rug. “Ethel’s friend Clara Puckett, of course. Clara said that Ethel knew Longnecker was a ne’er-do-well but she didn’t know how to get away from him.”
“Oh dear,” said Elizabeth.
Tad went on: “That’s why I think he might have forced her to leave with him.”
Elizabeth stretched out her arms for her son to come to her. Reluctantly he got up and allowed his worried mother to embrace him. “You’re too young to have such mature theories about things. You should run and play with children your own age and leave such complicated matters to your elders.”
Tad shook his head. “The time for childhood games is behind me. There are more important things for me to be doing with my life.”
“Like solving crimes?” asked Thomas.
Tad nodded. “Now, if you would be so good as to excuse me,” he said, retrieving the letter and magnifying glass from the writing desk and snatching up his hat from the floor, “I will be in my room trying to make some sense out of my sister’s alleged elopement, which flies in the face of all reason. Have Albertha bring my breakfast to my room on a tray.”
Not waiting for a response from his parents, Tad departed the room, the seriousness in his carriage evincing a sense of grand purpose.
After a silent moment, Thomas turned to his wife and said, “It does seem strange, if indeed it be true, that Ethel should run away to marry a man she no longer loves.”
“Or trusts,” added Elizabeth. “Oh, that seems frightening even to contemplate—that he may have gotten her to leave against her will. And yet the letter offers no clues as to possible coercion. I refuse to believe it. I choose to believe, instead, that she took careful stock of her feelings for the young man and decided that the good clearly outweighed the bad. If you recall, Tommy, I did the very same thing prior to our wedding.”
“What do you mean, ‘if you recall’? What did you do, Lizzie—put it all down in a ledger?”
“As a matter of fact, I did. Happily, the good did win out, my love. Else I wouldn’t be sitting here today.” Elizabeth’s nascent smile suddenly evaporated. “Oh, Tommy. Where do you think the two of them could have gone?”
Thomas looked upon his wife with compassionate eyes. “We can’t go after her, Lizzie. Marrying Longnecker and moving away with him is her decision to make. Perhaps she’ll write to us shortly.”
*
Seated at the desk in his room, Tad read and reread the letter his sister had left behind. It was most assuredly in her hand, but there wasn’t the ease of expression that he was used to. Ethel’s trip to Europe with their aunt the previous summer had generated a number of letters to him, and these he now drew from a drawer in his desk to compare to this far more consequential missive.
Ethel was a good writer, and though her letters usually had a frothy, whimsical feel to them, they were remarkably well-crafted. This farewell letter was well-crafted, to be sure, but the voice was without variance in tone, and the meringue was entirely absent. This aberration of character was the first clue that Tad took from it.
After twenty minutes or so there came a knock at the door. Albertha, the cook, entered with a breakfast tray. “Set it there upon the bed, Mrs. Hudson.”
“My name ain’t Hudson, and you know it.” Then in susurrant appendix: “You snot-nosed little mischieviant.”
“‘Mischieviant’ isn’t a word, Mrs. Hudson. And don’t think that I don’t appreciate you. Your cuisine may be a little limited but you have as good an idea of breakfast as a Scotchwoman.”
Albertha set the tray upon the bed. “You’ve said that before, Master Tad. Is it be something your Mr. Holmes says?”
“Perhaps it is. Come over here. I want to show you something.”
Albertha went to Tad. She peered over his shoulder. “Is that the letter—the one from poor Miss Ethel?”
Tad nodded. “Why do you call her ‘poor Miss Ethel’?”
“Because I don’t reckon she wanted to go with that young man.”
Tad turned around. “Why do you say this?”
“One night I overheard them two fussing on the back porch—fussing like cats in a bag, but with their mouths half-closed-like, so as to keep their voices low, I suppose.”
“What was it that my sister and Mr. Longnecker were quarreling about?”
“Why, that very thing, Mr. Tad! He wanted her to marry him and she didn’t want no part of it. But he lays the law down on her—says she’s his and no other man gonna have her.”
“Did you tell this to my parents?”
Albertha shook her head. “Young people in love—they get all het up sometimes. They say things that no person in his right mind gonna say. What was it you wanted to show me?”
“It’s quite curious, Mrs. Hudson. Look closely. What is the first thing to strike you about this letter?” Albertha took her reading glasses from her apron pocket and hooked the end pieces behind her ears.
“The stationery’s got a nice, pretty look to it. And it smells like roses, don’t it?”
Tad got up from his chair. “Sit here, Mrs. Hudson. Examine the letter as closely as you wish.”
Albertha sat down.
“With what instrument do you think my sister has penned this letter?”
“It don’t seem to have been penned by a pen at all, but by a pencil.”
“Precisely. Now why do you think that she chose to write the letter in pencil?”
“Well, can’t rightly say.”
“I have a theory. Would you like to hear it?”
“Please. And hurry yourself up, child. I have to fix your father’s sack lunch before he leaves for work.”
“Look at the words, Mrs. Hudson. See how some seem to have been made darker than the others?”
“Yes, I do.”
“And what could be the reason?”
Albertha shook her head and gave a little shrug.
“Oh, but certainly you must see, Mrs. Hudson!” Tad exclaimed, rocking upon his heels with a kind of boyish exuberance not at all replicative of the severe and intellectually gelid Mr. Holmes. “She’s written the letter in code. It is absolute brilliance! And it is our job now to decipher it.”
“And just how is it we do that?”
“By taking each of those words she has made slightly darker than the others through pressing the pencil harder upon the page—by taking those words and assembling them into a form of sentence anagram to give us the true, hidden meaning of her letter.”
“That sounds rather farfetched to me, sport,” said Mr. Ellsworth, who was now standing in the doorway of his son’s bedroom. “Albertha, do I pay you to cook our meals or to duck off and play Watson to my son’s Sherlock?”
“To cook the meals, Mr. Ellsworth.” Albertha rose quickly, her head bowed in humble subservience. But even in the midst of her haste to return to her duties in the kitchen, the Ellsworth cook allowed a little sauce to bubble from her pot: “Excuse me, Mr. Ellsworth, but I ain’t Watson when I’m in this here room. I’m Mrs. Hudson, and you best be remembering that.”
During Albertha’s withdrawal, Tad let slip a smile that was quickly transmuted back into the stone face of the impassive detective.
“Your mother is handling this quite badly, Tad,” said Thomas to his
son. “I don’t think either of us approves of your making sport of it. Please give me the letter, and let’s have an end to all this nonsense.”
“It isn’t nonsense, Pop. Sis has written the letter in code. You can help me if you like, and Mom, too, but I won’t relinquish the letter until I’ve finished deciphering it.”
Thomas scratched his head. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this kind of impudence from you. You may have always been Peck’s Bad Boy, but now you’ve become Peck’s Hopelessly Incorrigible Boy, and I’ll not have it.”
“And I refuse to give up this letter until I’ve tested my theory. I love my sister far too much to do that to her.”
All the wind had suddenly deserted Thomas’s sails. He dropped down upon Tad’s bed like a lead weight. “Why would she write to us in code?”
“Because she couldn’t do anything else.”
“Why did she not come to us and simply say that she didn’t want to go with Longnecker? If he is the dangerous man that you now purport, we could all have stood against him.”
“Maybe he’s more dangerous than we could even imagine, Pop, and she didn’t want to see her family harmed.”
Thomas thought about this. Then he said, “Let’s decipher the code and see what it is that your sister’s trying to tell us.”
Dear Mom and Pop,
My husband has won my heart at last. I’m sorry to hurry off like this as you nap so peacefully, and I will pine away for you like a little kid without his marbles in the street. But it will not kill me to try to be a good wife to Adam who loves me so much. It will help me immeasurably if you try to understand. I’m not a little lost lamb. I am a grown woman now, and it fits me. I get pleasure from making Adam happy. And he has come into my life only to make me happy. He has great plans for us away from Battle Creek. Soon he is going to buy me evening gowns of lavender and tulle, and diamond solitaires and a bright red Cadillac Model A. Please don’t come looking for me. If you do, it will mean that you don’t trust me to make this important decision about my life.
You will always be in my thoughts and in my heart. Adam has his own parents, but they aren’t half as wonderful as you are.
Love,
Your Ethel
husband has my I’m hurry nap will pine you kid marbles street kill help I’m lost fits get come Soon me Cadillac don’t come If me in has his
Through employment of the anagrammatical talents of Tad, his mother and father, Albertha the cook, and the chief inspector of the Battle Creek Police Department, the message was, within a matter of three hours, successfully and decisively decoded:
Help. I’m kid nap. Come get me. I’m in Cadillac, Pine Street. Hurry. My husband has lost his marbles, has fits, will kill me if you don’t come soon.
Ethel was rescued with all speed. Adam was returned to the lunatic asylum from whence he had escaped. And Thomas and Elizabeth Ellsworth’s oldest child vowed never again to fall in love with a good-looking newcomer to Battle Creek who wanted something more from her than simple directions to the Battle Creek Sanitarium. She vowed something else as well: to value every moment her younger brother spent in the thrall of his fictional detective idol, for she had laid her hopes for rescue at the feet of Tad’s inquisitive nature, inspired by Mr. Holmes.
Love and trust between siblings can be powerful forces for good. But then, everyone knows this. It is, to borrow from the famed sleuth, elementary.
1904
IN MEMORIAM IN PENNSYLVANIA
The man writing my husband’s obituary asked where he went to college. “Haverford College,” I replied. Then I smiled. Just that morning I had asked my grandson Tommy to go out and buy me a Haverford College sweater. I wanted to bury Lindsay in it, you see. My late husband had always said he wanted to be buried in his old college sweater. Because the moths, as I had earlier discovered, had had other ideas, I was forced to improvise.
I’m a resourceful widow.
I may be mistaken, but I think my Lindsay was the last surviving member of Haverford’s Class of 1904. He was almost ninety when he died this week. He had been in touch with several of his classmates—the “Nineteen Fours” they called themselves—throughout their entire lives. Deep friendships were forged in those days, the kinds of friendships I don’t think the college kids of today could ever understand.
The saddest thing about my husband’s senility was the loss of all those memories. We’ve had a good marriage, and a long one, but there was something special about Lindsay’s college days that no love of wife or child could take the place of.
In the last year of his life Lindsay would often forget who I was, or he’d fail to recognize his children and grandchildren. I would also have trouble making sense out of the things he’d say—things sometimes mumbled, sometimes spoken with volume and authority but still totally incomprehensible. The doctor said that Lindsay’s gibbering was nothing more than the expression of thoughts—fractured, disjointed thoughts—that his brain could no longer assemble and process in a rational manner. I tended to agree with his opinion. For this reason, I never prodded Lindsay to explain any of the random statements he made. I’d nod and smile and comb his hair because it was always mussed. The attendants at the nursing home could have done a better job of keeping him looking nice. Lindsay was a beautiful man. He was kind and funny and good to the children and me. It seemed in those last few months that he was dead already—that some stranger had come to take his place, or worse, some living entity incapable of speaking beyond senseless prattle, unable to love in the deep way that my husband once loved, powerless to remember even a single detail of a life well worth remembering. To be robbed of memory seems to me the most insidious assault of all.
On one of my visits last summer I thought that I would write down some of the things he said. It was a silly thing to do, I know it. But the words were delivered by a familiar voice that still resonated for me, because this was all that I had left: the shell that resembled my husband in appearance and the voice that used to come to me from across the dinner table, from behind the steering wheel of our car, over the telephone from his office, in the intimacy of our nocturnal bed.
“Gods and hook fish!”
I scribbled it down. “Gods and hook fish.” What did it mean? Well, it can’t possibly mean anything, can it?
“Ye gods and little fishhooks, Baldy!”
Baldy’s getting sentimental. Somebody muzzle him. He sits by the fire and sucks his pipe and reminds us that it will all be over soon. Our final quarter. One quarter more and then it’s out the door—or doors: those stately doors of Roberts’ Hall. Funeral-marching. Diplomas in hand. Must we, Baldy? Must we think about it?
Who knew that 1904 would be the year that our bully lives came to a crashing halt?
Bonny seems poised to speak. Bonny has a tendency to get philosophical. He’s got those big ears and he looks about twelve but he’s the class sage by reputation and he won’t let us down. He’ll say something that will take the lumps out of all of our throats. Say something, Bonny. Say something soothing and sagacious.
“Remember Lester? Down in the dumps because nobody would dump him?”
I nod. I remember. Poor ol’ Lester—the only freshman who didn’t get his turn at being dumped out of bed from a sound sleep. I think it hurt his feelings something awful, to think that nobody liked him enough to want to toss him to the floor and throw his mattress on top of him.
“Good things finally come to he who waits for his dumping,” Lester says through a guffaw. “I got mine soon enough. And a little more to spare. You chuckleheads broke the ventilator over my door with all your roughhousing and you knocked down my bookcase like it was the wall of Jericho!”
Everybody’s laughing now. We’re sitting around the fireplace in Lloyd Hall and all the memories are flooding back. The lump is still there. It’s late. The night and the quiet (save for the crackling of the logs on the fire) have sent our thoughts to dark places where good things are destined to come to an end—all th
e things that will be so sorely missed—new chances to beat Swarthmore on the gridiron, or to beat whoever has the guts to face us on the cricket field—Cornell, Harvard, the New Jersey Athletic Club!
“Baldy, Thorny, Marmy, Had.”
Baldy remembers forming a bucket brigade the night Denbeigh Hall burned down, and Thorny describes with his customary sailor’s seasoning how we used to fumble with our academic gowns in the blustering winds of our senior year. Damn those gowns and the antediluvian chucklehead who first decided that seniors should wear them! Marmy waxes gastronomical over four delectable years of steak a la Bordelaise, asparagus on toast, iced tea and strawberries and fudge and ice cream. And “Had” puts us all into hysterics by recalling the day the electrical lab short-circuited.
We should—all eight of us—have suspended our group reminiscences and gone back to our rooms to start penning the opening paragraphs of our respective graduation theses.
“A History of Isthmian Canal Failures.”
A History of Isthmian Canal Failures by Jack Thomas. Wireless Telegraphy by Benny Lester. The Philadelphia Filtration System by “Battery” Clark. The Negro Problem by Edgar “Psyche” Snipes. There probably wouldn’t have been such a Negro problem if classes like Nineteen-Four hadn’t put up as their contribution to Junior Play Night a black-face minstrel show of such pasquinading offense as to make even the racially accommodating Mr. Booker T. Washington apoplectic.
“Ethel and beloved Maudie.”
Thoughts of the end of our college careers moving with astonishing illogic (as all thoughts eventually do) to the fairer sex. The nearness of the rosy-cheeked maidens of Bryn Mawr and the utterly unattainable theatrical Misses Ethel Barrymore and our own beloved Maudie—that is to say Miss Maude Adams, who was ours not in reality but only within our heartfelt fancy.
And now into this late hour of throbbing longing suddenly step the conjured wraiths of every girl we have ever loved and those to whom some of us are presently engaged. And suddenly we are facing our own futures as we have never faced them before, accompanied by the women—both real and imagined—whom we will woo and wed and with whom we will make our families. And into that void steps my dear…
