The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  “Quite a while ago,” he began, “I mentioned that we’d even gone so far as to look for some outsider, some mysterious stranger, as I put it, on the night of the crime. When we couldn’t find one I figured we better check back on a few other things. Local gossip naturally was one. But there wasn’t any gossip about LeNormand and his wife, outside of a lot of old hens brooding around about her and who she was and why he married her and why she married him, and all like that. Now in my experience, Mr. Jones, a murder is a thing that doesn’t just happen out of a clear sky. By that I mean, if you look close enough you’ll discover a whole lot of little things, straws in the wind, you might say, coming ahead of it. Usually you can uncover some of these things by keeping your ears open. But like I said there wasn’t any real gossip. Nobody even thought there was any bad blood between them. It’s hard to believe with a woman like her and a husband like he was that there was never any trouble, but I couldn’t even find a single old cat who claimed that Mrs. LeNormand had been playing around with another man. So the gossip angle petered out. Sometimes, too, in my experience, some of these things that come ahead of a murder go so far as to get into the police records.” He opened the big black ledger in front of him. “So Cap Hanlon and I went through the blotter book for a long ways back.” He sighed. “It seems to be fairly restful, being a policeman in this town. We didn’t find a possibility till we hit August. And then we came on something that probably doesn’t mean a thing. Except that it’s an open case, and it has a woman in it.”

  For the life of me I couldn’t decide what this was leading up to. But I could see that we were coming to something that excited him.

  “Early in August”—he looked at the book—“on the seventh, to be exact, there was a disappearance in this town. And the person that disappeared was a woman.” He stopped speaking and began to fiddle with his pencil. There was something uncertain about him then, as though he were trying to decide a point that was vital to him without letting me in on the story. Finally he jabbed the pencil at the scratch paper and said, “I’m going to tell you the whole story because it’s the only way I can get the information I need. But I want you not to interrupt me, and I want you to give me your word of honor as a gentleman that what I have to say will go no further. You’re not to speak a word of it to anyone. Okay?”

  I gave him my word of honor. Keeping it turned out to be the hardest job I ever tackled in my life.

  Parsons was looking grave and a little doubtful, but he went on finally. “About eight o’clock in the evening, August seventh like I said. A tourist named Jamison, Stewart Jamison, stopped up here by the Sunoco station to get some gas. He was driving an old Ford. A model A. In the car with him was his wife and their daughter. It was their daughter that disappeared.”

  He paused and licked down a flap of tobacco on his cigar. “I want to tell you about the daughter. Her name was Luella—Luella Jamison. The Jamisons live in a little town in South Carolina, and if you don’t mind I won’t tell you the name of it. They’ve got a farm down there, and they’re dirt poor. Cap says the car was a wreck on wheels, and when he talked to them he noticed that their clothes were old and mended. But he says they seemed kind of a high type, for all that. They were clean and nice-spoken. Both of them, he says, were tall and fairly good-looking, but it struck him that they were pretty old to have a daughter only twenty. The man must have been about seventy, and the woman, his wife, not much younger. That’s about all I can tell you about them—I’ve got some pictures that I want to show you later. All except for one thing. The daughter was an idiot.”

  That hit me. I had not known what to think about Parsons’ story except to wonder what connection it had with the LeNormands and with Jerry and me. I could see still less connection after he spoke these last five words, but something went through me almost instantly after I heard them. The only way to describe the feeling is to say it was like the click of the latch on a door closing behind you. But even as I felt it I lost the reason for the feeling; for one fleeting second things had made sense, and then it was all a jumble again.

  “The way it happened,” Parsons continued, “was like this. Mrs. Jamison got out of the car, and got her daughter out to go to the rest room. Mr. Jamison was checking the air pressure on the tires at the moment. You know how those filling-station rest rooms are. You get to them around a couple of angles of pretty close latticework. The ladies’ room at the Sunoco place is very small—just big enough for one person at a time. So Mrs. Jamison fixed up Luella first, and then she led her out and put her hands on one of the uprights of the latticework and told her to hold on to it. Then she went in herself, and when she came out, the girl was gone. There wasn’t a trace of her, and nobody saw her go. It was just the end of dusk, and the girl had on a dark cloth coat. Mr. Jamison and Jack, the guy at the station, were stooped over, working on the tires, and Cap couldn’t find anyone who saw the girl.

  “I better tell you a little of what Cap and I found out about Luella. She’d been an idiot from birth. She was nearly six before they could teach her how to walk, and she never did learn how to dress herself, or feed herself. And furthermore, she couldn’t even speak. ‘She used just to make a few little noises sometimes,’ her mother told me. None of the doctors in their part of the world could do a thing for her, and naturally it was pretty tough on the Jamisons, she being the child of their old age and all, and an only child at that. They hadn’t got married till Mrs. Jamison was way over forty, and they hadn’t expected to have any children at all. When Luella came, they were tickled to death, at first. Then, when they saw how it was, they decided it was God’s will and did everything they could for the kid. Being poor, it wasn’t much, but they always kept her neat and clean, and never gave up hope that sometime they’d find a doctor who could do something for Luella. She wasn’t so much of a burden on them as you might think. At least that’s the impression I got after talking to them. She wasn’t subject to any kind of violent fits, or anything like that, and always did what they told her to if she understood it. Things like hanging on to that lattice post, I mean. They never used to worry about leaving her by herself at the farm; if they both had to be away for a while, they’d latch the door to her room and leave her sitting in her chair. Mealtimes they would have her at the table, and Mrs. Jamison would feed her. Every way they could they tried to bring her out, and there’s no doubt about their both loving her. There’s a big photograph of her in the living room of their house now . . .

  “I’m telling you all this so you’ll get the picture of these people. I must say I like them. Both good Anglo-Saxon stock from away back. His people were English and he’s proud of them in a quiet sort of way. He told me his great-grandfather was a famous scientist, or mathematician, or some such thing. He had a couple of books the old boy wrote more than a hundred years ago.” Parsons smiled apologetically. “They were so glad to have a visitor, they showed me everything in the house. Maybe I’m getting softheaded, but I’m positive those two would never cook up a disappearance act even if they didn’t love their kid, which I’ll bet my last dollar they did.”

  He looked out the window again. “It was pathetic the way she cried when she talked about Luella.

  “Well, came the New Deal. The Jamisons were cut in for a slice of the AAA money that was going round, and they decided to use it on Luella. They wrote a lot of famous doctors up north about her case. Most of them answered that it didn’t sound as if there was anything that could be done, but one man wrote and said if they could get her up to him he’d make an examination and charge them just his minimum fee. Then, if he thought he could do anything, he would make some sort of arrangement about later payments. It was a good man, too,” said Parsons. “I looked into that.”

  He picked up a folder from among his papers and glanced into it thoughtfully. There seemed to be half a dozen photographs in it. A sudden anxiety to look at them came over me. I reached out my hand.

  “In a minute,” he said. “The rest of the story
is short so far as facts are concerned. The girl never turned up. It’s pretty hard to see what could have become of her. Even if she’d fallen into the lake, her body would have come up. Cap and the boys dragged most of it, anyway. I thought for a while she might have got picked up by some other car, maybe, but there’s no evidence of it, and that idea raises a whole lot of others. I won’t go into them all with you now, but I’m pretty well satisfied, myself, that that didn’t happen. For one thing, the state troopers were having a driving license checkup a mile or two down the road, and they’d have been apt to notice anything as out of the way as a car with some guy in it who’d just got hold of a feeble-minded girl by mistake. Now I want you to look at the girl in this picture.”

  He handed me what turned out to be an enlarged snapshot of the front of a farmhouse. There was a section of path in the foreground, edged with white-painted stones. Then the house. A small, clapboarded one with a veranda across its whole front length. Even if the boards were obviously in need of paint and the whole place looked as pinched and poor as you could well imagine, it was neat and clean, and not in bad repair. I couldn’t see any broken boards in the veranda, and the curtains at the windows were trimly and evenly looped.

  Two people were sitting in rocking chairs on the front porch. One was a spare, almost gaunt woman in her sixties, with the thin hair pulled up from her ears and piled in an old-fashioned coiffure on the top of her head. She wore a bleached-looking Mother Hubbard and old, high-button shoes. There was a basket of what seemed to be sewing in her lap. The other figure took my eye at once; I was hardly aware of the rest of the picture at first. It was a girl—Luella, of course. She was sitting in a rocking chair next to her mother. But where Mrs. Jamison was clearly looking at the person who had held the camera, the girl’s eyes were not focused on anything. She was simply staring into the distance. Her mouth was partly open, and her whole body was slumped into the chair. Her arms were lying out along the sides of the chair, and in one hand she held something which I could not make out at first. Then I saw it was a rag doll. It was dangling from her fingers. She wasn’t paying the slightest attention to it. Even if no one had told me she was an idiot, I could have guessed it after one glance. Everything about her was mindless, vacant, not human. I looked at her face a long time. It seemed to have regular features. The eyes were the same distance apart as Selena’s. The hair was apparently darker, but the porch was in shadow.

  I pointed that out to Parsons. He merely observed that the color of hair was one of the least permanent things in this world.

  He showed me other pictures, several of them. Even one blurred enlargement of the face of Luella Jamison. I dislike remembering that enlargement even to this day. I looked at all of them for a long time. I remember my heart beat so sickeningly in my throat that I could scarcely breathe.

  Parsons finally broke the silence. “What do you think, leaving the hair color out of it for the moment?”

  “God,” I told him, “I don’t know. It’s inconceivable that it could be Selena. In a general way, I suppose this girl does look something like her. But I can’t tell what that face would be like with a mind behind it. . . . Can you?”

  He seemed disappointed. “No, you’re right about that. But in general, Mr. Jones, would you say that it was impossible for her to be Mrs. LeNormand?”

  “I can’t say that it would be impossible. But her hair would probably have to be bleached—and I know damn well Mrs. LeNormand’s hair isn’t bleached—and she’d have to have more than the ordinary amount of intelligence before she’d be even close.”

  “Yes,” he said, and then after several seconds, “yes” again.

  “I don’t get it,” I said finally. “There must be something more up your sleeve than this. What about fingerprints?”

  He grinned at me. “You might make a detective someday. I’ve got Mrs. LeNormand’s, of course. But I haven’t got Luella Jamison’s and I can’t get them. Mrs. Jamison is too good a housekeeper. She washed Luella’s room, cleaned all her things, once a week. And when she went back home, brokenhearted, she got the room all ready again for the girl. There may be some of her prints down there, but none that could be identified positively. I couldn’t find any at all except ones made by Mr. and Mrs. Jamison. A girl like that,” he added, “touches mighty few things, when you come to think about it.”

  “Listen,” I said to him. “I don’t see your point at all. You seem to have gone down there, and spent a lot of time on this Luella Jamison. From what you say, you must think she has some connection with Mrs. LeNormand, or even could be Mrs. LeNormand, and yet you know her. You know she is intelligent. You know how she speaks and handles herself. You even know, or ought to know,” I added thinking of his reports on our New York activities, “that she dances.”

  “Oh, yes.” He was quite calm. “I know she dances, all right. She dances a month after her husband is murdered.” He must have seen me wince. “I don’t blame Mr. Lister. He thinks he’s got to get her mind off it, and he loves her anyway and wants to dance with her, so it’s a good idea to take her dancing.” He waved his hand again. A large chunk of cigar ash fell off onto the table. “Damn. And I know she talks too. Not a trace of a Southern accent, either. But there are some things about the way she talks that puzzle me. It’s what she doesn’t say.”

  I asked him what he meant by that.

  “I seem to be giving you a lot of lectures this afternoon,” he replied. “Being a college man, maybe you’re used to them. I’ll tell you, Mr. Jones. Even professors talk like human beings. What I mean is that when they’re not dishing it out to their students, they talk in a way that tells you a lot about their past lives, if you listen close. Little words, expressions they use. Gestures too, and facial expressions. You know what I mean. Individual ways of saying things that have been built up over years of talking. It’s like a style in writing, I guess. And it’s never quite the same in any two people.”

  Certainly I knew what he meant, and I knew that it was the absence of this quality in what Selena said, particularly when I first knew her, that bothered me. It was unnatural.

  “I see what you mean,” I told him.

  “Mrs. LeNormand talks as if she was reading it out of a grammar book,” he said.

  That had been Walter LeNormand’s way too, I suddenly remembered. And the thought gave me a twinge of uneasiness.

  “LeNormand talked that way too, generally,” I told him. “At least, he did when I spoke to him the few times we ever met. And he was precise about everything connected with words and figures.”

  “Unh hunh.” He didn’t seem specially interested.

  Neither of us said anything for a minute or two. I was thinking hard, and Parsons’ idea seemed completely fantastic when I got through considering it. How could this Luella Jamison have run away from her parents and turned herself into the sort of person Selena LeNormand was? I put this to Parsons after a while.

  “I know,” he said. “Its almost impossible. If her insanity was due to a piece of bone pressing on the brain, and it got knocked back into place and made her normal again . . . sort of an unlikely thing, though, and I can’t find a doctor that will admit the possibility.”

  “Naturally not,” I said virtuously.

  The remark appeared to nettle him. He looked at me a moment then and said, “All right, put this in your pipe and smoke it. Luella Jamison disappeared the evening of August seventh. On August ninth, at ten-thirty in the morning, Joe Peters over at the county building in New Zion issued a marriage license to one Walter R. LeNormand of England, and a certain Selena Smith. Smith!” There was contemptuous suspicion in the way he said it. “Selena Smith, of Lafayette, Oklahoma. Aged twenty-one. And there isn’t any Lafayette, Oklahoma.”

  10. CRAS AMET QUI NUMQUAM AMAVIT

  “YOU CAN see what sort of a case it is, Mr. Jones.” Parsons’ voice was harassed, and he chewed irritably at his cigar. “There isn’t a damn thing I can go to work on. Nothing but a half-baked idea
, and every time I think of that I wonder if I’m getting too old for this sort of work.”

  He was right, of course. He knew practically everything I knew, except one thing. One thing that I hardly liked to admit even to myself: that Jerry was going to marry this woman, whoever she was, in a little over a month. As soon as I thought about that I realized something else, something that instantly destroyed my whole peace of mind. I knew this possibility about Selena, and I had promised Parsons not to tell anyone, not even Jerry, about it. It was frightening to know I’d have to live with the story of Luella Jamison, and think about it every time I looked at Selena, and never be entirely sure it wasn’t true.

  “Of course,” Parsons was saying, “I’ve tried to trace LeNormand’s ever being seen with Mrs. LeNormand before August seventh. And no one that I can find ever saw her until the ninth. LeNormand didn’t even leave town except once, and that was on the tenth. He took his car out of the garage about seven, and drove north along Route 72. I don’t know where he went or what he did, and I can’t find out. He got back to town in the evening.”

  “Did they get married in New Zion?” I asked him.

  “No. A man named Willetts, a justice of the peace, married them. He lives on the Collegeville turnpike about five miles this side of Zion.” He paused to grunt and then went on. “Sometimes I wonder how some of these birds learn enough to be justices of the peace. They’ve got to know how to read and write. That’s about all this Willetts does know, and he writes awful slow. But his story agrees with Joe’s, over at the county building, in one respect. It was raining on the ninth, and both of them remember that Mrs. LeNormand was wearing an old trench coat that was too long in the sleeves for her. Joe said it was a man’s coat. She didn’t have a hat. And there was a trench coat in LeNormand’s closet when we went through his things.”