Shortest Day

by Jane Langton

  “But he’s away,” said the Dean. “Praise be to God for his manifold blessings. Oh, say, Ellery, why isn’t your boss here? Ernest’s not on sabbatical too?”

  Ellery Beaver rose and stood with his back to one of the windows and arranged his face with care. His expression was half the warm smile of a kindly and compassionate man, the old friend and disciple of Ernest Henshaw, and half the grin of a wolf closing in for the kill. “Just between you and me …”

  In gripping detail he divulged the sad story of the mental deterioration of his chief, while the others listened in fascinated horror. A burning question was uppermost at once. If Henshaw really was over the hill, who would take his placed?

  It was apparent to the General Counsel and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences that Henshaw’s assistant, Associate Dean Ellery Beaver, was a rising man.

  PART FOUR

  THE LORD OF MISRULE

  Nowell, nowell, nowell,

  Nowell sing we loud!

  God hath this day poor folk raised,

  And cast adown the proud!

  Carol, “Masters in This Hall”

  CHAPTER 24

  Wassail, wassail, all over the town,

  Our cup is white and our ale is brown.

  The cup is made from the old oak tree,

  And the ale is made in Kentucky,

  So it’s joy to you and a jolly wassail!

  Kentucky wassail

  Palmer Nifto’s little plan burst full-blown on the world that evening. A bunch of Revels people were present at the beginning, after taking in a movie at the theatre on Church Street and eating a late supper together in Harvard Square.

  There were six of them—Morgan and Sarah Bailey, Walt Shattuck, Arlo Field, Jeffery Peck, and Kevin Barnes. At dinner some of the cherries were still stuck in Kevin’s hair.

  Crowded into a booth in the WurstJiaus, relaxing over their beers, they might have had a good time if Dr. Box hadn’t suddenly appeared among them. Eagerly she hauled up a chair and parked it at their table, blocking the aisle. All she wanted, she said, was a glass of tomato juice and a chance to explain the true meaning of the horn dance as an ancient hunter-gatherer ritual ensuring success in the chase.

  Arlo Field didn’t bother to listen. He sat gazing at Sarah—stupidly, unconsciously—until he caught her husband looking at him. At once he dropped his eyes to his beer. Dr. Box talked on and on. Walt murmured a comment now and then, gently protesting, because he knew a lot more about the old rituals than did Dr. Box. Kevin gazed at the ceiling and shook his head to make his cherries waggle, Jeffery Peck snickered, and Sarah’s courtesy was sorely tested. Her baby was a lead weight inside her.

  They came out of the Wursthaus to find Harvard Square jiggeting with life. People were thick on the sidewalks, crowded at the crossings. They ascended and descended the subway stairs. A fat woman in a black leather coat jerked to the secret music of her earphones, an old guy in a fur hat held up a copy of the newspaper Spare Change, a long-haired kid recited his poetry in front of the Harvard Coop, taxis pulled away from the sidewalk, the Peruvian band sang loudly in Spanish, and a graceful black man on Rollerblades swooped in and out among the cars on Massachusetts Avenue.

  Sarah dropped a coin in front of an old man crouched in a blanket in front of the Unitarian church. He didn’t pick it up. Was he asleep? Glancing back, she saw his dark hand creep out and in again.

  Morgan and Sarah said good night to the others and started across the street to wait for the bus to Inman Square, but just then a large truck came out of nowhere and blocked Massachusetts Avenue. The driver leaned out the window and argued with a couple of policemen. A familiar-looking guy in dark shades was arguing too, talking a blue streak.

  “Who’s that?” said Sarah, looking at the man in dark glasses. “Doesn’t he hang around that tent city of homeless people?”

  Morgan didn’t know, nor did he care. He was content to have Sarah’s arm in his, to have no competition for her attention at last.

  They dodged around the obstruction while people shouted at the truck from the stalled cars on Garden Street. Stuck in the teeming traffic on Massachusetts Avenue, frustrated drivers blew their horns.

  The truck was heaped high, packed tight—puffy arm to puffy arm, sagging seat to flabby pillowed back—with seventeen of Palmer Nifto’s drab upholstered requisitioned sofas.

  CHAPTER 25

  From the East the donkey came,

  Stout and strong as twenty men;

  Ears like wings and eyes like flame,

  Striding into Bethlehem.

  Heh! Sir Ass, oh heh!

  “Orientis Partibus”

  It was 4:00 a.m. in Harvard Square. The traffic jam had calmed down. The three-quarter moon shone bald and bright in the sky above the truck that was double-parked on Garden Street, as Palmer Nifto and the truck driver and Bob Chumley tried to manhandle the first sofa down on the pavement.

  Half the citizens of Harvard Towers waited on the sidewalk. Bob’s dogs frisked and barked and tangled one another in their leashes. Vergil Taylor skimmed in and out, executing phenomenal leaps on and off the curb, while his boom box thundered and crashed. A guy from the Cambridge Chronicle, summoned by Palmer Nifto, leaned against a light pole, yawning.

  “Okay,” said Palmer, “here we go. Put the first one down right here.”

  The driver of the truck was mystified. “But this is a major intersection. It’s Harvard Square. You can’t dump sofas on the street in Harvard Square.”

  “Why not? Come on, Bob, you take the other end.” Palmer jumped down and grasped the stumpy legs of the sofa, and it came down with a thump.

  “But, Jesus, Palmer,” said the driver, “this is a parking place, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Why, so it is,” said Palmer. He plucked a quarter out of his pocket and popped it in the meter. “There we are. Perfectly legal. All we’re doing is parking.”

  The guy from the Cambridge Chronicle guffawed and took a picture, Bob Chumley snickered, and his dogs leaped into the truck and hopped up on another sofa.

  “Here, Guthrie,” said Palmer, beckoning to the old man, “this one’s for you. Just lie down and make yourself comfortable, okay?”

  Guthrie shuffled forward and stared uneasily at the humpy shape of the sofa, which looked very strange on the edge of a broad city avenue in the middle of Harvard Square, somebody’s derelict three-cushioned high-backed buttery-soft vinyl sofa with lumbar support, bought years ago at a sleazy furniture store in Central Square. “You mean here? This sofa right here? Listen, I want to tell you something, I ain’t going to lie down on a piece of crap like that there sofa.”

  “Now, come on, Guthrie. It’s a nice comfy sofa, and it’s all yours. And, hey, looky here, I’ve got a blanket.” Palmer nipped into the cab of the truck, hauled out an army blanket, and tucked Guthrie in like a loving mother with an infant child. “Cozy as a bug in a rug, Guthrie. Now, just make yourself comfortable and lie down and go to sleep.”

  Guthrie lay down cautiously, then reared up again. “Listen, I want to tell you something. The police, they ain’t gonna like it.”

  “What’s not to like?” Palmer beamed with righteousness. “I put in a quarter. We’re parking here, that’s all we’re doing. Go to sleep now, Guthrie, there’s a good boy.”

  Guthrie lay down again, but he kept lifting his head to watch Palmer Nifto and Bob Chumley and the bemused driver of the truck dump sofa after sofa down on the parking spaces along Garden Street.

  “My God, Nifto, what’s all this?” Arlo Field was on his way to the Science Center to begin dawn observations of the rising sun with the spectrohelioscope. He stopped to gaze at the row of battered sofas.

  Palmer explained, while his crew of homeless men and women plopped themselves on the sofas and hauled up Palmer’s blankets and settled down. Bob Chumley took charge of the meters, moving up and down the line, popping in quarters, and the truck driver backed his truck a little farther up the street to dum
p the last couple of sofas.

  “Hey, like my meter’s gonna run out,” hollered Guthrie, at the other end of the row, in sofa number one.

  “Right you are.” Bob raced back, accompanied by his dogs, and dropped in a quarter.

  Arlo started to laugh. He couldn’t stop. He was still laughing when a police cruiser pulled up beside Palmer and a couple of uniformed women got out and said, “What the hell is going on?”

  “Just a sec.” Palmer guided the last sofa down from the truck into a parking place next to the old cemetery. The sofa was a baroque affair with a busted leg. It came down with a bang, and another leg broke off. The sofa tipped crazily on its remaining legs, but Palmer beckoned to Gretchen Milligan to lie down on its gritty velvet surface.

  Gretchen was game. “Whoops,” she said, laughing. “It’s, like, rocking.” The sofa settled back with a bump against the curb, and she nestled herself into the cushions.

  “You see?” said Palmer to the two policewomen, dropping a quarter in Gretchen’s meter. “She’s paying her way. It’s all perfectly straightforward. If rich people’s cars can have homes on the street, merely by paying a quarter, so can we. You want to speak to my attorney?”

  The two women looked at Nifto, flabbergasted. Their mouths were open, but nothing came out. Then the shorter one had a flash of genius. “Wheeled vehicles,” she said firmly. “These parking spaces are exclusively for the use of wheeled vehicles. Get these sofas out of here. Come on, Palmer, get ’em out. Right now. You hear what I said? Move them out of here right now.”

  “Okay, Palmer,” said the truck driver wearily, “we better load ’em up again. Oh, God, I’m tired.”

  “Hey, Palmer,” said Arlo, “wait a minute. Come here, listen, I’ve got an idea.”

  Palmer listened, and then he turned away from Arlo and grinned at the two women in uniform. “Okay, okay,” he said, “out they go again. Come on, Bob, let’s load ’em up.”

  “But, shit, Palmer,” said Bob, who was tired of humping sofas, “like we just—”

  “I know.” Palmer helped Gretchen heave herself out of the broken sofa. “But we’ve got to be law-abiding, don’t we, Bob?”

  “Here,” said Arlo cheerfully. “I’ll help.”

  Bulging enormously, Gretchen stood on the sidewalk and watched as the driver of the truck and Bob Chumley and Palmer Nifto and Arlo Field helped the other occupants out of the sofas and hoisted all seventeen bulky pieces of furniture back onto the truck, piling them on top of one another, right side up and upside down.

  The sofa caper was over, and the sleepy citizens of Harvard Towers began shuffling back to their tent city. But Gretchen Milligan looked back regretfully. “It was so comfortable,” she said. “I mean, that sofa was really comfortable.”

  “God,” said one of the policewomen to her partner as they drove away, “what will they think of next?”

  CHAPTER 26

  … gladly, good lord, would I game here and sleep,

  But I have a quest and a promise to keep.

  “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”

  It was true that Homer had washed his hands of the two Revels tragedies, the deaths of Henry Shady and Tom Cobb, leaving both matters up to the investigative branches of the Harvard and Cambridge Police Departments. But as time went on, Homer’s fatal curiosity was getting the better of him.

  There had been nothing in the papers about the real cause of Cobb’s death, and nothing on the local television news, only the report that he had swallowed a toxic substance. But the rumor that he had been poisoned was everywhere, and Homer wanted to get to the bottom of it.

  He had long since forgotten his wife’s idiotic concern over the first Revels death, the accident that had killed Henry Shady—her wild story about some crazy goose and the problem of timing and some other dumb thing—what was it? No matter. It didn’t make sense. His wife, Mary, was a superb human being, a wonderful companion, a warm and responsive lover, a magnificent teacher and a fine writer, but she didn’t know beans about the investigation of criminal activity.

  Was that why she’d been a little testy lately? Probably. Mary was just a little jealous of his long-standing expertise, all that know-how he had picked up so long ago as a lieutenant detective for Middlesex County. Jealousy, God! It was a pain in the neck.

  Unfortunately, Homer’s vast experience couldn’t help him now. By rights he should have been able to go straight to the Cambridge Police Department to find out more about the toxic substance that had killed Tom Cobb, but he couldn’t. His personal and official relation with the department was poor. Excessive interference on the part of an unaccredited person—that was the way they had put it.

  Well, of course they were right. While poking into certain matters in the recent past, Homer had found it necessary to flash his long-outdated identification card as a Middlesex County lieutenant detective. The Cambridge investigating officer had seen through him, and he had barely escaped arrest. So in this matter he would have to be completely on his own.

  Was the rumor true, that Cobb had been poisoned? How could he find out?

  On the afternoon after Palmer Nifto’s sofa caper in Harvard Square, Homer made his way to Cambridge Hospital. It was only a few blocks east of Memorial Hall, on Cambridge Street.

  Approaching the front entrance, he felt like the heroic protagonist of one of Dr. Box’s vision quests. In order to behold the vision or find the Grail or achieve whatever fabulous goal lay at the end of the quest, he would first have to overcome a set of impossible obstacles.

  The hospital receptionist was the first enchanted obstacle. She was a mountain of glass.

  Homer’s magic talisman was his famous charm. Leaning over the counter, he showed all his teeth and complimented her on her navy-blue suit.

  The magic failed. The receptionist was a severe young woman who at once detected the sexist nature of this ploy. “Get to the point,” she said sharply, with a look like a splinter from the glass mountain.

  “Can you tell me how to find the pathologist’s office?” said Homer humbly.

  “Third floor,” barked the receptionist. Whirling around in her chair, she began rattling the keyboard of her computer at high speed.

  “Thank you,” breathed Homer. Rambling down the hall, he found the elevator. The first obstacle had been overcome, if somewhat feebly. The second would be a seven-headed mastiff with a thousand bloodstained teeth.

  The door labeled PATHOLOGY was wide open. Homer walked in and found a medical technician in a white coat riffling through a file drawer. She turned her head in Homer’s direction and raised her eyebrows. With her long golden hair and pink cheeks she didn’t look like a mastiff at all, but Homer was wary.

  “I’d like to see the report of the toxicologist on the death of Thomas Cobb,” said Homer, trying to sound businesslike and bored, as though the matter were strictly ho-hum.

  “Right you are,” said the technician. Briskly she yanked out another file drawer and extracted a folder. But instead of handing it over, she looked at Homer suspiciously. “May I ask your authority for requesting this information?”

  Seven doggy heads had sprouted from her shoulders. Oh Christ, thought Homer. Whisking out his bag of amulets, he produced his old identity card. True, its magic had been discredited by the Cambridge Police Department, but since then he had encased it in plastic. It looked shiny and new.

  Damn the woman, she was holding it under a lamp and examining it closely, while clutching the folder to her breast. When she looked up at him gravely, blood dripped from her seven cavernous jaws. “This card is fifteen years out of date. May I ask if you are still employed by the District Attorney of Middlesex County?”

  Little white lies came easily to Homer’s lips, but outright falsehoods did not, especially one that could be exposed by a simple phone call. “Well, no, but I’ve had considerable experience since then in investigative matters. You might have heard of the explosion in Memorial Hall, for example, or the ax attack in Amher
st? No? What about the body in Gowing’s Swamp? You mean to tell me you never heard of that?” Homer racked his brain for more of his blundering triumphs, while the medical technician looked at him with deep suspicion.

  Then victory fell into his hands. It was one of those sudden miracles that are apt to happen in vision quests upon the arrival of angelic visitants.

  In this case the angels were a couple of cadavers. One arrived from the east, the other from the west. Their gurneys nearly collided in the corridor. The medics accompanying them at once began arguing about which dead body was to be signed in first. In the confusion the golden-haired guardian of the Pathology office left her post and joined the fracas in the hall.

  Left to himself, Homer reached for the autopsy report on the body of Thomas Cobb. Swiftly he leafed through it, and at once found what he was looking for.

  The gums of the deceased, explained the toxicologist, showed a significant blue line. His stomach contained a gummy mixture of chocolate, corn syrup, sugar, soybean oil, milk, cocoa powder, malt, lactose, salt, egg white, peanut butter, and a substantial quantity of arsenate of lead.

  Homer had found his Holy Grail.

  Sarah Bailey was expecting half a dozen of her colleagues for a committee meeting. The costume designer, the music director, the stage manager, the lighting designer, and the sound engineer, they were all coming. They would need chairs to sit on. She raced around the apartment on Maple Avenue, rearranging furniture. She tidied up the sink, swabbed the counter, picked up the books and papers from the floor, swept up the dead leaves under a dying houseplant, and made the bed. Then she dumped the contents of the wastebasket into a plastic bag, and whirled the bag to twist and knot the top. At once she untwisted it again to take a look at the trash.

  What were those little brown papers doing in there? They looked like candy wrappers. They were candy wrappers. Tastychox, the wrappers said. It was that rich, delicious kind of chocolate that Tom Cobb had liked so well.