Shortest Day

by Jane Langton

  Polite Cambridge type in Eddie Bauer padded vest (mail-order credit-card classic): “Oh, sorry, but I think that’s my seat. Look, my ticket says D4.”

  Bob Chumley in Morgan Memorial mackinaw, la Mode Hobo: “Well, Jesus, you’re late, like I thought it would be okay.”

  For some of the smaller children it was their first theatrical experience. They were squealing and crawling over their parents, unaware that the dark hollow stage was about to be transformed into a place of magic.

  Even for the adults it was pleasant to be embraced by the warm enclosing space, to breathe the golden air and admire the playfulness of the architecture and enjoy the nineteenth-century atmosphere of tawny wood and cast-iron column. Who had thickened it but eminences from the past, like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Eliot Norton and Winston Churchill and Professor John Finley and T. S. Eliot, speaking from the stage, standing between the stone figures of James Otis and Josiah Quincy at either side?

  Otis and Quincy were still there, pale as milk in their Carrara marble, looking impassively down, while the squinting animal faces above the stage stared outward at the mezzanine. At the back of the stage the painted Harvard coat of arms declared the virtue of VERITAS, and high above, only dimly visible, were a thousand square feet of Latin inscriptions. The sumptuous words had been meant to inspire the young with the generosity of the forefathers in erecting this building for the cultivation of the highest arts and the instruction of succeeding generations.

  Well, here they were, the succeeding ages, waiting to be entertained, eager only for the bright revelry to come, unconscious of any call to generosity and sacrifice.

  It was Arlo Field who provided the sacrifice. After the jolly horn prelude and the processional entry of the chorus singing its way down the aisles, after Walt’s invitation to everyone to join in “The First Nowell,” after the Morris men performed their stick dance—with Kevin Barnes filling in again for Jeffery Peck—after the children’s street games and the ceremonial parade with the boar’s head, after Saint George’s mock battle with the dragon and the second entry of the Morris men—after all these festive rites were over, it was Arlo’s turn to enter the mystic center of the sword dance and become the symbolic victim—like Dr. Box’s Adonis, whose bones were ground in a mill, and Osiris, who was killed and revived with the growing wheat, and John Barleycorn, who was crushed between two stones.

  While the concertina played its merry tune, the Morris dancers raised their swords and executed their intricate figures and tramped around Saint George. Once more they wove their steely web around him, and then—snick!—the swords were snatched away, and light flashed along the edge of one blue blade, and Arlo fell with blood streaming from his throat.

  CHAPTER 36

  Out of children eleven I’ve got but seven

  And they be started up to heaven,

  Out of the seven I’ve got but five,

  And they be starved to death alive;

  Out of the five I’ve got but three,

  And they be popped behind a tree;

  Out of the three I’ve got but one,

  And he got around behind the sun.

  Traditional British Mummers’ Play

  Hastily, silently, in a hush of horror, they picked up Arlo and carried him offstage. The audience was silent too, awestruck and bewildered. What had happened? For a moment the stage was empty, and then Walt came forward and explained. His face was white.

  “There’s been an accident. I’m afraid we’ll have to cancel the rest of the performance.”

  There was a general groan. Walt held up his hands. “There’ll be an extra performance on the thirtieth of December. Substitute tickets will be handed out at the doors as you leave.”

  Disappointed men and women rose from their seats, children whimpered, twelve hundred people poured into the memorial corridor. What happened? Someone was hurt. It was those goddamn swords, my God!

  There was chaos at the ticket desk. The new date’s no good, we’ll be away, so may we come tomorrow? At the other end of the corridor there was a blockage, where a pair of medical technicians eased a stretcher out the door.

  In the great hall Homer Kelly blew his stack. “Who the hell?” he bellowed. “Who the hell was holding the goddamned bloody sword?” Because there it was, piled up with the rest on the table, its razor edge gleaming, Arlo Field’s blood dripping off it like the blood of a chicken from a kitchen knife.

  The Morris men didn’t know. In their consternation at the sight of Arlo lying on the floor with his throat cut, they had dropped their swords in horror.

  In his jolly red Father Christmas robe, Homer thundered at them, “My God, you were all wearing gloves? Why the hell were you wearing gloves?”

  They looked at each other sheepishly, and Bill Foose spoke up. “It’s Joan. She does the costumes. She said gloves and red sashes. Green baldrics. You know.”

  For a moment Homer stared at the six of them, facing him in a row. Then Sarah Bailey joined them. Her face was red and swollen. She had been sobbing her heart out in the ladies’ room at the bottom of the steep stairway beside Sanders Theatre.

  “Well, tell me,” said Homer, “could it have been an accident?” Avoiding the bloody sword, he picked up one of the others. “All the rest have dull edges. They’re not meant to be sharp, are they?” Homer turned to Morgan Bailey. “What would you do if you wanted to sharpen it? Use some kind of knife-sharpener?”

  Morgan shrugged uneasily, and Kevin Barnes answered instead. “If it was me, I’d use a whetstone.” He made a scraping gesture to show what he meant. “You just run it along the edge like this. Then you turn the sword over and do the other side.”

  Bernard Fox looked doubtful. “It would take you a while.”

  “Sure, but it would work.”

  Bernard looked at Homer darkly. “I suppose you think it was one of us, rights? I mean, you used to be this big detective, isn’t that rights”

  Homer flapped his hands. “I don’t know what the hell I think. After all, somebody else could have sharpened the sword beforehand, and then one of you just picked it up and—”

  “But you wouldn’t be able to, you know, cut his throat with it,” said Kevin, demonstrating, holding his neck, “unless you really meant to do it. You know, unless you really, like, slashed at him with what-do-you-call-it, malice aforethought.”

  Homer grimaced and changed the subject. “Now, listen. I hate to be the one to mention it, but this makes four—four people hurt—or worse—during this year’s Revels. The police aren’t going to think it’s a coincidence. Henry Shady was killed in a traffic accident. Jeffery Peck died in a fall at the Science Center. Twenty-two witnesses saw him strike the glass roof of the cafeteria at two minutes after three o’clock yesterday afternoon. I’m sure the police will want to know what each of you was doing at the time.” Homer hauled up his red robe and pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. It was a list of sources for arsenate of lead. “Tom Cobb died after eating a candy bar into which arsenate of lead had been injected. Tell me, do any of you work with stained glass?”

  They looked at him blankly.

  “Or battery plates?” said Homer. “No? Ammunition? Metal roof sheeting? Lead-paint removal?”

  Shuddering, Sarah moved away and went looking for Walt, the Old Master, to ask him to take Arlo’s place as Saint George. But she couldn’t pull herself together. She found Mary Kelly instead and fell weeping on her shoulder.

  “I know,” said Mary. And of course she did know. She had guessed that a heavy connection had been building up between Arlo and Sarah. No wonder Sarah couldn’t stop crying.

  But Mary didn’t know the other reason. It was something Sarah had remembered about Morgan—he kept a whetstone in his desk drawer. It was just a rectangle of hard gray stone for keeping the knives sharp, so they would cut cleanly, making delicate slices of cucumbers and tomatoes, slitting the meat of a chicken away from the bone, or slicing open the bodies of Mor
gan’s specimen waterfowl.

  The whetstone that had sharpened the sword that had cut Arlo’s throat was Morgan’s own. He had killed Henry Shady and Tom Cobb and Jeffery Peck. Sarah’s doubts were gone forever.

  CHAPTER 37

  Then on the cross hanged I was,

  Where a spear to my heart did glance;

  There issued forth both water and blood,

  To call my true love to the dance.

  Carol, “My Dancing Day”

  It was a routine case of hypothermia. The pathologist at Massachusetts General Hospital looked dispassionately at the thawing body of Albert Maggody lying on his metal table. There was nothing exceptional about it at all. It was the cadaver of an aged African-American male exposed to conditions of extreme cold by the criminal carelessness of the city of Cambridge and Harvard University, and most likely God.

  “Undress him, will you?” he said to his assistant, turning away to collect his instruments.

  “Certainly,” said the assistant. One by one she removed Maggody’s cracked shoes and his worn socks, trousers, and underwear. Then she unbuttoned his sweater. As she pulled the sleeve over the closed fist of his right hand, something fell out and fluttered to the floor. It was a piece of paper wrinkled into a ball.

  The assistant picked it up and tossed it in the wastebasket. “No, wait, let me see it,” said the pathologist.

  Clucking her tongue, she picked up the wadded piece of paper and handed it to him. He pulled it open and read it silently. The first part was in pencil—

  Darling,

  Meet me at three o’clock?

  I love you.*

  Sarah

  *Passionately!

  The second part had been added with a typewriter—

  JEFFERY, MAKE IT TOMORROW

  IN THE ASTRONOMY LAB.

  Puzzled, he looked up at his assistant. “The cadaver in the next room, what’s his name? It’s Jeffery, isn’t it? Jeffery with an ‘e’ in the wrong place? What’s this old geezer doing with a letter addressed to Jeffery?”

  The assistant shrugged her shoulders. “Only connection I can see, they both came over from Cambridge Hospital.”

  “Right, the same hospital. And they must have died within an hour or two of each other. And the Cambridge Common, where this old guy froze to death, isn’t far from the Science Center, where the other guy fell and broke his neck. A stone’s throw away, so to speak.”

  “My, my, aren’t we the great detective this morning? What else do you deduce, Mr. Holmes?”

  “Oh, hell, it’s nothing to me.” The pathologist pocketed the piece of paper, then inserted his knife in Maggody’s torso and slit it open with a single stroke. “Just a couple more Christmas cadavers.”

  But as he worked, he made up his mind to call the Cambridge Police. They might just possibly be interested in the coincidence about the letter.

  PART SIX

  THE DOCTOR

  A doctor! a doctor!

  Is there a doctor to be found

  Can quickly raise my noble son

  Lies bleeding on the ground?

  Saint George and the Dragon

  CHAPTER 38

  Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain,

  Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain;

  Love lives again, that with the dead has been.…

  Carol, “Love Is Come Again”

  Kevin Barnes and Chickie Pickett were having lunch in the Greenhouse, the Science Center cafeteria, which had started serving meals again. The smashed glass roof had been covered with plywood. The cashier had done her best to cheer the place up by fastening a small aluminum Christmas tree to the top of her cash register. Her earrings were tiny Christmas balls.

  “How is he?” said Chickie, dabbing at her eyes.

  Kevin made a this way, that way gesture with his hand. “It’s touch-and-go. Sarah spent the night in the waiting room of the Intensive Care Unit. She says they just shake their heads whenever she asks how he is.”

  “Oh,” sobbed Chickie, “he can’t die, he just can’t.”

  “What’s the matter?” said Kevin. “You like him better than me?”

  Chickie knew he was just kidding. She gave him an affectionate poke, teetered off on her high heels to the elevator, and ascended to the astronomy lab on the eighth floor.

  Harley Finch was there, bumbling about. “Too bad about the analemma,” he said, sounding a little smug.

  “Too bad?”

  “There’s a big blot on the negative. See for yourself. He left it drying in the darkroom. One of his last acts,” added Harley, with mortuary relish.

  Chickie hurried into the darkroom, turned on the lamp, plucked the negative from the drying line, and held it up to the light. Oh, shit, Harley was right. The suns were there, and the tower of Mem Hall, but there was a big white blotch on the bottom of the film.

  Wait a minute. Chickie stared at the blotch. It wasn’t altogether formless. She snapped off the darkroom light, laid the negative in the holder on the enlarger stand, slipped a sheet of photographic paper out of an envelope, and adjusted the focus to form an image. Patiently she counted twenty seconds. At last she snatched up the paper and slid it into a pan of developer. Bending over the pan she watched the image darken, and suppressed a squeal of surprise.

  The blotch was not a blotch. It was a couple of men on the terrace, and one was heaving the other up on the railing. The two men were a little out of focus, but there was no mistaking who they were.

  In Cambridge Hospital, Dr. Box asked the whereabouts of the Intensive Care Unit, then took the elevator to the fourth floor. There she was interrogated by the woman at the reception desk.

  “You wish to see Mr. Fields? Only family visitors are allowed. He has seen his mother, and no one else.” The receptionist made a face. Arlo’s mother had been a disaster. “Are you a relative?”

  “I am his great-aunt,” lied Dr. Box, gripping the straps of her briefcases.

  “Well, you can wait in the hall if you like. He’s in Compartment C. The nurse may let you in, but then again, she may not.”

  Dr. Box hurried down the hall and looked through the window of Compartment C.

  Ah! There was the boy, flat on his back. His eyes were closed. He was white and still. There were tubes going in and out of him and padded bandages around his neck.

  Dr. Box knocked on the window and raised her eyebrows at the nurse, who was hanging a bottle of red liquid on a hook and fastening it into a plastic hose.

  The nurse looked at her, distraught, and shook her head, but Dr. Box wasn’t having any of that. She knocked again, rat-a-tat-tat.

  Impatiently the nurse came to the door, opened it a crack, and said, “He can’t see anyone. He’s lost a lot of blood. He’s very ill.”

  “But I am his great-aunt.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the nurse, and shut the door.

  Dr. Box did not withdraw. She pressed her nose against the window and watched the nurse’s every move. At last, with a Get lost gesture at Dr. Box, the nurse hurried off to care for another patient.

  At once Dr. Box opened the door and nipped inside the compartment. Reaching into one of the bags dangling from her shoulders, she extracted a sprig of holly and approached Arlo’s bedside. Gently she laid it on the white sheet over his chest. Then, smiling to herself, she closed her bag and went away.

  Arlo opened his eyes.

  The overworked intensive-care nurse was thoroughly disgusted. The mother of the man whose life they were trying to save had almost killed him by throwing her arms around his neck and starting a small hemorrhage. Then there had been the tired-looking young woman who had spent the entire night in the waiting room, but at least she had shown the courtesy of not trying to push her way in, like the madwoman in the purple hat. Now here was this ridiculous girl in the fuzzy fake-fur coat pounding on the glass, shaking a big envelope, and demanding to be let in.

  Heaving a sigh, the nurse put her head out the door and said, �
�What are you, his second cousin once removed?”

  “What?” Chickie Pickett flapped her envelope at the nurse. “He’s got to see!”

  “I’m sorry,” said the nurse sarcastically, “but he can’t see anything. He just happens to be fighting for his life.”

  But Arlo lifted his head and croaked at Chickie, “Show me!”

  “Oh, the analemma’s there, all right,” cried Chickie, pushing past the nurse. “Like it looks just great. But there’s this other stuff going on. Look.” She pulled out the print she had made from Arlo’s negative. It was still damp, but the picture was sharp and clear, the bright suns in the dark sky, the sunlit tower of Memorial Hall, and the violent action in the foreground. “It’s two guys, two guys fighting up there on the porch—you know, the terrace. It’s Morgan Bailey, and he’s pushing Jeffery Peck over the railing. Sarah’s husband, he killed Jeffery Peck! It’s right here!”

  Arlo focused his eyes on the print for a moment, then dropped his head back and closed his eyes.

  “You see?” said the nurse. “I told you. Please leave at once.”

  But Arlo lifted his head again, and whispered, “Homer, call Homer Kelly.”

  “Homer Kelly? You mean that big guy with, like”—Chickie waggled her fingers excitedly under her chin—“whiskers?”

  Arlo summoned a last effort from his vocal cords and wheezed. “Concord, he lives in Concord,” then dropped his head again and closed his eyes.

  Chickie leaned her furry bosom over him and kissed him while the furious nurse tugged at her coat.

  Afterward the nurse went straight to her supervisor and demanded that visitors to Intensive Care be screened more thoroughly. “What about making them fill out a questionnaire? I mean—God!—I’m supposed to be responsible for saving these people’s lives, and you should just see what goes on around here.”