Shortest Day

by Jane Langton

  “Oh, pooh,” said the supervisor. “Relax, honey. Take a day off. You’re working too hard.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Then woe is me,

  Poor child for thee!

  And ever mourn and say,

  For thy parting

  Nor say nor sing,

  By, by, lullay, lullay!

  “The Coventry Carol”

  After her long night of drowsing in the waiting room of the Intensive Care Unit at Cambridge Hospital, Sarah was still painfully alarmed, and no one had set her mind at ease. She did not go home. Instead she ate breakfast in the Square, then went back to Memorial Hall to work with the Old Master.

  Walt was taking Arlo’s place. No one could be a better substitute, but he had to learn all of Saint George’s lines, and he had to be told where to stand and how to move from place to place. Joan Hill was there to measure him for a new costume and whip it up in a hurry for the Sunday-afternoon performance. Homer Kelly had to leave a student conference a little early, in order to practice the resurrection scene with Walt and the Doctor and the Fool, but of course the student was grateful. She snatched up her notebook and charged out of the building.

  Mary came in as she ran out. The student shouted, “Merry Christmas, Mrs. Kelly,” and Mary laughed and wished her a happy new year.

  Homer looked at his wife soberly. “Any news?”

  She shook her head. “Nobody seems to know.”

  Solemnly they made their way upstairs and pushed through the thick horde of people in the corridor, and entered the great hall. But before Sarah Bailey could start her last-minute rehearsal, another crisis erupted.

  “Hey, Sarah,” said Kevin Barnes, “where’s Morgan?” Kevin was dressed in his white trousers and red sash, and his bells jingled at his knees. In only twenty minutes the Morris men were supposed to go onstage for the first time. From the corridor Sarah could hear the pandemonium of twelve hundred people talking and calling to friends across the hall, and the noise of excited children and then the diminishing of the racket as everyone began pouring into Sanders Theatre.

  Sarah didn’t know where Morgan was. She had been afraid to go home. Her world had burst into fragments, she had found her treasure and lost it, and she was overwhelmed by the sense of continuing tragedy. “Find someone else,” she said quickly. “There must be someone. Hurry, hurry.”

  “Well, Jesus,” said Kevin, “who else is there?” He wandered off, feeling hopeless, but at once he ran into an old friend, Buck Zemowski, and his troubles were over. Buck had been the original Father Christmas before he came down with the flu, before Sarah dragooned Homer Kelly to take his place.

  Grinning, Kevin brought him back to Sarah. “Guess what? We’re in luck. Buck’s the best Morris dancer in Boston.”

  Buck smiled modestly and demonstrated his prowess by leaping into the air and coming down with a crash.

  “Well, that’s wonderful,” said Sarah.

  “Come on, Buck, we’ll get you decked out.”

  As it turned out, Morgan Bailey’s clogs were a trifle small for Buck, but he suffered good-naturedly through the exertions of the afternoon, then went home and soaked his sore feet in a pan of soapy water.

  “Where have you been?” said Morgan.

  Sarah was too tired to make the obvious retort, “Well, where have you been?” She closed the door and went directly to Morgan’s desk and opened the drawer.

  The whetstone was missing. The middle drawer of Morgan’s desk was neat, as usual, with everything in its own space—the sharpened pencils, the drafting tools, the calculator, the rolls of tape, the protractor and triangles, the collection of household tools, the hammer, the pliers, the screwdriver. But the little compartment reserved for Morgan’s whetstone was empty.

  Behind her back she could feel him watching her. Lately he was always watching her, he never took his eyes off her. Sometimes she wanted to scream at him to look at something else. Look at your geese, look at your ducks, look at the great auk. Stop looking at Sarah Bailey.

  “What do you want in my desk?” said Morgan softly.

  Silently Sarah looked at him. Then she turned back to the desk to pick up the ringing phone, aware that Morgan was reaching at the same time for the one that hung on the wall.

  “Mrs. Bailey?”

  “This is Sarah Bailey.”

  “Sergeant Hasty here, Cambridge Police. I wonder if you know anything about a certain letter, which I would like to read to you.”

  Sarah stared at the map of bird migration that hung over Morgan’s desk, while Sergeant Hasty cleared his throat and read the words passed along to him by the pathologist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

  “The first part is in pencil, and it goes like this.” In a monotone Hasty read it aloud—“Darling, Meet me at three o’clock? I love you. And it’s signed, Sarah. And there’s a word at the bottom.” Sergeant Hasty’s voice flattened still further as he read the postscript: “Passionately!”

  Sarah did not turn around, but she could feel Morgan’s eyes on her back. “How—” she began. “I mean, where did the letter come from?”

  “Wait a minute, there’s more. This part is typed—Jeffery, make it tomorrow in the astronomy lab. Now, tell me, Mrs. Bailey, do you know anything about this letter?”

  Yes, of course she knew something about the letter. She knew everything about the letter. It was the note she had written to Morgan last week. And there in front of her on Morgan’s desk was the typewriter with which he must have added the rest. Somehow he had delivered it to Jeffery Peck, and then he had met Jeffery in the Science Center and tossed him over the railing.

  “Mrs. Bailey, are you still there?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m here.” Dizzily Sarah leaned on the desk as everything fell into place, revelation beyond revelation, the waters opening to expose the drowned sailors at the bottom of the sea. Henry Shady and the murdering wheels of Morgan’s car, Tom Cobb and the candy wrappers in the wastebasket, Jeffery Peck and the letter that summoned him to his death, Arlo Field and the whetstone that sharpened Morgan’s sword.

  “Mrs. Bailey?”

  Sarah was afraid. She put her hand on her belly and begged her son, her daughter, to help her now, but the baby lay still. Carefully she put down the phone and turned around. “Morgan, I have to go now.”

  Morgan dropped the other phone, letting it dangle on its rubber cord and bump against the wall. He had barely heard the voice of Sergeant Hasty. He had not been paying attention. He smiled at Sarah, because at last he had uncovered the core of his torment, and it was a blessed discovery. There would never be any end to the marauders, that was what he knew now—never in all future time. Only when there was nothing to take from him, nothing to deprive him of, would he be at rest. “All right, then,” he said, “go.” He was making a strange noise in his throat.

  Hastily Sarah snatched up her bag. With a farewell glance at Morgan, she opened the door, hurried down the stairs, and slipped out into the night.

  Behind her, moving swiftly half a block behind, Morgan stalked her, hissing, stretching out his neck, arching his powerful wings.

  CHAPTER 40

  KING. Hello! Hello! What’s the matter here?

  CLOWN. A man dead!

  KING. I fear you have killed him.

  CLOWN. No! He has nearly killed me!

  Traditional British Mummers’ Play

  In obedience to the command of Arlo Field, croaked at her from his hospital bed, Chickie Pickett called Homer Kelly and told him about the two men in the foreground of Arlo’s picture of the forty-four suns in the sky. “It’s Jeffery Peck, all right,” said Chickie, “and the other guy is Morgan Bailey.”

  “My God, are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Morgan and Sarah live upstairs from me. I see them every day.”

  “But that means—Jesus! Well, thank you, Ms. Pickett. That’s a big help.”

  It was December twenty-fourth, Christmas Eve. Homer put down the phone, passed along
Chickie’s stunning news to Mary, and sat down to dinner—a sirloin steak, hot and rare on a heated plate, a baked potato, and a large helping of out-of-season asparagus.

  Mary stared at him in horror, and threw her napkin on the table. “Morgan Bailey!” She leaped up from her chair. “But that means he’s responsible for the other things too, for poisoning Tom Cobb and trying to kill Arlo Field.”

  “Well, maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t. Hey, what are you doing? Where are you going?”

  Mary hauled on her coat, snatched Homer’s parka off its hooks, and dumped it in his lap. “It’s Morgan’s jealousy, haven’t you seen it? He’s obsessive about Sarah. He’s dangerous, Homer.” Mary’s amateur psychoanalytic diagnosis of Morgan Bailey was turning out to be right, she had been right all along. She dragged Homer out of his chair.

  Homer felt like whimpering, “It’s Christmas Eve,” but he put on his coat and stumbled after Mary down the icy porch steps. “Where the hell do they live?”

  “On Maple Avenue.” Mary lunged at her car and flung open the door. “It’s near Inman Square. I went there once last fall, on the bus, but we can park on the street, somewhere, anywhere, legal or illegal, who cares?”

  “My wife, the notorious desperado,” whined Homer, ducking in on the other side of the car and whacking his head on the roof.

  Mary had never made the trip to Cambridge in less than twenty-five minutes. This time it took nineteen. “Here,” she said, “this fireplug will do nicely.” She swooped into a forbidden space on Cambridge Street, and turned off the engine.

  “My God, woman, you’re sticking out into the street.”

  “Oh, come on, Homer. Don’t be such a fusspot.”

  Recklessly Mary climbed a snowbank. Homer jumped out of the car, wallowed around the fireplug, and galloped after her in the direction of Maple Avenue.

  “Wait,” said Homer, “isn’t that—?”

  Mary stopped in her tracks. “It’s Sarah. And he’s there too. Look, Homer, it’s Morgan.”

  It was exactly like the first time, like the day when Mary had seen Morgan secretly following Sarah along the same sidewalk. Now Sarah was hurrying, picking her way swiftly along the path where the snow had been cleared, her footsteps loud in the deserted street, while Morgan followed silently behind her. He was walking faster, coming closer, catching up.

  Homer and Mary stood behind a tall stand of bushes and watched Sarah stop on the curb to cross to the other side. She was waiting for the heavy truck that lumbered toward her, heading for Somerville.

  The hair on the back of Homer’s neck stood on end. “What the hell is he doing?”

  Morgan was racing at his wife, his neck outstretched, a hissing sound coming from his throat, his arms spread wide, his coattails flapping. He rushed at Sarah and threw out his arms to shove her into the path of the truck. By a violent effort Homer reached her first and snatched her out of the way.

  Morgan’s momentum drove him forward. The driver of the truck cursed and slammed on his brakes, but he was too late. Morgan Bailey lay in the street with crushed beak and broken neck and shattered wings, his obsession dying with him, his torment at an end.

  CHAPTER 41

  In a manger laid and wrapped I was,

  So very poor, this was my chance—

  Betwixt an ox and a silly poor ass,

  To call my true love to the dance.

  Carol, “My Dancing Day”

  Harvard University was still in a quandary. The death of old Maggody was the breaking point. It brought matters severely to a head. The poor old man had crept to the very door of Harvard’s Vice-President for Government and Community Affairs, and in his extremity he had knocked, and he had not been let in. He had frozen to death on the doorstep only three days before Christmas. It looked bad, very bad indeed.

  Worse still, one of the homeless women from Nifto’s insane tent city had holed up in Henshaw’s garage, hugely swollen, ready to give birth. A few hours later her child was born in Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital, a howling baby boy.

  It was a perfect Christmas story, full of pathos and righteous indignation. NO ROOM AT THE INN, proclaimed the Cambridge Chronicle. NO ROOM AT THE INN, repeated the Boston Globe and The New York Times. Gretchen’s baby was famous, and the Boston Herald named Harvard its Scrooge of the Year.

  After Christmas, the story would have died, if a single representative of the press had not gone back to Saint Elizabeth’s, hoping to eke out a piece on the status of homeless single moms.

  Her questions soon petered out, because Gretchen didn’t think of herself as a homeless single mom. She was more like a lost princess. Her responses didn’t make much sense. The woman from the Cambridge Chronicle put away her notebook and asked a random question. “You didn’t happen to see Mr. Maggody, did you, when he dragged himself to the door of Henshaw’s house?”

  “Well, no,” said Gretchen. “Well, like I guess I did, sort of. I saw Palmer carrying him. Well, I mean, he was carrying somebody, and I guess it was Maggody.” The news-woman took her notebook out again. “Palmer? You mean Palmer Nifto? Palmer Nifto brought Maggody there? You mean Maggody was already dead, and Nifto brought him to Henshaw’s front door?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess so. Like, well, he was carrying him sort of over his shoulder, and then he put him down on the porch.”

  “You saw all this from the garage?”

  “Oh, right. There’s this window. You can see the front door through the window.”

  Gretchen had no idea she was betraying the clever manipulations of Palmer Nifto. She cuddled her homely baby and knitted him a sweater, and made up her mind not to turn him over to the Department of Social Services.

  For Palmer it was a final stroke of ill luck. It had been bad enough when the uproar caused by the death of Maggody was displaced in the public mind by shock over the death of Jeffery Peck and the attack on Arlo Field. But this was worse. Now that everybody knew Palmer Nifto had picked up a corpse and moved it in order to blacken the good name of Harvard University, Maggody was back in the headlines with a vengeance, and so was Palmer Nifto. And there was an even grimmer question. What if Nifto himself had put the old man out in the snow to freeze to deaths? Palmer’s goose was cooked.

  In the highest counsels of Harvard Yard it was the juiciest bit of news, a morsel of Christmas pudding. As Palmer’s stock went down, Harvard’s went up.

  Ellery Beaver laughed so hard he could hardly relay the news to the General Counsel on the phone. Of course the General Counsel was delighted, and so was the Dean of Faculty. They all agreed that the old man’s death was a shame, but at least it had not happened on the premises of the Vice-President for Government and Community Affairs. The craven exploitation of the old man’s death by Palmer Nifto made him a laughingstock. His outrageous demand for a piece of Harvard real estate lost all credibility.

  On the twenty-seventh of December, while Sanders Theatre resounded with the Wednesday-afternoon performance of the Christmas Revels, the Dean and the General Counsel and Ellery Beaver met for a late lunch in the Faculty Club to consider their options.

  “We simply ignore Nifto,” said Ellery.

  “Exactly,” agreed the Dean. “We don’t have to dignify the man with seminars and teach-ins and all that sort of thing.”

  “And we certainly don’t transfer any Harvard real estate,” said the General Counsel. “After all, Nifto has put himself completely out of the picture.”

  The General Counsel leaned forward with a shrewd suggestion. “Here’s my idea. We negotiate through a third party, not with Nifto. Some highly respected and impeccable person outside the university chooses a charitable agency to which the university would then contribute funds.”

  “An already existing agency,” suggested the Dean of Faculty, nodding and smiling. The Dean was a humane man who contributed privately to a number of charitable organizations, and he had names on the tip of his tongue. “The Greater Boston Food Bank, the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless, Sh
elter Incorporated? Something of that sort?”

  “The charm of it is,” said the General Counsel, “we simply ignore Nifto. He’ll be left high and dry.”

  They finished their coffee and gathered up their coats. As they moved toward the door, the Dean of Faculty murmured in Ellery Beaver’s ear, “What exactly is the state of your chief?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know,” said Ellery, his voice deepening with sorrow. “He hasn’t shown up in the office since Nifto dropped the old codger on his doorstep. I don’t know what the hell’s going on.”

  CHAPTER 42

  Ye winged seraphs, fly! Bear the news!

  Ye winged seraphs, fly, like comets through the sky,

  Fill vast eternity with the news, with the news,

  Fill vast eternity with the news!

  American folk hymn, “Wondrous Love”

  Gretchen Milligan’s baby was five days old when the supernova in the constellation Sagittarius was discovered, like an outrageously exaggerated star of Bethlehem.

  It was Arlo Field’s discovery. Of course, Arlo didn’t know a supernova was waiting for him when he argued his way out of the hospital and walked straight down Cambridge Street to the Science Center and took the elevator to the astronomy lab on the eighth floor.

  He felt fine. There was a thick bandage on his neck, and he had a bunch of pills to take, but he felt strong enough to work. He wanted to get on with his studies of reversing solar oscillations before he was fired.

  And he wanted to see Sarah. He was confused about Sarah. Her husband was dead, he knew that, and it had been Morgan’s sword that had landed Arlo in the hospital. And Morgan was responsible for the deaths of all those other guys. What did it mean for Sarah? Was she all right? She had not come to see him in the hospital, not once. Not even once.