by Jane Langton
“What makes you so sure he was there when Mr. Heron died?” said Homer. “As far as we know, Edward Heron was alone when he had that attack. He could have got that bruise on his forehead by falling on the stone wall in a paroxysm of gasping for breath.”
“It was the yellow jackets, Uncle Homer. Remember, I told you there were yellow jackets there? I think Buddy was just finishing the job of moving the last stones, when by mistake he picked up this stone with a yellow jacket nest under it. And it was just at that moment that Mr. Heron came along and said, ‘What are you doing here?’ and Buddy threw the rock at him and knocked him down, and then Mr. Heron was so disturbed and hurt that his asthma was excited, and he began to cough and wheeze and gasp for breath.”
“But you don’t have any proof that Buddy was there when Edward died. You’re just making that stuff up.”
“No, I’m not. Buddy was already stung himself when he came along the first time that day and asked to see Mr. Heron. He didn’t get these stings later on, when he pretended to be going to find him.” John’s eyes were focused inward on a memory of Buddy bending over a honeysuckle stump, his red neck exposed, inflamed with scarlet welts. “I didn’t think of it until the other day, and then I realized he must have been there in the orchard before Mr. Heron died, right there with him beside that broken nest. They both got stung at the same time.”
“What about Mr. Heron’s medicine?” said Homer sharply. “What happened to that?”
“Buddy took it away from him.” John waved his arms. “You see? That explains what happened to it. Buddy grabbed it away, so Mr. Heron couldn’t save himself, and then Buddy just stood back and watched him die.”
Homer strummed his lower lip thoughtfully with a forefinger and gazed at his nephew. “And the third thing?” he said solemnly. “What about the third thing?”
“Well, the third thing is that Buddy tried to kill me with a black widow spider. There was this black widow in my collection all of a sudden, only I never put it there. And then I did a really stupid thing. Oh, never mind the stupid thing.” John waved his hands in dismissal of the stupid thing. “The point is, Buddy put it there.”
“But where would Buddy get a black widow spider?” said Homer. “What makes you think it was his doing?”
“Well, who else would it have been? And anybody can order one through the mail. It’s easy. I’ve got this catalogue.”
There was a pause. Homer and John looked up as Mary came out of the house and lifted Benny into his wading pool. “Oh, Homer, you’ve got to take his picture,” said Mary. “Wouldn’t that be a cunning picture to send to Gwen, Benny splashing in the water?”
“Good God, not now,” said Homer, staring balefully at his small nephew, who was jumping up and down in the water and shrieking, “THE SKY IS FALLING, SAID HENNY PENNY! THE SKY IS FALLING, SAID TURKEY LURKEY! THE SKY IS FALLING, SAID DUCKY LUCKY!”
“That’s right, dear,” murmured Mary. “Have a good time.” She smiled at John and settled down in a lawn chair beside the pool, as Benny tossed a bucket of water into the air and shouted, “THE SKY IS FALLING ON YOUR HEAD! LOOK OUT BELOW!”
Homer closed his eyes, wiped his hand across his face, and turned back to John. “You said anybody can order a black widow spider through the mail? That’s interesting. I didn’t know that.” Homer leaned back in his chair and gazed into space, remembering an encounter in front of the dime store on Walden Street, and Buddy Whipple rushing away around the corner, and Benny’s crazy story about a box of worms. And that piece of paper that had fallen from Buddy’s pocket —
Homer sat up and looked at John. “You live in the same house with Buddy Whipple. Tell me, does he have asthma?”
John looked blank. “Asthma? Buddy Whipple? Not so far as I know.”
Homer sighed. “That’s what Barbara says too. She says she never saw anybody with healthier lungs. Then what the hell was Buddy doing with a prescription for epinephrin? You know, the same stuff Edward Heron was supposed to have been carrying with him on the day he died, only he wasn’t.”
John made a puzzled face and shrugged his shoulders.
Homer waved his hand in helpless resignation and fell back in his chair. “You know, John, I’m slow. I know I’m slow. That story you told me about Fabre — what’s his name? Jean Henri Fabre. You know, when he was a little boy, that experiment he did, opening his mouth and closing his eyes to find out how he saw the sun in the sky? Well, I’ve had my stupid mouth open all the time, and my eyes closed. But even imbeciles like me catch on at last and see the light. Buddy Whipple moved the stone wall to get himself another little slice of real estate. He let Edward Heron die without lifting a finger to help him. He tried to do you in with a black widow spider. And he’s got some kind of strangle-hold on Virginia Heron. But what is it? What the hell is on his mind? Something nasty, you can be sure of that. Something big. Something to do with land. I don’t like it at all.”
“I know who we should talk to,” said John, jumping up impulsively. “William Warren, over there in the Lincoln town hall. He knows everything there is to know about local real estate.”
“Good,” said Homer, standing up grimly. At the same instant his nephew Benny, transported by the apocalytic melodrama of his nursery saga, leaped out of the wading pool, raced across the lawn and tossed a whole bucketful of water at his uncle, screeching that the sky was falling, the whole sky, along with the sun and moon and planets and asteroids and meteorites and comets and red giants and white dwarfs and black holes and galaxies and all the rest of the expanding and contracting universe, the whole entire SKYYYYYYYYYYYYYY.
Forty-Two
AS HOMER AND JOHN DROVE ACROSS ROUTE 2 THE HEAVENS opened. It began to pour.
“The sky is falling, all right,” said Homer peevishly, turning on the windshield wipers. “Damn little kid. It’s all his doing.”
“Wow,” said John, watching the rain sheet across the glass. “I can’t believe it. It must be raining in the vegetable garden and the front yard and the back yard all at once. I mean the rain doesn’t take turns, the way we have to do with the sprinklers. Isn’t that great!”
“Hold it,” said Homer, as they pulled up in front of the Lincoln town hall. “I’ve got a busted umbrella in the trunk.” Homer’s umbrella was mildewed and one of its ribs had collapsed, but it shielded them from the drenching downpour as they made their way into the town hall. In the lobby they were greeted by an extraordinary flower arrangement beside the water fountain, a staccato composition of dried pulque pods from Mexico, a contorted branch of diseased locust, and three defoliated branches of the fried-egg tree, on a bed of smashed Coca Cola bottles. A kinked rusty wire meandered toward the ceiling.
Homer glanced at the flower arrangement, then averted his eyes hastily. “What are we going to say to him?” he muttered to John, putting down his dripping umbrella on the floor.
“I don’t know, Uncle Homer. You’re supposed to be the big lieutenant detective. Haven’t you got a right to go in and ask questions?”
“Well, for Christ’s sake, I’m not anything official anymore. You know that.”
The door to the selectmen’s office opened as they stared at it doubtfully. “Well, good morning, John,” said William Warren, smiling at him warmly. “Come on in. What’s on your mind? And this is your Uncle Homer, if I’m not mistaken. How do you do, Professor Kelly? I’ve got a book you wrote.”
Homer was flattered. “You do?” he said, beaming.
“Yes. And I want to talk to you about it some time. You made a mistake, I think. You said Thoreau built his house with boards and nails from an Irishman’s shanty. That’s right about the boards. But somebody stole the nails. He had to buy a lot of extra nails.”
“Oh,” said Homer, crestfallen. “Well, thank you. I guess the whole thing is one big mess of boners.”
“Oh, no. Some parts of it were quite good, I thought. Now, what is it you two want to see me about?”
“Well,” said Homer, “we
just wondered if we could take a look at your maps. You know, the maps of property holdings in the town.”
“Well, certainly. Which ones, precisely, would you like to see?”
“Which ones?” Homer looked at John. “The Heron place, I guess. And the Whipple property next door.”
William Warren looked at Homer soberly, then reached for one of the giant black books that lay on his long table and hefted it in his arms and laid it on top of the others. “Here you are,” he said, opening it to the right page. “Actually, there’s a slight error on this map. At least so I’ve been told.” William’s voice was dry, his face expressionless. “This property line right here is too far to the east by several hundred yards. This stone wall boundary right here. Buddy Whipple claims the old survey was incorrect. And I guess he’s right. I checked it myself with a theodolite the other day, from Baker Bridge Road. There’s no stone wall at all along the boundary line shown here.”
John nudged Homer’s elbow. “That’s the one. That’s the stone wall we were talking about. See? What did I tell you?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, Mr. Warren,” said Homer, “my nephew thinks the stone wall has been moved.”
“Moved?”
“Stone by stone. Somebody picked it up and moved it farther to the west. There are chalk marks on the stones, numbers, so they could be picked up and put down again someplace else in the right order.”
William Warren stared at Homer. His grave face became graver. He looked at John. “I should think, in that case, you could see a bare strip of ground where the stone wall was moved from.”
“But he plowed it all up,” said John. “Buddy did, I mean. He got in there right away with a tractor and a rotary mower, and chopped down all the wild growth and plowed it under and planted stuff. So you can’t see any bare ground there anymore at all.”
“I see.” William pursed up his mouth and frowned. Then he glanced out the window at the rain. “I usually take a little coffee break about this time of day. Would you like to join me? I generally take my thermos outdoors and sit under the trees in the middle of the afternoon.”
“Well, certainly,” said Homer. “Of course, it’s raining cats and dogs, but who would mind a little thing like that?”
Behind the town hall an old cemetery sloped down the hill. Huge slate tombstones leaned at gloomy angles. Homer’s umbrella was only big enough for two ordinary-sized human beings. Heroically he sat outside its perimeter of protection and leaned against one of the gravestones. Rain poured down upon his head, plastering his hair to his forehead, drenching his eyelashes, running in rivulets into his mouth.
William was proud of the cemetery. “This stone was erected in honor of Eleazer Brooks,” he said, “good Lincoln farmer, soldier and statesman. Move over, Homer, and you’ll be able to read the inscription. Ah, here’s my coffee. We can take turns with the cup.”
Out-of-doors in the pouring rain, physically removed from the professional chamber where he conducted the business of the town, William Warren was hospitable and talkative. On official premises there were things one preferred not to discuss. One’s office was a place of stern ethical principles. But under the trees in the open air William was his own man. “It just so happens,” he said, taking a bulky folded map from inside his raincoat, “that I’ve noticed a couple of funny things myself.” With difficulty he unfolded the map. John held one end high under the dry circle of the umbrella. “Look here, this small-scale map shows the northwest end of town. See there, that’s the Heron place. There’s Buddy’s house up the hill, right next door. Here on the other side is Mrs. Bewley’s place, and then we have a piece of back land Buddy picked up at auction this summer. Then you get Randall Jones, only he just sold this strip of his property to Buddy. Then Knickerbocker — well, I guess Henry Knickerbocker still owns all of his place. Then a couple more parcels of back land that just happen to belong to Buddy Whipple. He bought them outright from their former owners this summer. What I want to know is, what does he want all that back land for? He can’t do anything with it. He can’t build on it, or anything. The parcels are all too small, even if they had frontage, which most of them don’t.”
Homer poked his dripping head under the umbrella and tried to see what William was pointing at. “Where?” he said. “Where, where? Show me.”
“Right here, Uncle Homer.” John ran his finger along a curving line. “This is what he’s talking about. I see what you mean, Mr. Warren. It’s a long narrow piece, all more or less connected, except for Mrs. Bewley’s house and that scrap of land that belongs to Henry Knickerbocker. Is that it? What could he do with a long strip like that?”
“Goddamnit anyway,” said Homer, craning his neck, pawing at the map. “I can’t see a damn thing. Oh, Jesus, there goes my coffee all over northwest Lincoln. Sorry, William. Here, we might as well hold the map out under the rain and wash it off. Is this what you’re talking about? You mean, this strip right here?” Homer stared at the map. “But it isn’t a strip unless Bewley and Knickerbocker give up their parcels, is it? And of course Buddy’s own little connecting strip doesn’t even belong to him, if what John says about that stone wall is correct. Of course —” Homer flicked a sidelong glance at John, “— he might be able to persuade the Heron girls to give him the piece anyhow.”
“Never,” murmured John.
“Well, just suppose, for the sake of argument,” said William, “that Buddy Whipple succeeded in gaining ownership of the entire strip. Then do you see what it would look like?”
“A long skinny piece of back land,” said Homer slowly, gazing at the map, “Between Route 2 and Baker Bridge Road.”
“That’s it, do you see?” said William. “Between Route 2 and Baker Bridge.”
“A new road,” said John softly.
“Oh, oh, I see,” cried Homer. “A road, a cutoff road, going through the back land on this side of Route 126 behind the Walden Pond parking lot. A great big four-lane highway, I’ll bet, slicing the Herons off in a tiny corner between two major thoroughfares. Jesus X. Christ. I see it now. He’d sell all those pieces at a vast profit to the state highway department, with the blessing of that bastard Howard Croney.”
William screwed the plastic cup back on his empty thermos, shook out his soggy map and struggled to his feet. “Well, there’s still Henry Knickerbocker and Mrs. Bewley to be thankful for,” he said. “Let’s hope they hang on.” Together the three of them squelched up the wet grass to the back door of the town hall. In William’s office Homer and John spread the map on the rug, careful to utter no word to the tight-lipped selectman who was seated once more at the table, carrying on in righteous silence the daily affairs of the town. Squatting on the floor, Homer dabbed at the wet splotches that fell on the map from his dripping rain-soaked hair, and studied the long strip of patchwork that represented the driving force of Buddy Whipple’s will.
Forty-Three
THE DOWNPOUR WAS ENDING AS JOHN GOT OUT OF HOMER’S CAR AT the bottom of the driveway. Walking up to the house, he saw the clouds part and the sun send broad rays over the drenched trees, the dripping front yard. Birds came out from the shelter of the tumbled bushes and took off across the empty air. There was a distant surly rumble of thunder.
His room was still stuffy and hot. An elm-leaf moth was batting against a window. John captured it in his butterfly net. But as he reached into the long bag and grasped it by one wing, he heard the telephone ring dimly through the wall from the other part of the house.
He took the moth with him. Charging down the dark stairway, he rushed through the laundry into the room that had been Edward Heron’s study, snatched up the phone in his left hand and shouted hello.
There was a very angry man on the other end of the line. “Listen here, you told me you wouldn’t call in that loan for years. That’s what you told me. You knew I couldn’t pay you back for a while. I told you that at the time. What the hell did you loan it to me for anyway — Christ! — if you were going to want it bac
k as soon as this? My god, Buddy, listen here —”
The man was so enraged, it took John a minute or two to persuade him he was talking to the wrong party.
“What do you mean, the wrong party? Who the hell are you?”
“John. John Hand. I live here too. Buddy isn’t here right now.”
“Oh, Christ.” There was a fuming silence. “Listen, tell him Henry Knickerbocker wants to talk to him right away. Henry Knickerbocker, you got that?” The crash of the phone rang in John’s ear. He hung up and stood gazing at the feeble struggles of the moth in his right hand. Henry Knickerbocker owned one of the last parcels of land that kept the curving strip belonging to Buddy Whipple from making a complete arc, a single narrow band plunging through the woods in the direction of Route 2. Then John checked himself. Mr. Knickerbocker had been talking about money, not land.
Taking his moth back upstairs, John consulted his chart to see which of his spiders was hungriest. Number Six hadn’t been fed in a long time. John pulled down the filmy covering over the web frame of Number Six, one of his Nuctenea sclopetarias, and put the moth into the web with a pair of tweezers. Then, watching the spider rush at the moth and throw silk all over it and paralyze it, he decided money and land were the same thing. Buddy would be so obliging! If the money was not to be had, he would be perfectly willing to take a small piece of land instead.
