by Jane Langton
“So that was it,” said Homer. “That was what Buddy had on Barbara. I’ll bet he never gave her that ten thousand. I’ll bet he made her write that statement, and then he called her a murderer and threatened to expose her and get her debarred or decapped or decapitated, or whatever they do to forbid registered nurses from practicing their calling.”
“What a rotten piece of interfering malevolence that man was,” said Mary. “So that’s why she stopped working.”
“And then after Edward Heron’s death, Buddy began bullying Virginia. He told her Barbara was a — what do you call it? — patricide. First she had killed his father, and then she had brought about the death of her own. And he said he would spread the news, and ruin Barbara’s life, unless Virginia went along with his schemes. And of course Virginia’s mouth was sealed. She wouldn’t tell Barbara about Buddy’s threats, because she thought Barbara would rush out in the street and admit to any kind of ugly crime rather than see Virginia herself go down Buddy’s rancid drain. It was a case of doubly mistaken generosity and puritanical self-immolation. Oh, these old-fashioned New Eng-landers! Any sign of another document in that box? Last will and testament of Clarence Whipple, Esquire?”
“No, nothing at all,” said Mary. “Where can it be? Maybe he didn’t have one. Or maybe he stored it in his room at the Herons’ house with all his other stuff.” They drove to Lincoln to take a look. Barbara was there to meet them. They gave her the envelope and the folded piece of paper.
“What’s this?” said Barbara.
“We found them in Buddy’s safe deposit box,” said Mary. “You might just want to dispose of them somehow.”
“I suggest a small bonfire,” said Homer wisely. “Now, Barbara, may we go upstairs and take a look at Buddy’s things?”
“I cleared them all out,” said Barbara. “It was a pleasure. I just dumped everything in cardboard boxes and stowed them in the laundry.”
And there in the laundry, Homer and Mary found what they were looking for. Kneeling on the floor behind a wooden drying rack dripping with wet socks, they fished a thick wad of legal papers out of the inside pocket of one of Buddy’s sports jackets. Mary smoothed the folded sheets on top of the washing machine, and together they read Buddy Whipple’s intentions for the disposition of his earthly effects.
His possessions were many and great — an enormous, heavily furnished house, a number of parcels of land, and a large holding in securities and investments, itemized on an appended sheet.
“But who gets it all now?” said Mary, flipping over the pages. “I don’t think he had any close relatives, do you?” Then Mary found the name of the beneficiary, and tapped it with her finger. “Virginia Heron. It all goes to Virginia.”
“No kidding? Some tax dodge, I’ll bet,” growled Homer. “Some wily scheme or other.”
“No, Homer, you’re wrong about that. I think in his clumsy overbearing way Buddy really loved her. He didn’t know what to do about it. He didn’t know how to make her love him in return. He thought if he could once get hold of her by force, then he could persuade her to be happy. What would it matter that giant trucks were careening past her old front door, now that she was up the hill among all the moose heads and hunting prints and all that faded grandeur? How could she help but love him back?” Mary shook her head with wonder. “Poor old goofy sinister simpleminded Buddy.”
Homer took his wife’s hand. “It’s funny how physical force just doesn’t seem to work with some women. They’re stubborn. They get their backs up. You have to edge around them when they’re hot looking, and then sneak up behind them and just” — tenderly Homer pulled back Mary’s collar — “drop a live frog down their neck.”
“Homer, you beast!” Mary arched her back, reached awkwardly inside her shirt, pulled out a wet sock, and threw her guffawing husband to the floor.
Fifty-Seven
FIRST RESIDENT MOVES
INTO “THE LODGE”
Bringing with her only a large house-plant, Mrs. Alice Bewley, 79, today moved into one of the ground floor apartments of “The Lodge,” Lincoln’s new low-income housing complex, once the hunting estate of Alexander Higginson. House and grounds were the gift of neighboring resident Virginia Heron to Cambridge Housing Associates, Jane Plankton, president.
The same firm will build another unit of low-income housing on Route 126 on the foundation of a house destroyed by fire. This property was recently acquired by Ms. Heron, along with an additional 15 acres of woodland. Six of the 15 acres will be zoned for conservation, the rest given to the Walden Pond Reservation.
“Oh, Lord,” said Homer, putting down the Concord Journal, “imagine Mrs. Bewley in Alexander Higginson’s great hall. She’ll have her little chickens roosting on those moose antlers, you see if she doesn’t.”
“Oh, no, she won’t,” said Mary firmly. “Barbara gave her an enormous cat. You should have seen it, Homer. She found this crazy longhaired kind, and it has six or seven toes on each paw. She said Mrs. Bewley took to it right away. You know the way Mrs. Bewley talks — OH, THE DARLING KITTY. It was a big success. She’s going to call it Maxie.”
Homer laughed, remembering all that he had heard about the original Maxie and his fellow chickens, gone but not forgotten, departed and, alas, digested. “Well, it’s a mercy the strip of woods around the corner is going to the Walden Pond Reservation. With good old Mike Brumble in the governor’s office for another four years, his conservation lawyers will be able to make the donation stick. If Croney had been elected, God knows what would have happened to it. Thank God, he lost the nomination.”
For Howard Croney had been defeated. In the long run it was not his cupidity that did him in, nor his flagrant and manifold conflicts of interest. It was simple old-fashioned lust. On the day before the Democratic caucus, Madeline Croney had driven to her husband’s campaign headquarters with a pile of freshly laundered shirts. Leaving her little yellow car idling in the courtyard, she had carried the shirts in the front door. Sixty seconds later she burst out the door again, flung the shirts into the bushes, jumped into her car, plunged down the driveway, swerved violently out onto Route 126, raced down Route 2 across the Charles River, and screeched to a halt beside the NO PARKING sign in front of the television studios of Channel 4 on Soldiers Field Road. Stalking past the startled receptionist, Madeline pushed through a door marked STOP DO NOT ENTER, tramped past a crew of stupefied cameramen, brushed aside the astounded meteorologist, presented herself to the cameras before a glorious satellite photograph of the northern hemisphere, and announced to the world that her husband was in bed with a Sunday school teacher.
“So if you were planning to vote for him,” said Mrs. Croney, “don’t. Take it from me, he’s a jerk.”
Croney’s defeat was a disappointment to Putnam Farhang. The insurance portfolio of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts would continue to be distributed among a number of New England firms, only one of which was the Paul Revere Mutual Life Insurance Company. And Putnam’s wife suffered her own moment of mortification. At the October competition of the Middlesex County Society of Flower Arrangers, Amelia Farhang failed, after all, to win the grand prize for creativity.
“She lost?” said Effie Fawcett, unable to believe her ears. “Those judges must have been out of their minds.”
But it wasn’t the judges’ fault. And it certainly wasn’t Amelia Farhang’s. Amelia had spent an entire month in rapt concentration in her greenhouse, surrounded by masses of plant material and miscellaneous accessories. Her entry was a tropical fantasy, featuring a Venus flytrap and an assortment of elements flown in from Puerto Rico — a bunch of bananas, a gigantic frond of palm, and a spray of magenta orchids. But at the last moment, just as the judges were approaching her booth, Amelia reached out to adjust the palm leaf at the back of her composition. At that instant a large hairy mygalomorph spider was awakened by the heat from the bright light overhead. Coming out of hiding in the bananas, it ran briskly up her arm. With a wild shriek, Mrs.
Farhang threw it across the room. Her hand struck the container. Slowly, fatally, the vase wobbled on its base, toppled, and fell to the floor with a crash. Amelia shrieked and shrieked. One of the judges slapped her face. The Venus flytrap caught a fly. The spider landed unhurt and crawled behind a chair.
But the barn spider on the door frame of the house at the bottom of Pine Hill was at the end of her days. John checked up on her whenever he came home from school, and kept a record. All through November and December she hung upsidedown beside her egg sac. Without a web she could catch nothing, and therefore she ate nothing. Even when John offered her a live moth, presenting it to her in a pair of tweezers, she showed no interest. She merely edged away and settled down on the other side of her egg sac. And when he looked for her in January after his first semester exams, she was nowhere to be seen.
I wish I knew whether she froze to death or died of starvation, wrote John in his notebook.
Or maybe she just died of old age. Her egg sac looks great though, really fluffy and warm. All those little embryo spiders are well cushioned against the cold. Some nice warm day in spring they’ll work their way out of the egg sac, and then there’ll be barn spiders all over the place.
Spring was early that year. In the wilderness of the old orchard the cloudy blossoming tops of the apple trees were visible from Baker Bridge Road. Rabbits multiplied in the rabbit holes. Pheasants laid clutches of yellow-green eggs in the low tangle of catbrier. Sheetweb spiders spread their horizontal veils in every chink of the stone wall, and three newborn yellow jacket queens set up housekeeping under projecting boulders.
And as the days lengthened and the grass in front yards turned green, John’s little brother Benny discovered baseball. His father bought him a ball and a bat and a tiny glove for his sixth birthday, and to everyone’s surprise, Benny’s entire personality underwent a dramatic change. He abandoned all intellectual pursuits. He joined the Peewee League and gave his heart to the game. But, alas for poor Benny! He was the worst hitter on the team and he just couldn’t seem to catch the ball at all.
Neither could his Uncle Homer. Of course Homer had never claimed to be skillful at sports of any kind, being clumsy and butterfingered by birth and utterly lacking in natural physical grace.
But he was better at baseball than Benny. With lordly condescension Homer took the boy under his wing on Saturday mornings, and taught him how to bunt to the infield and catch a pop fly and pitch a wild curve ball into the bushes.
The Spider as an Artist
Has never been employed —
Though his surpassing Merit
Is freely certified
By every broom and Bridget
Throughout a Christian Land —
Neglected Son of Genius
I take thee by the Hand —
Emily Dickinson
Afterword
ALEXANDER HIGGINSON’S HUNTING ESTATE IN LINCOLN WAS BROKEN up in 1939, and its subsequent history is of course different from the fictional account in this book. Less than two acres of land were sold with the eighteenth-century farmhouse at the foot of the hill. The pond and its adjacent field are now owned by a neighbor. The other fields, the woods, and the old orchard belong to the Lincoln Conservation Trust. Mrs. Bewley’s house is imaginary. So is the Second Parish Church, which bears no relation whatever to Lincoln’s estimable First Parish.
The characters are imaginary too. Even Jane Plankton has lost all resemblance to any living soul. Only her musical ineptitude in The Memorial Hall Murder was actually drawn from life.
A number of people have been friendly to this book. I am grateful to Chuck Howarth of Boston’s Museum of Science and Chris Lahey of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Laura Lougee of Parsonsfield, Maine, was generous with her knowledge of barn spiders. My indebtedness is especially great to Professor Herbert Levi of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and to his wife Loma for their kindness in answering questions about spiders, and for helping me gather a small spider zoo of my own. John Hunter, curatorial assistant in the museum, found the New Hampshire barn spider whose eggs have now hatched above my laundry door.
My thanks go also to Ralph Macone, Dr. Gordon Winchell, Lincoln assessor Douglas Burckett, meteorologist Don Kent, and Anne McGrath, curator of the Thoreau Lyceum. The story couldn’t have been written at all without the help of the Flints of Lincoln — Margaret and Warren Flint, Senior, and Warren Flint, Junior. Their good suggestions were drawn from a family history of several hundred years of land use in this Massachusetts town.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Homer Kelly Mysteries
1
All but Death, can be Adjusted …
After the death of his wife Owen Kraznik went on living and teaching in Amherst, but his days had become a bewildering fluster, a tangled wilderness, a formless and perplexing dishevelment. Snatching at the chaos as it hurtled past him, end over end, Owen struggled to arrange it in a rational pattern.
But the Emily Dickinson Centennial Symposium refused to be made sense of. It came crashing into Amherst like a loose boulder, ricocheting from College to University, crushing and grinding and destroying. Who was responsible? Owen didn’t know. After the fire, after the disappearance of Alison Grove, after the awkwardness about the picture, after the attack in Emily Dickinson’s bedchamber—with an axe!—and after all those other bizarre disasters, it was impossible to single out one human being and say, “Look, that person is entirely to blame.”
But some of the guilt was his own. Wincing, Owen couldn’t help pointing a finger at himself. Of course he wasn’t crucially at fault, but there was no denying that it was Owen Kraznik who had given that boulder its first little nudge, way back in October. And then he had thrown up his hands in horror and galloped after it as it gathered speed and plummeted down into the peaceful valley of the Connecticut River, to bruise and shatter and lay waste, and change lives forever.
It was just an innocent little remark, that was all. If only he had kept his mouth shut!
2
Went home a century ago …
“Emily Dickinson has been dead for a hundred years.” That was all he had said. And it had been true—well, almost true. On that October day last fall it had been ninety-nine years and five months since Emily Dickinson perished of Bright’s disease in the big house on Main Street. And Owen had said it on the day. the letter came, the letter from Peter Wiggins, the letter about the picture.
Owen had risen early that morning, as he always did, eager to get to his office at the University of Massachusetts before Winifred Gaw showed up. Now, taking the letter out of his mailbox, he held it in his teeth while he fastened the bicycle clips to his pants, and then he sat down on the top of the porch steps and looked at the return address:
Professor Peter Wiggins
University of Central Arizona
Pancake Flat, Arizona
Pancake Flat, Arizona? Owen smiled. What an improbable-sounding place.
He pulled out a thick wad of paper from the envelope. It was an article he had seen before, a study of a famous photograph of Emily Dickinson. Well, the photograph might or might not be a picture of Emily Dickinson. There was a controversy about it. This man Wiggins was trying to prove it was genuine. He had bought it from a collector. He owned it now, out there in Pancake Flat. He had examined the whole subject thoroughly. The photograph was authentic, he said. It was a real photographic portrait of Emily Dickinson, the celebrated poet of Amherst, Massachusetts, without a shadow of a doubt.
Well, good for Peter Wiggins, thought Owen, unfolding the xeroxed copy of the photograph. Turning it to the light, he looked at the face of the young woman in the picture.
Gravely the dark eyes looked back at him through the lens of the ancient camera and across the space of a hundred and twenty-five years. The woman was indeed good-looking. Owen wanted to believe it, that this was really the poet whose life and work had meant so much to him. What a fine and sensitive face! But did it match the
younger face, the true face of Emily Dickinson as she appeared in the daguerreotype of 1848? Ah, that was the question. Some people thought they were the same, some didn’t.
Owen put the picture back in the envelope and took out the letter. Peter Wiggins wanted to come East. He was inquiring eagerly: Would the English department at the University of Massachusetts be interested in a slide lecture on the subject of the photograph? Did Professor Kraznik know of a teaching position in New England? Résumé enclosed.
The letter had a panicky ring. The poor fellow seemed frantic to escape from Pancake Flat. Owen pictured him, this unknown Peter Wiggins, standing forlornly in some sunbaked desert landscape, stretching out his hand to the East. It was like Emily Dickinson’s own yearning for the impossible—“Heaven”—is what I cannot reach! Well, poor Wiggins was out of luck, thought Owen sadly. Nothing could be done for him. All the colleges in the Connecticut River Valley were firing, rather than hiring.
Trundling his bicycle down the steps, Owen mounted and rolled along the driveway, wobbling a little as he turned onto Spring Street, dodging puddles from yesterday’s rain. Wet leaves were plastered to the pavement. Overhead the rising sun struck the lofty crowns of the sugar maples and set fire to them as with a match. Owen glanced up at the treetops and told himself he should take more pleasure in things like that. But it was no use. Since Catherine’s death he found no savor in natural wonders. Today it was too painful to remember her delight in the autumn color of the Amherst countryside. Better not to notice anything, better not to be reminded, better not to think about that kind of thing at all.
Damp leaves spun around his wheels as Owen turned left on Dickinson Street, focusing his mind safely once again on the article by Peter Wiggins.
