The Transcendental Murder hk-1

by Jane Langton

  Alice Herpitude was peeking around the door, nodding and smiling. Mary thought it over. She couldn't get Charley into worse trouble by being on the inside. Maybe she could help him. Then again, helping Charley might mean hurting his brother. Mary stared at the little bust of Louisa May Alcott on her desk. Louisa looked noncommittal. "What did Lieutenant Kelly say about it?" said Mary.

  "Oh, he thought it was great."

  Jump, Mary, jump. "Well, all right, I guess so."

  Mary walked over to the station at lunchtime to see what was expected of her. Homer nodded at her, and snapped open a card table and squeezed it into the corner of Jimmy's office beside his desk.

  "Grandiose appointments of your office completed just in time."

  "Tell me," said Mary, "how a student of the Transcendentalists ever got to be a police lieutenant."

  "Other way around. My father was a cop in Cambridge. Hence, Kelly. So I was more or less brought up on the force. And my mother was a classicist. Hence, Homer. Classicists live in libraries. So I did my teething on any old chewed-up volume that was lying around. Sucked out all the glue, gradually gummed my way through a five-foot shelf."

  "Do you have a degree in anything?"

  "You mean like a Ph.D. from Harvard? Look, my dear, the closest I ever got to Harvard was as a traffic cop like my father, shepherding Harvard students across Harvard Square. Picking up a law degree at Northeastern night school and reading Waldo and Henry on the side—those things were strictly extra-curricular."

  He walked her to the corner, and the conversation galloped along in a sort of airy antagonism. A shot, a parting shot, and then Homer shouted a ricochet across the street. Mary found herself walking down the Milldam with a big grin on her face. She collided with Alice Herpitude, who was coming out of the First National grocery store.

  "Oh, I'm so sorry, Alice. I wasn't looking where I was going." She leaned over and picked up Miss Herpitude's packages.

  "We're such pygmies, Mary dear. I don't know why you Olympians take any notice of us at all."

  *26*

  My Aunt Maria... was heard through the partition shouting to my Aunt Jane, who is deaf, "Think of it! He stood half an hour today to hear the frogs croak, and he wouldn't read the life of Chalmers." —Henry Thoreau

  It was Mary's first full day in the employ of the District Attorney of Middlesex County. Homer Kelly nodded at her curtly as she came in. He glared guiltily at his size 14 shoe. He hadn't told the D.A. about this yet. Hiring a secretary onto the payroll wasn't something to be done lightly, and it would probably be just as well not to tell the D.A. at all that Mary Morgan was the beloved of the chief suspect. One was supposed to stay strictly away from personal connections with possible criminals under investigation. But when it came to that, my God, there was Rowena Goss, Charley's sister. (Personal connections, Jesus.) Homer swung around in his chair and cleared his throat with a blast like the Last Trump.

  "Now, the first thing I want you to do," said Homer, "is tell me about the members of the Alcott Association. Some of them felt pretty strongly about those crazy letters of Ernie's. And the letters have disappeared. Or at least we can't find them. Maybe he had them on his person there at the bridge, and somebody shot him and stole them after he refused to give them up. Now, do you have any idea which of these people might be fanatic enough to commit a crime just to protect the reputations of Emerson and Thoreau and all that gang they idolize so much?"

  "Well, I idolize them myself, most of them," said Mary.

  "I'm aware of that. And you wouldn't hurt a flea. And that reminds me. Where did you say you were when all this was going on?"

  "Asleep in bed. And I would hurt a flea. I squash flies all the time."

  "Tell me about Howard Swan."

  "Howard? Well—I don't know any other way to describe him except to say that he's the best fellow in the world. One of those dependable people that everyone turns to and relies on. He's president of the Alcott Association, Secretary of the Thoreau Society, something or other in the Antiquarian Association, Moderator of Town Meeting, and probably other things, too. And not because he's aggressive and usurping but because everybody asks him to do the hard jobs nobody else really wants."

  "Mmmmm," said Homer, scribbling it all down. Jimmy Flower came into the office, pulling on his coat. He picked up his Chief's hat and put it on. It was the smallest regulation size, but it still left a draft around the edges and rested on his ears, folding them over. "Jimmy," said Homer, looking up, "did you get a report yet on Howard Swan's story that he was in New York?"

  "Yes, that's in. Those business buddies he said he was having lunch with all agreed he was with them on Patriot's Day, just the way he said they would. At one o'clock he was sitting right there in that restaurant off Wall Street. He was there all right."

  "He's some kind of big wheel in banking, isn't he? What about the men he was lunching with? All solid citizens?"

  "They sure were. Above reproach. Jeez, what a nice thing to be. I wisht I was above reproach."

  Mary laughed and told him that he was, if anybody was. "Tell that to Isabelle," said Jimmy, going out again.

  "Well, that's enough on Swan. We've been all over his house there on Main Street anyhow, and didn't turn up anything. He's not married?"

  "No. There is some talk about an unhappy love affair, long igo. But then that's what people always say."

  "All right, now what about Teddy Staples?"

  "Teddy?" Mary smiled. "He certainly is a little nutty about Thoreau."

  "Let's begin with Teddy."

  Teddy's cottage on the Sudbury River was approached by a mile-long driveway off Fairhaven Road. Another driveway branched off his, leading to Alice Herpitude's house. Both houses looked out from pine woods on the wide bend of the river called Fairhaven Bay. Teddy's house had been built by the son of his illustrious ancestor as a summer camp, and basically it had once been a simple little house with a front porch toward the river, standing high and straight like an upright piano. But Teddy in a slack season for stonemasons had begun engulfing his front porch in a surging tide of cobblestones. Homer pulled up his car and stared at it, unbelieving. Mary explained that the Antiquarian Society was all upset about it, and was trying to make him stop. "But really," she said, "that would be too bad. Houses like the way it used to be are a dime a dozen. Now it's unique."

  "Absolutely one-of-a-kind," breathed Homer.

  Teddy was making a cobblestone birdbath in his front yard, which was really a beaten-down part of the woods, marshy at the bottom by the river, with ferns pushing up sticky fiddleheads, and skunk cabbages, greener than anything else, putting out red snout-like flowers. It was chilly, and Teddy had on several layers of pants. The top one was split down the back seam where the staples had given way, showing a checkered pair underneath. Teddy waved his mortar trowel at them.

  "You'll f-f-forgive me, if I go right on. I've got to work fast before the mortar dries."

  "Oh, Teddy, isn't that a nice birdbath," said Mary. Teddy looked up at her, his thin face shining. "Mary, I saw some red crossbills yesterday, in the very p-p-place he saw them, up the Assabet, by the hemlocks..."

  "He... ?" asked Homer.

  "Henry Thoreau," said Mary. "Teddy is bound and determined he's going to see every bird Thoreau saw in Concord. How is your list coming, Teddy? How many more to go?"

  Teddy turned back to work. His eager look was gone, his face seemed to have closed in. "Oh," he said, "there's a few more..." He buttered a big round boulder with mortar and jammed it into place.

  "I suppose it's harder now than it was in his day," said Homer. "Now that the area is so built up..."

  "That's right," said Teddy, sounding grim. "And some of the birds were rare even for his time, even then."

  Homer asked him what he thought about the death of Ernest Goss.

  Teddy flushed and looked miserable. "I suppose you want me to say I think it's terrible. Well, I don't. The d-d-damn fool..."

  "Were you
at the parade on the 19th?"

  "Me? At the parade? No, I was too busy."

  It turned out after some pressing that Teddy had been out in his canoe on the river, watching a bluebird try to claim a nesting site in the hollow of a dead tree.

  "Well, what did you do before and after that?"

  "Before and after? Heck, I must have spent three, four hours watching the bluebird. It was having an argument with an English sparrow over its property rights, and they took possession one after the other. The sparrow finally won out, I'm sorry to say."

  "Where was this hollow tree?"

  "Where was it? Oh, I can show you the place. It wasn't far from the North Bridge, as a matter of fact. In fact every time those dern guns went off I was afraid the bluebird would give up and fly away. But she stuck to it. And unfortunately s-s-so did the sparrow. The black ducks didn't, though. There was a flock of them there, floating on the water, and one of the gunshots sent 'em all up—up and aw-w-w-ay."

  "Which gunshot?" said Henry. "What time of day?"

  "What time? Heck, I sort of 1-1-lose track of time." Teddy was arranging small cobblestones artistically in a circle around the edge of his birdbath. "It was a long time after the others, though, I'm pretty sure. Most of the people must have g-gone home."

  "That was probably the shot that killed Ernest Goss. I don't know what good it does us, though. We have other witnesses to the sound of the shot, a little before one o'clock. Besides the Boy Scout there was Mrs. Parsons with her baby carriage. The baby woke up and started to cry. But anyway, maybe you'd better show us just where you were."

  Teddy finished off his birdbath and cleaned his trowel. Mary made room for him beside her in the front seat of the car, and he sat down with his long bony hands hanging between his knees. She made small talk about birds, trying to ask sensible questions. Teddy answered in stammers, ill at ease. He showed them where to park on Monument Street, and then led them down to the river. "Here we are," said Teddy. "Right beside where the Mill Brook comes in. Here's the tree. See? The high water killed it, many years back. Those must be my footprints there, coming up from the shore. See there, where the g-g-ground is soft?"

  "Did you see or hear anything else, Teddy, while you were here, any time during the course of the day? Anything that might have had a remote connection with the killing of Ernest Goss?"

  "Me? Oh, no. No."

  "Did you have those binoculars with you?"

  "These? Oh, sure, I always carry my glasses and my f-f-field notebook." He patted his pocket. Then he stopped, his hand on his chest, and stared at the sky.

  "What is it?" said Mary, turning to look where he was looking.

  Teddy's voice trembled in a fusillade of stuttering. "I-I-I d-d-don't know. I-I-It's s-s-so h-h-h-high..."

  He fumbled to free his binoculars and jerked them up to his eyes. Mary saw a dark speck wheeling and soaring very far up. It disappeared behind a clump of alders. Teddy, breathing rapidly, plunged along the shore and then into the water. He strode out, the water soaking up his trousers to his thighs, his eyes clamped to his glasses.

  "What is it?" said Homer. "Looks like a gull."

  Teddy stood silent, transfixed. Then his shoulders sagged. He lowered his glasses, and with his back to them, seemed to be trying to get hold of himself. "It's a d-d-duck hawk," he said. He started to cough.

  "Come on out, Teddy," said Homer. "We'll take you home and you can put on some dry clothes." Mary wondered if he had another pair of trousers to put on. They drove him home, and she watched him stumble out of the car and start up the steep stony steps of his cobblestone porch. She felt extremely sorry for him. His trousers slapped against his legs, he was hunched over with uncontrollable spasms.

  Homer backed the car around. "If you had to pick out one word to describe his mood, what would it be?"

  Mary thought about it, then picked the right one. "Afraid."

  "And there's another thing. Did you notice how he always repeated each question as though he were giving himself more time to think? That's an odd trick I associate with liars."

  "Oh, no. Teddy isn't a liar. Not usually, anyway. I'm sure of it."

  "Well, look. He could have paddled up to the North Bridge, bumped off Goss and paddled home again, and no one the wiser."

  "Well, maybe."

  The first thing Homer did when they got back to the station was to send Sergeant Shrubsole out to Monument Street to look in the hollow tree. "Do I have to have a search warrant?" said Bernard wittily. "I mean if someone lives there now..."

  "Oh, hurry up. I can just see that fowling piece standing up inside. I suppose it would be too good to be true."

  It was too good. There was nothing in the hollow tree but an extremely huffy English sparrow sitting on a nest of spotted eggs. She made a frightful fuss about the whole thing, lecturing Shrubsole roundly from a nearby bush, as he groped around inside her house. Gallantly, in spite of the superfluousness of any more English sparrows at all in the world, he put her nest back where it belonged, eggs and all. "Small thanks I got," he said.

  *27*

  The Soul selects her own Society—

  On her divine Majority—

  Obtrude no more— —Emily Dickinson

  Miss Herpitude was no ordinary librarian. She did not regard it as her sacred task to protect her precious volumes from the clutches of the villainous defacing mob. Instead it was her faith that the proper destiny for any book in her car was to lie open upon the lap of a reader, whether he were taking notes soberly in school or simply holding his place with a buttery finger while he ate lunch at his own table.

  Mary looked at Miss Herpitude with awe and wonder. That admirable woman was using a razor blade to cut a map out of a history book so that a boy doing his homework could hold it up to the window and trace it. When he was through with it Mary knew that Miss Herpitude would spend half an hour pasting the map back in. Her maxim was, and Mary subscribed to it with all her heart, that the books were there to be used and the librarians were there to be useful.

  Be useful. Here came someone who was obviously in need of help. A stranger was goggling around at the pale watchers on the balcony, Ephraim Bull and Judge Hoar and Bronson Alcott and Louisa May. Then he goggled at Mary and came right over. When he opened his mouth his speech was one of the cruder forms of British English, with an absurd affected accent thrown in for good measure. Poor wretch. His posture was miserable, his chest was caved in, his legs were bowed like a cockney cowboy's. His eyes stared and stared at her, fixed and unblinking.

  "Can I help you?" said Mary.

  "Oi hev something to show yew," he said. His eyebrows and his hair, thick wiry stuff combed forward over his forehead, were a dull black like lampblack. He wore glasses with round celluloid frames. If he had stood up straight he might have been about as tall as she was, but his posture was dreadful, and his long neck thrust forward so that his Adam's apple hung down over his collar. His collar was dirty, with a black line around the edge. But all of these details were as nothing beside the awful facts of his complexion. The poor fellow had a ghastly case of acne, and its prominences were superimposed on the shallow depressions and pits of old smallpox scars like the mountains and craters of the Moon. Mary had to stare very hard at his googly eyes in order not to be caught making a clinical examination of his pimples. As an unnecessary final flourish, his jaw suffered from malocclusion and two yellow buck teeth rested on his lower lip. Mary felt some anguish for him. But then her sympathy vanished as it became more and more apparent that he considered himself as sexually appealing as Tarzan the Ape-man.

  There was a sheaf of grubby typed pages in his hand. All his own work. He laid it on the desk and ran his finger along the lines, reading aloud. Ralph Waldo Emerson's Philosophy of Life, by Roland Granville-Galsworthy, Oxford University.

  What a charlatan. Mary nodded as though she believed it, and then Roland Granville-Galsworthy asked for the complete works of Emmanuel Kant. In German. "I'm afraid we have it only
in English," said Mary.

  "Thet's quoite all roight. Thet will dew," said Granville-Galsworthy. What a show-off. Mary bet he couldn't read German anyway, the way he had pronounced Kant. She found him a watered-down version of the Critique of Pure Reason, and settled him down in the reference room. As she went out she could feel his eyes on her back like two dirty greyish-white balls. For the rest of the afternoon he kept coming to the doorway and staring at her, or going to the Men's Room, gaping at her over his shoulder. He went to the Men's Room twice, getting the key from her and returning it with his damp hand. Before he left he thrust his opus on Mary, writing on it graciously, "With the compliments of Arthur." Mary showed it to Alice Herpitude.

  "But it's cribbed straight from that book by Claridge," said Miss Herpitude. "What an incredible man."

  Mary started to laugh. "When I was in the sixth grade we had a health play, and I was supposed to be 'Malnutrition, First Cousin to Death.' I tried to make myself look just like that, with that same droopy posture and big lipstick pimples. I was a smash hit, too. I suppose I shouldn't be so hard on the poor fellow. He probably can't help being a wretch, a dolt and a fool."

  "But surely," said Miss Herpitude, "he should have medical advice. I feel truly sorry for the poor man."

  *28*

  Lectured in basement ... of the orthodox church, and I trust helped to undermine it. —Henry Thoreau

  Poor Mary. The sham graduate of Oxford, having once set his googly eyes on her, would not take them off. He showed up everywhere. He came every day to the library, asked for some ponderous work and read picture magazines instead, like a boy with a comic book folded in his speller. When Mary didn't appear at the library on Thursday, he asked Miss Herpitude where she was and followed her to the Police Station, bobbing his Adam's apple up and down like a yo-yo. Mary couldn't understand him at all. His repellent skin was part of a hide so thick that he was sensitive to no hints and boggled at no excuses. Mary loathed the sight of him. When he began waiting for her at lunchtime, Jimmy Flower started to kid her about her boyfriend. Mary took to ducking out the back door, but Granville-Galsworthy caught on to that trick, too, and she had no peace. Homer Kelly, shaking his head, would lift the corner of the shade and watch the two of them go off together, Mary marching firmly in advance, Roland Granville-Galsworthy skulking in the rear.