The Transcendental Murder hk-1

by Jane Langton

  It was signed in ink. The signature had run, but it had a homely look, and it jumped out at Mary from the page. It was her own.

  Homer looked up at her. His face was still with an arctic calm, his eyes buckets of nails. Mary couldn't speak. She didn't say anything at all. She stared at the signature. That was her M, her closed A and careless R, and her Y that was just a bump and a straight line without any loop.

  Then Jimmy snatched the paper suddenly. "I'm going to tear it up," he said.

  "What do you want to do," said Homer, "lose your badge? That's evidence."

  Jimmy glared at him. "It don't mean anything and you know it."

  "Oh, but it does," said Homer. He stood up and reached out, gripping Jimmy's wrist. He squeezed the wrist in his large hand until Jimmy's fingers went limp and dropped the paper. "Thank you," said Homer. He picked it up. "This note calls Philip away from the place where he was surrounded by witnesses who could furnish him with an alibi for the time of the murder, to a lonely spot where no one would see him coming or going. He could walk to the barn from the Gun Club right across a dry field." Homer looked at Mary coldly. "Did you meet him there?"

  Mary dumbly shook her head.

  Homer started walking around the room. "Philip Goss received this note some time during the morning of the murder. Expecting a declaration of love he walked eagerly across the field to the barn, arriving around 12:30. Impatiently he waited there for Mary for a full hour, maybe longer, before giving up. Then he tossed the note aside in disgust, returned to the Rod and Gun Club and started to drink himself under the table. Afterwards, when asked about his whereabouts, Philip was gallant. He refused to name the reason he was missing, for fear of getting into trouble the girl he loved. A gentleman of the old school."

  "That's more than you are, I see," said Jimmy, his voice rising. "Listen here, Homer Kelly, if you say a word, just one word, that harms a hair on the head of my Mary, I'll..."

  Homer interrupted roughly. "Oh, so she's your Mary now, is she?" Jimmy made an angry lunge for the piece of paper, but Homer snatched it away and held it behind his back. He looked at Mary and spoke softly. "Split the lark, and you'll find the music. Mary, did you write this?"

  Mary hugged her arms and shivered. She found herself noticing the way Homer's head was arranged on his neck, the way his neck grew out of his collar. His head was different from the bald knob that rested on Jimmy's shoulders like a friendly turnip. It was erect like a dog's, furry and cocked and alert. Cocked. Cocked like a gun. "No," she said. "I don't think I did. I mean, of course I didn't. I know I didn't."

  Homer blinked. He lowered his eyes to her desk and touched her typewriter. "We can find out what machine it was typed on. probably. I'll bet it was Charley's. And anybody could have traced your signature. Charley had letters from you?"

  Then he wasn't—it was all right. Mary nodded without speaking.

  Homer glanced at the note again. "Elite type. Small portable, most likely. Is that what yours is? I mean the one you use at home?" Mary nodded again, and looked at the piece of paper. Even with its soaking it looked grubby, and she was reminded of the dirty typed sheets of plagiarized scholarship turned out by Roland Granville-Galsworthy.

  "Jimmy," said Homer, "have you got some typewriter experts up your sleeve?"

  Jimmy was still glowering. He shook himself and spoke grudgingly. "We'll look into it."

  Mary took Jimmy's phone call in her library office. "Well," said Jimmy, "his lordship had to admit that it couldn't have been your typewriter that wrote that note. The expert identified it as Charley's, all right. The A tended to skip, the type needed cleaning, the E was tipped off-axis to the right, and so on and so on. But of course the Great Kelly hastened to add that you or anybody else could have used Charley's typewriter. But what this really amounts to is one more little piece of evidence that doesn't do Charley Goss any good."

  "But why would Charley forge a note from me to Philip?"

  "It's like Homer said. To get Philip away from witnesses, to take away from him the alibi he would have had for the time of the murder."

  "But if Charley was planning to kill his father and pin the murder on Philip, why did he wear the Sam Prescott outfit and do it in a public place?"

  "Just so that you would ask that very question."

  "Oh. Well, did you ask Charley about it?"

  "Oh, he denied it. Categorically. Then we talked to Philip, and he admitted receiving the note. He said he found it on his pillow before the parade. Said it got him all excited. (You sure have a powerful effect on us men.) But then he got very angry when you didn't show up. He didn't remember dropping the note, but he supposes he probably did. And it could have blown into the road where Mrs. B. could have found it. And, say, we found the letter that your signature was traced from. It was one of the letters you wrote to Charley from Amherst, that summer when you were working on that female poet. What's her name?"

  "Emily Dickinson. What did my letter say?"

  "Oh, you needn't worry. It sure wasn't any smoldering billy doo, it didn't even smell pretty. Say, Mary, listen here, were those boys jealous of each other over you?"

  "I told you," said Mary. "I turned them down, both of them a year ago. They weren't really serious about me any more, I just came in handy to take out."

  "Is that so? Did they have any other girlfriends?"

  "Well, no, not that I know of."

  "Do you think they still hoped to win you over, either them?"

  "Oh, maybe, but I did everything I could to discourage it."

  "Well, I just wonder if one of them could have been worked up with jealousy on your account, and tried to eliminate the opposition by getting it accused of murder."

  "Oh, no, no, I'm sure not." That was absurd. Mary hung and turned away from the telephone, looking troubled. Sh folded her arms on the sash of the window and stared out at the rain that had been coming down obstinately for a week nov. But she didn't see the lowering sky and the sodden leaves. She was aware only of a heavy feeling of increasing guilt—the more she took part in the investigation of Ernest Goss's murder, the more deeply entangled in suspicion Charley became. Whether you loved someone or not, if they loved you, you had a certain responsibility not to hurt...

  Alice Herpitude was looking at her, questioning her, picking at her sleeve. Mary had to say it out loud, and admit it to herself as well as to Alice. "Things look pretty bad for Charley Goss."

  Then Miss Herpitude did an odd thing. She started trembling all over. Her pale old lips looked thin and tight. "Are you sure?" she said. "Do you think they'll accuse him of—of—?"

  "I just don't know," said Mary.

  *44*

  There is one field beside this stream,

  Wherein no foot does fall.

  But yet it beareth in my dream

  A richer crop than all. —Henry Thoreau

  The rain had stopped at last, and the sun was out, hot and bright. Tom came back from a trip to the Fulton Box Company in Boston with a load of crates for packing corn, five dozen to a crate. He was stacking them in the loft in the barn. John was helping him. "Boy," said John, "I sure wish we still had some cider froze from last year. It sure is hot. Boy, I sure am thirsty."

  "We'll try to make more this year than we did last," promised Tom. "And we won't wait for our apples, we'll get some early drops down from Harvard."

  "Boy, if we just had a good hurricane, then we'd have plenty of drops."

  Tom stopped tossing crates and scowled at John. "Don't you go tempting fate to destroy our apple crop again. Plenty of drops, plenty of cider, sure, but plenty of money down the drain, plenty of kids that don't go to college."

  "Well, I love hurricanes anyway."

  "You just go in and wash your mouth out with soap. I'm going to get out the John Deere and harrow that corn stubble in across the way. You go tell Annie. She's been wanting a ride." Tom mopped his forehead and unbuttoned his shirt. A little later he was heading the tractor down the dirt road that led p
ast the cider shed and into the cornfield. Beside the road there were daisies suspended in the delicate grass. The sun bore down, and he pulled his visor lower.

  Annie straddled his lap and hung onto the big holes in the metal saddle. "What do you harrow the cornstalks in for, Daddy?" she wanted to know.

  "What else would you suggest we do with them? We harrow them in and get the dirt turned over, then plant it to rye, and then the rye grows up pretty green before the first snow and gets a good root system and grows some more in the spring. Then we turn it under again. With $2500 a year for fertilizer you've got to get all the return from a field that you can." Tom bounced up and down on the seat and went on grumbling. Running a farm in this day and age was no business for an honest man. Annie stopped listening. She leaned to one side and looked back to watch the big rusty plates of the harrow turn over the ground. One set of disks was curved one way and threw the dirt out, the other set was curved the other way and threw it back in It was wonderful how nice and smooth and flat it left the ground after churning it up. The dry weedy dusty clods came up dark brown and clean.

  Suddenly over the noise of the tractor there was a clatter and rattle as two of the disks jammed and scrabbled at something caught between them. Tom cursed and stopped the tractor. Annie hopped down and looked. She got excited and clapped her hands. "It's not a rock," she said. "It's a gun, a big gun."

  "It's just a stick," said Tom, looking over his shoulder.

  "No, Daddy, really, it is, it's a big old gun." Annie tugged at it, and hurt herself. She hopped around and flapped her hand Tom sighed and got down to go and look. By gad, Annie was right. It was a gun, an old flintlock, all dirt and rust. Tom stood up and scratched his head. "Well, I'll be damned," he said.

  "Just imagine!" said Annie. "An old, old gun buried in our field like it says on the sign on the front of our house! And I saw it first! Can I have it? Please, Daddy?"

  Tom bent down again, and began to disentangle the gun from the harrow. "No," he said. "I'm afraid not. Unless I'm very much mistaken this gun is going to make Mr. Flower very, very happy."

  The gun did indeed make Mr. Flower very happy. It filled him with joy and delight. "Leave it lay!" he chirruped into the telephone. "We'll send out the photographer and some lab men who'll know how to clean it up. Holy horsecollar, now we're getting somewhere!"

  "It's not the musket?" said Homer Kelly.

  "You betcher sweet life it is."

  The harrow had scratched it badly, the metal parts were rusted and the wood was mildewed, but Homer recognized at once the lovely long lines of the old fowling piece Ernest Goss had handed around among his guests on the night of April 18th. Bernard Shrubsole cut notches in a couple of cardboard boxes and he and Jimmy lifted the gun into the boxes with the hooks on a pair of coathangers. Then they took it into Boston to the Department of Public Safety, and handed it over. When Mr. Campbell had worked on it, they carried it down to Lieutenant Morrissey in Ballistics. He was delighted with it. He shone a light down the barrel. "Look at that. See all that black? Wasn't cleaned after the last firing. Didn't you say Ernest Goss cleaned it after it was fired the night before?"

  "We did," said Homer. "And you'll notice that the flint is missing."

  "This must be the murder weapon, all right. Here, let's give her a try." Lieutenant Morrissey had made some balls from Ernest Goss's mold. He took one of them out of a drawer, along with a patch cut from a piece of linen, a can of black powder and an oilcan. "There was a backwoods rule about powder. You were supposed to put a ball in your hand and pour a cone of powder over it just enough to cover it, and that was the right charge. And then you pour it in, like this. You were supposed to use bear grease or something on the patch, but I guess 3-in-l is good enough." He oiled the patch, set the gun stock on the floor, laid the patch across the muzzle with the ball on top of it and pressed it down a little way with his finger. Then he pulled out the ramrod mounted under the barrel and used it to push the ball and patch gently all the way down. "Okay, stand back, here she goes." He held the long gun up to his shoulder and pointed it into a barrel filled with cotton wadding. There was a great noise, and two puffs of smoke emerged from the powder pan and the muzzle. Lieutenant Morrissey grinned. He set the gun down and groped in the wadding for the ball. Then he brought it up, squinted at it and beckoned them to the other side of the room where there was a comparison microscope. He placed the ball in a holder and put it under one side of the microscope, and stared into the eyepiece for a minute, adjusting the focus and the light. "Here," he said to Homer noncommittally, "you look."

  Homer looked, and Jimmy looked. "Just a lot of miscellaneous scratches on both of them," said Jimmy.

  "I told you you wouldn't be able to match up the gun and the ball. You have to have rifling to do that. But, heck, you must be pretty sure this is the gun anyhow, aren't you? Goss owned a musket, his dying word was 'musket,' he was killed with a musket ball, the musket was missing afterwards and here's a musket that was obviously hidden near his house. What more do you want? And to top it off, this one has a missing flint."

  "I wish that blasted Boy Scout had seen the thing," said Jimmy. "Look at the size of it. He swore up and down he didn't see it."

  Mr. Campbell came in then, shaking his head. "No prints. Not a chance. If there were any there to begin with, the wet ground obliterated them all."

  "So it could have been either Charley or Philip," said Jimmy. "I suppose we could confront Charley with it and look grim as if the thing were crawling with prints and stuck all over with identifying bits of hair and microbes and so on, and see if he loosens up at all."

  "There's one thing we can be sure of," said Homer. "Whoever hid that gun in Tom's field had a sense of history and a feeling for the fitness of things. Tom Hand planted corn in that field every year on April 19th because old Colonel Barrett did it back in 1775. The murderer knew that, and he knew about the muskets Colonel Barrett laid down in the furrows, to hide them from the British. But that could mean either Philip or Charley."

  "Or it could have been Teddy Staples," said Jimmy.

  "Or Tom Hand himself, or Mary Morgan."

  "If you're going to get ridiculous," said Jimmy sourly, "why don't you throw in old Mrs. Bewley for good measure?"

  *45*

  I know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own. —Margaret Fuller

  Genius, that was it, a stroke of genius. It had occurred to Homer that there might be some reward in going over Teddy's journal more carefully. He had brought it with him to the Minuteman Lunchroom and he had been eating his hamburger and working his way through the entry for April 19th again, when a passage rose up and hit him in the face.

  It wasn't in the main body of the text, it was hidden among Teddy's marginal observations on wildlife. April 19th began with a brief mention of the bluebird's nest. Then it went on:

  Assabbett. Saw Tom Hand &

  Finggerling pl. corn...

  Who was Finggerling? There hadn't been anybody planting corn with Tom except young John. Oh, of course, "Finggerling" was Teddy's cute way of saying "one of the little Hands."

  Bl. dk nstting. 6e, spekkled.

  Gossling digging corn. Gl. ind.

  Ch. Queer. Oriole's nst...

  That was all for April 19th. And the passage was like a cryptogram, full of abbreviations and misspellings. Homer puzzled over it and stared at the page. "Bl. dk nstting. 6e, spekkled" might mean that Teddy had seen a black duck nesting with six speckled eggs. One of the goslings had been pecking at Tom's corn. But that didn't make sense, did it? Ducks had ducklings, not goslings, and one of the ducklings wouldn't be hatched and pecking for its own food if the rest were still eggs, would it? Then Homer felt the small hairs on the back of his neck rise up. If Finngerling meant a young Hand, could not Gossling mean a young Goss? In which case the extra S was not a misspelling at all! What about "Gl. ind. Ch."? Suppose the "Ch." stood for Charley"? The "ind." could be "indicated" and
the "Gl." could be "Glass," or binoculars. Teddy had looked through his binoculars and seen Charley Goss digging in the cornfield. Burying the gun! What else could he have been doing but burying the gun? Homer slammed the book shut and looked up triumphantly. There were no two ways about it—he was a genius! Then he frowned. Straight ahead of him was that fool who was always tagging after Mary, Goonville-Ghoulsworthy or somebody. Goonville-Ghoulsworthy gave Homer an unhealthy-looking bucktoothed smile. Homer grunted something, and slid out from behind his table. He paid his bill, then put his head down and charged at the door.

  Mary Morgan was just coming in with Alice Herpitude, and for a minute they were all tangled up together. Miss Herpitude emerged white and shaken, groping for a chair. "Good heavens, Homer," said Mary. Granville-Galsworthy made himself prominent, urging them to his table, pulling out a chair for Miss Herpitude. "Oi hope yew'll join me," he said. Mary bent over and looked anxiously at Miss Herpitude.

  Miss Herpitude tried to smile. "I'm all right," she said. But she looked very ill indeed. Homer grumbled his apologies, feeling like an oaf. Maybe he'd better join them for coffee, to make amends. Then Rowena Goss spied them through the front window, and she came in and squeezed into the wall seat beside Homer. Granville-Galsworthy transferred his wet gaze from Mary to Rowena, and licked his lips.

  Rowena kissed Homer and started scattering her boarding school accent about. It was full of umlauts. "What a pufectly precious place..."

  Mary looked away in confusion. The kiss hadn't been a warm one, that was the whole trouble with it. It was a sweetly possessive, almost wifely little peck. What did that mean?

  "Now, Homer, I want you to just drop whatever tawdry thing you're doing and come up with me to the club for tennis. It's a pufectly gorgeous day. See? I've got my Bumuda shorts on under my skut." She gave him a playful glimpse of a magnificent piece of tan meat. Roland Granville-Galsworthy goggled at it. Howard Swan went by on his way to the cash register, and he goggled at it, too. But Homer's attention was transfixed by the sugar bowl.