Face on the Wall

The Face on the Wall

A Homer Kelly Mystery

Jane Langton

A
MysteriousPress.com

Open Road Integrated Media Ebook

Prologue

T
he child fell. He fell past Aesop, and the hare and the tortoise. He fell past the Homeric bard and the ship of Odysseus, past Lewis Carroll and Scheherazade, past Hans Christian Andersen, Long John Silver, and the raft of Huckleberry Finn and Jim on the Mississippi River. He fell past Edward Lear, and the Owl and the Pussy-cat in their beautiful pea-green boat.

The child fell past the tales and the tellers of tales, all those who make bearable the sorrows of the world.

Chapter 1

Once upon a time a poor fisherman caught a magic fish. “Throw me back, good fisherman,” cried the fish, “and I will grant anything you desire.”

At once the fisherman threw him back in the water, saying, “Thank you, Lord Fish, I want nothing.”

But when he went home and told the story to his wife, she said, “You fool! Why should we live in this miserable hovel? Go back! Ask the fish for a palace!”

W
ishes are tricky things. In folktales, when they are fulfilled, when every greedy request has been supplied, they often turn sour. The old storytellers understood very well that granted wishes were in defiance of the natural order.

And yet Annie's seemed safe enough. She had earned her dream. She had worked for it, she had paid for it herself. It did not depend on any other human being in the whole world. Her wish was for a house. Not an entire new house, because she already had a house. What Annie wanted was a new wing on the east end of her house, to replace the tumbledown shed.

“My God,” said Homer Kelly, slowing down his car on Baker Bridge Road and staring across the field, “Annie said it would be big. It's big.”

“Wow.” Mary stared at the house too, as a car behind them blatted its horn.

Homer pulled over and parked beside the stone wall. “Big doesn't come cheap. She must have her mouth right under the faucet.”

“Well, her picture books are selling very well.
Jack and the Beanstalk
made her fortune.”

They sat in the car and gazed at the clean new wood of Annie's house. Across the cornfield, through the bare branches of the November trees, they could see the small figures of carpenters climbing ladders and kneeling on the roof.

Mary Kelly's interest in Annie's house was not merely passing curiosity. Anna Elizabeth Swann was her niece, the daughter of her sister Gwen. Mary had watched the girl grow up, and then she had stood by Annie during her teenage nuttiness, her insane marriage and awful divorce. Annie's mother and father were often away in India or Pakistan or Nepal, supervising the planting of fruit trees for miscellaneous maharajahs and state agricultural schools, leaving Mary to act as a substitute parent in one crisis after another. Now, at last, Annie's troubles seemed to be over. It was a relief to enjoy her success.

What Homer and Mary could not foresee, as they stared across the field at the rising rafters and listened to the thunk of the nailing machines, was the misery that was about to descend on Annie's house, and the notoriety to follow.

If they could have forecast all these things in a crystal ball they might have seen themselves inside the enchanted glass along with Annie—because her long-suffering Uncle Homer was about to be drawn on again. Several times already in Annie's checkered career he had lent a hand, first in disentangling her from that bastard Grainger Swann, second when she was arraigned for possession of cocaine, third when she was picked up for drunk driving.

Poor old Homer. Once again his past life was about to catch up with him, those distant days before he had started teaching, the old days of his youth, when he had been a lieutenant detective in the Office of the District Attorney of Middlesex County. Since then, by some weird fate or astral influence, Homer had made a habit of stumbling over one dead body after another. Again and again he had been forced to set aside scholarship for the pursuit of psychopaths all over the state of Massachusetts, and in places as far-flung as Florence and Oxford.

“Well, she's a funny girl,” said Homer. “Headstrong. Likes to get her own way.”

“Well, of course she does. So do I. So do you.” Mary watched the first clapboards going up on the east wall of the new wing, and thought about her niece. Annie was a big-boned tall woman with ample breasts, a slightly hooked nose and a mass of chestnut hair spraying out from a clasp at the back of her head. She looked more like an allegorical figure on a pediment—Peace, or Justice, or Bountiful Nature—than anyone's cuddly little friend. And yet for a piece of monumental statuary she was surprisingly excitable and apt to go off halfcocked. “You know, Homer,” said Mary, “she's my niece, not yours, but it's amazing the way she's so much like you.”

“Really?” Homer smirked. “You mean brilliant and good-looking? A breaker of hearts?”

“No, no, that's not what I mean at all. She's big and noisy, rash and impulsive. And obsessive. She gets an idea in her head and won't let it go. She's like a dog with a stick. That's Annie. That's you. There's a truly remarkable resemblance.”

“Well, gee, thanks a lot.”

“Of course, you don't have anything like Annie's artistic talent. She gets that straight from her great-grandmother. Oh, Homer, you should have seen my grandmother's cakes. Five layers high with confectionary swans and castles and three-masted ships, all in spun sugar. She was amazing.”

Homer gave one more glance across the field as he turned the key in the ignition. “You know, that's a hell of a big house.”

“Well, she's just going to live in the new wing. She's already rented the old part to a family named Gast. Nice people, she says, with a couple of little kids.”

“Well, good, maybe the rent will pay her taxes.”

As they drove away Mary caught a last glimpse of the bright new boards heaped on the ground beside Annie's house, until they were hidden by the trees around the conservation field. Then she saw only the tractor that was turning under the remaining stalks of corn, and a couple of crows flapping low over the ground, looking for morsels turned up by the plow.

Chapter 2

There were three ravens sat in a tree,

Down adown, hey down, hey down….

Old English song

T
here were crows too around another house, twelve miles away, in the village of Southtown. Months had gone by. It was March, not November, a warm melting day with puddles in the ruts of the driveway.

When Pearl's brother got out of his car and moved toward her front porch, four or five of the crows were settling in the trees, harshly cawing, as though they had flown up all at once and were just coming back down. There was no other sound but a faraway cheeping like squeaking wheels, the chatter of birds on the rusty towers of Fred Small's sand-and-gravel company, over there to the south, beyond the farthest reach of Pearl's land. The birds were stopping to rest on their way north, fluttering from the gravel-sorting hoppers to the crushers and back, taking possession of the abandoned quarry.