Shortest Day (31 page)

“Mrs. Bailey?”

Sarah was afraid. She put her hand on her belly and begged her son, her daughter, to help her now, but the baby lay still. Carefully she put down the phone and turned around. “Morgan, I have to go now.”

Morgan dropped the other phone, letting it dangle on its rubber cord and bump against the wall. He had barely heard the voice of Sergeant Hasty. He had not been paying attention. He smiled at Sarah, because at last he had uncovered the core of his torment, and it was a blessed discovery. There would never be any end to the marauders, that was what he knew now—never in all future time. Only when there was nothing to take from him, nothing to deprive him of, would he be at rest. “All right, then,” he said, “go.” He was making a strange noise in his throat.

Hastily Sarah snatched up her bag. With a farewell glance at Morgan, she opened the door, hurried down the stairs, and slipped out into the night.

Behind her, moving swiftly half a block behind, Morgan stalked her, hissing, stretching out his neck, arching his powerful wings.

CHAPTER 40

KING.
Hello! Hello! What's the matter here?

CLOWN.
A man dead!

KING.
I fear you have killed him
.

CLOWN.
No! He has nearly killed me!

Traditional British Mummers' Play

I
n obedience to the command of Arlo Field, croaked at her from his hospital bed, Chickie Pickett called Homer Kelly and told him about the two men in the foreground of Arlo's picture of the forty-four suns in the sky. “It's Jeffery Peck, all right,” said Chickie, “and the other guy is Morgan Bailey.”

“My God, are you sure?”

“Of course I'm sure. Morgan and Sarah live upstairs from me. I see them every day.”

“But that means—Jesus! Well, thank you, Ms. Pickett. That's a big help.”

It was December twenty-fourth, Christmas Eve. Homer put down the phone, passed along Chickie's stunning news to Mary, and sat down to dinner—a sirloin steak, hot and rare on a heated plate, a baked potato, and a large helping of out-of-season asparagus.

Mary stared at him in horror, and threw her napkin on the table. “Morgan Bailey!” She leaped up from her chair. “But that means he's responsible for the other things too, for poisoning Tom Cobb and trying to kill Arlo Field.”

“Well, maybe it does and maybe it doesn't. Hey, what are you doing? Where are you going?”

Mary hauled on her coat, snatched Homer's parka off its hooks, and dumped it in his lap. “It's Morgan's jealousy, haven't you seen it? He's obsessive about Sarah. He's dangerous, Homer.” Mary's amateur psychoanalytic diagnosis of Morgan Bailey was turning out to be right, she had been right all along. She dragged Homer out of his chair.

Homer felt like whimpering, “It's Christmas Eve,” but he put on his coat and stumbled after Mary down the icy porch steps. “Where the hell do they live?”

“On Maple Avenue.” Mary lunged at her car and flung open the door. “It's near Inman Square. I went there once last fall, on the bus, but we can park on the street, somewhere, anywhere, legal or illegal, who cares?”

“My wife, the notorious desperado,” whined Homer, ducking in on the other side of the car and whacking his head on the roof.

Mary had never made the trip to Cambridge in less than twenty-five minutes. This time it took nineteen. “Here,” she said, “this fireplug will do nicely.” She swooped into a forbidden space on Cambridge Street, and turned off the engine.

“My God, woman, you're sticking out into the street.”

“Oh, come on, Homer. Don't be such a fusspot.”

Recklessly Mary climbed a snowbank. Homer jumped out of the car, wallowed around the fireplug, and galloped after her in the direction of Maple Avenue.

“Wait,” said Homer, “isn't that—?”

Mary stopped in her tracks. “It's Sarah. And he's there too. Look, Homer, it's Morgan.”

It was exactly like the first time, like the day when Mary had seen Morgan secretly following Sarah along the same sidewalk. Now Sarah was hurrying, picking her way swiftly along the path where the snow had been cleared, her footsteps loud in the deserted street, while Morgan followed silently behind her. He was walking faster, coming closer, catching up.

Homer and Mary stood behind a tall stand of bushes and watched Sarah stop on the curb to cross to the other side. She was waiting for the heavy truck that lumbered toward her, heading for Somerville.

The hair on the back of Homer's neck stood on end. “What the hell is he doing?”

Morgan was racing at his wife, his neck outstretched, a hissing sound coming from his throat, his arms spread wide, his coattails flapping. He rushed at Sarah and threw out his arms to shove her into the path of the truck. By a violent effort Homer reached her first and snatched her out of the way.

Morgan's momentum drove him forward. The driver of the truck cursed and slammed on his brakes, but he was too late. Morgan Bailey lay in the street with crushed beak and broken neck and shattered wings, his obsession dying with him, his torment at an end.

CHAPTER 41

In a manger laid and wrapped I was
,

So very poor, this was my chance—

Betwixt an ox and a silly poor ass
,

To call my true love to the dance
.

Carol, “My Dancing Day”

H
arvard University was still in a quandary. The death of old Maggody was the breaking point. It brought matters severely to a head. The poor old man had crept to the very door of Harvard's Vice-President for Government and Community Affairs, and in his extremity he had knocked, and he had not been let in. He had frozen to death on the doorstep only three days before Christmas. It looked bad, very bad indeed.

Worse still, one of the homeless women from Nifto's insane tent city had holed up in Henshaw's garage, hugely swollen, ready to give birth. A few hours later her child was born in Saint Elizabeth's Hospital, a howling baby boy.

It was a perfect Christmas story, full of pathos and righteous indignation.
NO ROOM AT THE INN
, proclaimed the
Cambridge Chronicle
.
NO ROOM AT THE INN
, repeated the
Boston Globe
and
The New York Times
. Gretchen's baby was famous, and the
Boston Herald
named Harvard its Scrooge of the Year.

After Christmas, the story would have died, if a single representative of the press had not gone back to Saint Elizabeth's, hoping to eke out a piece on the status of homeless single moms.

Her questions soon petered out, because Gretchen didn't think of herself as a homeless single mom. She was more like a lost princess. Her responses didn't make much sense. The woman from the
Cambridge Chronicle
put away her notebook and asked a random question. “You didn't happen to see Mr. Maggody, did you, when he dragged himself to the door of Henshaw's house?”

“Well, no,” said Gretchen. “Well, like I guess I did, sort of. I saw Palmer carrying him. Well, I mean, he was carrying somebody, and I guess it was Maggody.” The news-woman took her notebook out again. “Palmer? You mean Palmer Nifto? Palmer Nifto brought Maggody there? You mean Maggody was already dead, and Nifto brought him to Henshaw's front door?”

“Well, yeah, I guess so. Like, well, he was carrying him sort of over his shoulder, and then he put him down on the porch.”

“You saw all this from the garage?”

“Oh, right. There's this window. You can see the front door through the window.”

Gretchen had no idea she was betraying the clever manipulations of Palmer Nifto. She cuddled her homely baby and knitted him a sweater, and made up her mind not to turn him over to the Department of Social Services.

For Palmer it was a final stroke of ill luck. It had been bad enough when the uproar caused by the death of Maggody was displaced in the public mind by shock over the death of Jeffery Peck and the attack on Arlo Field. But this was worse. Now that everybody knew Palmer Nifto had picked up a corpse and moved it in order to blacken the good name of Harvard University, Maggody was back in the headlines with a vengeance, and so was Palmer Nifto. And there was an even grimmer question. What if Nifto himself had put the old man out in the snow to freeze to deaths? Palmer's goose was cooked.

In the highest counsels of Harvard Yard it was the juiciest bit of news, a morsel of Christmas pudding. As Palmer's stock went down, Harvard's went up.

Ellery Beaver laughed so hard he could hardly relay the news to the General Counsel on the phone. Of course the General Counsel was delighted, and so was the Dean of Faculty. They all agreed that the old man's death was a shame, but at least it had not happened on the premises of the Vice-President for Government and Community Affairs. The craven exploitation of the old man's death by Palmer Nifto made him a laughingstock. His outrageous demand for a piece of Harvard real estate lost all credibility.

On the twenty-seventh of December, while Sanders Theatre resounded with the Wednesday-afternoon performance of the Christmas Revels, the Dean and the General Counsel and Ellery Beaver met for a late lunch in the Faculty Club to consider their options.

“We simply ignore Nifto,” said Ellery.

“Exactly,” agreed the Dean. “We don't have to dignify the man with seminars and teach-ins and all that sort of thing.”

“And we certainly don't transfer any Harvard real estate,” said the General Counsel. “After all, Nifto has put himself completely out of the picture.”

The General Counsel leaned forward with a shrewd suggestion. “Here's my idea. We negotiate through a third party, not with Nifto. Some highly respected and impeccable person
outside
the university chooses a charitable agency to which the university would then contribute funds.”

“An
already existing
agency,” suggested the Dean of Faculty, nodding and smiling. The Dean was a humane man who contributed privately to a number of charitable organizations, and he had names on the tip of his tongue. “The Greater Boston Food Bank, the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless, Shelter Incorporated? Something of that sort?”