The Transcendental Murder (26 page)

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?”

Chapter 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 com. 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 püfectly 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 püfectly gorgeous day. See? I've got my Bümuda shorts on under my sküt.” 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.

“I don't play tennis,” he growled. He had to get out of here. He couldn't very well tell her he was about to go out and arrest her brother, could he? What was the matter with the girl anyway? Didn't it matter to her that her father was dead and her mother was in the looney-bin and that it was he himself, Homer Kelly, who was doing his best to clap her brother in a condemned cell? And besides, there was something strange about Rowena anyhow. She was a dish, all right, a real dish, but lately he had begun to have the queerest feeling when he was with her, as though something had been sort of pulled down over his head. She made you feel muffled or something, as though you had a scarf wrapped around you, or a gag shoved down your throat. Homer mumbled his excuses and made his escape, leaving behind him a clumsy assortment of people, crowded between the door and the cash register—one glamorous dish, one frightened old librarian, one bona fide slobbering sex maniac and one thoroughly miserable young woman.

Chapter 46

	I will come as near to lying as you can drive a coach-and-four.
HENRY THOREAU

Mrs. Bewley was sweeping the steps when Jimmy's official car rolled up the drive. When she saw Homer she beamed at him and pulled a batch of baseball cards out of her apron pocket. (Jesus had been sending her messages about the Red Sox and the Yankees.) “I'VE BEEN SAVING THEM JUST FOR YOU.”

Homer thanked her profusely, pressed her hand and inquired for Mr. Goss at the top of his lungs. “IN THE BARN,” screamed Mrs. Bewley.