Town of Masks (23 page)

The light was gone from the room then. She strained for the sound of footsteps. Only the light was loud, streaking out from the open garage door into the treetop over her, then down within inches of her and narrowed to a circle as the searcher closed the door and tested it with his hand. The reflection of the light on the white door defined him. Matheson.

She waited until he was abreast of her on the drive. “Did you find what you were looking for, Matt?”

The light jerked in his hand, but his voice was easy. “No, I didn’t find anything, Miss Blake. I was looking for the boy, as a matter of fact.”

“Equipped with keys and flashlight?”

“I generally carry skeletons,” he said.

“And a warrant to use them?”

“No. But since it was his room I was visiting, I didn’t see much harm in using them. When did he take off, Miss Blake?”

“I have no idea. He was gone this morning.”

Matheson came over to where she was standing. “You aren’t holding a gun on me, are you?” he asked, playing the light up to her hands.

“I don’t own one.”

“It mightn’t be a bad idea, you living alone and all—and what happened to Mrs. Verlaine.”

“I have no such valuables,” Hannah said. “And you can be grateful I don’t own a gun. If I’d had one, standing here, I think I’d have used it.”

“Your feet’s going to get wet standing there in the grass. Did you think it was the kid come back?”

Testing, Hannah thought, in his own sly manner. To have asked what he wanted to know he would have said: “If it was the boy, would you have shot him?”

“No. I didn’t think it was he. I have the key to his room.”

“So,” Matheson said. “Any idea why he quit without giving you notice?”

“No. He was a tramp when he came and he probably went on the tramp again.” She put one word after another warily. It was Elizabeth, she thought, who put him onto it. From where else the sure information he had left without notice?

“But you was so sure he wasn’t coming back you took the key,” Matheson said.

“When someone takes his clothes, it’s a fair assumption that he will not return, isn’t it?”

“And when a door’s locked, that he won’t get in. Good night, Miss Blake. I’m sorry if I gave you a start.”

“Where’s your car, Matt?”

“Why, I left it over on Cherry Street, Miss Blake. It isn’t such a long walk through the fields. I wanted to see how long it took me.”

She could not take alarm at that, certainly. Dennis was his prey under those circumstances.

“It will be a longer one back that way. I’ll drive you if you like.”

“No, thanks. I’m going to walk it from a different angle going back.”

She returned to the highway for her car, and driving into the garage, sat there for a long time wondering if Matheson was watching her. Finally she got the key to Dennis’s room and went up to it. She followed what she believed to be Matheson’s footsteps, and by examining the windowframes and baseboards, she saw the markings of the policeman’s search. He had been prying for a loose board, a hiding-place where, according to his conjecture, the boy might have concealed the jewels until he took off with them.

T
HE MEMBERS OF THE
library board not away on vacation convened at Hannah’s at nine o’clock. A sufficient number to the task, she thought. Without preliminaries, Baker turned the meeting over to her.

“I have learned,” she started, “that Campbell’s Cove is not the place to do something anonymously. I suppose you are all aware that I am the donor of the prize for the poetry contest.”

“I must say I’m not surprised,” Katherine Shane exclaimed.

Surprised or not, she must say,
Hannah thought. Elizabeth was leaning back in the chair, her head resting. Tired and pale, she looked, and surely she was not surprised at the meeting or its disclosure. She had anticipated from hearing the plan that Hannah could not stand the strain of remaining anonymous.

“Elizabeth did a beautiful job of the presentation,” she continued. “It’s much too bad the response was not commensurate with her efforts. If it had been, I should not feel compelled to ask for this meeting. Friends, we have five entries to the contest. Five.”

No one seemed surprised at that, either. Baker, in fact, murmured his expectancy of it.

“Speak out, Ed,” Hannah said. “You’re satisfied with the response?”

“Well,” he hedged, “I can understand your disappointment—”

“My disappointment!” Her voice was shrill with the demand. Now was the time for him to say it out—for anyone there to ask the truth: “To what purpose the contest, Hannah, that we should share your disappointment?”

Baker merely squirmed in his chair. “It’s true the library sponsored it, and got up the ballyhoo. Getting nothing but this out of it is discouraging—”

While he groped for words Elizabeth looked up. She pointed to the Manila envelope she had laid on Hannah’s desk. “Miss Blake, how do you know you haven’t brought a poet out of hiding in Campbell’s Cove? Five of them perhaps. That, I recall, was your purpose? Five is a goodly number of poets, don’t you think?”

“Plenty,” Baker muttered.

But all the others in the room grew busy in their embarrassment.

“For every poet,” Hannah said evenly, “there are at least a hundred who think that they are poets. To make a contest we need contributions from all of them.”

The embarrassed ones wagged their heads in approval. They would run out any chute of escape, Hannah thought—and apparently Elizabeth after them, for she made no answer.

But Baker had to take it up, seeing nothing of the issue. “I just don’t see it as a calamity. I’ll tell you the truth, Hannah, after all that’s happened this last week, I can’t get into much of a froth over this.”

“I can,” Hannah said, “and I intend to. Do you remember the meeting last spring when Maria said our men were afraid of culture? They’re not afraid of it. They despise it. This contest was organized to add distinction to our celebration of Campbell’s Cove Day.” She glanced at Elizabeth. There was no protest in her face, nor in any face in the room. They were all on her side, eager to follow the easy way, the contest for the Cove’s Day now, not for poets at all.

“We shall have the governor here and Senator Cravens. There will be a nation-wide broadcast of what happens here. We are setting ourselves up as a model community.”

Gradually, calling on the depth of her resources, Hannah pumped enthusiasm into them. “Does a soldier lie down on the battlefield when his friend is killed?” she demanded. “He fights the harder for it. I refuse to believe that all of Campbell’s Cove is dead. And I refuse to have it proclaimed to the country. I want us to have a secret here among us of the library board.” She lowered her voice. “We shall pretend that we have a hundred entries, a hundred and five in fact. Call it priming the pump if you will, making a hundred others wish they, too, had given their talents, making them resolve to join the next contest, and I pledge you here another contest, an annual one. We shall have a dynamic community if we kindle the spark. What do you say? Ruth?” She turned to Mrs. Copithorne.

“Well, Joanne, our oldest girl, entered a poem, I think. Perhaps I shouldn’t say anything.”

“All the more reason to say something,” Hannah insisted.

“There’s nothing we’d have to do except keep still about it, I mean about the number of poems?”

“That is all.”

“I must say I don’t see any harm in that,” Katherine Shane said. “And I see what Hannah means. You can’t call it off now very well and we all want to hold our heads up on Cove Day.”

“Elizabeth?” Hannah challenged.

“There’s to be a sham invasion of the Cove, isn’t there?” the girl said after a moment, making a point of the word “sham.”

“That’s right. A simulated air attack.” Hannah addressed herself to all of them quickly. “You should see the preparations O’Gorman has made to evacuate the Cove. A fleet of fifty boats to take half the town out to the point. Those east of High Street will make a cavalcade into the hills.”

“I know,” Baker said. “The block captain’s lined up my family. It’s going to take a lot of doing, Hannah.”

“We’ll be working night and day on it. That’s why I want to get this contest business settled tonight. I suggest we put it to a vote—a silent vote for silence.” She risked a smile.

“Fair enough,” Ruth Copithorne said.

“It’s the democratic way,” Elizabeth said, rather airily.

“That’s right,” Hannah said.

Elizabeth looked from one of them to another. “Doesn’t it frighten you to do an undemocratic thing in a democratic way?”

“It frightens me much more,” Hannah said, “to admit that we are without hope, without confidence.”

“Another vote of confidence?” said Elizabeth. “Fred Matheson got one last week.”

“And he deserved it,” Hannah said, using the tactic she had learned from Wilks. “I don’t remember that you were there, Elizabeth, but if you had been, you would know what might have happened that night if I hadn’t made peace in the chamber.”

“That’s right,” Baker said. “You did a swell job.”

“It was an uneasy peace. That’s why I’m determined to weld it permanently on Campbell’s Cove Day.”

“All the talk of peace in the world,” Elizabeth said, “and there is no peace anywhere.”

Hannah plunged over the remark. “Katherine, will you make the motion for us to present the contest winner to the anniversary committee without reference to the number of entries?”

“I so move,” Mrs. Shane said proudly.

Ruth Copithorne seconded it, and Hannah called for a show of hands in favor. All but Elizabeth’s were raised. But she did not vote against it, and Hannah called it unanimous.

W
HEN THEY WERE GONE
and she had stacked the coffee things in the kitchen sink, Hannah returned to the study. Elizabeth had not stayed for coffee, and going she had stood a long moment in the drive as though she were trying to draw something to herself out of the very atmosphere. Hannah had watched from the vestibule, the simple ones chattering away inside. There was something pleasant about locking in combat with someone whom you cared about. But to have won was no great pleasure. Not to have raised and seen this issue through, however, was impossible. Katherine Shane would have gone giggling through the crowd on Cove’s Day, whispering on the five entries, on Hannah Blake’s contest for the boy who wasn’t there. Now she had forced them into a conspiracy of silence. She had dared to say “poetry contest” to them, and dared them in return to say “Dennis Keogh” to her. And they were silent, a loyal silence for which she vowed gratitude. She had inflicted a faith upon them. Really, she thought, to have doubted Hannah Blake at that moment they would have had to doubt themselves. None of them was capable of that.

Elizabeth, without a word of reference to it, had left the Manila envelope on her desk. She opened it now, the five sealed entries inside, plain white envelopes and one marked
No. 1.
A note from Andrew Sykes to Elizabeth was attached by a paper clip. Hannah read:

My dear Elizabeth:

A paltry lot. Here is one with less rhyme than reason. A poem still. What is a poem? I asked myself that consenting to be your judge. A poem is a little truth, or maybe a little love. And poetry is the most of it of which one is capable.

Adieu and thanks for many kindnesses and long patience. A virtue, patience. But do not believe for an instant that it is its own reward.

It was signed with Sykes’s initials, and its contents, Hannah thought, recalled something of him that he himself had forgotten. A little truth—a little love! From him the words were mockery. She took a piece of notepaper from her desk and wrote to Elizabeth:
Since this is addressed to you, you may want to keep it, your only souvenir of the contest. Believe me, I understand your abhorrence of it. I wonder if you have any intimation of mine, Sincerely
…

She got up and walked to the window and back. That was not the truth at all. She did not abhor the contest. Not now. It was purged clean, five or a hundred and five, the contestants were sincere and innocent. And so was she, the honest benefactress of the Cove. They were all with her tonight and Elizabeth was not against her. Their faith had made her whole again!

In truth, there was no mark left against her, Hannah thought in high elation, except perhaps Sykes’s word on the contest. And Elizabeth, too, was glad to be shed of him; otherwise she would have cherished that note from one so eminent—a note of commendation. False praise from a false prophet.

Thus reasoning, she took the note and her note to Elizabeth and put a match to them. False praise, false prophet, false judge, she thought. The contest entries were in plain white envelopes, a penny apiece in any dime store, a dozen of them in her desk drawer now. She took a paper knife to the entries and opened the five of them with clean, sharp strokes. She read first the one marked
No. 1,
and its opening line showed her judgment of Sykes accurate:

The winged horse of war vermined with greed.

A perverse joke he had almost perpetrated on the Cove—his parting venomous arrow. Here was a poem to read aloud on Campbell’s Cove Day, to celebrate preparedness, unity, a day for patriots! What a climax he had planned to their mock invasion.

And written by Kenneth Tobin. The conscientious son of a conscientious father!

She read the others. A paltry lot he had called them because each one sang a song of simple pleasure. What did he know of a little truth, a little love except as he perverted it to an epic distortion? One among the entries was quite suited to the occasion, extolling love and dove and Campbell’s Cove—childish, eager words, perhaps, but to be childlike and eager was a most wonderful thing. Certainly in this age of cynicism.

She sat a long time thinking about it, and in the end she decided that Mr. Sykes should bless love and dove and Campbell’s Cove in spite of himself. And coincidental to the happy irony, Doctor Copithorne should discover himself the father of a budding poet.

I
T WAS A WEEK
of high and glorious accomplishment for Hannah. The town had roused itself from its show of mourning, and under her direction, the citizens prepared themselves for the annual festival—a festival despite its serious overtones, she reminded them. Her enthusiasm was infectious, and there seemed to be no bottom to her store of it. In her own heart she was sure that she would take no more plunges down the dark morass from which sleep gave the only respite.