Only in New England : the story of a gaslight crime (3 page)

We took the album down to the dining room.

"Here's where they ate," Ed said. "At this same round table. The room is just as it was, except I took down a big old hanging gas fixture and put in electric lights."

I said, "I suppose after dinner they moved into the parlor."

Ed said, '111 show you."

He guided us through the puzzle of the three-door vestibule. The parlor was a tight little pentagon which seemed somehow apart from the rest of the house. With its horsehair sofa, its black marble fireplace, its Turkey carpet, mahogany chairs, bric-a-brac, whatnot and needlepoint samplers, it resembled a stage set. Today's decorators generally deplore dark interiors, and the maroon and blue motif of this little parlor proved at once somber and oppressive. The mood was heightened by the picture over the mantel—the framed lithograph of a large and veiny human eye staring starkly over the legend: International Order of Ancient Knights, Lodge No. 46.

Meeting mine, the Eye challenged my presence in the house

and made me feel uninvited. It followed me as I crossed to look at the steel engraving of Morning, Noon and Night —the child in the bow of the rowboat, the handsome couple at the oars, and the ancient gaffer in the stern, standing upright and pointing at the sad, dim shore in misty distance. In keeping with this gloomy portrayal of man's junket from cradle to grave was the massive volume on the marbletop table beside the sofa. Gustave Dore's Night Scenes from the Bible. Tabourets, footstools, wax fruit under glass, an obsidian vase, a statuette of Chief Massasoit, a model of the Marie Celeste and a stuffed owl added an ostentatious confusion to the parlor's solemnity.

Ed's wife said from the door, "That eye has to go. It oggles me when I come in here to clean . . . Ed insists on leaving it."

I said, "But the parlor is wonderful. Genuine Americana."

"I've put everything back," Ed said, "the way they had it. Notice the gramophone. I found that out in the barn."

It dominated a window corner. A big, bell-mouthed morning glory sprouting from a little oak-veneer box with a crank handle. It sat on a cabinet containing shelves of small black cylinders— the forerunners of the victrola platter. We tried one later. Out oame a scratchy rendition of "Daisy Belle." A voice spoke in preamble: This is an Edison reck-ord.

Evidently the Bridewells had junked the gramophone. It interrupted their talk.

"I remember glimpsing them in here talking," Ed recalled, "and wondering what they found, all the time, to talk about. I'd be peddling papers. Coming up to the house, I'd see Earnest with his back to the window, flailing his arms like he's practicing a speech. Lionel would be yapping and the old lady carrying on. I didn't get wise till later that they were quarreling."

"Tell how they went to church," Ed's wife said.

"Oh, yes. Every Sunday. Down to the Primitive Sabbatarian that used to be here. Real Fundamentalist. They'd go in the old lady's surrey pulled by the matched bays. She always drove. Sitting up stiff, like a coachman. Otherwise, they never went out together, unless on business."

"Was that what they quarreled about?"

"All the time. You see, the old lady held the reins, and she wouldn't let go."

Luke Martin had begun to pace the carpet. "Tell about the murder, Ed," he urged.

"Wait," I said. "Ed's doing all right. We're just getting acquainted with the Dramatis Personae."

"How's that?" Ed inquired.

"You're giving us the cast of characters." I was thinking that these Bridewells were walking stereotypes of gaslight Yankee-dom. Of course, the old mother and the elder son were pillars of the church. As befitted conventional tycoonery and conservatism. Even handsome Lionel had found it expedient to follow the styles in conformist respectability. But the faces registered by the camera suggested that the fundamentals of Cromwellian doctrine neither softened the heart nor purged the soul of egocentric selfishness.

"Well, of course, I don't actually know they rowed all the time," Ed conceded. He added, "You know some people enjoy squabbling. It gets to be kind of a habit. They like a good after-dinner bone to pick ... I guess the Bridewells got along well enough except about money."

"What else is there?" Luke Martin asked.

Ed's wife chuckled, and Ed looked at her affectionately. Then, "But I guess you're right so far as the Bridewells were concerned. They had—at least for these parts—a lot of money. Root of the trouble, I expect. The old lady sat on it, and the boys wanted it."

The oldest plot situation in the hackney repertoire—the Have holding out on the Have-nots. Also the world's oldest casus belli. Inciter of wars and revolutions, it had generated the overthrow of nations and the dissolution of empires since the day of the Rosetta Stone. Now I was to see its disruptive workings in Bride-wellia (surely the world's smallest domain) here in the microcosm of Quahog Point.

As Ed Brewster outlined this particle of history, Captain Bridewell had left his entire estate to his widow, enjoining her to make such disposition of the properties to the sons as she saw fit. Abby Bridewell did not see fit. Although willing to delegate

certain management duties to the sons, the dowager mother refused to sign over a dollar's worth of property, and she ruled the family treasury with an unyielding soepter.

Ed said, "She owned everything. The hotel and the other businesses. If the sons made any money, they had to hand it over. She wouldn't let go of a dime."

And I could not help but visualize the old lady in her rocker as resembling one of those period-piece, castiron penny banks whose only gesture was to make a deposit. Give her a coin, and the automatic response was to pop it into her mouth (or perhaps a slot in her bosom) whence it would be swallowed with a tiny clank. Thereupon she would settle back with a fixed expression of satisfaction. You couldn't get a cent out of her without resort to a hammer or a screw driver.

Coupled with her penury was a relentless determination to direct the lives of her sons. Our narrator opened the album to an early picture of Earnest Bridewell standing, hand in bosom, on white steps in front of a granite pillar. Earnest, it seemed, had attended college—Ed thought, perhaps, Bates. As a young man, then, he had practiced law for a spell.

"I guess there was never much law to practice here at the Point, though," Ed said. "They say Earnest was a pretty good lawyer in his salad days, but there wasn't any salad. I've heard old-timers say the old lady wouldn't let him set up in the city. Wanted him to tend family affairs at home. After the old Captain was paralyzed, she installed him—Earnest—as manager of the Trawler and Kelp Companies."

It was Abby Bridewell and her money that originally put him in the State Senate, and voted him to the board of the P. and Q. But Abby told him how to vote when in the Senate and on the Board—of that, Ed Brewster was certain. "She had him under her thumb, I'll warrant that."

"What about the other one—Lionel?"

"I've heard my father tell," Ed said, "that Lionel Bridewell wanted to go into opera. Back when he was in his twenties. Abby let him study for a time up in Boston."

He displayed an early picture of Lionel posed in profile, chin

in palm. The man had the build and features of an American Apollo—and knew it.

"He had a voice," Ed said, "but it seems he didn't have no talent. There was some kind of trouble up in Boston—woman, apparently —and the old lady ordered him home. He got the management desk at the Surf and Sand. Just a clerk's job, really. The old lady kept the say about the hotel."

Ed confided that he had gleaned most of these biographic details from a box of letters up in the attic. "The old lady saved her correspondence by the bushel. Some of it dates back to the Civil War."

"Did you read it all?"

"Most of it. And then I heard talk in the village. . . . But you get the picture."

I did. The mother-ridden politico. The frustrated baritone. Romulus and Remus, middle-aged, bound by maternal cordage to the ancient She Wolf. But the apron strings in this case were purse strings.

"Stingy?" Ed held out a fist. "I recall one time I missed their newspaper. End of the month she came down to the printer's office and demanded two cents off her bill. She used to go down to Thorn's and buy stale fish. She was tight, miserly, mean, saving, scroungey, nickel-pinching and grasping."

Ed's wife protested, "She couldn't have been that bad."

"She wasn't one of these sweet-type mother tyrants," Ed assured. "She was the kind who peed carbolic acid."

"Ed!"

"But she had brains."

Luke said, looking significantly at his watch. "Tell about the murder."

"She got her brains knocked out," Ed said'.

"Where?" The abruptness of his statement had brought me upright from a chair.

"Cellar stairs," Ed said. "Here, I'll show you."

We went through the vestibule to the dining room, through a pantry into the kitchen. One of those wide old-fashioned kitchens roomy enough for three or four rocking chairs in addition to a

six-foot sink, a king-size range and a red-and-gold coffee mill.

There were doors to a back store room, a back washroom and a side porch. But the one that fascinated me was a small, heavy door at the right side of the kitchen. It was reinforced with iron bands, and the hinges had the look of Revolutionary War metal-smithing. The handle was an iron hoop.

"This is the oldest part of the house." Ed said. He tapped on the door. "Timbering's hand hewn."

He swung the door open and switched on a nearby kitchen light, and we looked down.

Steep and narrow steps descended into a well of darkness. A smell of must came up the steps. An exhalation of raw earth and cobwebs and stale air more than faintly forbidding. Streaked with shadow, the wall of the stairway revealed primitive masonry— lumpy cobblestone imbedded in cracked plaster. On the open side a wooden handrail reached up out of the dark like a bony arm.

Ed said, "She got it coming up the steps."

"When?"

"Spring of 1911."

"I mean, time of day."

"Evening."

"What was the weapon?"

"They found a heavy bag." Ed shaped a pouch with his hands. "With blood on it."

"So she was sandbagged!" I was surprised by the unusual device.

"Bag of lead. Heavy buckshot."

"Who did it?"

"Nobody saw it done. But suspicion fell right off on Earnest Bridewell."

"The State Senator."

"There were other people, too," Ed said slowly. "The case had angles. Four or five parties were suspected. If you—"

"Ed," his wife interrupted, "these gentlemen want to get up early in the morning and go fishing."

Ed closed the cellar door. He said, "Goodnight, boys. See you in the morning."

CHAPTER 3

We did not get up early in the morning and go fishing. I was awakened by a summoning aroma of bacon and eggs. The gloom suggested five A.M. Then I saw the watery windows and heard the downpour. My wrist dial pointed to nine:ten.

We ate breakfast with the lights on. When it rains at the shore, it really rains. From the window I could barely see the boxwood hedge. The dooryard was a lake. The April garden resembled greenery afloat at the bottom of an aquarium.

Ed came in from the barns, looking glum. "Whoosh," he said, taking off oilskins. "You can hear the surf a mile away. I'm sorry, Luke."

Martin glared at the window. "I'm going back to bed." He stamped up the stairs, fuming. Never frustrate the Compleat Angler.

Ed told me I was welcome to his library, and he showed me into a small sitting room behind the dining room. He said it used to be the sewing room. Only room in the house he had tampered with and done over. His tamperings were tasteful. Pine paneling. Bookshelves. Fish and wildlife prints. A rack of guns. A touch of Abercrombie and Fitch in a mansion out of Currier and Ives.

When he excused himself (chores), I settled down with a book on shotguns. But I couldn't become less interested. The room was comfortable, but with the gray rain blowing against the windows, I felt shut in, uneasy. I thought of donning oilskins and walking down to the Center for a look-see. No. Nothing is twice as depressing as a shore resort out of season unless it be a rundown shore resort out of season.

And abruptly I was thinking: "Bag of shot. That's an odd weapon!"

Ed and his wife were busy somewhere out back. I roamed into the dining room, into the queer front vestibule, into the parlor.

In the rainy gloom the parlor had somehow contracted. The black marble fireplace monopolized the wall space. The sofa crowded the chairs. There were too many bits and pieces in the whatnot. The gramophone's absurd morning glory thrust its neck out obtrusively.

Ed Brewster had left the family album on the marbletop drum table beside the sofa. I picked up the album and sat down. As I did so, all the furniture seemed to crowd around me. When I thrust out a leg, Abby Bridewell's rocker kicked me in the shin. The Eye over the mantel, protuberant, staring, watched me. I opened the album to a Brady-type photo of Abby Bridewell flanked by Earnest and Lionel, and three more people crowded into the overstuffed room.

I could almost see them—Abby in her matriarchal chair— Earnest at the fireplace—Lionel replacing me on the sofa. Time: 3:00 P.M. They have just completed one of those Victorian repasts that went from soup to nuts, complete with mutton and dumplings, boiled potatoes, ham simmered in milk, fried eggplant, glazed carrots, boiled coffee, spiced pears and a glutinous floating island. Weighted with custard, calories and contention, they make preparations to digest the surfeit.

The old lady, smelling of mothballs and cologne, begins to rock. Earnest palms a pepsin tablet and loosens his satin vest. Lionel, working a regurgitative toothpick, looks from one to the other combatively. As though by mutual agreement the argument begins.

Earnest thinks they ought to buy a car. It doesn't look right for a man in his position to be going around in a buggy.

Abby: What's wrong with a buggy?

Earnest: You don't see many buggies in the State capital today, Mother. All the important people are driving automobiles.