The Transcendental Murder (23 page)

“Who's worried?” snarled Homer. He turned to wade toward the shore, hobbling, hanging onto his toe. Then he stopped, and hopped up and down in one place, and pointed. “What's that?” he said.

Facing them was a great grey rock. There was an inscription carved into its face. “That's Egg Rock,” said Mary. “We went right by it twice before.”

Homer waded clumsily to the edge of the water, and read the inscription.

ON THE HILL NASHAWTUCK
AT THE MEETING OF THE RIVERS
AND ALONG THE BANKS
LIVED THE INDIAN OWNERS OF
MUSKETAQUID
BEFORE THE WHITE MEN CAME
.

“Musketaquid,” said Homer. “That's the old Indian name for the river.”

“Yes, and of the tribe. It means Grass-ground River, or river surrounded with grassy meadows. Thoreau liked to call it that, too. He called his little boat
The Musketaquid.
”

Homer was bleeding into the water, but he let go of his toe and ran his finger over the word
Musketaquid.
“Musketaquid. Musket-a-quid. Musket …” He looked at Mary. “Say, you don't suppose that was what Ernest Goss was trying to say when he died?” Mary stared back at him. Could it have been? Then Homer tugged at the canoe and dragged it up on the sloping shore. Mary wrung out a streaming handkerchief and tied it on his wounded toe. It was hard to do because he kept hopping around.

“What do you think you're doing?”

“I don't know. Looking for something. Doing research.”

“Oh, I see. Well, hold still. Golly, I'm afraid you're going to bleed right through this bandage. He really took a piece out of you.”

Homer got away and hobbled all over the small point of land that marked the joining place of the rivers, leaving wet red drops on the ferns that grew in clefts in the granite outcropping. Then he found something. It was a small tin bait box, wedged deep down in one of the clefts. It was fastened shut by a heavy padlock.

“Zowie!” shouted Homer. “My letters! What do you want to bet?” He rattled the box around. “Something in there all right.”

“You're sure it's not just a lot of smelly worms?”

“Doesn't sound like worms. Sounds like papers.”

“Well, it could be a club that some boys have, and this is their secret hiding place, and the papers tell who's president and what the password is. Oh, Homer, look, you've got to sit down and put your foot up. You'll bleed half to death. You stay here. I'll find a house and call Tom and get some bandages and he'll bring the car as close as he can.”

“You go wigwams? You one heap awful big wet squaw.”

“You one heap awful big bloody mess, go Happy Hunting Ground.” Mary climbed over a great fallen log, rotten and soft, and started up a barely visible path. Old Squaw Sachem had had a trail somewhere here, and up on Nashawtuc Hill there were some houses.

Homer stretched out on the ground and put his foot up on the canoe. He held the bait box on his stomach and patted it. “Me findum plenty wampum. Me plenty heap awful smart.”

Chapter 40

	Everything that befalls, accuses him.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Homer was for opening the bait box with a can opener, but Jimmy Flower would have none of that. He brought out a manila envelope that held the contents of Ernest Goss's pockets, and poured them out on his desk. Small change, wallet, penknife, key chain. And on the key chain there was a small key for which they had as yet found no matching lock. “Will wonders never cease,” said Jimmy. The rusted padlock was reluctant, but it gave way. Inside the bait box was a plastic folder, and in the folder was the batch of letters. Mary recognized them at once. These were
the
letters, the letters Ernest Goss had read to the Alcott Association, Transcendental dynamite.

“Now don't you go handling them,” said Jimmy. “We'll let Campbell at Public Safety work them over. I'll get them off to him right now.”

“So if I'm right,” said Homer, “Goss wasn't saying
musket
at all as he lay dying. He was trying to say something else entirely. And that's why Arthur Furry didn't really need to strain himself to remember a big gun. There was no big gun. No musket at all.”

“Hold on there, not so fast. Don't forget, he was killed with a musket ball and there's a musket missing.”

“But why should a dying man waste his last words on the weapon that killed him? That's what's bothered me all along. He didn't even bother to tell the name of his murderer. Something else was more important to communicate—the whereabouts of the letters on which he planned to raise a big reputation. He wanted them found and saved and published and credited to his own glory.”

“Well, could be. I don't know. I'm not going to make up my mind yet. Say, how do you suppose Goss got the letters to Egg Rock? By boat?”

“He probably just drove down Nashawtuc Road and walked over. And he could have left them there any time after he read them aloud to the Alcott Association, afraid they might be stolen if he left them around the house.”

“But what did he pick that particular place for?”

“I know,” said Mary. “It must have been an old haunt of his. He was a great arrowhead collector, don't forget, and he must have scratched around there a good deal on the site of the old village, looking for Indian artifacts.”

Mr. Campbell, the fingerprint man, made an informal report by telephone to Jimmy Flower. “Of course,” he said, “paper isn't the best stuff in the world to get good prints from, but fortunately these didn't dry out too badly, being out-of-doors the way they were. So the sweat prints didn't fade too much for us to make some indentifications. Well, there's two sets of prints on them, on all of them. Right thumb prints on the upper righthand corner of each sheet. That's where you hold it to read it over after you write, or to read it for the first time if you've just received it. One set of prints is Ernest Goss's, the other is his son Charley's.”

“Whose?
Charley's
?”

“That's what I said. And Ernie's appear to be on top of Charley's in some cases, which makes it look as if Charley wrote them and Ernie received them.”

(Charley's? Mary, sitting at her card table in the corner, felt her heart sink. Another bad mark for Charley.)

“What about real old prints? Like a hundred years old? You didn't find any of those?” said Jimmy.

“That's a different kettle of fish. You have to use a different way of bringing them out. You see, the sweat prints evaporate after while, so you have to use a system that looks for acids that don't evaporate. Well, we used it on these letters. It's called the ninhydrin method. Of course we can't be positive, since we never tried it on anything as old as these letters were supposed to be, but we didn't turn up a single print.”

“There was nothing on them, then, but prints by Ernest and Charley Goss?”

“That's right. Now, do you want me to send these down to the lab, so they can look into the paper and ink? They look to me like they're all done with the same brown ink.”

“Okay. But I bet we can get Charley Goss to talk. Say, what about the bait box? Where Charley's prints on that?”

“No, just his daddy's. And of course about a million big huge blobs belonging to one Homer Kelly. Tell him from me he's a great big overgrown blundering oaf.”

Jimmy passed along the message, and Homer grinned. “Tell him from me he's a dear boy and thank him very much.”

Charley Goss had given up trying to find a job. He had planted a colossal vegetable garden behind the house and he was spending his time caring for it. He threw himself into it, hoeing and weeding and setting out branching sticks for the peas to climb on and tented stakes for the tomato plants. Only Rowena and Edith and Charley himself were left to eat the results, because Philip had moved into George Jarvis's bachelor apartment on Thoreau Street. But the garden gave Charley something to do, and he gave most of his produce away.

Mary looked at him guiltily, as he came into Jimmy's office with Sergeant Shrubsole. Charley's face was red and healthy-looking from the sun, but his eyes looked miserable. He glanced at her, and then looked away without speaking. She had tried to tell him privately that her time spent with the lieutenant-detective from the District Attorney's office was an effort to help him. But Charley had merely looked at her with red eyes, and said, “Oh, sure.” Mary had bitten her lip and said nothing. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps after all her motives were not as clear as all that.

Jimmy Flower brought out a chair for Charley and started talking. Charley listened to the facts about his fingerprints on the letters, and then confessed right away. “Sure,” he said, “I wrote them. But let me tell you how it happened.” He turned to Homer. “You know what a great practical joker my father was? A real joker. You saw him that night going after poor old Edith with that paper napkin. Well, it occurred to me (back in February I guess it was), after a particularly nasty trick he had played on me, that one way of getting back at him was to try it myself. Let him slip on his own banana peel. I thought it over for some time before I finally came up with this. The thing that made me think of it was an exam I had in one of those crazy schools I went to. They didn't really have exams, just something they called CTPs, Creative Thinking Projects. The course was a sort of Renaissance History Seminar, or something. You were supposed to write an imaginary letter from Savonarola to Pope Alexander VI. Well, I had a wonderful time. I had Savonarola threatening to hire Leonardo da Vinci's flying machine and drop burning coals on the Vatican. Got a very good paragraph on my PCP. That is, my Personal Critical Profile. In other words, my report card.

“But anyway, the point is, it gave me this idea of writing letters from one Transcendentalist to another, making them ridiculous but sort of superficially convincing. I did a whole lot of reading, and I even copied the handwriting, when I could find the originals. There's a glass case there in the library with samples of writing by Emerson and Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott.”

Homer shook his head. “I've got to hand it to you, Charley. You did a magnificent job. Works of art, all of them. What did you do for paper and ink?”

“It was just good bond paper in various weights and sizes. And brown India ink. I left the paper in the barn a while to get weathered. Any even slightly scientific examination would show that it wasn't old paper.”

“What did you do with them when they were finished?”

“Well, that took a bit of thought. I finally wrote another letter. This one was supposed to have been written by a sweet little old lady in western Massachusetts by the name of Miss Maria Fuller Alcott Emerson …”

“Maria Fuller Alcott Em——Say, that's the mysterious lady in your father's will! Okay, go ahead, what was she for?”

“She was supposed to be a genteel old lady in reduced circumstances, descended on both sides from Concord greats. She flattered my father up and down, going on about how much she had heard about his integrity and honor and all that bilgewater, and how her grandfather had known his grandfather, and how ashamed she was to be selling the souls of her great ancestors, so she didn't want her name mentioned, but her poverty had reduced her to this extremity. So would my father publish these letters under his own name and divide the royalties with her, that was all she asked, some fraction of the royalties, and would he please memorize her address and burn this? Well, of course, Dad fell for it. He wrote her this big pompous magnanimous letter, agreeing to the whole thing, and then she sent him the letters.”

“He really wrote a letter to some fictitious lady?

“Oh, I have an old buddy out there in Springfield. He's a postman. He agreed to send and receive letters for her. I guess he's kept his mouth shut.”

“Well,” said Homer. “It all worked just the way you hoped.”

Charley flushed. “Not quite,” he said. “Of course I was delighted when I heard he had read them to the Alcott Association and that they had laughed at them. I thought that would be the end of it. I'd had my revenge. But I didn't dream he'd go on taking them seriously after that.”

“Didn't that put you on the spot then?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your father
did
go on believing in them. That meant that there would eventually be a good deal of notoriety and investigation and damage to literary reputations, and it probably meant that the letters might be traced back to you. How would you have explained to the press, for example, your responsibility for such spectacular forgeries?”

Charley was silent.

“And your father. What would have been his reaction to the discovery that his own son had made a fool of him before the world? Had you thought that through?”

Charley still said nothing. He looked down at the red backs of his hands, which were clutching his knees.