“It would head for home once Harry let go of the bridle rein.” He took down the names of all who had been at the bridge party and prepared to leave. “If any of you come up with something you forgot to tell me, be sure to get in touch. We’ll talk some more later.” He headed for the stairway, Earl following to let him out. “Thanks for the coffee, Emma. Good night, Polly. Oh, wait. You ladies will have to take the long way home after all. If you care to come now, I’ll drive you over to the Terrace. Don’t want anybody going walking over the lot until we’ve had a good look at it in the daylight.”
Thelma, Rose, and Mary accepted the offer with alacrity. And Earl, Polly, and I were left to tidy up. Bed, for the time being, seemed out of the question. “I was tired as all get out when I first came upstairs,” Earl said. “Now I doubt if I could get to sleep for thinking about this.”
We sat at the kitchen table going over what had happened, trying to come up with answers as to who and why.
“Who’d go to such lengths?” Polly said. “Good for nothing as Harry is — was — folks in Longvalley aren’t the vindictive kind. Not that the most of us wouldn’t have gladly removed Harry if there’d been some way.”
“He wasn’t overdone with friends,” Earl agreed. He was attacking a plate of leftover sandwiches. “Outside of Nora I can’t think of anybody who even moderately tolerated him. Always thought that one day he’d go too far, a beating maybe, but hardly this.”
“What about Nora?” I said. “She’s got to be told.”
“The chief was driving out to the farm right after he left us,” Earl said. “Nora, she’ll be wondering — but no, this isn’t the first time that horse has galloped home without Harry, him lying in a ditch until he sobered up enough to walk.”
“Why such a sweet person as Nora Fitzmaurice married Bagley is past any understanding,” Polly said. “This past year for her must have been hell.”
Nora, although Bagley’s wife for the past year, was still referred to as Nora Fitzmaurice. Everyone in Longvalley had been astounded when Nora had married Bagley so soon after Charlie Fitzmaurice died.
“Bamboozled into it by that rascal,” Earl said. “Trusting little woman, thinking all men were like her dad, or Charlie. That’s where she was wrong.”
I sat thinking about Nora. She hadn’t been to town much after marrying Harry. About a month ago she’d come into the shop. I’d been shocked at her appearance. Her once shining blonde hair had straggled about her neck in rattailing strands. The cream and roses complexion had looked old. And behind her dark glasses, as she’d raised them briefly, I saw that her lovely blue eyes were sunken and ringed about with purple bruises fading to yellowish grey. I’d mumbled something about why didn’t she stay for lunch, as I’d be going upstairs in a matter of minutes. And Earl, tactless as usual, said, “Right, Nora, stay for lunch. Looks to me like you ain’t been eating right.” She had smiled then, for a brief second looking like the lovely Nora we’d always known.
Her voice hadn’t been the same either, low pitched now, and hoarse. And then, as she waited for Earl to box her purchases, she’d said to me, in an intense whisper: “Emma, did you know that Reggie Crossland’s back from Australia?” Her voice and manner had taken me by surprise, for a glimpse of the old, vibrant Nora had shone through. It was after she’d gone that I thought about how close she and Reggie had once been. But it was only a momentary thought at the back of my mind.
“These sandwiches are good,” Polly was saying. She and Earl, the plate between them, settled into the pleasant task of finishing them.
Nora and Reggie Crossland. Was it eighteen or twenty years ago? Both of them eighteen then. Sweethearts they’d been, crazy about each other, it had been easy to see. And I remembered “crazy” was the word Nora’s father had used when he’d put his foot down at their wanting to become engaged. “That crazy Reggie Crossland. I’ll not have him for a son-in-law.” He’d succeeded in separating them by sending Nora off to nursing school. The war coming right about then had helped, I suppose, for Reggie was among the first to join up.
“I’ll wait,” Nora had told me, grimly. “We’ll marry, Emma, you just wait and see. But I’m not going to sit about mooning in my father’s house. He doesn’t really want me to go away to be a nurse. But it’s what I’m going to be. Then when Reggie comes back and becomes a teacher, I’ll have a profession, too.”
Nora was not only very beautiful, she was spunky as well. I could see why Reggie was so taken. Sure, he loved to look at her, who wouldn’t? But it was a sort of lively fire she had that made her especially attractive. As for Reggie’s becoming a teacher, which his dad, Lionel Crossland, was, that was not at all what Reggie had in mind. He’d be a vet, he said, or a farmer. And that was where he ran afoul of his father, a clash of strong wills.
Lionel Crossland was the best school principal Longvalley has ever had, a rather fierce looking, redhaired man immaculately turned out. Hair brilliantined, mustache waxed, and so neat. Grey suits ranging from charcoal shade to highest grey, with a bandbox look. Mattie and Lionel Crossland had had their troubles with Reggie. Not that the boy was bad; far from it. It was the fights he got into mostly, and being hauled off to the police constabulary for a talking to by the chief. They found it degrading. At least Lionel did. Mattie Crossland had a more philosophical attitude. Except for the red hair Reggie took after Mattie, both of them having a lovely sense of humor. You couldn’t blame Lionel, really, for he did have a standard to maintain in the school. His shining red face seemed to get redder after every one of Reggie’s escapades.
Reggie, both Earl and I liked him a lot; he was our box boy at the time he and Nora were going to high school and right up to the time he left for the war. A goodnatured, curly-haired redheaded young giant he was. Forget-me-not blue eyes twinkled with the devil’s own mischief. His flashing grin was, he said, “To show my beautiful false teeth. Something I have to do for my old man. All that orthodontal work he paid for. I sure wouldn’t have had them if it hadn’t been for my father. He wanted me perfect, you see.” Of course they were no more false teeth than were Nora’s gleaming white ones that made her smile something to see. Three boys we’d had need of to do the work after Reggie went away.
But Reggie could get into trouble without even trying, for he was a bit wild, that is, by some people’s standards. There was the motor bike he bought. Tearing about town with that thing banging and roaring all hours of the night — Nora riding pillion, of course — didn’t do a thing for his popularity. Then there were the fights; but every incident was the outcome of one of Reggie’s good deeds: restraining a wife or dog beater, quite aggressively in some cases, for Reggie never had assessed his own strength; sailing into a group of rowdies tormenting a girl. There were the many pranks, too, some with disastrous results. “That Reggie Crossland fighting again,” you’d hear. The constable going for Reggie, seldom for the provocative source. Reggie suffering further in the inevitable row with his father.
When the bike folded, literally, on impact with a tree as Reggie pushed it to ninety on a stretch of open highway, miraculously with but minor damage to himself, he put fifty dollars of his hard earned money into an old jalopy, which, with the aid of stalwart friends, he parked in our back yard and in off hours took completely apart. “We can be thankful,” Earl said, staring at the wreckage strewn about the yard, “that he’ll not injure himself or anyone else driving that. For never is he going to get that lot together again.”