And finally they came to that little town in Missouri, and nobody found them out. He had a job checking off grain bags and hogs at the river landing and it looked as if they were going to be safe and happy at last, because there weren’t even any men in the place more vigorous than himself.
They had a little house and were furnishing it from a furniture catalogue. And then one day he came home when she was out and found a letter addressed to “Miss Frieda Hemyers care of Mrs. John Slade,” which was the name they were living under.
It was postmarked “Appleton, Wisconsin,” and when he asked her about it she said it was from the boy who’d wrestled the baggage at the hotel in La Vallette, the same one he’d seen with her among the dunes. Later, when he asked her what was in it, she said she’d burned it and told him there was nothing in it — the fellow only wanted to know how she was.
But the thing stuck in Homer’s brain. It wasn’t, he said, that he was jealous. He had a kind of funny affection for the boy, even though he’d never spoken to him.
He kind of felt that Frieda really belonged to the boy if he wanted her. It was all mixed up in his head and he kept trying to think it out.
And then one day the river boat was a day late and he went back to the house an hour or two after he’d left it. He opened the back door but there wasn’t anybody in and when he called Frieda’s name she didn’t answer, so he went to their bedroom and found the door was locked, and all at once he knew what had happened.
For a moment he just stood still, feeling that he was going to die. He turned cold all over, and then for a moment he couldn’t see. It seemed to him that it was the end of everything, because he’d got to feel that all his life that went before was nothing at all and that he’d been alive only since he ran off with Frieda.
In his brain the thought was born that the only thing to do was to finish it then and there, and to finish it, he’d have to kill Frieda and the man who was in there with her, and then himself.
The funny thing was how clearly he remembered it all, because he was certainly insane at that moment. He took a chair and smashed down the door, and then, with a revolver, he just fired blindly into the dark room until the revolver clicked empty. And when he tried to shoot himself there wasn’t any bullet left.
It was an awful moment when he stood there in the doorway. The emptiness of the pistol seemed to bring, him to himself, and suddenly, because he was really a good man, he wanted to save them both.
But it was too late. Frieda was unconscious and dying, and the man was dead.
It was only then that he discovered it was the boy who had wrestled the baggage at La Vallette. He’d come all the way to Missouri to find her and run off with her.
It made him sick, and the funny thing was that the remorse he felt wasn’t so great because he’d killed two people, but because the two people were Frieda and the boy. If he’d known that Frieda had the boy with her, he’d have gone away quietly and left them together forever.
They were young and love belonged to them. He was old and finished, and he was left alive. And it was terrible, too, that he’d killed the two people who had set him free. They were the two who had given him life and he’d killed them. For a moment he said he had a horrible feeling that instead of killing the boy, he shot himself as he was 30 years before.
After a long time he got up and laid the two bodies on the bed and covered them with a sheet, and then went into the kitchen and put his head into the oven of the stove and turned on the gas. One of the neighbors who ran in to borrow some eggs from Frieda found him there.
He wasn’t dead yet. They dragged him out and brought him to and then found the bodies.
I stayed with him up to the end.
He didn’t make the least effort to save himself. If Frieda had been his wife they’d have let him off maybe with manslaughter, but of course, all their story came out at the trial and he didn’t have a chance.
But Homer didn’t give them any satisfaction. He was sorry he’d killed Frieda and the boy, but he wasn’t repentant about anything else, and he was glad of the two years of happiness he’d had with Frieda. He just sort of smiled when the judge sentenced him.
I took his body back to Hanover and buried it alongside my grandfather, because Etta wouldn’t have anything to do with it. In Hanover, he became a great Example. The wages of sin is death, they said, but they never said anything about the wages of the way Homer was brought up, or the wages of living with Etta.
Last week Martha and I drove out to Ontario to see about buying our winter apples and before I thought about it we were passing the old Sammis house. The roof had fallen in and it was almost hid by bushes, and the pasture where Homer and I had lain in the sun was muddy and frozen. The cattle stood with their heads together and their tails towards the November wind.
Looking for a Diamond
by Edmund Crispin
Gervase Fen, professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford, found Ann Cargill waiting for him in his rooms in college when he returned there from a quiet dinner at the George. She was a quiet, good-looking girl, the pleasantest if not the brightest of the few undergraduates to whom he gave private tutoring.
“Nice to see you back,” he said. For he knew that Ann’s father had recently died and that she had been given leave of absence for the first few weeks of term in order to cope with that situation and its aftermath.
“It’s not about work, I’m afraid,” she confessed. “Not altogether, I mean. I... I was wondering if you could help me in something — something personal.”
“Surely your moral tutor—” Fen began, and then suddenly remembered who Ann’s moral tutor was. “No,” he said. “No, of course not. Wait while I get some drinks, and then you can tell me all about it.”
“I’m probably being several sorts of fool,” said Ann as soon as they were settled with glasses in their hands. “But here goes, anyway.... I don’t know if you know anything about my family, but my mother died years ago,
I’m an only child, and my father — well, the important thing about him, for the moment, is that he had a passion for jewels.
“Jewels weren’t his business. They were his hobby. And two or three months ago he sunk an enormous amount of money — about three-quarters of his capital, I should think — into buying a single diamond that he’d set his heart on, a huge thing, quite flawless.
“Well now, at the beginning of this year Daddy shut up our house at Abingdon — I live on my own in the vacs, you see, in a flat in Town: he liked me to do that — and flew out to Australia on business. He didn’t take the diamond with him. It was left in the house—”
Fen lifted his eyebrows.
“Ah, yes, but the point is, it was really quite as safe there as it would have been in the bank. At the time he started collecting jewels, Daddy had his study made as near burglar-proof as money could buy; and there was only one set of keys to the door and the safe; and when he went to Australia he left those with Mr. Spottiswoode, his solicitor.”
Ann took a deep breath. “And then he... he was killed. In a street accident in Sydney... I... I went down to Abingdon after the wire came, and wandered about there a bit. Remembering. That was when I saw Mr. Spottiswoode, the solicitor, driving away from the house.
“I don’t think he saw me. I called after him, but he didn’t stop. And of course, being Daddy’s executor, he had a perfect right to be there. But I always hated Mr. Spottiswoode...”
Ann wriggled in her chair. “And I’m pretty sure,” she added, “that he was a crook.”
After a brief pause: “I’ve no proof of that,” she went on. “And you don’t have to believe it if you don’t want to. I only mentioned it because it’s one of the reasons why I’ve come to you. Mr. Spottiswoode—”