I laughed and told him that the night-light was apparently the one gift that had survived the years during which my aunt purged her home of every other reminder of Arthur, save Travis himself. He cocked his head to one side for a moment, but made no wisecracks, so I went back to replacing the bulb.
Travis came slowly down the hall and Frank, who had already taken a liking to him, offered to help him get settled in a chair.
“No thanks,” Travis said. “The thought of trying to get up again makes me want to stay on my feet.” He saw what I was working on and smiled a misshapen grin. “What are you doing to the Virgin Mary?”
“I was going to surprise you,” I said, trying to concentrate on what was becoming a frustrating effort to reattach the base to the statue. “You know-replace the bulb and set this in your room-have you wake up to a glowing religious night-light.”
Frank groaned.
“Hey, Mr. Episcopalian,” I said, handing the two parts to him. “Instead of making rude sound effects, why not see if you can get this back together?”
Frank took it from me as Travis said, “Well, you do almost have to grow up with it, Irene.”
“Tell that to her sister,” Frank said, peering up the hollow Virgin Mary’s plastic gown. “She keeps trying to talk me into converting.”
“Maybe I’ll put off meeting Barbara,” Travis said, and Frank laughed.
Frank started poking a finger into the statue. “Hold it,” I said. “There’s a limit-”
He looked back into the bottom of the statue, ignoring me. “Get me a pair of tweezers.” Tweezers!
“Please.”
Well, it was the magic word, after all.
With tweezers in hand, he began picking at something inside the statue.
“What is it?” Travis asked.
“The reason the bulb won’t fit. There’s something rolled up inside here.”
Travis looked over at me.
“Travis, you said this was the only thing among your mother’s possessions that your father had given to her…”
“And he gave it to her to protect her,” he said softly. “To protect her from Gerald?”
Frank soon began complaining that if we didn’t give him some elbow room, he wouldn’t be able to get the object-something made of metal wrapped in paper-out without tearing the paper.
But a few minutes later he succeeded, and handed a short flat key and what at first appeared to be a scroll of thick paper to Travis.
“Is that a safe-deposit box key?” I asked.
“Too short,” Frank said. “Maybe a cash box, something like that.”
Travis, who had taken a seat next to Frank on the couch, handed the scroll back to him. “Could you help me unroll it?”
Frank carefully unrolled the scroll, which turned out to be a small envelope. It was the size of the envelopes invitations and thank-you notes sometimes come in, about four-by-six inches, and it was addressed to Arthur Spanning at an address I didn’t recognize at first, but marked “Personal.”
The address was written in black ink in a rough hand. There was no return address, no stamps, no postmark, but at the top of the envelope, a different hand had penciled in the number twenty-five and circled it.
“The office address?” I asked Travis, finally remembering.
“Yes. He told me that he had most of his mail sent there, not only because W would read it to him, but because it was the one place he would be every day-otherwise, he alternated between our house and the farm, and later between his apartment and the farm. But even if he couldn’t get into the office during the day, most evenings, he stopped by to check his mail.”
“Ulkins was there all the time?”
“No. Ulkins would tape-record the mail, usually just summarizing it. See this number twenty-five? Ulkins wrote that. He numbered the envelopes, then said on the tape, ”Letter one is from so-and-so, regarding x and y…‘ and so on. My father would listen to it as soon as he got a chance, whenever he had a moment. Sometimes that was in the afternoon, but usually it was late in the day.“
He explained who W/Ulkins was to Frank as he turned the envelope over. There were two red ink marks on the back, from a pair of rubber stamps. One was the figure of a hand.
“Hand-delivered,” Travis said, pointing to it.
The other stamp was a date-all numerical. “Date received,” he said.
“The day Gwendolyn DeMont was murdered,” I said.
“Should I-should I be handling this?” Travis asked.
“Probably no prints, but just to make sure, here,” Frank said, and using the tweezers but making the barest contact otherwise, he removed five index cards and the page of a calendar from the envelope. All were as curled as the envelope, but using the eraser end of a pencil to hold down one end and the tweezers to hold the other end, Frank held them open.
The calendar page was from the same date, the day of the murder. On it, someone had drawn a crescent moon.
“This doesn’t have anything to do with the actual phase of the moon,” Travis said. “It means ‘This night.”“
On each of the five index cards, symbols had been drawn.
“What do they mean?” I asked Travis.
He pointed to a simple house shape with other symbols within it.
“I’m not sure. The symbols on the inside of the house shape mean, ”Rich people live here.“ When we used to leave the notes for one another, our house was drawn like this, but with a heart inside.”
“Maybe it was a symbol for the DeMont farmhouse,” I said. “Especially if Gerald and your dad devised it before your dad lived in it.”
Frank held the next one open. “A zero?” I asked.
“Yes, in a way,” Travis said. “It means ‘Nothing to be gained here.”“ The next one also seemed familiar. ”A diamond?“ Frank asked.
“No, see the little protrusion at the bottom?” Travis pointed to it. “It’s a hobo sign for ‘Hold your tongue.”“
Neither of us guessed at the next one.
“This means ‘A crime has been committed here,”“ he said. ”And this last one means ’Be ready to defend yourself.“”
“He killed her,” Travis said. “Gerald kept hinting about this great favor he had done my father, but he didn’t really admit killing her.”
“He warned your father with hobo signs. These papers are what he was looking for,” I said. “And this key.”
We had told Frank about our encounter with Gerald, but only the basics. Now Travis filled him in on the details, then said, “I know he’ll be convicted of murdering my mother, and maybe even charged with attempted murder for trying to kill me. Killing Ulkins, the way he hurt Irene, and tried to kill her-there may be convictions for that, too. He should go to jail for a long time, and I should be satisfied.
“But if Gwendolyn’s murder is left as an open case, it isn’t enough.” He paused, then added, “I feel sorry for her, but I’d be kidding myself if I said I wanted justice for her sake. It’s more selfish than that.
“I want to clear my father’s name. I mean, he was a bigamist, yes- that I admit. But he didn’t kill his wife. My family-my father, my mother and I-we paid for that murder. We were punished for it, even though my father was innocent.” He stopped himself, shook his head. “No, that’s not true. He didn’t kill her, but he wasn’t innocent.”
“Your father protected Gerald,” Frank said.
“Yes,” Travis said. “He protected the killer.”
“His only brother,” I said. “A man who had raised him.”
“His brother’s keeper,” Travis said. “And God knows, Gerald was his keeper in every sense of the word.” He turned to Frank and said, “Is there any hope of using these to convict him of murdering Gwendolyn?”