Of the members of the faculty the troopers questioned, the most upset emotionally was Miss Hackett.
“There was never anything between us but friendship,” she kept repeating in her Victorian way. “He would often come to me for consolation. I felt genuinely sorry for him, the way she browbeat him. But for anyone to infer anything more is too preposterous for words.”
Mrs. Gordon went to pieces in the morgue when the troopers took her there to complete the identification of her husband.
“Poor dumb bastard,” she said. “I loved him.”
It was the Indian tomahawk shifted suspicion to Natty Bowles. Yes, he had seen the drama director several times after the night of the performance, dodging around campus after midnight. Yes, that was his axe. He had given it to Dr. Cloute to add to his Indian collection. Yes, he had watched the lovers on the knoll many evenings, starting last fall. And then back stage that winter, when he came in to check the furnace.
Dr. Cloute admitted that Natty had given him the tomahawk to add to his collection of artifacts. He was proud of his collection. He would show it to his students during his lectures on the French and Indian wars. He had written several papers on this bit of Colonial history, saying, “Somehow, I feel far enough back one of my ancestors was a chief of the Six Nations.”
Oddly enough, Dr. Cloute hadn’t missed the tomahawk until it was found by the body of Cyril Gordon. It had evidently been taken from the white pine chest in his study where he kept arrow heads, stone pestles, hide scrapers, bone fish hooks and round net sinkers, peace beads of wampum, charred cobs of Indian corn.
In his lectures to the senior class he always stressed the cultural status of the American Indians. They were nearer civilization than the early Colonials realized. They knew how to preserve meat. They had cross pollinated corn, beans, squash. And they were a highly moral people. There was no trading of maidens under the hide tepees or in the long bark houses. At that, he would smile knowingly and his senior students would smile back. They knew this was his way of condemning what went on back campus, even among some of the Horseham faculty.
Suspicion centered like the nose of the bloodhounds on Natty Bowles. He told too many conflicting stories about what he had seen, how he had watched the lovers make love back stage and on the grassy knoll. But when the prosecuting attorney held up the tomahawk for the jury to see the dried blood on the blade, he shook his head, denied he had used it to knock but the brains of Cyril Gordon, director of dramatics. As much as he admitted hating him.
Yes, he had seen the red paint on the bloated body when the troopers moved it into the morgue, holding their noses. Yes, the body bore the Indian curse sign, the sign a brave painted on the chest of his dead enemy.
Had Natty ever quarreled with the drama director? Yes, the white man had sworn at him on three different occasions for forgetting to leave the thermostat turned up in the gym winter evenings Gordon was holding rehearsals. Gordon had called him a bad name, a lazy clout. At first Natty had thought the drama director had meant the president, Dr. Cloute. At the time Natty had asked me what it meant and I had told him clout meant a blow.
“So instead you deliberately set out to kill him, didn’t you?” The attorney repeated the charge to remind the jury. “You sneaked up on him while he was asleep on the knoll, struck him with your tomahawk. Then with red clay you painted on the dead man’s chest the swastika of death.”
The jury brought in a verdict of murder in the first degree. Natty was shipped to the death house. But after the prison psychiatrist’s examination, Judge Trent had Natty committed to the hospital for the criminal insane.
Campus settled down after that. Came the time for finals, new contracts for the faculty, Dr. Cloute’s wife Hilda forced him not to renew Miss Hackett’s contract. Hilda had taken Martha Gordon into her confidence. Mrs. Gordon could handle the speech classes much better than the dean of women.
The last day of school, Miss Hackett opened the little blue envelope. Instead of her contract for the next year, she found a neatly typed letter informing her that Bruce Harrison would become dean of both male and female students.
She had heard the day before through the campus grapevine, that because of my friendship with Natty, Dr. Cloute had not renewed my contract, under the contrived excuse that journalism would not be offered next year at Horseham College. She came to my office to see me.
“Before I leave, I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate your keeping my affair with Mr. Gordon out of the papers,” she said, sitting down by my desk and lighting a cigarette.
“That was nothing, just good public relations, as Dr. Cloute would put it.”
“He gave you the sack too, didn’t he?” she asked. Except for her wide blue eyes and one strand of crow black hair that had a way of dropping down over one eye and that she kept tossing aside like an untamed mare, she looked much like my youngest aunt Matilda, the one who lives in Boston.
“I don’t know what to do about it,” she said. “Maybe you could advise me.”
“About what?”
“Dr. Cloute.” She tossed her head. “He’s quite a bastard, you know.”
I shook my head. She seemed like Natty, accusing the president of Horseham College.
“The first year I came to Horseham as dean of women, he asked me to teach a two-hour course in speech. ‘As a favor, Miss Hackett,’ he said, and five hundred dollars more a year.”
“Horseham doesn’t pay very well,” I admitted to encourage her to continue the story of her relations with Dr. Cloute.
“I soon enough found out what the extra salary meant,” she spoke quietly, as if confessing to a priest. “He would call me into his office after the last bell. At first he would talk about his family in New Hampshire and ask me if I had ever met any other Cloutes while I was at Durham. That led to his confessing that he was part Indian. And then he asked me if I didn’t want him to show me how the Indians made love.”
“And did he show you?”
“Yes, after he threatened to tell the faculty how he had seen me going into the darkroom with one Of my senior boys, to help him develop some pictures of my speech class.”
“So Dr. Cloute was your first lover.” I knew she wanted me to level with her.
“Yes, we got along all right. The second year he put through another thousand dollar raise. And then Cyril Gordon came on campus. From that first faculty meeting, loved this blue-eyed Irishman, the free way he walked, swinging his legs, whistling, his touseled hair bobbing with his laughter. I had dreamed of a lover like him, gentle as summer rain, coming on me sitting in the heather, waiting for his voice.”
“And he found too what he was looking for?”
I must encourage her to be quite frank.
“You and everyone else on campus knows he did. His wife had interrupted his career, torturing him, before his class, at rehearsals. He told me she was driving him daft.”
“Yes, it was quite evident.” I had heard the red-headed actress many times tearing away his dignity as a man.
“If you were I, would you tell the police?” Her quick question caught me wondering how it had been, this Irishman lying with her in his arms, on the divan back stage, on the pineneedled knoll in the back woods.
“Tell the police what?” I asked, wondering what she meant. She put out her cigarette in the ash tray, watching the sparks flare and die.
“About Dr. Cloute and how he took to following us, spying on us. Once on the divan a small flashlight flicked on in the wings and I saw his face twisted with his own frustration. My next salary check was fifty dollars short. When I asked why he said the board of trustees had ordered him to cut all salaries fifteen percent and his hands were tied. I learned later the only two salaries that had been cut were Gordon’s and mine.”