So it falls to Rainer to walk to the police station and inform them that his neighbor has passed on. As a stonemason, one of the skilled workers, he’s in a better position to convey such information, and the fact that his English is better than most doesn’t hurt. He decides to say that, as far as he can tell, George died of a fit, which is close enough to the truth for him to be able to stick to it. And stick to it he does, even though the cop he tells stares at him for an uncomfortably long time after he’s finished speaking, as if he thinks he can stare a confession out of Rainer. When the officer gets up from his chair and accompanies Rainer back to George’s, somewhat to Rainer’s surprise the officer agrees that Rainer’s assessment appears to be correct. He’ll have to send over to Woodstock for the undertaker, the cop says, Rainer’s free to go. He thanks the cop, and takes his leave.
No one person witnesses all of what happens next. Lottie pieces most of it together from the combined gossip of a dozen different people that day and the next. The substance of it is simple. The undertaker’s assistant, a young fellow by the name of Miller Jeffries, who’s sent by his boss to collect George’s body, upon his return to Woodstock shotguns his boss, then drives back to the camp to shoot his sweetheart and himself. The consensus among the camp’s population is that Jeffries lost his mind, which is what the residents of the camp tell the newspaper reporters who show up to cover the crime. I know: not the most earth-shattering of explanations. No one breathes a word about the reason for Jeffries’s insanity, although a good portion of the camp traces it to the trip he took to fetch that body. A smaller number of people know that he met Helen, the dead man’s dead wife, who was waiting in the house for him when he arrived. About an hour before Jeffries shows up, folks see her walking up the street to her house. One moment, the street is empty. The next, she’s in it, as if she turned a corner in the air and appeared. She makes her muddy way to the house, and takes a seat next to her husband’s corpse. Maybe she’s expecting the undertaker himself. He’s otherwise engaged, though, so it’s Jeffries who’s taken the black horse and wagon over from Woodstock. He’s a bit strange-looking, is Miller. The papers describe him as short, with bow-legs and long arms. Word is, he isn’t the brightest candle in the box, either. Lottie, who met him a couple of times in passing, said his face looked like he was trying to solve a difficult math problem that was beyond him. He climbs down from his wagon, enters the house, and meets what’s waiting for him.
A neighbor passing by the house a few minutes later glances in a window and sees Jeffries standing with his head bowed, Helen seated in front of him. The neighbor doesn’t hear Helen saying anything to Jeffries, but he’s in a hurry to get someplace and doesn’t pay much attention. Whatever Miller Jeffries learns in the ten minutes he spends inside that house sends him out of it with more determination in his stride than anyone could recall him ever having shown. The corpse that occasioned his trip he leaves lying. He rides back to Woodstock, to the undertaker’s, where he has a small room at the back, as well as a shotgun no one knows about tucked under the mattress of his bed. He finds his boss bending over a body he’s almost done preparing for burial. As far as anyone can tell later on, there’s no dramatic confrontation, no melodramatic scene. Jeffries simply lifts the shotgun and blows a hole in the undertaker’s back. The impact bounces the man off the coffin he’s leaning over. As he lies there, Jeffries walks over to him and empties the shotgun’s remaining barrel into his groin. He reloads, and shoots the undertaker twice more, a second time in the groin, and once in the face. When he’s finished, he takes the horse and cart and returns to the camp, to the hospital, where his sweetheart is a nurse. He finds her talking to a patient, a man recovering from the flu, raises the shotgun, and shoots her through the heart. She collapses onto her patient’s bed, and that fellow will tell the reporters he was sure he was next, but Jeffries only looked at him with dull eyes, said, “She told me everything,” and turned the shotgun on himself.
It’s a pretty sensational event. The Catskills have seen their fair share of murders over the years — more, probably, than most folks realize — but this one causes a stir far and wide. There’s even a song written about it, “She Told Him Everything.” For a short time later that year, it enjoys a measure of success. Pete Seeger used to sing it once in a while. I think he recorded it, too. The song’s written from the point of view of Jeffries’s sweetheart, and portrays her as torn between two men, Jeffries, who’s cast as a kind of schoolgirl crush, and the undertaker, who’s presented as the girl’s true love. She wants to do right by Jeffries, but she can’t deny her feelings. Finally, she tells him, tells him everything, as the title says, and that’s that. Tragedy.
Obviously, there was something going on between Jeffries’s sweetheart and his boss. Well, he thought there was, at least. What the song misses is the source of Jeffries’s information. From his final words, the songwriter, following the newspapers, assumes that Jeffries learned of his sweetheart’s betrayal from her lips, that she confessed the whole thing to him. No one told the songwriter about Jeffries’s meeting with Helen. If they had, he might have penned a different song.
Lottie knows about that meeting, as do Clara and Rainer. For Lottie’s parents, there’s no doubting what happened. Helen told Miller Jeffries his sweetheart’s secret, and, in so doing, signed the death warrants for the girl and both her lovers. If they required any further proof of the urgency of the situation, this is it, in spades.
As it so happens, they’re going to receive still more evidence, whether they want it or not. While Rainer pores over his books late into the night, sleeping an hour, the dead woman continues her mischief. She isn’t around when the second undertaker comes from Wiltwyck for her husband’s body. I guess she had her fill of morticians. George’s mortal remains are carted off to Wiltwyck. I don’t know what becomes of him. Buried in a pauper’s grave, most likely. I think he’d drunk what little savings the family had. The children, though — whom I guess you’d have to call orphans, despite the fact that their mother was up and moving around — they receive another visit from Helen. The kids’ve stayed on at Italo and Regina’s, which is where their late mother finds them later the same day Miller Jeffries sends himself to his eternal reward. The day is just getting on to dusk. Italo is on his way home from work when he sees Helen ahead, lurching towards his house. Right away, he knows what she’s after, and, as he’ll tell Rainer the following morning, he’s simultaneously furious and afraid. Furious, because here’s the woman — the thing — that threatened his wife and children, not to mention the orphans, whom he’s already thinking of as his own. Afraid, because of the secret words she’s whispered through the door to Regina. He speeds up his pace, rushing past Helen to his house. Once inside, he doesn’t waste any time. He bolts the door and begins piling objects in front of it, the kitchen table, a trunk, a couple of chairs. The children he sends into the back room. Regina refuses to accompany them. I think she wants another crack at Helen.
They wait there behind Italo’s makeshift barricade, him clutching a hammer and chisel, Regina a cast-iron pan. His heart is pounding so hard he’s dizzy, Italo will report, and no doubt Regina felt the same. They wait there, and as the minutes drag by, they look at one another, confused. Granted, Helen moves slowly, but she should have been knocking on the door by now, uttering her request. Unless Italo was mistaken about her destination, which seems impossible. You know that line from the movies: “It’s quiet. Too quiet.” That’s how they feel. They wait, their nerves screaming with the strain. When they hear the crack at the back of the house, and the children shrieking, it’s almost a relief.