“But the summoning of a posse comitatus is the function of—” Judge Shinn stopped. “Hunting? For whom, Burney? What are you holding back?”
Hackett blinked. “Not holdin’ nothin’ back, Judge. Ain’t had a chance. Prue Plummer phoned me here soon’s I hung up after talkin’ to you. Says she mistook your two rings for her three. As usual. Anyways, she listened in. Well, Prue had somethin’ to tell me before she began phonin’ the news around the Corners. A tramp stopped at her back door ’bout a quarter of two today, she says. Dang’rous-lookin’ furriner, spoke a broken English. She couldn’t hardly understand him, Prue says, but she figgered he was after a handout. She sent him packin’. But here’s the thing.” Hackett cleared his throat. “Prue says she watched this tramp walk up Shinn Road and go round Aunt Fanny’s to the back.”
“Tramp?” said the Judge.
He glanced at Johnny’s back. Johnny was looking out the north window at Aunt Fanny Adams’s barn and lean-to and the Isbel cornfield beyond.
“Tramp,” nodded Constable Hackett. “There’s nobody in Shinn Corners’d beat in the head of Aunt Fanny Adams. You know that, Judge. It was that tramp murdered her, and it’s a cinch he can’t have got far on foot in this pourin’-down rain.”
“Tramp,” the Judge said again.
The siren shut off in mid-scream, leaving a shimmer of silence. Then there was confusion in the garden and the road. The swishy movement of feet in the kitchen, the creak of the swinging door, a wedge of eyes.
Judge Shinn suddenly pushed the door in and he and Burney Hackett went into the kitchen. Johnny heard angry female murmurs and the old man saying something in a neighborly voice.
The rain was still driving hard in crowded slanting silver lines, putting up a screen beyond the window through which the cornfield wavered. Water was pouring off the Adams barn in the back yard and the pitched roof of the small lean-to attached to it, a two-sided affair open at the front and rear. Johnny could see through to the stone wall of the Isbel field as if the lean-to were a picture frame.
He turned back to the painting on the easel.
She had caught in her primitive, meticulous style all the raging contempt of nature. The dripping barn, the empty lean-to, every stone in the wall, every tall tan withered stalk in the rain-lashed Isbel field, every crooked weeping headstone in the cemetery corner, cowered under the ripped and bleeding sky.
And Johnny looked down at the crumpled bones, and he remembered the dark gray face, the timid, burning eyes, the green velour hat, the rope-tied satchel, the spurting shoes as their feet fled in the downpour... and he thought, You were a very great artist, and a beautiful old woman, and there’s no more sense in your death than in my life.
Then the Judge and Samuel Sheare came in with a staring man between them, and the Judge said in the gentlest of voices, I’m sorry, Ferriss, that death had to come to her this way; and the man shut his eyes and turned away.
When Mr. Sheare said in his troubled way, “We must not, we must not prejudge. Our Lord was poorest of the poor. Are we to lay this crime on the head of a man merely ’cause he must ask for food and walk in the rain?” — when the minister said this, Fanny Adams’s grandnephew raised his head and said, “Walk in the rain? Who?”
They had taken him out of the studio into Fanny Adams’s gleaming dining room, and Prue Plummer was there with Elizabeth Sheare, stroking the pin butterfly hinge on the door from the death room with patient avarice. But Ferriss Adams’s question brought her mouth to a point, and Prue Plummer told him avidly about the man who had begged for food at her back door.
“I saw a tramp,” Adams said.
“Where?” asked Constable Hackett.
Mr. Sheare said suddenly, “I ask you to remember that you’re Christians. I’m stayin’ with the body,” and he went into the studio. His stout wife sat down in a corner.
“I saw the tramp!” said Adams, his voice rising. He was a tall dapper businessman with thinning brown hair and close-shaven cheeks that had grown pink and blotchy. “I was on my way over from Cudbury just now to call on Aunt Fanny and I passed a man on the road... Miss Plummer, what did this tramp look like?”
“Had on dark pants,” said Prue Plummer, making a smacking sound, “and a light sort of old tweed jacket, and he was carrying a cheap suitcase tied with a rope.”
“That’s the man! It was just a few minutes ago! What time is it? He’s still up there somewhere!”
“Take it easy, Mr. Adams,” said Burney Hackett. “Where’d you see this feller?”
“I got here just about three-thirty — I passed him only a few minutes before that,” cried Adams. “It was on the other side of Peepers Pond, the Cudbury side, about three-quarters of a mile beyond it, I’d say. He was headed towards Cudbury. Thought he acted queer! Jumped into the bushes when he saw my car coming.”
“Less’n four miles from here, it’s three thirty-five... say you passed him ten-twelve minutes ago...” Hackett thought deliberately. “Can’t have got much more’n half a mile past where you saw him. Your car’s outside here, Mr. Adams, ain’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I got to stay here, get my posse together and make sure everybody keeps his mouth shut. Judge, I’m deputizin’ you and Mr. Shinn and Mr. Adams to start out after that tramp. He’s likely dang’rous, but you got two guns. Don’t use ’em ’less you have to, but take no chances, neither. Got enough gas in your tank, Mr. Adams?”
“Gassed up this morning, thank God.”
“Don’t figger we’ll be more’n five-ten minutes behind you,” said Constable Hackett. “Good huntin’.”
And then they were in Ferriss Adams’s old coupé, rattling furiously up the hill in the rain, Johnny and the Judge bouncing around in the jump-seats clutching their guns.
“I hope this windshield wiper holds out,” said Adams anxiously. “Do you suppose he’s armed?”
“Don’t worry, Ferriss,” said the Judge. “We have a manhunter with us. Fresh from the wars.”
“Mr. Shinn? Oh, Korea. Ever kill anybody, Mr. Shinn?”
“Yes,” said Johnny.
They knew it was the same man the moment they saw him. He was slogging along the streaming road at a fast shuffle, the roped satchel bumping off his knees as he shifted its weight from one hand to the other, the absurd velour hat a cloche now clinging to his ears. He kept glancing over his shoulder.
“That’s him!” yelled Ferriss Adams. He stuck his head out of the car, squawking his horn. “Stop! In the name of the law, stop right there!”
The man dived off the road to his right and disappeared.
“He’s escaping!” screamed the lawyer. “Shoot, Mr. Shinn!”
“Yes, sir,” said Johnny, not moving. It was hard to keep her shattered head in focus; already she was part of his dreamworld. All he could see was a live man, running to stay alive.
“Shoot where, you idiot?” cried Judge Shinn. “Ferriss, stop the car. You can’t drive into that muck. It’s swamp!”
“He’s not getting away from me,” grunted Adams, struggling with the wheel. “Say, isn’t that a wagon road? Maybe—”
“Don’t be a fool, man,” roared the Judge. “How far will we get?”
But Ferriss Adams’s coupé had already plunged into the marsh, its wheels whining for traction.
They slipped and skidded after the fleeing man. He had been forced onto the path; apparently a few seconds of floundering in swampwater up to his knees had made the road with its mere five inches of mud seem like a running track. He ran stooped over, dodging, weaving, ducking, as if he expected bullets. The satchel was under his arm now.
They were in the marsh area about four and a half miles northeast of Shinn Corners, well beyond Peepers Pond. It was posted with county signs warning against dangerous bogs, and the heavy rain of almost two hours had not added to its charms. Now a rolling mist closed in that made Adams curse.