He had apparently forgotten all about his aunt.
Johnny lay down flat on his stomach with his head over the tailboard and was sick all over the road. The Judge held onto his legs, looking away.
The rain stopped and the late afternoon sun came out just as they passed old man Lemmon’s hovel on Holy Hill.
Hubert Hemus’s car was parked just beyond the Adams house, before the church. The prisoner, Burney Hackett, the three Hemus men were nowhere to be seen.
“Where is he?” demanded Judge Shinn, pushing through the crowd of women and children at the church gate. “What did they do with him?”
“Don’t you worry, Judge, he’s safe,” said Millie Pangman. The sun flashed off her gold eyeglasses. “They’re fixin’ up the coalbin in the church cellar as a jail. He won’t get away!”
“Too good for him, I say,” bellowed Rebecca Hemus. “Too good for him!”
“And that Elizabeth Sheare runnin’ to make him a cup of tea,” said Emily Berry venomously. “Tea! Poison’s what I’d give him. And gettin’ him dry clothes, like the church was a hotel. Peter Berry, you get on home and take those wet things off!”
“Wouldn’t it be better if you all went home?” asked the Judge evenly. “This is no place for women and children.”
“What did he say?” shouted old Selina Hackett. “Who went home? At a time like this!”
“We have as much right here as you men, Judge,” said Prue Plummer sharply. “Nobody’s going to budge till that murdering foreigner gets what’s coming to him. Do you realize it was only by the grace of God and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost that I wasn’t the one he murdered? How many times I told Aunt Fanny, ‘Don’t take in every dirty stranger who comes scraping at your kitchen door,’ I told her. ‘Some day,’ I said, ‘some day, Aunt Fanny, you’ll let in the wrong one.’ The poor dear wouldn’t ever listen. And now look at her!”
Mathilda Scott said in a low voice, “I’d like to get my hands on him. Once, just once.”
Judge Shinn looked at her as if he had never seen her before.
Hackett and the Hemuses appeared on the church steps. As the Judge led the way through the group of women and children to meet them, Johnny noticed Mert Isbel’s daughter Sarah and her child hanging about the edge of the crowd. The woman’s face was lively. But the liveliness died as her father pushed by her. She drew away, gripping her little girl’s hand.
“Burney, what’s the meaning of this?” cried Judge Shinn. “Locking him in a coalbin!”
“Got no jail to lock him in, Judge,” said the constable.
“He shouldn’t be here at all! Have you notified Coroner Barn-well yet?”
“I got to talk that over with Doc Cushman. Doc’s waitin’ for us over at Aunt Fanny’s.”
“All Dr. Cushman can legally do is bring in a finding that death was caused by a criminal act, and report that finding at once to Coroner Barnwell in Cudbury. From that point on, the case is in Barnwell’s hands. He will either summon a coroner’s jury of six electors—”
“Judge.” Hubert Hemus’s gaunt face was granite, only the jaws moving, like millstones grinding away at the words to come. “For ninety-one years Fanny Adams belonged to the town. This is town business. Ain’t nobody goin’ to tell us how to run town business. Now you’re an important judge and you know the law and how things ought to be done, and we’ll be obliged for your advice as a judge and a neighbor. We’ll let Coroner Barnwell come down here and make his findin’s. If he wants a coroner’s jury, why, we got six qualified electors right here. We’ll do everythin’ legal. Ain’t nobody goin’ to deprive this murderin’ furrin trash of his legal rights. He’ll have his lawyer and he’ll have his chance to defend himself. But he ain’t leavin’ Shinn Corners, no matter what.”
A murmur formed behind them like an oncoming wave. The sound tickled Johnny’s scalp. He fought down another attack of nausea.
Hube Hemus’s cheerless glance went out over his neighbors. “We got to get this organized, neighbors,” the First Selectman said. “Got to set a day and night guard over the prisoner. Got to set guards against outside meddlin’. Got to see that the milkin’s done — we’re a full hour late now! — got lots to do. Right now I b’lieve the big boys better get on home and attend to the cows. Mert, you can send Calvin Waters back in your wagon with Sarah and the child to do your milkin’; we need you here. We men stay and figger out what we got to do. The women with small children can take ’em home, give ’em somethin’ to eat, and put ’em to bed. Bigger children can watch over ’em. The women can get together and fix a community supper...”
Somehow, the Judge and Johnny found themselves shut off. They stood about on the periphery, watching and listening, but groups fell silent and drifted apart at their approach.
“It must be me,” Johnny said to the Judge. “Shinn or no Shinn, I’m an outsider. Wouldn’t it make it easier all around, Judge, if I packed and got out?”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” said the Judge scornfully.
“What do you mean?” said Johnny.
The Judge looked suddenly quite old. “Nothing. Nothing, Johnny. It has nothing to do with you. It’s me. I’ve sat on the bench in Cudbury for too many years to be en rapport with Shinn Corners. Hube Hemus has passed the word around.”
It was from Ferriss Adams that they learned what had happened in the cellar of the church when the prisoner was brought down to the coalbin. Adams had the story from Samuel Sheare, whom he had sought out to discuss arrangements for Fanny Adams’s funeral. Mr. Sheare had been present in the cellar; he had insisted on providing the prisoner with dry clothing — the man’s teeth were clacking from immersion and chill. When he brought the clothing, the minister had asked Constable Hackett and the Hemuses to leave him alone with the prisoner; they had refused and ordered the man to strip. Either he misunderstood or he understood too well — doubled over in agony still, the man had resisted furiously. The Hemus twins had torn the clothes from his body.
In his jacket Burney Hackett found a paper identifying him as one Josef Kowalczyk — “Mr. Sheare spelled it for me,” Ferriss Adams said, “it ends in c-z-y-k, which Mr. Sheare says the fellow pronounces ‘chick’” — aged forty-two, a Polish immigrant admitted to the United States under a special refugee quota in 1947. They had also found, in a dirty knotted handkerchief tied to a rope slung around Kowalczyk’s naked waist, a hundred and twenty-four dollars.
“And that’s the clincher,” snapped the Cudbury lawyer. “Because Mr. Sheare says that yesterday, at Aunt Fanny’s open house, she took him into her kitchen for a private talk. She told him she’d noticed Elizabeth Sheare’s summer dresses were pretty shabby, and she wanted him to buy his wife a new one. She reached up to the top shelf of her old pine cabinet, where she’s always kept her row of spice jars, and she took down the cinnamon jar. There was some change in it and a roll of bills, When Mr. Sheare protested, Aunt Fanny said to him, ‘Don’t ye worry none about my runnin’ short, Mr. Sheare. You know I keep some cash here for emergencies. There’s a hundred and forty-nine dollars and change in this jar, and if I can’t give Elizabeth Sheare a new dress out of it without her knowin’, what in the land’s sake can I do with it?’ And she peeled off two tens and a five and pressed them into Mr. Sheare’s hand. A hundred and forty-nine dollars in Aunt Fanny’s cinnamon bank only the day before,” said Ferriss Adams, “she gave twenty-five of it to Samuel Sheare, there’s nothing left in Aunt Fanny’s cinnamon jar — they’ve already checked that — and here’s a hundred and twenty-four dollars hidden under Kowalczyk’s undershirt... smelling of cinnamon. It’s what the Judge and I as lawyers, Mr. Shinn,” said Adams dryly, “call circumstantial evidence, but I’d say those are pretty damning circumstances. Wouldn’t you, Judge?”