Andrew Webster had only one question: “Mrs. Sheare, when you got home Friday from Mrs. Adams’s get-together, or perhaps after the Fourth of July exercises on the green, did your husband give you any money?”
“Yes,” answered Elizabeth Sheare in a low voice, “twenty-five dollars, two tens and a five, with which he told me to buy a dress. That’s why I wanted to go to Cudbury Saturday with Emily Berry. Mr. Sheare didn’t say where he’d got the money, but I knew. The bills smelled of cinnamon.”
Orville Pangman raised his enormous hand, took the oath, and lowered his body into the witness chair.
At one-thirty Saturday afternoon, he testified, he and his son Eddie and Joel Hackett, who was “helpin’ out,” began work on the roof of his barn, which needed reshingling. At one forty-five they had noticed the tramp — Orville Pangman jerked his head toward Kowalczyk — at Prue Plummer’s back door; they had remarked about him. They had seen Prue turn the tramp away, the tramp leave, and Prue follow him to the road and stare after him for a few minutes before going indoors again.
They had worked right through until about half-past three, Eddie ripping up the old shingles on the roof, Joel handing up the new ones from the farm truck, and he, Orville, nailing them into place. Yes, right through the rain and all. With half the rotten shingles ripped off the roof and the rain looking as if it were going to keep up indefinitely, they had to keep going or flood the barn. “We grabbed some slickers hangin’ in the barn and kept goin’. Got wet some, but we finished the job.” Pangman had just nailed the last shingle into place when Prue Plummer came running to her back door screaming the news that Aunt Fanny had been murdered. The three of them had immediately jumped into the truck — “Car was in the garage and I didn’t want to waste time backin’ her out” — and driven over to the Adams house to join the posse. No, Millie wasn’t home at two-thirteen. She’d gone over to the Judge’s and got back about half-past two.
Millie Pangman’s honest face was set in iron curves as she took the oath. She sat down and made two fists menacingly, glaring at Kowalczyk through her goldrimmed eyeglasses.
She certainly did know where she’d been at two-thirteen on Saturday. Fool question, seeing that her husband Orville had just said where she’d been, but if they wanted her to say it, too, she’d just as soon. She was over in Judge Shinn’s kitchen, that’s where she was. She’d gone over there just before the rain started with a meat pie she’d got ready at home, and she put it in the oven on low heat and prepared some vegetables for the Judge’s supper, and then she went back home, figuring to drop in a few times during the afternoon to keep an eye on the meat pie. Only with what happened, it burned and the Judge and Mr. Shinn had to eat out of cans Saturday night. Yes, she left the Judge’s house about two-thirty. No, she wasn’t alone. She had Deborah in tow, to keep the child out of mischief. Debbie got into more mischief than any six-year-old in Cudbury County; she’d be mighty glad when fall rolled around and the child started school...
Andy Webster asked Millie Pangman a question that puzzled her: “Mrs. Pangman, when did you last hear from your son Merritt?”
“From Merritt? Well, I declare... Just Monday mornin’. Yesterday. Got an airmail letter from Japan. Merritt’s on some kind of special Navy duty there. What on earth—”
Mathilda Scott had dressed with care for the great event in what must once have been an expensive dress and a hat that had been in fashion during the war. Her beautiful eyes did not look up during her testimony. Her ravaged face with its dark hollows was apprehensive; she kept twisting her work-crippled hands. It was as if she were concealing not only a sorrow but a shame.
It was just another proof of the rottennesss of fate, Johnny reflected, that her neighbor in the jury box was Peter Berry.
At two-thirteen on Saturday, she said, she had been in the bedroom of her husband and father-in-law — because of the work involved in caring for two invalids, she had found it more convenient to keep them in the same room. She was sure of the time because she had had to give Earl his medicine at two o’clock — he took it every four hours during the day, and she was always careful to give it to him on the dot. And from that time until Prue Plummer called about twenty-five minutes or so after three, she remained in the bedroom... she, her husband, her father-in-law, and her daughter Judy. Earl was kind of jumpy, and Judy was reading to him, a Western magazine, he loved cowboy stories, even old Seth Scott seemed to enjoy them, though she doubted if he really understood... She? She was cleaning the room.
“There’s a mess of cleaning up has to be done around two helpless men,” Mathilda Scott murmured. “My father-in-law especially.”
“When you heard the news from Prue Plummer, Mrs. Scott, you went immediately to the Adams house?”
“Well, I didn’t want to, I mean I didn’t want to leave my husband, but Earl said Judy could take care of them — as she’s doing now — and I was to drive right over with Drakeley and find out what had happened. So Drakeley and I jumped into the jeep — he’d put the car into the garage out of the rain, the jeep was standing out front all day and had got wet anyway, and we don’t have a truck any more — anyway, we came on over.”
“Was Drakeley working around the place all that time you and the rest of your family were in the house, Mrs. Scott?”
“Well... not all the time.”
“Oh, Drakeley wasn’t home for a while?” asked Ferriss Adams.
“No.” The twisting hands twisted faster.
“Where’d your son been, Mrs. Scott?”
“He... he’d had to go somewhere for his father.”
“I see. What time did Drakeley leave the house?”
“Well, he worked all morning... He left about half-past one.”
“In the family car?”
“Yes.”
“What time did he get back?”
“About a quarter of three. Talked to his father some, changed his clothes, then went on out back to work. I called him in when I heard the news about Aunt Fanny.”
“Where did Drakeley have to go, Mrs. Scott?”
Mathilda Scott looked stricken, and Johnny sat forward. Was this the break?
But guilt has many faces. There was nothing in Mathilda Scott’s story of her son’s actions Saturday that to the insensitive called for twisting hands and a public agony. It was a familiar story, Johnny felt sure, to everyone there with the possible exception of the Berrys. Drakeley had simply gone over to Comfort to try to borrow money from Henry Worthington, president of the Comfort bank. The bank being closed on Saturdays, Drakeley had made a two o’clock appointment to see Worthington at his Comfort home. The boy had dressed in his best clothes and driven off at one-thirty. He had come back at a quarter to three, empty-handed. That was all. But it was apparently enough to make Mathilda Scott act like a criminal.