“I’m afraid they’re even worse than that, Mr. Casavant,” said Judge Shinn. “Fanny Adams was murdered last Saturday afternoon.”
It took them some time to restore Roger Casavant’s aplomb. He wept real tears and wrung his beautiful hands as he delivered tragic periods to her memory.
“Saturday afternoon, you say? What an irony! Exactly when?... No, that’s too much. Lay another crime at the feet of television! I’d fully intended to come up here Friday evening for the weekend. But last Wednesday I was asked to join a Saturday round table TV program emanating from Chicago — on a discussion of modern art — so I flew out there instead on Friday evening. And there I was, in a wretchedly humid Chicago studio on Saturday afternoon between one and one-thirty, breaking lances against the impenetrable density of two so-called university professors, when but for that stupid waste of time I might have been here saving the life of Fanny Adams!”
Casavant seemed barely able to assimilate the vigilante situation in the village. He kept saying dazedly that he hadn’t seen a word of it in the papers.
“That magnificent, that God-given talent,” he kept repeating. “A trial, you say? Then you’ve run the animal to earth. Good, good! Why didn’t the newspapers—”
Far from bridling at the warning that he might not be permitted to leave Shinn Corners for a day or two, Casavant tilted his delicate chin and said that a legion of ruffians could not drive him from the village now. There was so much to do. He had to catch up on Fanny Adams’s recent paintings; this was his first visit since the previous August. He must see the one they said she was working on when she died — the last, the very last painting from that inspired brush... In the end, to be rid of him, Judge Shinn asked Ferriss Adams to take Casavant over to the Adams house and turn him loose among the paintings in the cabinets.
“Will it take you long, Mr. Casavant?”
“Oh, days and days. I’ll be making copious notes—”
“Well,” the Judge sighed, “as long as you stay out from underfoot...”
The first witness Wednesday morning was Selina Hackett, the constable’s mother. (“Long as we’re engaged in a mathematics problem,” said the Judge, “we may as well cancel out old Selina, too!”)
Each question had to be shouted in the old woman’s ear, and half the time her responses made no sense. But finally they got out of her a reasonable picture of her Saturday. Burney had left the Haclcett house, she said, well before noon to drive to Cudbury. She had given her grandchildren their lunch at about a quarter past twelve — Joel had to run over from the Pangmans’ and run right back — and after lunch she had made Cynthy and Jimmy go out with her to the small vegetable garden Burney had put in behind the garage to hoe and weed the carrots and onions and lettuce and beans. The rain at two o’clock had driven them back indoors, and there they had remained, through her son’s return from Cudbury and after, until Prue Plummer came running over to tell her about Aunt Fanny’s murder.
“Fine thing!” shouted Selina Hackett bitterly. “Fine thing when a body’s own child can’t tell his mother first, but I have to hear it from a neighbor!”
She was still glaring at her constabulary son when Ferriss Adams helped her out of the witness chair.
Judge Shinn called a short recess while Constable Hackett took his mother across the road to Shinn Free School, where the children were segregated, and brought back Sarah Isbel.
Merton Isbel got half out of his campchair when his daughter came in. But Orville Pangman seized the old man’s arm, Hube Hemus leaned over, both said something insistent to him, and he sank back, mumbling.
The Isbel woman spoke in whispers while the jury looked at the paintings on the walls, at the ceiling, at the hands in their laps.
Nobody looked at Merton Isbel.
Sarah had been in her workroom at the Isbel farm with her child Saturday from lunch time on, she said, sewing and fitting a dress; neither of them had set foot out of the house. The workroom was at the back of the house; it had been the smokeroom of the original farmhouse; her mother — this was almost inaudible — her mother had changed it over. Until the rain began her father was visible to her and Mary-Ann through the window. He was plowing behind Smoky, the old gray. The rain had brought him in; he had stabled Smoky. He had his smithy in a corner of the horse barn and she had heard the clang of his hammer on the anvil on and off until Prue Plummer phoned. When the news came, her father hitched Smoky and Ralph to the farm wagon — they had no car — and they drove into the village at a gallop.
When Andrew Webster signified that he had no questions, Sarah Isbel fled.
Ferriss Adams called Merton Isbel to the stand.
The old farmer began quietly enough. When the rain drove him into the barn, he had taken the opportunity to reshoe the two horses. No, he had not left the barn... He dropped to a mutter. The Swedish iron that he used to use for the nails... Johnny could not make out whether the Swedish horseshoe nails were no longer available or Isbel could no longer afford them... The lined face, full of pits, a face of weathered granite, came alive in the most curious way. Muscles and nerves began to move, so that the stone seemed turning to a lava, heating more and more from below, until the whole rocky structure was in motion.
And then, with a roar, Mert Isbel erupted.
“Whoreson! Seducer! Antichrist!”
He was on his feet in a crouch, left arm dangling, right arm leveled, chin and nose thrust forward in total accusation.
He was addressing Josef Kowalczyk.
Kowalczyk pressed back in his chair like a man flattening before a hurricane. Andrew Webster’s bony little bottom lifted itself clear of his seat as he grasped the edge of the pine table.
“Merton,” said Judge Shinn in a shocked voice.
“Mr. Isbel—” began Adams.
“Mert!” Burney Hackett reached.
But Merton Isbel roared again, and as he roared the people held their breath. For this was not the outburst of a sane man heated to anger; it was the explosion of sanity itself. Mert Isbel was hallucinated. For the moment he thought Josef Kowalczyk was the traveling man who had destroyed his daughter Sarah a decade before. And he damned the destroyer and praised God for delivering him into his hands.
“Robber — despoiler of virgins — father of bastards — furrin scum!”
Before their immobilized eyes the old farmer lunged across the pine table and pulled the stupefied prisoner from the chair, his powerful hands about the man’s throat.
“Ten years I’ve waited — ten years — ten years...”
Kowalczyk’s skin turned from gray to gray-violet. His eyes popped. He made strangling noises...
It took six men to drag Mert Isbel off the prisoner. They held him down on Fanny Adams’s trestle table, pinning his arms, hanging onto his thrashing legs. Gradually his struggles subsided, the madness went out of his eyes. They got him to his feet and took him upstairs to one of the bedrooms.
Judge Shinn surveyed the wreckage wildly.
“We’ll recess, we’ll recess,” he kept saying. “Will you people please help clean up this mess!”
Lunch was solitary. Each man chewed away at Millie Pangman’s sandwich tastelessly.