Alice Herpitude was peeking around the door, nodding and smiling. Mary thought it over. She couldn't get Charley into worse trouble by being on the inside. Maybe she could help him. Then again, helping Charley might mean hurting his brother. Mary stared at the little bust of Louisa May Alcott on her desk. Louisa looked noncommittal. "What did Lieutenant Kelly say about it?" said Mary.
"Oh, he thought it was great."
Jump, Mary, jump. "Well, all right, I guess so."
Mary walked over to the station at lunchtime to see what was expected of her. Homer nodded at her, and snapped open a card table and squeezed it into the corner of Jimmy's office beside his desk.
"Grandiose appointments of your office completed just in time."
"Tell me," said Mary, "how a student of the Transcendentalists ever got to be a police lieutenant."
"Other way around. My father was a cop in Cambridge. Hence, Kelly. So I was more or less brought up on the force. And my mother was a classicist. Hence, Homer. Classicists live in libraries. So I did my teething on any old chewed-up volume that was lying around. Sucked out all the glue, gradually gummed my way through a five-foot shelf."
"Do you have a degree in anything?"
"You mean like a Ph.D. from Harvard? Look, my dear, the closest I ever got to Harvard was as a traffic cop like my father, shepherding Harvard students across Harvard Square. Picking up a law degree at Northeastern night school and reading Waldo and Henry on the side—those things were strictly extra-curricular."
He walked her to the corner, and the conversation galloped along in a sort of airy antagonism. A shot, a parting shot, and then Homer shouted a ricochet across the street. Mary found herself walking down the Milldam with a big grin on her face. She collided with Alice Herpitude, who was coming out of the First National grocery store.
"Oh, I'm so sorry, Alice. I wasn't looking where I was going." She leaned over and picked up Miss Herpitude's packages.
"We're such pygmies, Mary dear. I don't know why you Olympians take any notice of us at all."
*26*
My Aunt Maria... was heard through the partition shouting to my Aunt Jane, who is deaf, "Think of it! He stood half an hour today to hear the frogs croak, and he wouldn't read the life of Chalmers." —Henry Thoreau
It was Mary's first full day in the employ of the District Attorney of Middlesex County. Homer Kelly nodded at her curtly as she came in. He glared guiltily at his size 14 shoe. He hadn't told the D.A. about this yet. Hiring a secretary onto the payroll wasn't something to be done lightly, and it would probably be just as well not to tell the D.A. at all that Mary Morgan was the beloved of the chief suspect. One was supposed to stay strictly away from personal connections with possible criminals under investigation. But when it came to that, my God, there was Rowena Goss, Charley's sister. (Personal connections, Jesus.) Homer swung around in his chair and cleared his throat with a blast like the Last Trump.
"Now, the first thing I want you to do," said Homer, "is tell me about the members of the Alcott Association. Some of them felt pretty strongly about those crazy letters of Ernie's. And the letters have disappeared. Or at least we can't find them. Maybe he had them on his person there at the bridge, and somebody shot him and stole them after he refused to give them up. Now, do you have any idea which of these people might be fanatic enough to commit a crime just to protect the reputations of Emerson and Thoreau and all that gang they idolize so much?"
"Well, I idolize them myself, most of them," said Mary.
"I'm aware of that. And you wouldn't hurt a flea. And that reminds me. Where did you say you were when all this was going on?"
"Asleep in bed. And I would hurt a flea. I squash flies all the time."
"Tell me about Howard Swan."
"Howard? Well—I don't know any other way to describe him except to say that he's the best fellow in the world. One of those dependable people that everyone turns to and relies on. He's president of the Alcott Association, Secretary of the Thoreau Society, something or other in the Antiquarian Association, Moderator of Town Meeting, and probably other things, too. And not because he's aggressive and usurping but because everybody asks him to do the hard jobs nobody else really wants."
"Mmmmm," said Homer, scribbling it all down. Jimmy Flower came into the office, pulling on his coat. He picked up his Chief's hat and put it on. It was the smallest regulation size, but it still left a draft around the edges and rested on his ears, folding them over. "Jimmy," said Homer, looking up, "did you get a report yet on Howard Swan's story that he was in New York?"
"Yes, that's in. Those business buddies he said he was having lunch with all agreed he was with them on Patriot's Day, just the way he said they would. At one o'clock he was sitting right there in that restaurant off Wall Street. He was there all right."
"He's some kind of big wheel in banking, isn't he? What about the men he was lunching with? All solid citizens?"
"They sure were. Above reproach. Jeez, what a nice thing to be. I wisht I was above reproach."
Mary laughed and told him that he was, if anybody was. "Tell that to Isabelle," said Jimmy, going out again.
"Well, that's enough on Swan. We've been all over his house there on Main Street anyhow, and didn't turn up anything. He's not married?"
"No. There is some talk about an unhappy love affair, long igo. But then that's what people always say."
"All right, now what about Teddy Staples?"
"Teddy?" Mary smiled. "He certainly is a little nutty about Thoreau."
"Let's begin with Teddy."
Teddy's cottage on the Sudbury River was approached by a mile-long driveway off Fairhaven Road. Another driveway branched off his, leading to Alice Herpitude's house. Both houses looked out from pine woods on the wide bend of the river called Fairhaven Bay. Teddy's house had been built by the son of his illustrious ancestor as a summer camp, and basically it had once been a simple little house with a front porch toward the river, standing high and straight like an upright piano. But Teddy in a slack season for stonemasons had begun engulfing his front porch in a surging tide of cobblestones. Homer pulled up his car and stared at it, unbelieving. Mary explained that the Antiquarian Society was all upset about it, and was trying to make him stop. "But really," she said, "that would be too bad. Houses like the way it used to be are a dime a dozen. Now it's unique."
"Absolutely one-of-a-kind," breathed Homer.
Teddy was making a cobblestone birdbath in his front yard, which was really a beaten-down part of the woods, marshy at the bottom by the river, with ferns pushing up sticky fiddleheads, and skunk cabbages, greener than anything else, putting out red snout-like flowers. It was chilly, and Teddy had on several layers of pants. The top one was split down the back seam where the staples had given way, showing a checkered pair underneath. Teddy waved his mortar trowel at them.
"You'll f-f-forgive me, if I go right on. I've got to work fast before the mortar dries."
"Oh, Teddy, isn't that a nice birdbath," said Mary. Teddy looked up at her, his thin face shining. "Mary, I saw some red crossbills yesterday, in the very p-p-place he saw them, up the Assabet, by the hemlocks..."
"He... ?" asked Homer.