Assabbett. Saw Tom Hand &
Finggerling pl. corn...
Who was Finggerling? There hadn't been anybody planting corn with Tom except young John. Oh, of course, "Finggerling" was Teddy's cute way of saying "one of the little Hands."
Bl. dk nstting. 6e, spekkled.
Gossling digging corn. Gl. ind.
Ch. Queer. Oriole's nst...
That was all for April 19th. And the passage was like a cryptogram, full of abbreviations and misspellings. Homer puzzled over it and stared at the page. "Bl. dk nstting. 6e, spekkled" might mean that Teddy had seen a black duck nesting with six speckled eggs. One of the goslings had been pecking at Tom's corn. But that didn't make sense, did it? Ducks had ducklings, not goslings, and one of the ducklings wouldn't be hatched and pecking for its own food if the rest were still eggs, would it? Then Homer felt the small hairs on the back of his neck rise up. If Finngerling meant a young Hand, could not Gossling mean a young Goss? In which case the extra S was not a misspelling at all! What about "Gl. ind. Ch."? Suppose the "Ch." stood for Charley"? The "ind." could be "indicated" and the "Gl." could be "Glass," or binoculars. Teddy had looked through his binoculars and seen Charley Goss digging in the cornfield. Burying the gun! What else could he have been doing but burying the gun? Homer slammed the book shut and looked up triumphantly. There were no two ways about it—he was a genius! Then he frowned. Straight ahead of him was that fool who was always tagging after Mary, Goonville-Ghoulsworthy or somebody. Goonville-Ghoulsworthy gave Homer an unhealthy-looking bucktoothed smile. Homer grunted something, and slid out from behind his table. He paid his bill, then put his head down and charged at the door.
Mary Morgan was just coming in with Alice Herpitude, and for a minute they were all tangled up together. Miss Herpitude emerged white and shaken, groping for a chair. "Good heavens, Homer," said Mary. Granville-Galsworthy made himself prominent, urging them to his table, pulling out a chair for Miss Herpitude. "Oi hope yew'll join me," he said. Mary bent over and looked anxiously at Miss Herpitude.
Miss Herpitude tried to smile. "I'm all right," she said. But she looked very ill indeed. Homer grumbled his apologies, feeling like an oaf. Maybe he'd better join them for coffee, to make amends. Then Rowena Goss spied them through the front window, and she came in and squeezed into the wall seat beside Homer. Granville-Galsworthy transferred his wet gaze from Mary to Rowena, and licked his lips.
Rowena kissed Homer and started scattering her boarding school accent about. It was full of umlauts. "What a pufectly precious place..."
Mary looked away in confusion. The kiss hadn't been a warm one, that was the whole trouble with it. It was a sweetly possessive, almost wifely little peck. What did that mean?
"Now, Homer, I want you to just drop whatever tawdry thing you're doing and come up with me to the club for tennis. It's a pufectly gorgeous day. See? I've got my Bumuda shorts on under my skut." She gave him a playful glimpse of a magnificent piece of tan meat. Roland Granville-Galsworthy goggled at it. Howard Swan went by on his way to the cash register, and he goggled at it, too. But Homer's attention was transfixed by the sugar bowl.
"I don't play tennis," he growled. He had to get out of here. He couldn't very well tell her he was about to go out and arrest her brother, could he? What was the matter with the girl anyway? Didn't it matter to her that her father was dead and her mother was in the looney-bin and that it was he himself, Homer Kelly, who was doing his best to clap her brother in a condemned cell? And besides, there was something strange about Rowena anyhow. She was a dish, all right, a real dish, but lately he had begun to have the queerest feeling when he was with her, as though something had been sort of pulled down over his head. She made you feel muffled or something, as though you had a scarf wrapped around you, or a gag shoved down your throat. Homer mumbled his excuses and made his escape, leaving behind him a clumsy assortment of people, crowded between the door and the cash register—one glamorous dish, one frightened old librarian, one bona fide slobbering sex maniac and one thoroughly miserable young woman.
*46*
I will come as near to lying as you can drive a coach-and-four. —Henry Thoreau
Mrs. Bewley was sweeping the steps when Jimmy's official car rolled up the drive. When she saw Homer she beamed at him and pulled a batch of baseball cards out of her apron pocket. (Jesus had been sending her messages about the Red Sox and the Yankees.) "I'VE BEEN SAVING THEM JUST FOR YOU."
Homer thanked her profusely, pressed her hand and inquired for Mr. Goss at the top of his lungs. "IN THE BARN," screamed Mrs. Bewley.
The barn was back down the driveway near the road. They walked into the cool dark square of the open door and called for Charley, but there was no answer. Dolly, the big brown mare, stood in her stall, looking at them with her large eyes. Jimmy rubbed her nose and told her he wished she could talk. Dolly bobbed her head as though she understood, and stretched her neck and licked his face.
Homer looked at Dolly. Then he slapped his brow. "Oh, for God's sake, Jimmy, these old-fashioned Yankees. When I said 'Goss,' Mrs. Bewley thought I said 'hoss'..." They walked back to the big house and finally found Charley out in back working in his garden. He was pulling weeds. He gave a start when their shadows fell across the ground in front of him, and stood up. Homer looked at the honest dirt on Charley's knees and had a misgiving. It just didn't seem possible, there under the hot July sun, to put together the gardener and the murderer. But then he remembered that this gardener had been doing a different kind of planting on April 19th, and he put away the misgiving.
Charley saw something in their faces. He started to talk before they could open their mouths. "You know," he said, standing up beside his twigged pea vines with a bunch of weeds in his hand, "this reminds me of the times when Philip and I were kids, and we used to have to go into Boston to the dentist. I was always scared to death. And the worst part wasn't having your teeth fixed, it was sitting in the waiting room, waiting for your turn. I couldn't even read the comic books. So look here, Kelly, make up your mind, will you? I want to get out of the waiting room. These comic books are terrible."
Homer said nothing. Jimmy felt awful. He shifted his eyes to Charley's garden. "What kind of a crop have you got here, Charley?" he said.
"Oh, tomatoes, summer squash, scallions, carrots, oak-leaf lettuce, just the usual. Those are radishes over there. We don't bother with corn because the Hands always let us help ourselves."
"Are you sure you didn't plant any corn this year, Charley?" said Homer.
Charley's glance turned slowly from his radishes to Homer's grim face, and met his accusing eyes. So it was true, he was out of the waiting room. But he made a half-hearted attempt to face it out anyway, convinced of failure. "What do you mean?"
"I mean we've been bringing in the sheaves, Charley, and one of them is a mighty funny-looking ear of corn. Tom Hand ran across your father's old fowling piece when he was harrowing his cornfield. We have the testimony of a witness that you buried it there, Charley, on the nineteenth of April."
"You mean somebody saw me?"
"Somebody did."
Charley gave up then. "Okay. I hate lying. I'm no good at it anyhow. Sit down." He gestured at the grass and squatted cross-legged on it. "I suppose it was Teddy. I thought I saw him out there on the river. He had his binoculars on me, did he? Has he come back? No? Well, all right, I did bury the damn gun. Look, I'll tell you every single thing I did and thought the whole day, start to finish. You saw me make my famous ride. Well, after that was over, I rode Dolly home, put her in the barn, walked up to my room and changed clothes. It was then about 11:30. I left my Prescott outfit there on a chair, all complete, hat, boots, wig, everything. And then I found this crazy note on my pillow. 'Meet me in the gravel pit,' it said, 'between 12:30 and 1:30...'"