"It's a lovely story. It pleases me, somehow, that those two might have found each other. But, Homer, there are still some things I don't understand. How could Howard Swan have killed Ernest Goss? He was supposed to have been in New York on the nineteenth..."
"It's Longfellow's fault, that's whose it is. That old cornball poem of his. What immortal lines does every man, woman and child in the country have engraved across his memory in letters of gold?
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five...
The eighteenth of April. Howard went to New York on the eighteenth, not the nineteenth, and then made a big point with his lunchtable companions about its being Patriot's Day in Massachusetts. 'You remember, boys, Paul Revere and all that kind of thing—on the eighteenth of April in 'Seventy-five. They're having a big parade back home today—' It wasn't until I discovered there in the Amherst library that Elizabeth Goss had once been engaged to Howard Swan, that Howard came back somewhat forcefully to my attention. And then I remembered an extremely small fact Jimmy had told me. He said that Howard's business friends had all agreed Howard was with them on Patriot's Day—remember?—'just the way he said they would.' Howard must have said to Jimmy, 'Ask them where I was on Patriot's Day,' so Jimmy, the obedient little fellow, did just that. Well—by nearly asphyxiating myself in a phone booth for an hour and a half I got hold of all of them. And sure enough, one by one, they all told me that Patriot's Day was the eighteenth of April. 'Don't you remember?' they would say condescendingly, and I could hear the words coming out of the telephone in red, white and blue, 'On the eighteenth of April in 'Seventy-five?' Then I would hang up and salute the flag. So you see what happened—Howard flew to New York on the eighteenth, got back in time for the dinner party, left early, then came back again when everyone was gone, to set things up. The only person still in the house would have been Mrs. Bewley, and he didn't have to worry about her as long as he kept out of her sight. Now—the first thing he had to do was prepare the weapons. One of the duelling pistols was to be fixed up as the official 'murder weapon.' It was the one that Charley had handled, putting it away. The other pistol would be the true murder weapon, but it would be cleaned out afterwards, wiped off and returned to the drawer so that it would not seem to have been touched. At this point he never touched the musket, because it didn't enter into his plans at all. The next thing was the manufacturing of the notes that were to lead Charley and Philip and Ernie to the right places at the right times the next day. For these he used Charley's typewriter in Charley's room, tracing your name for the notes that were to be sent to Charley and Philip from a letter of yours he found in a drawer. Then his preparations were about done. All he had to do was drive off somewhere far away from houses and fire the 'official murder weapon' into the woods so that it would be blackened inside. That was tricky because he didn't want to disturb Charley's prints. He must have used tools to do it with, clamps or something."
"But next morning he had to look as if he were going to New York."
"That's right. He headed off toward Boston, then just circled around wide and came back the back way and parked in some inconspicuous place like, say, the little road that leads in to Annursnac Hill. Then he snuck over to the Goss place and just hung around there, ducking in when he could to leave his notes. He watched Charley come back from his ride on Dolly and enter the house in his Prescott outfit. Then he saw him come out again in his own clothes and head lickety-split for the gravel pit, hell-bent on high romance. So then Howard just went in the house, snatched up the outfit, took it to the barn, changed clothes, leaving his own behind the hay somewhere, and galloped off through the woods on Dolly, keeping away from the road. It was all right to be seen, in fact that was the whole point, but not up close. He galloped up to the bridge, killed Goss, galloped back, giving Arthur Furry a good rear view, deposited the 'official murder weapon' in the cider press, leaving behind him his horse's hoof prints and a lost balloon to point the way, changed clothes in the barn and slunk into the house once more to leave the real murder weapon, all polished and cleaned up, back in the drawer. But then he struck his first snag."
"It had something to do with the flint, didn't it?"
"Good girl. That's right. It was only then, I'm convinced, that Howard noticed that the flint had dropped out of his gun—the real one, the true murder weapon. Crisis. What to do? He didn't dare now to go back and take the flint out of the gun he had deposited in the cider press. But this gun mustn't be found without a flint. Because then its twin in the cider press would be betrayed as a put-up job. So he took the flint from the musket. Up until then he must have been working with gloves on, careful not to leave any prints. With his gloves still on he opened the door of the cabinet where the musket was kept, took it out, and then I'll bet he took off his gloves to work the small screw that holds the flint in place. He took the flint out, transferred it to the murder weapon and put both guns away again, wiping everything off carefully. But he forgot one thing. While his glove was off he left a thumbprint on the inside of the cabinet door. Campbell saw it there, but there were so many others on the door anyway it didn't help us much. Well, anyway, then he was all done. He just had to duck back to his car, swing around by back roads again, bide his time, and then drive home to Concord from Boston around five o'clock as though he had just come back from New York."
"All right. I understand all that. But now will you please explain what it was all for? Why did Howard Swan, of all the people in the world, think he had to kill Ernest Goss? And then why did he kill poor Alice? And why did he almost..."
"Oh, God, don't say it..."
There was a car coming. It contained Rowena Goss, out for a spin with her fiance. She started to slow down as she recognized Homer's car, but when she saw how he was behaving with that Morgan girl she frowned and speeded up again, with a disapproving crescendo from her exhaust.
"Well, where were we?" said Mary, sitting up and straightening her hair.
The nosepiece of Homer's glasses was resting on his ear. He put it back where it belonged. "You were asking about Howard's motive. I suppose you want me to tell you what it is that will turn an apparently just, honest and respected citizen, scholar and gentleman into a murderer—right? Well, my darling, what are the usual reasons why people murder other people? Revenge? Self-defense? Jealousy, greed, lunacy, hatred, sudden passion?"
"Oh, Homer, you know it wasn't any of those. The only motive he could possibly have had was the suppression of those letters. But that just doesn't seem a strong enough reason to me. Not for Howard."
"Just think about it." Homer leaned back, put his arms behind his head and closed his eyes. "First, let's go back a long way. A long, long way. All the way back to an engagement between a young Harvard senior named Howard Swan, who was majoring in literature, and a pretty young debutante at Miss Winsor's school named Elizabeth Matthews. Now Elizabeth had something she felt she ought to confide to her husband-to-be—something that was a romantic family secret. She thought it was her duty to let him in on the story of her sublime origin, the royal bar-sinister in her ancestral past. So she did. She whispered it tenderly in his ear. Then Howard, to her astonishment, far from being merely suitably impressed, urged her not to keep it a secret any longer. He recognized it for the bombshell it was, and he yearned to be the agent for the explosion. But Elizabeth wouldn't let him. No sir. I don't know whether she felt protective about the reputations of her great-grandmother and grandfather or whether she just didn't want her name bandied about as the descendant of any kind of illicit union, no matter how august. Anyway, my guess is that this was why they broke up. Elizabeth forbade Howard to use her secret and Howard was good and mad. 'Oh,' says Elizabeth, 'you nasty, nosy man!' 'Why,' says Howard, 'you selfish little stupid bitch!' So the engagement was off. And the next thing you knew the selfish little bitch had rushed into the arms of Howard's classmate from Concord, Ernest Goss. And you can be sure of one thing—Elizabeth never mentioned her glorious ancestry to Ernie when she was confiding to him her intimate little girlish secrets. Okay, then—all right so far? Well then. Take another look at Howard. Here he was, left alone with his conscience and this tantalizing delicious tidbit of historical gravy. So what did he do? He did what any well-trained student would do. He began searching for evidence to back up Elizabeth's bald statement of fact. Over the next twenty years he sought and studied and researched, poring over the journals and poems and letters of Thoreau and the letters and poems of Emily Dickinson, everything he could find that would give him a lead. It took him that long partly because he was thorough and partly because he didn't have much spare time, what with all the committees he was on and the organizations he was chairman of. But he stuck to it. And what he finally came up with in those notebooks you found is pretty solid-sounding stuff. Howard was darn clever. And his theory took care of some of the Dickinson mysteries pretty neatly. For example—you know how everyone who has looked into Emily's life agrees that somewhere around 1860 or '61 or '62 she must have gone through some sort of crisis of love and renunciation, and nobody is sure what it was..."