Only in New England : the story of a gaslight crime (19 page)

He drew a deep lungful of smoke and expelled it thoughtfully. He said to Earnest, "Your mother was a strong woman. For all her age she was in vigorous condition. Never knew her to have dizzy spells, did you?"

"I did not."

Cornelia said, "My aunt was never dizzy."

Dr. Hatfield said, "She went down those steps hard."

Earnest Bridewell seemed very positive about it. He said, "Doctor, wouldn't you say that my mother dropped a jar of preserves as she was coming up the steps, then slipped in the sirup and fell, fatally striking her head against the sidewall?"

Dr. Hatfield squinted thoughtfully through the smoke of a short cigarette. He moved the cigarette around between practiced lips. Then he said, holding the cigarette between his teeth, "Well, Earnest, I don't know. Maybe she had a heart attack. Maybe she just slipped like you say. Maybe she didn't. Seems to me—a man in your position, there ought to be an autopsy."

Earnest was firm about it. He wanted no autopsy. Neither would Lionel. Wasn't that right, Cornelia?

When she remained mute, Earnest flatly declared that he didn't want some veterinarian cutting up his mother out of scientific curiosity.

Dr. Hatfield took the jibe without comment. He had long ago become inured to Bridewell insolence.

"Very well," he said. "It's your mother, and I suppose it'll be your funeral."

Earnest said, "You'll issue a certificate of death by accident?"

"Yes."

"Then if you'll drive over and tell Undertaker Meek. And send me your bill."

I patched and threaded together the foregoing memorabilia from newspaper items, correspondence and similar source mate-

rials which Ed brought down from the Bridewell attic. He himself provided recollective bits and pieces for filler here and there.

We went over Old Abby's death while Annette Brewster attended church. Annette was a Catholic. As the Point lacked a Catholic church, she drove twenty miles inland, weather and road permitting, to attend late Mass—a devotional effort that cost half a day. And sometimes longer, depending on what Ed called the mood of his Protestant Kissel. As the roads were bad at that particular time of year, and Ed's Kissel proved more left-footed than usual, I had ample time for research into the details of Abby Bridewell's demise.

When my shorthand notes reached the point of the doctor's departure to summon the undertaker, I asked Ed about the town's reaction to Abby's death.

"It created a whale of a ruction," he recalled. "Neighbors running from house to house. Carriages dashing from farm to farm. Seems to me a crowd gathered at the Post Office, all excited. But the big thing, of course, was the funeral."

"Did you go?"

"Probably the only kid in town who didn't. Laid up with a cold or something. See if you can't find a story about it in that old copy of the Quahog Weekly Pointer."

The local obituary contributed little. It did offer the statement that Mrs. Abby Bridewell had passed away as the result of "an unfortunate accident." The rest of the obit was devoted to an encomium of the deceased. The encomium would have convinced a reader unacquainted with Abby Bridewell that she had embodied the virtues and graces of Boadicea, Good Queen Bess, Molly Pitcher, Mrs. Astor, Nancy Hanks, the Empress Eugenie and Mother Machree.

And now on high in Beulah Land She abideth up above. Our mortal loss is heaven's gain. We miss someone we love.

The flowery phrases and tearful verse were open stock. The wise printer kept a block of type for use in emergency. Nothing per-

sonal. The Qudhog Pointer would have run the same obituary paragraph for Cornelia Ord, Mrs. Bertha Smeizer or Delia Bryce, or, on the national level, Mrs. Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy. In fact, the obit might have been run for Madame Sophie. It was strictly a matter of first come, first served.

"This obituary, dated April 13, attributes the death to accident."

"Yes," Ed said. "From what Doc Hatfield spoke later, it would be interesting to know what he wrote on the death certificate. Too bad all those old files went up in smoke when the Town Hall burned. People around here were still arguing about the old lady's death ten years afterward."

I could find nothing more in print by way of an original obituary notice. But I did have another original referent that was first hand, and to hand. The cellar stairway. When I completed my obit notes, I asked Ed if I could look into the cellar again.

"Go on down if you want. Here, I'll get a flashlight."

To add to authenticity, the day had suddenly darkened under a rush of thunderheads. Gray shadows engloomed the kitchen, and with a little imagination I could turn back the calendar to a certain evening or early morning of 1911.

Ed opened the cellar door and shot the light down the steps. Holding gingerly to the wooden handrail, I went down. I counted twelve steps. They were made for a steep and painful fall. The lumpy sidewall offered protuberant cobblestone for a head-cracking. I could imagine the steps glazed with glutinous sirup—treacherously slippery. Add jagged glass, and bodily anguish was assured.

"The old lady was coming up, not going down," Ed reminded from above. "They knew that because she was bringing up a jar or jug of something. I recall Doc Hatfield saying the steps were a mess, so was she, and he'd never be able to enjoy fruit sirup again."

I observed, "She must have been holding to this handrail, then, with her left hand. Cradling the jar in her right arm."

"That's it," Ed said. "She was defenseless. Come up the steps like that, and you'll see how defenseless she was."

I liked Ed's term for it—defenseless—and as I started up the steep, stone steps, I could see how vulnerable she had been. I went

up with left hand holding the skinny wooden rail, right elbow curved in simulation of carrying a heavy jar. Even in pretense I had to be careful. It was almost like climbing a ladder one-handed.

As I neared the top, Ed stopped me with, "That's where she got it."

I confess it made me feel uncomfortable.

"See, from where you are," Ed pointed, "if you had a jar in your arm and dropped it, it would smash on that third step from the top. Notice, too. Where you're standing, your head and shoulders are coming up through the door-frame. Anyone waiting here at the side, could step around quick and let you have it."

Anyone waiting there at the side. Although I had anticipated the development, the simplicity of it gave me a mouse-run through the hair.

I could imagine the motionless shadow there on the floor—back a little from the doorsill—waiting. Coming up the steps, the victim would not see it.

I could imagine the killer standing with indrawn breath. The victim, puffing a little, would not hear the flexing of tightened muscle, the faint, secret sounds emitted by any tensing human body—a controlled swallow, the stretch of a sinew, the tiny pop in some excited digestive organ.

Abby looked up and saw—?

Ed's smile seemed to spread across the doorway. "It kind of gets you, doesn't it? To this day it sort of gives me a creep. Whoever figured it out sure had the old lady set up for a kill."

Stepping up into the kitchen, I expelled a breath.

Ed closed the heavy hand-hewn door and turned the hoop handle to fasten the latch.

We went into the parlor to attend Old Abby's funeral.

CHAPTER 12

Horatio A. Meck, Undertaker and Embalmer. From what Ed told me about him, I deduced the "A" could only have stood for Alger.

"Like his father, Eustace Meck, before him," Ed described, "Horatio was a go-getter. Ever hear of an undertaker who'd rather die than miss a funeral? Both Mecks were like that. Doubled in spades."

Because the "Pointers" were notoriously hardy, the Mecks ran the local meat market on the side. It seemed the ice vault at the rear of the butcher shop made a dual-purpose chamber for cold storage. And in the old days the meat wagon was subject to conversion. That is, the "customer" would be brought to the shop in this delivery cart because Old Eustace liked to save the hearse "for the big parade." Some of the villagers, squeamish, objected to having their chops and roasts delivered in the same market wagon. To objectors, Eustace Meck would quote: "From the funeral baked meats, let the wedding feast be served." Old Eustace was a Shakespeare fan. He had once seen Edwin Booth in Hamlet, and the Boston performance lasted him a lifetime.

"You should have seen that old hearse," Ed said. "It was a real fancy job with a driver's seat up top, like a circus wagon, and with cut-glass windows. Old Eustace would drive in a frock coat and tophat almost as tall as Abraham Lincoln's. You got two horses with plumes for the fifty-dollar service, four horses with plumes for the hundred-dollar, and six horses for a real big go-down."

Even a two-horse funeral was an event in a community the size of Quahog Point. What Ed termed a "six-horser" generated almost

as much civic emotion as the Fourth of July or Hallowe'en. When Eustace cracked the whip to start a big procession on the way to Headland Cemetery, it was his proudest moment. It was the same with Horatio when he took over.

Horatio Meek was, in local idiom, a chip off the old block. Ed's use of the phrase went nicely with a depiction of the two Mecks as smallish men with sandy side-whiskers and buck teeth, dapper and quick in movement, like a pair of chipmunks.

But Horatio had one specialty. "He had this trick of mourning." He had trained under his father as a hired mourner—a thespian seldom seen today, but a popular performer at mid-Victorian funerals where demonstrations of grief were considered mandatory. If you couldn't cry over the demise of Uncle Albert, at least you could procure a substitute to do it for you. Horatio Meek was so adept at shedding specious tears that they sometimes sent for him at Boston, Providence and other dry-eyed metropolises. If the legend were true, at instant's notice he could weep like a willow.

Of course, the habitues of the Anchor Saloon would get Horatio to put on his performance. "Mourn for us, Horatio," they'd pester him. "Okay," he'd agree, "say something sad." They'd say something sad like, "Garfield just passed away," and Horatio would go into a crying jag. Or they'd sing, "Go tell Aunt Rhoda the old gray goose is dead," and he would literally bawl. He could stop any time, and grin like anything.

This was not to say that Horatio was incapable of genuine grief. Let a client talk about economizing, and he would become as mournful as a tombstone. "What?" he would dolefully protest. "You think my price too high for a lot in Headland Cemetery? Why, people are dying to get in!" And if anyone from Quahog Point were lost at sea, he would be absolutely inconsolable.

"Here's the thing," Ed said. "Neither of the Mecks could bear to lose a customer. Horatio was worse than his father. Why, one freezing winter night when you couldn't get a horse or wagon up the hill at land's end, he went after the customer with a wheelbarrow."

The customer in mention was Grampa Bryce, an ancient mariner who lived in a hermit shanty way out near the lighthouse. Nobody

knew how old Grampa was. Some said he had served as a powder monkey on the frigate Constitution. That he must have been a nipper when Nelson's flag captain, Sir Thomas Hardy, tacked in to bombard Stonington, Connecticut, during the War of 1812 (and got his bottom scorched, Hardy did, for his pains!). Anyway, it was on record that Jonathan Bryce had been with Calbraith Perry at Vera Cruz in 1848. Grampa Bryce was so old that he had forgotten all these things.

He was so old that he had outlived all the members of his lineal family (the other Bryces at Quahog Point were of another branch) except a female descendant who resided in Newport. As a pillar of the D.A.R., this lady preferred to think of her distinguished ancestor as a marble monument rather than a filthy old man who swore dreadful oaths and spat tobacco juice and wet his pants. Accordingly, she had not seen her great-great-grandfather for a number of years. She had, however, arranged with the Mecks for a noble monument, and had ordered a six-horse funeral for Grampa, if, as, and when.

Of course, Grampa chose the coldest week in that December of '95—or was it '96?—to pass away. Because of the blistering freeze, Horatio Meek wired the Newport relative to see if the obsequies could be delayed. Nothing doing. She wanted the ceremony that weekend, because she was going to Europe. If Meek could not bury the ancient, she would send a Newport undertaker. Lose a six-horse funeral? That was what sent Horatio harrowing out to land's end.

"The story was, he went at night," Ed narrated. "They say he darn near froze to death getting out there. And he was almost as stiff as the customer, time they got back to town. It must have been a sight, Horatio wheeling that barrow with Grampa in it sitting upright, staring straight ahead. But the worst was when they got back to the shop and he couldn't thaw out Grampa."

The Mecks sat the customer near the stove and built a roaring fire. They put hotwater bottles in his lap and placed his feet on a footwarmer. As with King David in the Old Testament: "They covered him with covers and he gat no heat." It appeared that

Grampa Bryce had been sitting dead and frozen in his hermitage rocking chair for several days. The boreal ride to town in a wheel barrow had definitely fixed him in jackknife posture. This stumped the undertakers with a problem in solid geometry. Posed like an angle-iron, the customer refused to fit a longbox. As neither circular nor L-shaped coffins were in vogue, the problem seemed insoluble. As the funeral hour approached, the Mecks became desperate.

"What did they do?" I asked Ed.

"Well, there were versions."

According to one, Horatio procured a sledge-hammer and . . . but I preferred the more heroic version. In this, Horatio offers to go to the service as a substitute. He dons the ancient mariner's jacket and cravat. Puts on the old man's spectacles. Whitens his hair, hands and face with flour. What'll they use for a beard? "We'll bob Old Fanny!" And Horatio is laid out in the coffin ready to go when—just at the last second—the true customer "snaps out of it."

"The point is," Ed concluded the vignette, "Horatio Meek would have gone to the grave himself before he'd lose a six-horse job. Or a two-horser, for that matter. Once he had you scheduled, there was just one thing in the world that could stop him from burying you."