Only in New England : the story of a gaslight crime (2 page)

All of the older "Pointer" families went for the trolley. A Bridewell and a Babcock were prime movers, it was said. The Thorns, Smeizers, Rosses, Goodbodys—all of them bought in. Then the Century belatedly turned. A "tin lizzie" put the Lizzie Borden sensation in the shade. Almost overnight steamboating crawled up on the beach and died. America took to the highway in its Merry Oldsmobile, its Winton Six, its Stanley Steamer, its Packard, its Stevens-Duryea. Motoring, as everyone knows, was the ruination of the old-time summer resort.

The Peninsular and Quahog Rapid Transit Line expired while the last mile of track was being laid. Before it was abolished by our recent Hurricane Hazel you could still see a section of trestle rusting in a stretch of open marsh. It was the trestle-work that really cost. That, plus a lot of stock juggling and inflation. Some of the "Pointers," deep in, went bankrupt. Nearly all of the investors lost a great deal of money.

That was around 1910. The year the Surf and Sand saw its reservations drop to a dozen rooms, the Headlander closed its doors, the Bayberry suffered a disastrous fire, and the Seagull went into receivership. John Y. Gillion hanged himself in a cupboard at the back of Thorn's Fish Market. Neill Smeizer lost his fleet of mackerel boats and took a job tending bar in the Anchor Saloon. Joel Goodbody ran off with the wife of a visiting yachtsman. Absalom Purdy was jailed for the Bayberry holocaust (arson). And Earnest Bridewell started another term in the State Senate.

The Bridewells had owned a reputedly sizable block of P. and Q. Transit stock. But they came off rather well. They managed to hang on to the Surf and Sand Hotel. They maintained an in-

terest in the vestigial Quahog Trawler Company (three boats), the residual Quahog Kelp Company (three miles of beach with riparian rights), and the Neptune Chandlery (a yachting supply store). Then, too, there was the Bridewell homestead—the big, gray gingerbread house with the boxwooded gardens, the surrounding orchards, the capacious stables.

Other "Pointers" had to sell their boats, their horses, their surreys with the fringe on top. Some of them, desperate, began to sell acres of beach property, and even articles of furniture to acquisitive realtors and antique dealers—"inlanders." But the Bridewells kept up.

The localites averred it wasn't the doing of the Bridewell Boys, although the Senator was smart enough. They laid the acumen and the credit to Abby Bridewell, the old mother. She it was who steered the family fortunes through the P. and Q. financial storm. She it was who managed the money.

She had managed it, it seemed, when Captain Nathan Bridewell first fetched it home from California. It was she who had handled Nathan's investments, had conceived the Surf and Sand. After he became a paralytic in the 80's, she had done even better with her distaff hand. Now, herself in the eighties, she ruled the estate with matriarchal acuity and discipline. Abby Bridewell was the local Hetty Green.

But with the calendar at 1910, Abby Bridewell did not have long to live.

CHAPTER 2

I first heard of the Bridewell case in 1939. On my maiden visit to Quahog Point. I went there with fish in mind. I came back with my thoughts on matricide.

Luke Martin introduced me to the place. Come on, fold up your typewriter for a weekend. You need some oxygen in your system. I know a shore point where it's cheap. We can get a boat and a guide and try for swords. Luke is a champion salesman as well as angler, and he had me hooked. He was abetted by April weather and crocuses in Manhattan dooryards.

We took the Post Road and cut over to Newport where we caught the coastal steamer. (It doesn't run any more.) Quahog Point was one of the regular stops. When we disembarked at the wharf I felt as though I had stepped into the past. The stubby fishing boats at wharfside. The nets. The old-timers posed like the one on the ad for cod-liver oil.

The little town with its cottages and Western-style storefronts. The Center with the dry fountain. The steeple of the Shore-side Methodist Church. The old-time street lamps. The raffish beach hotels with the decaying verandahs and boarded-up windows. The broad "sea houses," lavishly shingled and dormered— architecture of the day when lumber was plentiful and carpentry could be afforded. Quahog Point was a period piece.

Ed Brewster, our host-to-be and guide, met us at the pier. A wide man with an amiable face, he stepped out of a 1920 Kissel that suited the atmosphere, and came over to pick up our gear. Luke had fished with him for several seasons, and the previous autumn they had caught a record tuna.

Ed inspected the sky, frowning. "I don't like it," he said. "My crystal set says rain tomorrow, and so does my knee."

His crystal set and his knee forecast truly. The sundown grew smoky as we drove out to his house. By the time we got there, a damp wind was whipping the undergrowth at roadside.

My introduction to the house was memorable. It seemed a big place in the windy twilight. Elms in the side yard were bowing and creaking. A tall hedge of scraggly boxwood was in motion. Shadows were weaving across the drive, and dead leaves flew. The lamp-lit fanlight over the front door looked inviting. As we scuttled in, a few drops chased our heels.

We were welcomed in by Ed's wife, a French Canadian girl with a hospitable bosom and generous heart. There was a cramped

vestibule with doors admitting to a front parlor, an inner hall, a side dining room. We went into the dining room.

Doors opened into a kitchen, a pantry, a stairway going up. At the stairtop another door. Two doors opened into our front room, a capacious bedroom. My first impression of the house: a lot of rooms and an extraordinary number of doors.

At dinner (supper in the colloquial), Ed Brewster told us about the place. But the topic developed from a discourse on Quahog Point. In the course of which I learned that Ed Brewster had been reared there but not born there. So he wasn't, strictly speaking, a "Pointer." His father had worked as head chef at one of the Point hotels, and Ed had come there as a boy, and stayed. He had gone to the little red schoolhouse with the "Pointer" fry. Had worked his way up on the fishing boats. Had finally acquired a boat of his own, and, recently, this house.

"Been on the Point most of my life, but I'm still not one of them" He chuckled. "That's all right with me."

His wife? He laughed. "Annette's from Nova Scotia. Strictly a foreigner."

Not that they didn't get along with the "Pointers." Everybody liked Annette. The "Pointers" liked (and, I gathered, respected) Ed. It was just that at times they ignored him at Town Council, or wouldn't let him in on some local proposition. As he put it, "still treated him clannish."

"I think," Ed's wife offered, "maybe it's because of this house."

"It was long before I got this house," Ed said.

"But some of them do not like to come here."

"Who cares?" Ed looked mildly annoyed. Then he tilted back in his chair, listening. It had begun to rain.

Luke Martin, happily fed, pointed a cigar. "You've done a good job on this house," he said, looking around. To me, "You ought to have seen it before Ed took it over."

"Two years ago," Ed nodded. "It was a mess." He saw my interest, and enlarged, "Windows broken. Part of the roof gone. Rats. I got it for taxes."

Annette Brewster sighed. "It was a ruin. Plaster falling everywhere. Fieldmice in the furniture. It took a lot of work."

I looked around at the fumed oak. The fine old corner cupboard. The polished brass. "You mean this furniture was in it?"

"Everything," Ed Brewster said. "Pictures. Carpets. The works. We even found a lot of plate silver. But the place was a wreck. Nobody'd lived in it for nearly twenty years."

"They just went away and left it? All these things?"

"See, the family died out," Ed said. "And the natives wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole."

"Superstitious mutton-heads!" Luke Martin snapped.

"Well, not exactly," Ed said tolerantly. "You see," he explained to me, "there was a murder here."

"Tell him, Ed," Luke Martin said. "He's been writing true crimes for the Munsey Company."

"Secrets of the French police," I deprecated modestly. But I could hardly disguise the eager tone. Our host's statement had brought the fire-horse neighing out of me.

Ed Brewster said, "It was a long time back. Before the World War. They say there's only been two murders here at the Point. Since the old ship-wreckin' days, that is. One of the cases: a musician at the Bayberry was shot. He'd been fiddling around with one of the local girls. It wasn't much of a case."

"Is there a lot of such fiddling here in the summer?"

Ed thought a minute. "Yes, there is," he said. "And in the winter, too. But these days it's pretty much taken for granted. That shooting was back in the Nineties. Only other murder was the one in this house."

Of course, we were in the Bridewell mansion. The old homestead. But I'd never heard of the Bridewells until that moment. Ed Brewster donated the rest of that evening to the case history.

I heard about Captain Nathan Bridewell and how his ship came in. About the cumulative family fortune. About the uncles, cousins, and aunts. But the story centered around Abby Bridewell, the Captain's widow, and about the two bachelor sons, Earnest

and Lionel, who lived with the aged mother here in the house.

"They lived here together, the three of them," Ed Brewster said. "Earnest and Lionel were unmarried. I expect the old lady didn't encourage them to marry—she'd have figured the girls was after the family money. Anyway, they didn't, and when I knew them as a kid, Lionel, he was about forty-five, and Earnest Bridewell was pushing sixty. The old lady was in her eighties. Look, would you like to see them?"

"See them?"

Ed laughed at my surprise. "When we moved in here, I found this album. There's an attic full of stuff. Old books. Saratoga trunks. Everything. Come on up."

Ed's wife protested about the dust. But I was thoroughly intrigued. The house was growing on me, and I was curious about its story. Ed hurried into the kitchen for an oil lamp, and we followed him up the stairs. A back room, a back hall—more doors everywhere—and a ladder up to the third-floor loft.

"Here we are," Ed said.

We stood in a nest of lamplight and shadow with rain drumming on the roof overhead. We might have been in a second-hand shop on Third Avenue. All kinds of rummage was crammed under the eaves. Wonderful things. Bird cages, three-legged chairs, carpet bags, dress forms, boxes, trunks, books, broken parlor lamps, a headless statue of Napoleon.

While our host rummaged in a leather trunk, I examined some of the books. A first edition of Horatio Alger— Sink or Swim. A copy of Paradise Lost. The Calf Path by Sam Walter Foss. Whit-tier's Snowbound. The Prisoner of Zenda. A fabulous booklet entitled From the Ballroom to Hell; Facts About Dancing (Glad Tidings Publishing Co., 1894). An old Bible wherein someone had scrawled on the flyleaf: "Matthew, Mark, Luke, John; saddle the cats, and I'll get on." The book covers were sooty and the spines were warped.

I observed that you could sometimes tell about people by what they read.

Ed said, "You'll notice nearly all these books were gifts. Except in the Algers and that old Bible, the leaves are uncut."

I reversed the English on my observation to say you might tell about people by what they didn't read.

"Well, the Bridewells didn't read much," Ed remarked. "But as you can see, the old lady wouldn't throw nothing away. . . . Here's the album."

So I met the Bridewells as preserved between covers of brown plush, brass-bound and embossed with hearts and flowers. They were a numerous clan. Stern uncles and lanky maiden aunts. Little boys posed with elbow on parlor table, and solemn little girls seated on tuffets.

"Those were back in the eighties," Ed said. "The one with the derby is Captain Nathan Bridewell. He had a stroke and was paralyzed for years. Died in 1910."

The deceased sea captain resembled a character straight out of Eugene O'Neill. Chubby features framed with side-whiskers. Button eyes and buttoned-up mouth. He was holding a telescope propped on one knee.

"Here's the last of the Bridewells," Ed said, turning a page. "The ones we're talking about."

Earnest, the State Senator. He was posed like a statue, with hands gripping the lapels of his coat, in a stance of oratory. A gaunt man with a lean face, the stalk of his neck accentuated by a high stiff collar with wings wide open to accommodate the jut of a blade-thin Adam's apple. He wore a pompadour of dark hair, heavily-browed eyes, and a black horseshoe mustache. The flanks of his cheeks were sunken. His eyes, fixed on the camera, had little pouchy hammocks under them. One was informed by the pose that he took himself seriously. He might have been one of the humorless statesmen immortalized in the steel engraving, "Lincoln and his Cabinet."

Lionel, the junior brother, had stepped from the Currier and Ives period into the Turn of the Century. His close-up, circa 1905, bore the imprint of a fashionable Newport photographer. He faced the camera with folded arms and the intense self-interest of a theatrical portrait. His features possessed the clean-shaven, strong-jawed vacuity favored by the nickelodeon heroes of that day. He might have been the aging leading man of a smalltown

stock company. His handsomeness was marred by the weathering of middle age and something tricky in the eyes. I was reminded of certain portraits of William McKinley.

Abby Bridewell was a perfect Brady. Although her latest portrait was dated 1907, it might have been taken by Alexander Gardener. She was posed in a mahogany rocker. She wore a black lace cap, a black velvet choker, and a dress that looked as if it were fashioned of black bombazine. Her eyes were direct and uncompromising. Her mouth was a tight little line between dumpling jowls that would have suited one of Disney's dwarfs. But the grumpy, curmudgeon expression was, it seemed, deceptively folksy. I was to learn that this old lady embodied the temper, the sharp acumen, the willpowered determination of a German baroness. It came to me that somewhere I had seen her portrait before. Then I remembered. Pictures of old Queen Victoria.