Only in New England : the story of a gaslight crime (30 page)

But enough of this graveyard with its lugubrious public imagery, its solemn warnings. Lifting my heels, I headed crosslots for the road. Then I saw the small brownstone mausoleum.

BRIDEWELL

A gateway led to the doorstep, but I did not go in. From the gate I could see who was in residence.

Captain Nathan Bridewell

R.I.P., 1910 Abby Bridewell, his Widow

R.I.P., 1911

In the corner of the lot there were numerous other Bridewells. I made out Sybil Bridewell's headstone. But neither Earnest nor Lionel seemed to be on locale.

More than willing to be elsewhere, myself, I proceeded across the grass. My retreat brought me up against a granite angel labeled "Smeizer." The epitaph read:

1 hear a x>oice you cannot hear, Which says I must not stay, I see a hand you cannot see, Which beckons me away.

By one of those odd coincidences, I heard a far-off voice hail my name at that moment. Turning to glance down the slope, I saw a black sedan at roadside. The driver had an arm out of the window with a finger upraised in that gesture which says taxi.

It was Ed Brewster.

But I was somehow reminded of an old Irish legend. The ghostly hearse that draws up before the house of the unsuspecting. The driver who leans out and calls to the victim, "There's room for just one more."

Ed said, "We'll take a shortcut back to the house. We won't have much time if you're going to get that two o'clock boat."

I said, "Thanks for picking me up."

"Nan said you'd went for a walk. She's fixed you a lunch."

The car swerved in ruts, and trailed a plume of dust. We passed an abandoned farm and a yawning gravel pit. Then another abandoned farm.

"That's the place Earnest Bridewell lived for a time. After he married Floss Grimes."

"Ed," I inquired, "what became of Earnest and Lionel Bridewell? I didn't see them back there in the cemetery."

"They're there." He could not tell me exactly where. "Maybe in the new part. You were in the old part."

"Oh."

"Well, Lionel died some time around World War One. After, maybe. He'd left Quahog Point. You heard a lot of stories. There was one he tagged after a burlesque queen. Just a yarn, I suppose."

"I can imagine."

Ed frowned. "You know how it is. Some sailor says he seen Lionel at a burley house in Bridgeport or somewhere. Maybe it was Lionel, maybe it wasn't. Next thing you know, it's around that Lionel is married to one of those big pink Mae Wests. Or maybe that he's selling candy up the aisle between the acts."

This last was an evocative suggestion. The finale of the rake's progress. The curtain descends on a brassy rendition of "Sugar Blues." The house lights go up. And then, in the smoky lull of intermission, the candy hawker starts up the aisle. It is Lionel (or what is left of him) in straw hat and shirtsleeves, his eyes glazed, his false teeth shining, addressing the audience in cracked Calling Tones. "Prize in every package! Getcha chocolate-covered cherries!"

"I don't really know what did happen to Lionel," Ed mused. "Nothing out the ordinary, I expect. . . . Here! Here's somebody, though, can tell you about Earnest."

He slowed the car, then brought up at roadside where an elderly man in overalls was standing with a fishpole. We picked up Roy Goodbody.

After introductions, Ed said, "Roy, we was talkin about the Bridewells up at the cemetery. You knew the State Senator."

"Sure. We all knew him."

"What was that about his trouble after the trial? I was telling my friend here."

"Why, he died."

"I mean before that. Didn't they make him Road Commissioner?"

"Oh, that. Sure." Our passenger rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "A couple of years before the World War. The first one."

"What happened?"

"To Earnest?" Roy Goodbody shrugged. "I don't know what you mean, unless it was about him going back to jail."

I asked Roy Goodbody why Earnest Bridewell had gone back to jail.

"Well, he'd had this other trouble," Roy said. "About his mother. After that blew over, the County kind of relented. So they fixed him up with this Road Commissioner appointment. It was too bad, eh, Ed?"

Ed Brewster shook his head. "I never heard all the details."

"Why, Earnest kind of played it sharp. He got to padding the payroll with names off tombstones. Mecks, Purdys, Robinsons, Thorns. Even old Grampa Bryce. On the County payroll after they'd been dead for years. He might've got away with it if he hadn't started taking some of the slabs, well as the names."

I echoed, "Some of the slabs?"

"Well," Roy Goodbody told me, "taking names from a cemetery was one thing. Kind of usual in politics around election time and all that. You sort of expected it, back then, in ballot boxes and county payrolls . . . Earnest went too far. You don't like to walk into someone's barn and find a stable paved with flagstones that say 'Pythias Ross, Rest in Peace,' or 'Bertha Smeizer, Gone but not Forgotten.'"

"That was in Earnest's place back up the road near the cemetery?" Ed asked.

"Convenient," Roy nodded. "I don't calculate it's true, but I

heard the hearth inside the fireplace had Doc Hatfield's name on it."

We had come to a road-fork near the Bridewell (which was to say Ed Brewster's) house. Roy Goodbody climbed out.

As we drove on, Ed said, "Don't believe everything you hear. But they did send Earnest up for a couple of years. He died a short time after he got out of prison. His wife Floss was a good woman. Went away. Stepson Alvin, or whatever he was, died of paresis a few years back. That orphan, Walter Jones, died in an insane asylum."

"How soon after that did you acquire the house, Ed?"

"This place?" as we turned into the drive. "Some years after. Like I told you, it was vacant for a long time."

We pulled up at the side porch. Ed looked at his watch and then at me. "You've got about half an hour. . . . Let's see what's cooking."

I followed him to the kitchen door. As Ed stepped into the kitchen, he called, "Nan!" When she did not answer he grumbled something that sounded like "down the road for eggs," and stood aside to let me go ahead of him.

The kitchen was shadowy and quiet. Coffee simmered, aromatic, on the stove. I was conscious of the wall clock ticking. Then I was conscious of something else.

Ed said, "Use a beer? I got a keg down cellar. We can bring up a couple of pitchers if you'll come down and hold—" Then he paused to see what I was staring at.

My attention had gone to the cellar door ahead of him. "Isn't that a new door?" I asked.

Ed eyed it admiringly. "Yes, it is. Hung it myself some time ago. Ever try to put up one? It's a job."

"But the old one! The antique!"

"Chopped it up," Ed said. "It wasn't really any good. Warped cockeyed, and too thick for the frame. The old hasp was worn out and wouldn't latch. It kept swinging open, and give Annette the creeps. Every time she'd look up, the door would be moving ajar like someone was coming up out of the cellar."

"I suppose it would make one a little nervous."

"More than a little after what happened on those cellar steps."

"You mean Abby Bridewell."

"Not just her," Ed said. "Me, too. The damndest thing. It scared me out of a year's growth."

I looked at him. "What happened?"

"Huh!" he exclaimed. "It was the autumn after you first came here. I was fixing a water pipe down cellar. We'd had a storm warning that morning, and I wanted to get the job secured before a gale set in. I come in through the kitchen door with a three-foot pipe on my shoulder. Nan was in here fiddling around. I recall she asked me to fetch the laundry basket from the washroom so she could go bring in the laundry off the line before it blew away. I asked her couldn't she see I was busy. So she said she'd go fetch it herself. Anyway, she was out of the kitchen when I started down cellar."

Demonstrating, Ed went to the cellar way. He pulled open the cellar door. He said across his shoulder, "There wasn't nobody behind me, I'd swear to that. There wasn't nobody in the house, I'd swear, except Annette. And she says she didn't come near this end of the kitchen. . . . Look. . . . Here she comes now. She can tell you."

Breezy, Annette Brewster came in through the kitchen door. She was carrying a loaded laundry basket and pouting a mouthful of clothes pins. Before one of us could help her she dumped the basket on the table and palmed the pins.

"Speak of the devil," Ed said. "I was just telling about the time you went out for the laundry and I got clobbered going down cellar."

I exclaimed, "Clobbered?"

Ed rubbed the back of his head. "Damn near brained! It was dark down the cellarway, so I was extra careful on the steps. But I got it just the same. I'm about five steps down, and wham! Like across the back of the neck with a baseball bat."

Ed pointed down the dark cellarway. I moved to his side to peer down.

"See that lumpy sidewall?" He aimed a thick finger. "I must've bounced off that with a beautiful header. Whatever I got slugged

with, it caught that iron pipe on my shoulder and like to broke my neck. I came to at the bottom—it seemed a long time afterward—with Annette sponging my face."

I turned to look at Annette. Her expression was woeful.

She said unhappily, "I couldn't imagine what had happened. I saw him start for the cellar and I went into the washroom there, and got the laundry basket and went out to the porch. Just as I stepped out on the porch and closed the door, I heard this muffled bang or something—almost like a gunshot—and then a falling, clanging sound."

"The iron pipe," Ed explained. "Bouncing with me down the steps."

"You were on the porch," I prompted Annette fatuously.

"Well!" she exhaled. "I came right back in. I just knew it was Ed. I ran to the cellar door and looked down. There he was."

"You saw nobody in the kitchen?"

"Of course not."

"The cellar door?"

"Partly open, just as Ed left it. Those steep steps! You should have seen him. He might have killed himself!"

Ed said darkly, "Or been killed."

But on the way to Gillion's Wharf, Ed confided that he supposed he had actually slipped.

"After all," he said ponderously, "I'm no rich old widow sitting on top of a fortune. I'm no Hetty Green."

Thus legends, once launched, are seldom dispelled. Fable would give Abby Bridewell a Dun and Bradstreet rating no matter the contrary evidence exhumed by basic research.

Ed parked the car at the pierhead. Then he escorted me to the gangway of the S.S. Cremolian —an old walking-beam steamer of the Bay & Ocean Line. Most of the passengers had already boarded. The captain peered down from the bridge, and deck hands stood ready to cast off.

In parting, Ed said, "Going to write up that mystery?"

"I might," I said.

Rubbing his neck, he said, "It would be interesting if someone would ever solve it."

The steamer blew the whistle on us, giving me no time to tell Ed Brewster that he had that day supplied me with a solution. Actually I was most relieved about this outcome, and at the same time embarrassed by the sense of relief. But, however erroneous the suspicion, in a murder mystery all principals are suspect until cleared by the solution, whether the case be factual or fictional. Given possible motive and opportunity, a twelve-year-old newsboy could be as deadly as the next man. After all, Ed did acquire the gramophone, and—

Daggers of the mind! And fool's logic. Begin with a false premise, build assumption on supposition, and, as Lincoln or some other wise man once observed, you could prove a horse chestnut was a chestnut horse.

The steamer shuddered and backed away from the pier. Ed waved. Feeling happier than I had for some time, I waved back.

Later, I stood topside at the taffrail watching the headland and the lighthouse diminish astern. A whippy saltwater breeze helped to clear my head of attic cobwebs, Victorian epitaphs and other mental blocks. By the time the long peninsula was a chalkline far astern, I had all of the key jigsaws in place.

And so (to borrow the period rhetoric of a once nationally famous travelogue) I said goodbye to Quahog Point—last outpost of the Gaslight Era, and favorite resort of Ananias, Baron Munchausen and Professor Quackenbos—and sailed off in the tinted light of a golden afternoon, confident that I had found the answer to at least one mystery.

At any rate, I was almost certain that Earnest Bridewell had caused the death of his mother. And I was equally certain that I knew how he had done it.

CHAPTER 20

Earnest Bridewell must have killed his mother. Easy enough to see the modus operandi. Not to be mistaken for the deus ex machina.

Consider his supposedly ironclad alibi: He was at his farmhouse on the south side of Quahog Point throughout the entire evening of April 11. True, he left the house for a while. But according to his wife, he, Earnest, supposedly remained on the premises from suppertime until bedtime—a statement presumably substantiated by the testimony of the Bedford cattle dealers, McVest and Garvy.

Dissolve that crucial alibi, and Earnest could have been anywhere on Quahog Point. The solvent of what used to be called "horse sense" readily dissolves it. Not only do twilight and evening star shadow the alibi. The intention of the witnesses is open to doubt.

However, let us take them at their word and believe the cattle men testified in good faith. "We were out looking for southdown sheep, and I twice saw this man that evening," McVest could aver with hand on Bible, and perhaps swear to it honestly. Yet the inherent fallacy is obvious. When you're looking for ewes and rams, you are hardly paying attention to someone glimpsed in a dooryard or seen at a window.

The cattle dealers were in a hurry. They wanted to get their business over with. Their search for strays led them over rough terrain, through thickets of sapling and head-high bayberry. Probably they cast frequent and anxious glances at the evening clouds. A weather change was setting in. The wind off the sea

was chill. Preoccupied with sheep and mare's tails, the two Bedford men could have remained entirely unaware that Earnest Bridewell had quit the farmhouse and taken the northbound path through the orchard.

Around nine o'clock, then, Earnest arrives at the old homestead unobserved. Perhaps he sees Cornelia Ord emerge from the house. With no particular affection for this "vaguely related" cousin, he waits for her to go. Or, possibly, he arrives at the Bridewell homestead just after Cornelia's departure. At any rate, his mother is in there alone.

Earnest walks up the hedge-screened path to the front door (unnoticed by Mrs. Smeizer, for all her infra-red night vision) and enters the vestibule. The downstairs seems deserted. His mother is not in the lighted parlor. She must have just quit the room because the gramophone is playing "This is an Eddy-son reckord" over and over, the needle stuck in the groove (the voice Mrs. Smeizer heard!). Abby cannot have been gone long, or the machine would have run down. Earnest shuts it off.

Scowling, he looks for his mother in the dining room. Nobody. The sewing room is dark. A lamp is burning in the kitchen, so she must be somewhere in back. Earnest walks into the kitchen. He notices the cellar door standing open. Ah, his mother is down there.