A stony old road ran up Annursnac Hill. At the bottom was an old orchard of broken, bristling apple trees and a fallen wire fence like snarled bedsprings. The side of the hill was densely packed with blueberry and juniper bushes, and cedar trees standing like pikestaffs. At the top was a reservoir and a rocky pasture where the wind turned the white sides of the grass up in billows. Birch saplings with trembling new leaves grew along the barbed- wire pasture fence. Mary looked at them and found herself thinking of what Emerson had said about the mighty and transcendent Soul...
'Wow,' said Homer, 'this is a swell place. Just look at that view.'
It was the second day of May, and almost hot. Mary took off her jacket and sat down. Far below them they could see the hazy treetops bordering the Assabet, and Tom's cornfield, still dark brown, showing no sign of life. There was a green field next to it, with a blue puddle in the middle, and some white birds in the middle of the puddle. Next to the field they could barely see the complex rooftops of the Gosses' house, nearly hidden in its surrounding hemlocks, and far off to the right the tower of the Concord Reformatory. Homer lay down on his back and wondered what would happen if he were to put his arm around Mary. Or he might just tickle her a little in a friendly way...
'What do you suppose Teddy saw from here?' said Mary. 'What could you see if you had binoculars?'
Oh, the hell with it. Homer sat up. 'You'd see the souls of the Transcendentalists floating around over Concord. You could just sing out to Henry and he'd fly over and take you right up to Hebb'm.'
'There are a lot of birds down there. You can see such a lot of sky. It's like a big blue soup tureen, not just that teacupful we see from under the elm trees down there.' Mary glanced down at something shining beside her feet, then bent forward to pick it up. 'Oh, Homer, look. I've found something.'
'By God, it's a staple. Teddy must have sat right here and popped a gusset.' Homer stood up, his brown hair rumpled upwards on the back of his head, and gestured at one of the state policemen who were searching the hilltop. Then he pulled Mary to her feet. 'Say, I wonder how fine a fine-tooth comb Jimmy's men used when they went over the area where Goss was shot? Let's go see. If Teddy was there he may have come unstuck at the seams all over the place.'
'If you had one of those back-and-forth hats you'd look just like Sherlock Holmes.'
Homer was leaning over the path that led to the Minuteman, staring around through Mary's reading glasses, which he held halfway between his eyes and the ground. There was a group of tourists gawking at the grave of the British soldiers, telling themselves that they could still see where Ernest Goss's blood had left a stain. A small boy jabbed his father with his elbow. 'Look at the detective,' he said.
Homer played to the grandstand. 'It's elementary, my dear Flotsam. Egad, sir, look at that lollipop stick. Lemon-lime, I think I can say positively, sir, that the flavor was lemon-lime.'
'Query,' said Mary, 'which suspect has a passion for lemon-lime? In case you don't have a plan, Mr. Holmes, I have a plan.'
The boy had a good idea, too, and volunteered, 'What you could do is, you could have a whole lot of flavors in a dish, and then you pass it around and see which one ... aw, you're just kidding me.'
His father prodded him, and they moved away. Mary followed them across the bridge and looked up at the Minuteman. There he stood in his brazen calm with his bronze nose and ears and tricorn hat and his bronze buttons and the bronze wrinkles in his stockings and his bronze fowling piece and plow. Mary stared at the gun. What if the murder weapon was like the purloined letter, and the murderer had just stuck it in the Minuteman 's hand where everybody could see it? The bronze gun was just like the one Ernest Goss had kept in his cabinet, even to the engraved pineapple on the bottom that showed it was British made. The flint mechanism was all there, with the frizen down over the powder pan. Mary called herself an idiot, but she reached up anyway and touched the stock. It was bronze, all right, not wood. And of course the murderer would have had to saw off the bronze one, and then get rid of
Homer spoke roughly behind her. 'Look here.' He had a little pile of staples in his cupped hand, three or four of them, folded over on themselves.
'Where were they?'
'On the little hill where the obelisk is. You know what Thoreau said? 'Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.' '
*34*
Jimmy was feeling testy. His expense account was worrying him, and the nationwide search for Teddy Staples was going badly. No picture of Teddy had turned up anywhere. The official description called for an itinerant stonemason about five feet eight inches tall, weight one hundred and forty pounds, brown hair, bad cough, peculiar-looking, poorly dressed. Across the broad face of the land the police had turned up plenty of five-foot- eight-inch, one-hundred-and-forty pound, brown-haired, peculiar-looking derelicts who had such atrocious health habits that they had coughs; but only a few of these were itinerant stonemasons. Jimmy had been called up three times in the middle of the night by excited members of far-flung police departments. 'He denies it, of course,' the voice would squeak, 'but it's Staples, all right.'
Twice Jimmy had turned them off with a suggestion given him by the Audubon Society. 'Just one thing more,' he would say sleepily. 'Just mention sort of casually that you saw an evening grosbeak pulling up a worm in your back yard. If he disagrees with you, call me back. You heard me, an evening grosbeak. That's G, R, O...'
That had got rid of two of the suspects. But the third five-foot-eight-inch skinny itinerant stonemason with a bad cough had turned out to be a birdwatcher, too, and, glory be, he had boggled at the worm-eating grosbeak! 'Hang on to him,' shouted Jimmy over the long-distance line, 'I'll be right there.'
This particular wild-goose chase had cost $172.53, and it looked terrible, really terrible on the tally sheet.
The next afternoon Homer Kelly snatched Mary out of her library early and marched her along the street to the little brick temple with the putty-colored columns that faced down Walden Street. It had once been a bank, but now it provided office space for insurance men and lawyers. Among the lawyers were Philip Goss and his partner George Jarvis.
'The heck with Teddy,' said Homer. 'I'm going to get back on the main track. Who was it the Boy Scout thought he saw a split second after the murder? One of the Goss boys. It's about time I started chivvying them around.'
Philip's small office might have been on Beacon Street. There was a Turkish rug on the floor and the bookshelves were filled with old volumes in calf bindings. The roll-top desk was a piece of pleasant affectation. Philip was smoothly at their service. So was George Jarvis, who appeared out of nowhere and sat quietly in the background.
Homer wanted to know what it had been like to grow up in the Goss household. 'Is it really true that your father dealt more harshly with Charley than he did with you?'
'My father's attitude toward Charley has always troubled me. My earliest memories are of shielding Charley from my father's displeasure.'
'Why? Why was your father so hard on Charley?'
'I wish I knew. I think it was a tendency he had to see things only in black and white. Like in politics—
