The Transcendental Murder

chipped dishes on it and a sign on a stick. Carefully she made the sign in the shape of an elephant, with a long trunk in front. Mrs. Bewley began to smile all over her gaunt old face. 'OH. YOU MEAN WHITE ELEPHANT TABLE. YES, YES. I'M SURE I CAN SPARE A FEW THINGS FROM MY COLLECTION.'

'THAT'S NICE. YOU'RE ALWAYS SO GENEROUS, MRS. BEWLEY.'

Mrs. Bewley nodded and smiled. It was true, she was.

Downstairs Mary was ready to go. But at the front door she blanched. That Granville-Galsworthy fellow had taken to hanging around in the morning. He had a room on Belknap Street but some mornings Mary had suspected that he had been lurking outside all night. Grandmaw had complained of prowlers, and the other night Tom had nearly caught someone in the barn. It gave Mary the shivers. She opened the door a crack, thinking to dodge out the back way if he was there, and try driving off as if she hadn't seen him. But his sallow face swam up to the crack in the door. She jumped. He had been standing on the great granite step before the door.

'Oh, hello. Good morning.'

'Good morning tew yew.'

Mary walked quickly toward her car. Roland came, too. There was nothing for it but to ask if he'd like a lift. Where did he want to go?

'I'm going tew dew some research,' he said. 'Just let me out wherever you're going.'

Research, my eye. 'Well, I'm going to the police station. Is that all right?'

That was all right. Mary parked her car beside the station, and he got out and followed her to the door. She despaired. Was there no way she could rid herself of this limpet? Then he collided with someone who was hurrying around the corner of the building. It was Homer Kelly.

'G'morning,' said Homer, scowling. Roland lifted his hat and faded away.

Mary silently thanked God. 'Nice day,' she said meekly. Homer glared at her, opened his mouth to say something, and then thought better of it. Instead he opened the door for her. went in and leaned on the counter.

'Shrubsole,' he said, 'it's June.'

'That's right, sir; lovely day.'

'Miss Morgan and I will be out all day. Mind the store.'

'Working on the case, are you, Mr. Kelly?'

'Naturally. You didn't think we would take a day off, and go boating on the river, or some frivolous thing like that, did you? We're just going to be doing some miscellaneous—ah—'

'Research,' suggested Mary.

'That's it.'

Sergeant Shrubsole was looking curiously at Homer. He lifted up his forefinger, rubbed it on his superior's cheek and looked at it. It came away pink with lipstick. Shrubsole shook his head, winked at Mary and drew an obvious conclusion. Homer hastily pulled out a handkerchief and rubbed his face. Mary blushed, and, trying hard not to look unhappy, succeeded in looking guilty. But it wasn't her lipstick.

'Come on,' he said testily to Mary, pushing her out the door ahead of him. He slammed the door. 'Impertinent young fool.'

'You've got some on your collar, too,' said Mary. She licked her handkerchief and wiped at the smudge. Homer looked down at her and growled, 'Where can we hire a canoe?'

'A canoe? Oh, I see. Our research is going to be...'

'Naturally. Boating on the river.'

*39*

I left the village and paddled up the river to Fair Haven Pond ... 1 was soothed with an infinite stillness. I got the world, as it were, by the nape of the neck, and held it under in the tide of its own events, till it was drowned, and then I let it go downstream like a dead dog. —Henry Thoreau

'Wish I could go with you,' said Tom. 'I sure love this river. But what with crating asparagus and one thing and another a man hasn't a moment's peace this season. Here, why don't you use the outboard? See, it has its own battery. Doesn't make any noise at all.'

Homer looked at the motor doubtfully. 'Maybe we'd better just paddle,' he said. 'I don't know a thing about making motors work.'

'Nonsense. You don't have to. This one's good for ten, eleven hours. Here, I'll start her up.'

Gwen had made them a lunch in Annie's old plastic lunch-box. She came down to the edge of the river with Freddy to see them off. Freddy wanted to go, too. He wept as they shoved off from the shore into the middle of the dark stream. 'Goodby, Freddy,' shouted Homer. 'Don't cry, and we'll bring you a turtle.'

Freddy stopped crying right away. 'Big,' he said. 'Big.'

Out in the middle of the Assabet Mary could feel the sun drawing all the slivers from her mind. She knelt facing forward in the bow of the canoe and stared straight ahead so that Homer wouldn't see her smile. Grind away, hurdy-gurdy. (Henry Thoreau had spent half his life on the rivers.) Homer sat still in the stern, his hand on the tiller of the motor, his eyes on Mary's back. She was wearing a white dress. Unbidden, a quotation from Emerson floated into his head. Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. There was an asinine remark if ever there was one.

Mary pointed silently to a half-submerged log on which five turtles lay basking, leaning upon one another. They looked like overgrown shiny black beetles. Homer aimed the canoe that way, but when they came near, the turtles all slid into the water. 'Better on the way back, anyhow,' he said.

They passed a heron, standing motionless, and later a fisherman, motionless as the heron. Cloudy heads of water willows filled the edges of the river. 'We could be Indians,' said Mary. 'Everything must have looked just the same when they lived along this shore.'

'You awful heap big squaw,' murmured Homer. 'Squaw Head-in-Clouds.'

'Look,' said Mary, 'here's the junction of the three rivers. See? This is where the Sudbury comes in and joins the Assabet to flow on downstream as the Concord. We'll be at the North Bridge in a minute. It's just around the bend.'

The Concord River was slower-moving, but the surface rippled slightly in the warm breeze and slipped over the still body of the rest. The reflections in the water were upside-down impressionist pictures of the shore. Then a pair of redwing blackbirds fluttered out of the buttonbushes and Homer lost his self-control. That did it. It was all so damn pretty. Almost as if it were trying to persuade him of something he didn't want to be talked into. Homer looked around nervously and started tearing into Concord. In his opinion it was a polite little suburban pesthole, living on its picayune history, full of proper little anglophilic old biddies in sneakers. It made him sick. It was like Brattle Street in Cambridge, where you could feel the ghostly whiskers of old dead professors tickling your cheek. Creepy, that's what it was.

Mary promised herself she wouldn't get angry. She looked up it the watery light under the arch of the Red Bridge and remembered that Henry Thoreau had cooled himself in the same spot on hot days. That was it. Cool down. Just cool down.

'And the Battle. Some battle. Absurd little hesitation waltz of a skirmish. Cradle of American liberty, my foot.'

Well, all right then. Jump in when the rope swings. Jump, jump. Mary swung around to talk back. 'You know what Emerson said about the battle? 'The thunderbolt falls on an inch of ground but the light of it fills the horizon!' '

'Very pretty.' Damn it, those things in the water were water lilies. Wouldn't you just know. Blasted river. Blasted town. Double blasted girl. Then a mallard took off in its stooping fight from a stand of weeds in front of them, and Homer jumped. The canoe swerved and almost caught a snag. 'You've always got a quote, haven't you? Typical intellectual female. Talk talk talk.'

'All right then. You don't have to speak to me. Just shut up.'

'Okay. Who wants to talk to an intellectual female anyhow? Not me. There are two things that don't go together, and that's females and brains. Women weren't meant by God to talk in words of more than one syllable.'

'Well, I'm not, am I? All I said was, shut up.' Mary stared primly ahead at the North Bridge. What an irascible