The Transcendental Murder

up to his shoulder and pointed it into a barrel filled with cotton wadding. There was a great noise, and two puffs of smoke emerged from the powder pan and the muzzle. Lieutenant Morrissey grinned. He set the gun down and groped in the wadding for the ball. Then he brought it up, squinted at it and beckoned them to the other side of the room where there was a comparison microscope. He placed the ball in a holder and put it under one side of the microscope, and stared into the eyepiece for a minute, adjusting the focus and the light. 'Here,' he said to Homer noncommittally, 'you look.'

Homer looked, and Jimmy looked. 'Just a lot of miscellaneous scratches on both of them,' said Jimmy.

'I told you you wouldn't be able to match up the gun and the ball. You have to have rifling to do that. But, heck, you must be pretty sure this is the gun anyhow, aren't you? Goss owned a musket, his dying word was 'musket,' he was killed with a musket ball, the musket was missing afterwards and here's a musket that was obviously hidden near his house. What more do you want? And to top it off, this one has a missing flint.'

'I wish that blasted Boy Scout had seen the thing,' said Jimmy. 'Look at the size of it. He swore up and down he didn't see it.'

Mr. Campbell came in then, shaking his head. 'No prints. Not a chance. If there were any there to begin with, the wet ground obliterated them all.'

'So it could have been either Charley or Philip,' said Jimmy. 'I suppose we could confront Charley with it and look grim as if the thing were crawling with prints and stuck all over with identifying bits of hair and microbes and so on, and see if he loosens up at all.'

'There's one thing we can be sure of,' said Homer. 'Whoever hid that gun in Tom's field had a sense of history and a feeling for the fitness of things. Tom Hand planted corn in that field every year on April 19th because old Colonel Barrett did it back in 1775. The murderer knew that, and he knew about the muskets Colonel Barrett laid down in the furrows, to hide them from the British. But that could mean either Philip or Charley.'

'Or it could have been Teddy Staples,' said Jimmy.

'Or Tom Hand himself, or Mary Morgan.'

'If you're going to get ridiculous,' said Jimmy sourly, 'why don't you throw in old Mrs. Bewley for good measure?'

*45*

I know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own. —Margaret Fuller

Genius, that was it, a stroke of genius. It had occurred to Homer that there might be some reward in going over Teddy's journal more carefully. He had brought it with him to the Minuteman Lunchroom and he had been eating his hamburger and working his way through the entry for April 19th again, when a passage rose up and hit him in the face.

It wasn't in the main body of the text, it was hidden among Teddy's marginal observations on wildlife. April 19th began with a brief mention of the bluebird's nest. Then it went on:

Assabbett. Saw Tom Hand &

Finggerling pl. corn...

Who was Finggerling? There hadn't been anybody planting corn with Tom except young John. Oh, of course, 'Finggerling' was Teddy's cute way of saying 'one of the little Hands.'

Bl. dk nstting. 6e, spekkled.

Gossling digging corn. Gl. ind.

Ch. Queer. Oriole's nst...

That was all for April 19th. And the passage was like a cryptogram, full of abbreviations and misspellings. Homer puzzled over it and stared at the page. 'Bl. dk nstting. 6e, spekkled' might mean that Teddy had seen a black duck nesting with six speckled eggs. One of the goslings had been pecking at Tom's corn. But that didn't make sense, did it? Ducks had ducklings, not goslings, and one of the ducklings wouldn't be hatched and pecking for its own food if the rest were still eggs, would it? Then Homer felt the small hairs on the back of his neck rise up. If Finngerling meant a young Hand, could not Gossling mean a young Goss? In which case the extra S was not a misspelling at all! What about 'Gl. ind. Ch.'? Suppose the 'Ch.' stood for Charley'? The 'ind.' could be 'indicated' and the 'Gl.' could be 'Glass,' or binoculars. Teddy had looked through his binoculars and seen Charley Goss digging in the cornfield. Burying the gun! What else could he have been doing but burying the gun? Homer slammed the book shut and looked up triumphantly. There were no two ways about it—he was a genius! Then he frowned. Straight ahead of him was that fool who was always tagging after Mary, Goonville-Ghoulsworthy or somebody. Goonville-Ghoulsworthy gave Homer an unhealthy-looking bucktoothed smile. Homer grunted something, and slid out from behind his table. He paid his bill, then put his head down and charged at the door.

Mary Morgan was just coming in with Alice Herpitude, and for a minute they were all tangled up together. Miss Herpitude emerged white and shaken, groping for a chair. 'Good heavens, Homer,' said Mary. Granville- Galsworthy made himself prominent, urging them to his table, pulling out a chair for Miss Herpitude. 'Oi hope yew'll join me,' he said. Mary bent over and looked anxiously at Miss Herpitude.

Miss Herpitude tried to smile. 'I'm all right,' she said. But she looked very ill indeed. Homer grumbled his apologies, feeling like an oaf. Maybe he'd better join them for coffee, to make amends. Then Rowena Goss spied them through the front window, and she came in and squeezed into the wall seat beside Homer. Granville- Galsworthy transferred his wet gaze from Mary to Rowena, and licked his lips.

Rowena kissed Homer and started scattering her boarding school accent about. It was full of umlauts. 'What a pufectly precious place...'

Mary looked away in confusion. The kiss hadn't been a warm one, that was the whole trouble with it. It was a sweetly possessive, almost wifely little peck. What did that mean?

'Now, Homer, I want you to just drop whatever tawdry thing you're doing and come up with me to the club for tennis. It's a pufectly gorgeous day. See? I've got my Bumuda shorts on under my skut.' She gave him a playful glimpse of a magnificent piece of tan meat. Roland Granville-Galsworthy goggled at it. Howard Swan went by on his way to the cash register, and he goggled at it, too. But Homer's attention was transfixed by the sugar bowl.

'I don't play tennis,' he growled. He had to get out of here. He couldn't very well tell her he was about to go out and arrest her brother, could he? What was the matter with the girl anyway? Didn't it matter to her that her father was dead and her mother was in the looney-bin and that it was he himself, Homer Kelly, who was doing his best to clap her brother in a condemned cell? And besides, there was something strange about Rowena anyhow. She was a dish, all right, a real dish, but lately he had begun to have the queerest feeling when he was with her, as though something had been sort of pulled down over his head. She made you feel muffled or something, as though you had a scarf wrapped around you, or a gag shoved down your throat. Homer mumbled his excuses and made his escape, leaving behind him a clumsy assortment of people, crowded between the door and the cash register—one glamorous dish, one frightened old librarian, one bona fide slobbering sex maniac and one thoroughly miserable young woman.

*46*

I will come as near to lying as you can drive a coach-and-four. —Henry Thoreau

Mrs. Bewley was sweeping the steps when Jimmy's official car rolled up the drive. When she saw Homer she beamed at him and pulled a batch of baseball cards out of her apron pocket. (Jesus had been sending her messages about the Red Sox and the Yankees.) 'I'VE BEEN SAVING THEM JUST FOR YOU.'

Homer thanked her profusely, pressed her hand and inquired for Mr. Goss at the top of his lungs. 'IN THE BARN,' screamed Mrs. Bewley.

The barn was back down the driveway near the road. They walked into the cool dark square of the open door and called for Charley, but there was no answer. Dolly, the big brown mare, stood in her stall, looking at them with