Tales for a Stormy Night (20 page)

They drove in silence to the station, and there waiting at the desk was Allan Ford.

Sommers smiled faintly. “Another crossroad?”

“The light’s a lot better down here. You can tell a friend from a stranger. Have you told him about meeting me?”

“No. I assumed you had.”

Ford shook his head.

“Sometimes I’m just lucky,” the policeman said with a trace of bitterness. “Now you can both tell me.” He took a cluster of messages from the desk officer and motioned Ford and Sommers to sit down while he glanced through them.

“About one o’clock this morning,” Ford started, “Sommers and I met at where Cemetery Road crosses the Upper Road.”

“You were not at Shanley’s?” Kelley said, looking up.

“I was, but sometimes when I can’t keep awake, I go out for a walk. If Rossi’s Tavern is open, I have a quick beer. I’ve done it before and never been missed.”

“Shanley wouldn’t miss his own wife, he’s that self-centered,” the policeman said.

“Especially his wife,” Sommers said.

Ford looked at him. “You know them?”

“Only from a half-hour’s observation tonight.”

“Let’s take care of last night first,” Kelley said. “Go on, Ford.”

“The tavern was closed when I got there, so I turned around and started back to the Shanley house. That’s when I met Sommers coming down Cemetery Road.”

“And where were you coming from, Mr. Sommers?” Kelley asked quietly.

Sommers drew a deep breath. “The cemetery. I’ll tell you the truth, Kelley, and you’ll have to make out of it what you will. I did go to Rossi’s Tavern. I waited until Ellen went to bed, and it must have been just before twelve when I got there, but the place was already closed. I had a .32 revolver in my pocket and I intended to kill him. At least, that’s what I thought I intended to do.” He glanced at Ford. “He had—molested my daughter.”

Ford did not say anything.

“I ran most of the way to Rossi’s house then, down the Upper Road and up Cemetery Hill. There was a light on, and music playing. I hammered on the door, but no one came. I went round to the back and did the same thing. Still no one answered. Then, just standing there…” He shrugged. “A little mad, perhaps—I realized how close I was to the cemetery, to Ellen’s mother’s grave.”

Sommers entwined, then freed his long, thin fingers—too delicate by far, Kelley thought, for the brutal bludgeoning that had killed Rossi.

“I was coming down from there when I met Allan Ford. Well, first I had gone into the cemetery. I can’t tell you what happened to me. It was a wild night…an extraordinary experience.” He got up and moved about like someone long pent up, a prisoner. “I don’t know how to tell it. It was like being in communication with the spirit world. Maybe its just—that I didn’t want to kill. But I tell you now, I think I had the feeling that Rossi was dead. Something, somehow, made that known to me.”

There was silence for a few seconds, except for the police radio rumbling indistinct alarms behind them.

“I can believe that,” Ford said. “I saw him, Chief. I shook hands with him, just passing, and I tell you there was something different about him, something electric.”

“It was a spooky night, I know that myself,” the policeman said.

“I heard the music at Rossi’s, too,” Ford said.

“But neither of you heard anything you’d connect with the murder?”

“Not unless it was the music playing at the Rossi house,” Ford said.

“I’ll say this,” Sommers offered. “I would swear Shanley knew tonight what had happened to my daughter. And there were only two people from whom he could have found it out—Rossi or Rossi’s wife. Unless she told you today and you passed it on to him?”

Kelley shook his head. “Did he
say
he knew it?”

Disappointingly, Sommers admitted that he had not said it in so many words.

“But look,” Ford said, “unless my wife and Betty Shanley can back him up—doesn’t Shanley’s alibi for last night disappear when he’s no longer alibiing me?”

“It does,” the policeman said.

“But Shanley and Anna Rossi,” Ford said tentatively. “It just doesn’t seem right.”

“His devotion to his wife is no deterrent,” Sommers said.

“Maybe not,” Ford said, weakening a little, “and by God, Betty Shanley hints at something like it every once in a while. But why would Shanley kill Rossi? If Rossi did know about him and his wife, I don’t think he’d have made much fuss over it, considering his own infidelities. He might even have bragged about it.”

“Isn’t that just possibly your answer?” Sommers said quietly. “Do you think Shanley would tolerate gossip in the village about him and—and someone he’d consider a peasant woman?”

“Why not?” Ford said after a moment. “I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t see why not.”

“You think it would please his ego,” Sommers said, “for the village to know that he had so—sexy—a mistress?”

His hesitation on the word made both Kelley and Ford turn suddenly to look at him. “You know her too, then?” Kelley said.

“Only from observation,” Sommers said, “though I’ve sometimes wished it otherwise.” He lifted his head. “I’m a walker in the hills, and I’ve watched her work in the garden, among the vineyards she’s coaxing to grow up there. I’ve even heard her singing, and I’ve felt she would be a wonderful woman to—to know.”

“Me, too,” Ford said. “She’s a pleasure to hear and to look at, and I’ve always liked her, the times I’ve met her.”

Kelley drew his legs slowly beneath him, dreading to get up. “I guess that’s how we all feel about Anna Rossi. You gentlemen have made me sure that I’m right. I’m not even going to say thank you. It’s a funny thing: I think I’m going to prove to all you people now that I’m a pretty good cop, and in the end it’ll probably lose me my job. Nobody’s going to pin a medal on me for arresting Anna Rossi for the murder of her husband.”

Anna Rossi did not even have a second sleeping pill to indicate there might have been a first one; she did not have a prescription, or a box or bottle, to show the policeman. Music had been her best friend for years, she said, like somebody in the house worth having there. It was her natural accessory in a crude plot that night. The weapon was a stone hammer—the peculiar shape of which had been clearly indicated in the photographs of the victim’s skull. She said she would try to remember in which old well she had dropped it. Only vaguely had she planned to have the murder seem like an older one in the village below. The comparison had been drawn by the villagers. Actually she was not concerned whether she was discovered or not.

“I had to kill a pig,” she said with terrifying matter-of-factness. “After all, it was my pig.”

Sommers and Ford exchanged the briefest of greetings the morning after Mrs. Rossi’s arraignment. They would both be witnesses for the defense. And both agreed: she had a good lawyer in Shanley.

1959

M
OST PEOPLE, WHEN THEY
go down from the Ragapoo Hills, never come back; or if they do, for a funeral maybe—weddings don’t count for so much around here any more either—you can see them fidgeting to get away again. As for me, I’m one of those rare birds they didn’t have any trouble keeping down on the farm after he’d seen Paree.

It’s forty years since I’ve seen the bright lights, but I don’t figure I’ve missed an awful lot. Hell, I can remember the Ku Klux Klan marching right out in the open. My first case had to do with a revenue agent—I won it, too, and we haven’t had a government man up here since. And take the League of Nations—I felt awful sorry in those days for Mr. Wilson though I didn’t hold with his ideas.

Maybe things have changed, but sometimes I wonder just how much. This bomb I don’t understand, fallout and all, but I’ve seen what a plague of locusts can do to a wheat field and I don’t think man’s ever going to beat nature when it comes to pure, ornery destruction. I could be wrong about that. Our new parson says I am and he’s a mighty knowing man. Too knowing, maybe. I figure that’s why the Synod shipped him up to us in Webbtown.

As I said, I don’t figure I’m missing much. There’s a couple of television sets in town and sometimes of an evening I’ll sit for an hour or so in front of whichever one of them’s working best. One of them gets the shimmies every time the wind blows and the other don’t bring in anything except by way of Canada. Same shows but different commercials. That kind of tickles me, all them companies advertising stuff you couldn’t buy if you wanted to instead of stuff you wouldn’t want if you could buy it.

But, as you’ve probably guessed by now, I’d rather talk than most anything, and since you asked about The Red Lantern, I’ll tell you about the McCracken sisters who used to run it—and poor old Matt Sawyer.

I’m a lawyer, by the way. I don’t get much practice out here. I’m also Justice of the Peace. I don’t get much practice out of that either, but between the two I make a living. For pleasure I fish for trout and play the violin, and at this point in my life I think I can say from experience that practice ain’t everything.

I did the fiddling at Clara McCracken’s christening party, I remember, just after coming home from the first World War. Maudie was about my age then, so’s that’d make a difference of maybe twenty years between the sisters, and neither chit nor chizzler in between, and after them, the whole family suddenly dies out. That’s how it happens up here in the hills: one generation and there’ll be aunts and uncles galore, and the next, you got two maiden ladies and a bobtailed cat.

The Red Lantern Inn’s boarded up now, as you saw, but it was in the McCracken family since just after the American Revolution. It was burned down once—in a reprisal raid during the War of 1812, and two of the McCrackens were taken hostage. Did you know Washington, D.C. was also burned in reprisal? It was. At least that’s how they tell it over in Canada—for the way our boys tore up the town they call Toronto now. You know, history’s like a story in a way: it depends on who’s telling it.

Anyways, Maudie ran the inn after the old folks died, and she raised Clara the best she could, but Clara was a wild one from the start. We used to call her a changeling: one minute she’d be sitting at the stove and the next she’d be off somewhere in the hills. She wasn’t a pretty girl—the jutting McCracken jaw spoiled that—but there were times she was mighty feminine, and many a lad got thorny feet chasing after the will-o’-the-wisp.

As Clara was coming to age, Maudie used to keep a birch stick behind the bar, and now and then I dare say she’d use it, though I never saw it happen but once myself. But that birch stick and Old Faithful, her father’s shotgun, stood in the corner side by side, and I guess we made some pretty rude jokes about them in those days. Anyways, Maudie swore to tame the girl and marry her to what she called a “settled” man.

By the time Clara was of a marrying age, The Red Lantern was getting pretty well rundown. And so was Maudie. She wasn’t an easy woman by any calculation. She had a tongue you’d think was sharpened on the grindstone and a store of sayings that’d shock you if you didn’t know your Bible. The inn was peeling paint and wanting shutters to the northeast, which is where they’re needed most. But inside, Maudie kept the rooms as clean and plain as a glass egg. And most times they were about as empty.

It was the taproom kept the sisters going. They drew the best beer this side of Cornwall, England. If they knew you, that is. If they didn’t know you, they served you a labeled bottle, stuff you’d recognize by the signboard pictures. About once a month, Maudie had to buy a case of that—which gives you an idea of how many strangers stopped over in Webbtown. We had more stores then and the flour mill was working, so the farmers’d come in regular. But none of them were strangers. You see, even to go to Ragapoo City, the county seat, you’ve got to go twenty miles around—unless you’re like Clara was, skipping over the mountain.

Matt Sawyer came through every week or two in those days and he always stopped at Prouty’s Hardware Store. Matt was a paint salesman. I suppose he sold Prouty a few gallons over the year. Who bought it from Prouty, I couldn’t say. But Prouty liked Matt. I did myself when I got to know him. Or maybe I just felt sorry for him.

It was during the spring storms, this particular day. The rain was popping blisters on Main Street. Most everyone in Webbtown seems to have been inside looking out that day. Half the town claimed afterwards to have seen Matt come out of Prouty’s raising his black umbrella over Maudie’s head and walking her home. I saw them myself, Maudie pulling herself in and Matt half in and half out. I know for a fact she’d never been under an umbrella before in her life.

Prouty told me afterwards he’d forgot she was in the store when he was talking to Matt: Maudie took a mighty long time making up her mind before buying anything. Like he always did, Prouty was joshing Matt about having enough money to find himself a nice little woman and give up the road. Maudie wasn’t backward. She took a direct line: she just up and asked Matt since he had an umbrella, would he mind walking her home. Matt was more of a gentleman than anybody I ever knew. He said it would be a pleasure. Maybe it was, but that was the beginning of the doggonedest three-cornered courtship in the county history. And it’s all documented today in the county court records over in Ragapoo City. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’ve got my office in my hat, you might say, and I hang that in rooms over Kincaid’s Drug Store. I was standing at the window when Matt and Maudie came out of Prouty’s. I remember I was trying to tune my violin. You can’t keep a fiddle in tune with weather like that. I played kind of ex tempore for a while, drifting from one thing to another—sad songs mostly, like “The Vacant Chair.”
We shall meet but we shall miss him…there will be one vacant chair.
I got myself so depressed I hung up the fiddle and went down to The Red Lantern for a glass of Maudie’s Own.

Well, sure enough, there was Matt Sawyer sitting at the bar advising Maudie on the costs of paint and trimming and how to estimate the amount of paint a place the size of The Red Lantern would need. Now I knew Maudie couldn’t afford whitewash, much less the high-class line of stuff Matt represented. But there she was, leaning on the bar, chin in hand and her rump in the air like a sway backed mule. She drew me a beer and put a head on Mart’s. Then she went back to listening to him.