"Let's see now," said the D.A. vaguely. "I had another question ... Oh, thank you, Miss O'Toole. Yes. What about the mother, Mrs. Goss? Is she still unfit for giving evidence?"
"As a matter of fact Homer Kelly was over to see her this morning. She was still as crazy as a coot."
"Miss O'Toole suggested—that is, I wondered if even in her ravings she might say something that might be significant."
"Homer said she wouldn't even talk. When she saw him she dodged down the hall and peeked at him around the corner, wouldn't say a word. She's dyed her hair bright red and she goes around in this white nighty. She seems harmless enough, apparently, but there's no hope of getting anything sensible out of her. We thought we'd try the house again, though. Kelly wants to see for himself that there aren't any letters tucked away in some corner of the Goss place we haven't thought of yet."
Rowena Goss was playing her violin when Mrs. Bewley let them in. Mary suspected that Rowena had just whipped it out when she saw Homer's car turn up the drive, because her music was upside-down. She made a lovely picture, anyway. "Certainly, dear," she said. "Look around all you want. I wish we had some secret panels for you to discover, but I'm afraid we don't. I'll just go on with my practicing."
Jimmy and Homer wandered off to the cellar and started rooting around. Mary, with Rowena's "dear" sounding unhappily in her head, climbed the stairs and went back to Elizabeth Goss's bedroom. Downstairs Rowena was playing "Liebestraum." She played with plenty of vibrato and when she got to the end she started over again. She played it through six or eight times. Mary closed the door and began to look around.
The bookcase—the bed—the flower prints—the draperies—the dresser—the carpet. Everything seemed to fit the image of the woman Elizabeth Goss had been before she had gone out of her mind. Tasteful and uninteresting. Go around again. The bookcase—the bed—the flower prints—the draperies—the dresser—
The dresser. There was a chest on the dresser, a small black box. Mary moved closer and reached out to touch it. That wasn't black paint on the surface—the wood itself was very dark, nearly black. She lifted the lid and looked inside. There wasn't much in it. Jimmy's men must have examined the contents already. Sentimental keepsakes, most likely. Like that old dried-up daisy at the bottom—the memento of some girlish romance? (He loves me, he loves me not.) There was a small jewel case in the corner of the chest, half hidden by a fat envelope. Mary groped the case out of its corner and opened it. Inside it was an old ring with a purple stone, set in an antique fashion. Mary took the ring out of the case and held it to the light. Amethyst, probably. Now what about the envelope? Across the front of it someone had written, "great-grandmother's." She had to open it carefully because it was swollen from its contents and brittle at the edges. Why, it was hair, a braided mass of auburn hair—great-grandmother's? But it was as beautiful and shining as if it had been cut and braided only yesterday. She drew it out and held it in her two hands. It was wound in an intricate pattern, and Mary found her fingers picking at it, trying to find the beginning. She shouldn't be doing this, she shouldn't be doing this at all. But she went right on pulling at it. She just had to see. As she twisted it loose from its braiding, the hair sprang loose in deep ripples, like the silky fur of a spaniel's ears. Beautiful, it was beautiful. Awestruck, Mary lifted her right hand gently and let the hair fall over her left arm in a shining waterfall. She had forgotten that human hair could grow so long...
Then Mary shook herself and began to struggle with the problem of getting the hair back into the envelope. It was like trying to pour a river into a glass. She would have to braid it all up again. Furtively she glanced at the door. Rowena was still sawing away downstairs. Mary struggled to separate the cloudy mass into threes. What a job. It would take a good five minutes. Her fingers worked hastily. Left over right, right over left...
Red hair must run in the female line in Elizabeth's family—from great-grandmother to Elizabeth to Elizabeth's children. There was a picture downstairs in the dining room, painted in the style of John Singer Sargent, that showed Elizabeth as she had looked when she was married. She had been a redhead, all right, like her children, with a pretty, bushy bob. But not this color, surely? The hair in the portrait was a light red like Rowena's, not this deep, lustrous red-brown, the color of a sorrel horse...
Then Mary was struck by a thought, and her fingers shrank from the hair she was twisting. There was an old wives' tale (or was it true? perhaps it was true!) that the hair of a dead man goes on growing in the grave. A picture blossomed in her mind before she could stop it, a picture of a beautiful young corpse in a flowing white dress, with a pale pre-Raphaelite face, her white hands folded on the heliotropes of her breast, and her dark coffin filling and filling with the ever-lengthening coils of her glorious ghostly hair...
*36*
How martial is this place!
Had I a mighty gun
I think I'd shoot the human race
And then to glory run! —Emily Dickinson
The D.A. had finally come out to Concord. He didn't do anything in particular while he was there except spend an hour in Jimmy's office, whining. Miss O'Toole was away on vacation, and the D.A. felt naked and defenseless. And it was a misty night. He hadn't liked the way the trees had hung over the road on the drive out. The country was spooky, with those huge barns, probably jam-packed with cows, and those trees, brrrr.
And the newspapers were at him again. A district attorney * as supposed to come through with brilliant solutions to crimes and spectacular prosecutions. And here he was, getting nowhere is usual, the "Do-Nothing D.A." again. Well, they couldn't arrest the wrong man, could they? Then the papers would have at them for sure. And they couldn't arrest Teddy Staples, because they couldn't find Teddy Staples. Where in the hell was Teddy anyway? Brrrr, those trees!
After the D.A. left, Homer sat with his knees wedged into the kneehole of his desk, playing idly with his tie. He rolled it up from the bottom and then let go. As it unrolled, Mary and Jimmy Flower could watch the girl who was diving off the diving board go through the various positions of a swan dive and end up with a big splash at the bottom. "Holy horsecollar!" said Jimmy.
"It would look a whole lot better on a horse," said Mary.
Homer wasn't listening. He looked up from his tie slapped the desk. "I know one place we didn't look for th letters, or that gun or the missing hat—the Gun House."
"The Gun House?"
"Where the Concord Independent Battery keeps its cannon Come on. How can I manage to be so everlastingly dumb?"
Mary squeezed out of her chair and loomed up behind her card table. "Well I never," she said. "Homer Kelly being humble. What a nice change."
Homer laughed a huge basso laugh and lifted Jimmy right out of his chair. He dandled him up and down. "Well, if a person knows he's the cat's pajamas, why try to cover it up?"
"Ow," said Jimmy. "For Chris'sake, lemme down."
Jimmy didn't have a key to the Gun House, so they drove or by Harvey Finn's farm on Lowell Road and picked him up. The Gun House had been erected in the field next to Emerson's house by a patriotic town, the popular subscription taken up in a few days. Outside it a sign hung on a pole, displaying the crossed cannon insignia of the Battery. Harvey Finn opened the side door and turned on the light. The single room was like a big garage with a high beamed ceiling. Around the walls hung the harnesses for the horses. The two gleaming guns, copper-cent color, faced toward the big front doors, with the high-wheeled limbers behind them, their shafts resting on the floor. Homer stood between the guns and looked at them.