"Well, could be. I don't know. I'm not going to make up my mind yet. Say, how do you suppose Goss got the letters to Egg Rock? By boat?"
"He probably just drove down Nashawtuc Road and walked over. And he could have left them there any time after he read them aloud to the Alcott Association, afraid they might be stolen if he left them around the house."
"But what did he pick that particular place for?"
"I know," said Mary. "It must have been an old haunt of his. He was a great arrowhead collector, don't forget, and he must have scratched around there a good deal on the site of the old village, looking for Indian artifacts."
Mr. Campbell, the fingerprint man, made an informal report by telephone to Jimmy Flower. "Of course," he said, "paper isn't the best stuff in the world to get good prints from, but fortunately these didn't dry out too badly, being out-of-doors the way they were. So the sweat prints didn't fade too much for us to make some indentifications. Well, there's two sets of prints on them, on all of them. Right thumb prints on the upper righthand corner of each sheet. That's where you hold it to read it over after you write, or to read it for the first time if you've just received it. One set of prints is Ernest Goss's, the other is his son Charley's."
"Whose? Charley's?"
"That's what I said. And Ernie's appear to be on top of Charley's in some cases, which makes it look as if Charley wrote them and Ernie received them."
(Charley's? Mary, sitting at her card table in the corner, felt her heart sink. Another bad mark for Charley.)
"What about real old prints? Like a hundred years old? You didn't find any of those?" said Jimmy.
"That's a different kettle of fish. You have to use a differerent way of bringing them out. You see, the sweat prints evaporate after a while, so you have to use a system that looks for acids that don't evaporate. Well, we used it on these letters. It's called the ninhydrin method. Of course we can't be positive, since we never tried it on anything as old as these letters were suppos to be, but we didn't turn up a single print."
"There was nothing on them, then, but prints by Ernest and Charley Goss?"
"That's right. Now, do you want me to send these down a the lab, so they can look into the paper and ink? They look me like they're all done with the same brown ink."
"Okay. But I bet we can get Charley Goss to talk. Say, about the bait box? Were Charley's prints on that?"
"No, just his daddy's. And of course about a million big huge blobs belonging to one Homer Kelly. Tell him from me he's a great big overgrown blundering oaf."
Jimmy passed along the message, and Homer grinned. "Tell him from me he's a dear boy and thank him very much."
Charley Goss had given up trying to find a job. He had planted a colossal vegetable garden behind the house and he was spending his time caring for it. He threw himself into it, hoeing, weeding and setting out branching sticks for the peas to climb on and tented stakes for the tomato plants. Only Rowena, Edith and Charley himself were left to eat the results, because Philip had moved into George Jarvis's bachelor apartment on Thoreau Street. But the garden gave Charley something to do, and he gave most of his produce away.
Mary looked at him guiltily, as he came into Jimmy's office with Sergeant Shrubsole. Charley's face was red and healthy-looking from the sun, but his eyes looked miserable. He glanced at her, and then looked away without speaking. She had tried to tell him privately that her time spent with the lieutenant-detective from the District Attorney's office was an effort to help him. But Charley had merely looked at her with red eyes, and said, "Oh, sure." Mary had bitten her lip and said nothing. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps after all her motives were not as clear as all that.
Jimmy Flower brought out a chair for Charley and started calking. Charley listened to the facts about his fingerprints on the letters, and then confessed right away. "Sure," he said, "I wrote them. But let me tell you how it happened." He turned to Homer. "You know what a great practical joker my father was? A real joker. You saw him that night going after poor old Edith with that paper napkin. Well, it occurred to me (back in February I guess it was), after a particularly nasty trick he had played on me, that one way of getting back at him was to try it myself. Let him slip on his own banana peel. I thought it over for some time before I finally came up with this. The thing that made me think of it was an exam I had in one of those crazy schools I went to. They didn't really have exams, just something they called CTPs, Creative Thinking Projects. The course was a sort of Renaissance History Seminar, or something. You were supposed to write an imaginary letter from Savonarola to Pope Alexander VI. Well, I had a wonderful time. I had Savonarola threatening to hire Leonardo da Vinci's flying machine and drop burning coals on the Vatican. Got a very good paragraph on my PCP. That is, my Personal Critical Profile. In other words, my report card.
"But anyway, the point is, it gave me this idea of writing letters from one Transcendentalist to another, making them ridiculous but sort of superficially convincing. I did a whole lot of reading, and I even copied the handwriting, when I could find the originals. There's a glass case there in the library with samples of writing by Emerson and Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott."
Homer shook his head. "I've got to hand it to you, Charley. You did a magnificent job. Works of art, all of them. What did you do for paper and ink?"
"It was just good bond paper in various weights and sizes. And brown India ink. I left the paper in the barn a while to get weathered. Any even slightly scientific examination would show that it wasn't old paper."
"What did you do with them when they were finished?"
"Well, that took a bit of thought. I finally wrote another letter. This one was supposed to have been written by a sweet little old lady in western Massachusetts by the name of Miss Maria Fuller Alcott Emerson..."
"Maria Fuller Alcott Em ...Say, that's the mysterious lady in your father's will! Okay, go ahead, what was she for?"
"She was supposed to be a genteel old lady in reduced circumstances, descended on both sides from Concord greats. She flattered my father up and down, going on about how much she had heard about his integrity and honor and all that bilgewater, and how her grandfather had known his grandfather, and how ashamed she was to be selling the souls of her great ancestors, so she didn't want her name mentioned, but her poverty had reduced her to this extremity. So would my father publish these letters under his own name and divide the royalties with her, that was all she asked, some fraction of the royalties, and would he please memorize her address and burn this? Well, of course, Dad fell for it. He wrote her this big pompous magnanimous letter, agreeing to the whole thing, and then she sent him the letters."
"He really wrote a letter to some fictitious lady?"
"Oh, I have an old buddy out there in Springfield. He's a postman. He agreed to send and receive letters for her. I guess he's kept his mouth shut."
"Well," said Homer. "It all worked just the way you hoped." Charley flushed.
"Not quite," he said. "Of course I was delighted when I heard he had read them to the Alcott Association and that they had laughed at them. I thought that would be the end of it. I'd had my revenge. But I didn't dream he'd go on taking them seriously after that."
"Didn't that put you on the spot then?"
"What do you mean?"
"Your father did go on believing in them. That meant that there would eventually be a good deal of notoriety and investigation and damage to literary reputations, and it probably meant that the letters might be traced back to you. How would you have explained to the press, for example, your responsibility for such spectacular forgeries?"