A Show of Hands Page 11

  A tidy white picket fence, about waist high, held Evelyn Swear’s little patch of yard in place, and everything therein was as perfect as human hands could manage. She had crocuses, too, but they didn’t grow just anywhere, as was the case with Jeannie MacQues-ton’s. They were arrayed with military precision: the vanguard of spring venturing toward the strange new world of summer. There was no snow or ice in the yard. Evelyn had determined that that sort of business was over with for the year. Accordingly, she had Snotty Spofford and one of the other neighborhood boys remove the residue and prepare the various little planters, which would soon be invisible beneath their burden of flowers.

  Crisp lifted the latch, walked through the gate, and took the four or five baby steps along the brick path to the glass-paned door. The knocker was a brightly colored pine woodpecker. He gave two sharp tugs to the little string that made its beak bang against a wooden plate, then he folded his hands and waited.

  Presently a female form emerged into the bright shaft of sunlight from the shadows within and opened the door. “Hello?” said Evelyn Swears. She’d seen this man before, but whether on TV or at a bean supper she couldn’t recall. Crisp detected the doubt in her voice.

  “I’m Winston Crisp, Evelyn.”

  “Winston . . . ?”

  “I stay up at Matty’s place.”

  “Matty? . . . Oh. Oh . . . the professor.” The fire of recognition quickly swept into her eyes. “Yes, yes! Come on in, won’t you?” But she stopped halfway across the threshold and gripped his forearm with her firm hand. “Did you close the gate?” Crisp double-checked. He had. “If I don’t keep that gate shut, the dogs get in,” she said contemptuously, closing the door behind them.

  “You’re lucky I was down here doing laundry,” she said as she led him across the basement to the stairs. The smell of clean, warm linens hung neatly in the air. “I wouldn’t have heard you knock upstairs.”

  As he followed her up the steps, Crisp noticed that Evelyn, like Matty, wore sensible shoes. Perhaps all women grow into them in time, if they live long enough, he thought. Amanda Murphy would never wear sensible shoes. She would always be young, lovely, and impractical. And dead.

  “I’m sorry about the mess,” Evelyn said as they stepped into the kitchen. Crisp looked around. Moving from his own place into Matty’s, he had learned that mess is a relative term; how distantly related he began to appreciate as he looked from Evelyn’s spotless floor to her sparkling windows, to her gleaming dishes, arranged in descending sizes in the dish rack. “If I’d known you were coming, I’d’ve baked some sticky buns.” He knew she meant it. There was a smell of baking in the air.

  “Oh . . . well, I shouldn’t have just dropped in on you like this, Evelyn.”

  “Oh, I love company,” she said. Now her puttering had a purpose.

  Crisp didn’t remember being invited to sit, but there he sat, and before he knew which end was up, she had set the table for tea and produced a warm blueberry muffin from thin air. It sat steaming on his plate. A small pat of butter slid off its crown and oozed down its sides. “I haven’t even put the dishes away. Cream and sugar?”

  “Uh . . .” said Crisp. “Uh . . .”

  Cream and sugar were placed on the table. “Look at me,” Evelyn said, busily sorting herself out with her hands. Crisp looked at her. “I must look a mess.” Crisp didn’t think so. Evelyn was a thinner version of Matty, except that she wore slacks, which Matty would never have countenanced. Evelyn was a modern woman. She had a puckered little face with cheery cheeks and perpetually smiling little crescent eyes that peered at the world through gold-rimmed bifocals. The effect was completed to perfection by a pair of those magically capable hands that seemed the hallmark of her generation.

  “Isn’t that awful, them finding that girl up at the quarry like that,” she said. Crisp had planned to ease into the topic. He had rehearsed a whole series of little statements that, from segue to segue, would cause Evelyn to broach the subject. He’d have to save them for another time.

  He felt like an invited guest. She didn’t ask why he’d come. He wasn’t made to feel a nuisance or an imposition. Ample room was made for him in the routine of Evelyn’s day, and she accommodated herself to the intrusion as if it had been expected. Some places in the world had forgotten the term for such behavior. Happily, Penobscot Island was not among them. It was simple neighborliness, the act of putting oneself aside. “Eat that muffin ’fore it gets cold. I don’t expect it’s very good. I just threw a batch together this morning. Had to use store-bought blueberries.” She sounded ashamed. “Another month or two and we’ll have fresh, though. ’Course, rhubarb will be up in a few weeks. You’ll have to come back for some fresh rhubarb pie. Do you like double cream?”

  “Double cream?” Crisp said with his mouth full. He noticed Evelyn wasn’t eating. “Aren’t you going to have a muffin?”

  “Oh, no,” said Evelyn, as if the thought had never crossed her mind. “I don’t care for blueberry. I just like the smell.”

  Crisp swallowed hard. “You just bake them for the smell?”

  “Well, one reason is as good as the other, I guess,” Evelyn responded matter-of-factly. “If you bake ’em to eat, why not bake ’em to smell?” The teakettle had begun to whistle. She got up and poured the boiling water into a teapot. “My Harry loved blueberry muffins,” she continued. “I’d make ’em all summer long in those days. I guess the smell of blueberry muffins and summer got to be about the same thing to me, you know? So, I was feeling a little tired of winter this morning and figured if I got the smell of blueberry muffins in the house, it’d hurry up summer a little.” She poured a steaming cup of tea and placed it in front of him. He looked at her with all his eyes.

  It was a good muffin, and summer did seem a little less distant.

  “You saw her on the mainland . . . that girl?” Crisp asked.

  “Poor girl,” said Evelyn.

  “Poor girl,” said Crisp.

  “Yes. Becky Gable and me were going up to the coffee shop for some breakfast.”

  “Oh, you were together?” Evelyn nodded. The number of actual sightings was reduced from three to two. “And you took the first boat?”

  “Yes,” said Evelyn. “And just as we got there, she come out of the bookshop. You know the bookstore next to the coffee shop?” Crisp knew the bookstore. It was one of many that would probably never carry a volume of his poetry. “Well, she come outta there and struck off up street at a good clip.”

  Evelyn went on for a while about how good the food was at the coffee shop since the new owners took over. She couldn’t remember where they were from. New York or New Jersey. Something with “New” in it. “Could be New Guinea, for all I know. I think I’m getting forgetful. Happens at our age, you know,” she lamented. “ ’Course you do,” she added, as if it was obvious.

  It suddenly occurred to Crisp that, though there was a preponderance of people eighty and over on the island, he couldn’t think of a single case of senility or Alzheimer’s among them. Everyone he knew was razor sharp and completely aware. Of course, there was the possibility that they were all senile, himself included, and seemed cognizant only by comparison, but he didn’t think so.

  Something struck Crisp as curious. During a lapse in Evelyn’s prattle, he stuck in his oar. “She came out of the bookshop, you say?”

  Evelyn nodded.

  “And . . . you were on the first boat?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Evelyn. “Wouldn’t have time to get much done if we went over on the second boat.”

  “You just stayed the day then?”

  “ ’Course we did,” Evelyn replied, a little taken aback. “I ain’t about to get stranded over on the mainland all night. No sir.”

  Crisp smiled an understanding smile. “No. No, of course you wouldn’t want . . . You know, I’m surprised the bookshop was open that hour of the morning.”

  It struck her as curious, too, come to think of it. “You’re right, you know. Th
e boat gets in just after eight.”

  “How long did it take you to walk to the coffee shop, do you think?”

  “Oh, probably ten minutes.”

  “Ten minutes?” This struck Crisp as too long a time to walk the fifth of a mile from the ferry to Main Street.

  “Well, it’s Becky, you see. She fell on the ice last winter when she was down getting the mail, and she broke her hip. Dog ran in front of her. They should pass a law, as far as I’m concerned. Put ’em all on leashes. I’m sorry. I like dogs as well as anyone, but you can’t have ’em just going around crippling people like that, can you? Just bills, too,” she said.

  “Bills?” said Crisp. The thread of logic was unraveling and he had the feeling that if he didn’t get a hold of it pretty tightly, it would be lost forever.

  “From the mail,” said Evelyn. It wasn’t an answer, just a response dropped into a tiny opening in her commentary that would otherwise have been occupied by a “my goodness” or an “oh, my word.”

  “And they put in one of them stainless steel hip joints or whatever it is. They tried to put in plastic, but she wouldn’t have that. It’s not biodegradable, you know. Becky’s awful keen on the environment. So I’d say ten minutes.”

  Crisp massaged his brow. It would not be difficult to get information from Evelyn Swears. Sorting it out could be another matter.

  “Did you see her?”

  “Yes,” said Evelyn, sounding not the least bit indignant. She knew what happened to the minds of people Crisp’s age. “I just said that, dear. Me and Becky Gable saw her come out of the bookshop.”

  “No, no,” said Crisp with a smile. “I mean, did you see her face, or was she walking away from you? You said she went up the street . . . away from you.”

  “Well now, let me think,” said Evelyn, and she thought. “No,” she said finally. “No, I can’t say I saw her face. ’Course, I can’t speak for Becky, but I doubt she saw her until I pointed her out, because she walks with her eyes to the ground.”

  “Becky Gable does?” Crisp hypothesized.

  Evelyn nodded. “Because of her hip. Makes her awful cautious, it does. Well, it would, wouldn’t it?”

  Crisp sipped his tea and listened as Evelyn, sufficiently fueled to run until her supply of firsthand knowledge was exhausted, babbled on.

  Not that her oratory was in any way restrained within the borders of firsthand knowledge. Within a two-and-a-half-muffin time span, Crisp had been presented with an entirely new angle on island history and hearsay—what he would come to call the “beauty parlor perspective.”

  “How’d you happen to ask that?” Evelyn said finally, having circumnavigated the full range of topics.

  Crisp hastened to catch up. What had he asked? “Oh, uh . . . the girl, you mean?”

  “About seeing her face.”

  “Well . . . uh, you see,” Crisp mumbled. His thoughts had been wandering far and wide, scouting out the strange new terrain of the woman’s point of view. It was no easy task to marshal his thoughts against this sudden frontal assault. Many thoughts had difficulty finding their way and tripped over one another in their confusion. “I heard you had seen her. But only you three—Mostly Sanborn saw her, too.”

  “Oh, yes. I know that. The FBI asked us all about it last—when was that? September? October?”

  “Yes. Well, I hear she was . . . the men down at the hardware store”—he detected a slight upward wrinkling of Evelyn’s nose—“say that she dressed—”

  “I can just imagine what they said about the way she dressed,” said Evelyn scornfully. “Can’t find anything better to do than sit there all summer long and ogle summer girls.” The twinkle left her crescent eyes for a moment. “At their age,” she synopsized.

  “Yes,” said Crisp. He knew she knew he was one of the men at the hardware store. His comrades had been defamed. How should he answer this slur against their honor? His gaze fell to the floor. “Well . . .” he said limply.

  “I imagine she’d be hard not to notice, though.” Crisp detected a softening in her tone. Not forgiveness. Surely not absolution. He decided it was long-suffering forbearance. “I expect there’s lots of nice things you could say about her. She seemed a nice enough girl, from what I know, which isn’t much. But you wouldn’t call her modest.” Her left brow furrowed ever so slightly in thought. Crisp allowed all the silence she would need to give birth to whatever was on her mind. “She wasn’t a floozy, though—the kind they go crazy over down to the hardware store.” She lowered her glasses almost imperceptibly, looked at him over them, and dared his denial. He knew she would be amazed to learn the hardware store’s opinion of floozies. At least, she’d be amazed if he had the audacity to suggest what he knew to be the truth. He’d been a student of human nature long enough to know that Evelyn knew what all women know: all men are mortally guilty of something, so they sheepishly accept blame for lesser crimes in atonement. In the face of false accusations, a man’s silence becomes nolo contendere for the whole sex. “She wasn’t a loose girl, just . . . just—”

  “Naturally flamboyant?” Crisp suggested.

  “If that means what I think it means—colorful—that’s it exactly,” said Evelyn, brightening.

  Once again she was bustling. In a twinkling the table was cleared and the dishes were washed and arranged neatly in the dish rack.

  “That’s how we noticed her in the first place over in Rockland. She always wore these bright skirts.”

  “Like a gypsy?” Crisp suggested.

  “Just like a gypsy,” Evelyn concurred. “ ’Cept clean.”

  “But you didn’t see her on the boat going over?”

  Evelyn was very deliberate when asked a question. She thought carefully. Rare, Crisp thought. Most people’s responses were reflexive: they reply on impulse, leaving themselves to defend ludicrous positions. Generations of lawyers have successfully capitalized on the trait in their efforts to dismantle justice. They have classes in it at law school.

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t. Neither did Becky. She said so when we saw her . . . the girl, I mean. She said, ‘I don’t remember seeing her on the boat, do you?’ What I was trying to think of was if I saw her on the way coming back, and I didn’t. Somebody asked me that before, one’ve them FBI men back when she turned up gone. I was just rethinking in my mind, to make sure. I can’t say she wasn’t on board. Like I said at the time, I don’t go in the smoking cabin, and she could’ve been in there. Or out on deck. I don’t go out there, either. So I can’t say she wasn’t on the boat. There’s a lot of people going back and forth that time’ve year. But I didn’t see her get on or off, and that’s when I would’ve seen her. She would’ve stood out like a butterfly. So,” she said in closing, “she must’ve gone over the day before and come back later.”

  “She must have,” said Crisp. As he got up from the table, his coat, gloves, and hat manifested themselves in Evelyn’s hands. She helped him put them on as if he was her elderly, imbecile son she’d been doing for every day of his life.

  “Well, I’m so glad you came by,” she said as she walked him to the back door. It led out to the top of the ledge and a muddy little path that cut across a field to the road. “Take care you don’t slip on that ice at the bottom there,” she said, pointing to a place where ice used to be. “Next month I’ll have some fresh rhubarb pies. You come back then, Professor, and I won’t send you off hungry.”

  Crisp minded his step at the bottom of the ledge. What would Matty say if she found out he’d had someone else’s muffins?

  “Well, did you find any more bodies up there?” Mostly Sanborn’s distinctive voice tugged Crisp too quickly around, and a letter or two slipped from the little stack of mail in his hands. There were no letters from publishers among the flyers and bills. No rejections today. Of course, that meant no acceptances, as well. But no rejections meant his poetry was still out there somewhere, being read by someone. Reviled, most likely, but read nonetheless. There was hope. Having bee
n rejected so many times, he imagined he’d achieved a certain notoriety among editors and readers of unsolicited material as the most widely read unpublished poet of all time.

  “Dropped your mail,” said Mostly, rocking back on his heels and tangling his thumbs more determinedly in his overalls. Crisp bent his aged frame to retrieve the letters. Some of it was Matty’s, or he’d have let it lie. “You startled me, I guess. I was miles away.”

  “I’d rather be here,” said Mostly with a smile. “Not so many surprises when you know where you are.”

  Crisp smiled, too. “No, I suppose not.”

  “Find what you was lookin’ for up there? You never did say what it was, exactly. Somethin’ to do with that girl, I know.”

  “Well, I found some things, yes, but the police didn’t seem interested when I showed them.” That they’d shown interest later on, he could keep to himself without prevarication. “Just some little odds and ends. What brings you down to this end of the island?”

  “Oh, just had to get some six-inch bolts for the ramp,” said Mostly. They began to walk toward the hardware store. “They got three-eighths inch up at Brown’s, but I want five-eighths. Don’t want to leave things to chance, you know. Been enough tragedies up there without that ramp givin’ way under one’ve the senator’s fat friends at low tide. They’re likely enough to fall in by ’emselves.” He employed sign language to indicate that a lot of drinking went on at the senator’s.