A Show of Hands Page 14

  He struck off down the hill toward town. If his step wasn’t exactly jaunty, it was distinctly less elderly. For the moment his heart was as light as a schoolboy’s. At last he had an answer to one of the questions that had been haunting him. Soon he would have more.

  “Telephone for you!” Matty called as she bustled toward the parlor. Crisp was sitting in his favorite chair, holding a worn, old copy of Longfellow’s works close to his nose in the dim light, drenching himself in the cadence of the words, lost in the worlds of their meaning. “Telephone for you, Winston!” Matty repeated as she entered the room. Had she not just taken off her apron, she’d have been worrying it with her animated hands. As it was, she just posed them anticipatorily in the air like a Rubens cupid.

  It was not Matty’s voice that roused Crisp from his thoughts—she was one of those women who talked unendingly regardless of who was or who was not within earshot—rather it was her immediate presence at his elbow. “What?” he said, a little drowsily. The unconscious part of his brain retrieved the echo of Matty’s words from the brink of the abyss. “Telephone?”

  “For you,” said Matty, as if to say, of all people.

  No one ever called Crisp. As he ambled down the hall, he tried to remember the last time he’d talked on the phone. Not since he got to the island, surely. “Hello?”

  “Hello, Mr. Crisp.”

  The voice was immediately recognizable. “Mr. Hanson?”

  “Yes, sir.” The timbre was the same, but the tone was decidedly different. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything too important.”

  “I’m reading Longfellow,” said Crisp.

  “Oh, good,” said Hanson. Evidently he was among the many who did not share Crisp’s views on poetry. He’d probably end up an editor. “Then you’ve got a minute to talk. I ran into an old friend of yours this morning.”

  There was an ironic redundancy in the words. All of his friends were old. “Really?”

  “The state attorney general.”

  Who the heck was the attorney general these days?

  “Michael Jessup.”

  “Jessup?” said Crisp, brightening. “You mean Dickie Jessup?”

  “Well, his son, Michael.”

  The last time Crisp had heard the name Michael Jessup, it was attached to an excitable little towheaded boy of some six or seven summers who had an uncanny gift for clearing one’s pockets of nickels. He should be treasurer. “Michael Jessup is the attorney general?” said Crisp. He smiled at the image of young Michael barely visible behind a large mahogany desk in an imposing government office—the flag of state on one side, Old Glory on the other, and the attorney general himself toppling towers of nickels with row upon row of toy soldiers. “Imagine that.”

  “He told me all about you.”

  “Did he?” said Crisp. “How is his father?”

  “Dead.”

  The word hung for a moment in the air. Dickie had been in his early forties the last time they met. He’d always supposed they’d get together one day and exchange stories. Closer to the fire, chair by chair. “I didn’t know that. I’m sorry to hear.” He was.

  “Michael told me all about you,” Hanson repeated.

  “So you said,” said Crisp. “Did he tell you about the nickels?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He told me about the work you did for the government. Still do, from time to time, I understand.”

  “Not for a while now,” said Crisp. “Little puzzles.” To him that’s all they were. “Favors for old friends.” There was that term again.

  “Well, I owe you an apology . . . about the way I . . .”

  Hanson sounded uncomfortable. Crisp put him at ease. “Oh, don’t mention it, Mr. Hanson. Don’t mention it. Apology accepted.” People should always be put at their ease. It made them so much more pliable. “What can I do for you?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, I was wondering if you might . . . I know you’ve been sort of poking around on your own, but I was wondering if you’d mind helping out in a more . . . in an official capacity.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, I told you I’d been talking to Jessup—”

  “Michael.”

  “Yes. Well, it was about this case. I told him about the wire and the swimsuit . . . told him what you said.”

  “And about the beach sand?”

  “Yes, that, too. Everything.” He laughed. “I must confess, it didn’t seem half as crazy when I was the one doing the telling.” He paused. “Anyway, to put it bluntly, he told me to ask you to handle the investigation.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He wants you to take over. I’ll work for you. My whole department’s at your disposal.”

  It wasn’t an unusual request. Crisp had heard similar ones many times over the years, some in far stranger cases, or at least far more important cases than this. But he wasn’t in his old line of business anymore. He was retired. He was a poet. And he was in a race to solve Amanda Murphy’s murder before he lost his mind. But he had to act independently. To assume an official role would be to assume rules of conduct and mounds of regulation. Administrators don’t solve crimes.

  “No, no,” said Crisp. “I couldn’t do that. I’m honored, but—”

  “I know it’s a lot to ask, Mr. Crisp, but to tell you the truth, I’m just plain flummoxed.”

  Crisp detected the tone of a few sleepless nights in Hanson’s voice. “You got the fingerprints back?”

  There was a brief silence at the other end of the line, through which Crisp could hear the manufactured laughter of a television comedy in the background. “Andy Calderwood’s, definitely.”

  Crisp nodded, and both men draped themselves in a moment of deep reflection. Finally Crisp spoke. “I can’t take over the investigation, Mr. Hanson.”

  “But—”

  “Much as I appreciate your confidence in me, I’m afraid I’m just too old.” He did sound a little feeble. “But I’ll make you a proposition. Let me have a free hand, let me just keep poking around on my own, and I’ll let you know anything I turn up.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Crisp was sure.

  “Deal,” said Hanson after some thought. “What are you going to do?”

  “Oh, I think . . . I think you’d rather not know . . . in an official capacity,” said Crisp. “Give me a couple of days, and please don’t tell anyone that we’re . . . that I’m . . .”

  “I understand.”

  “Thank you,” said Crisp. “I will tell you one thing I’ve found out.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nobody saw Amanda Murphy on the mainland after the Calderwood boys’ accident.”

  “But the FBI report—”

  “Only repeats what the witnesses said. I’ve spoken to them, and none of them saw Amanda Murphy—only someone they thought was her.”

  “An imposter?”

  “I believe so.”

  “A woman, though.”

  “Probably . . . definitely not Andy Calderwood.”

  “But that changes the chronology. He could have killed the Murphy girl!”

  “Possibly.”

  “And the imposter would have to be either an accomplice . . . or a coincidence.”

  Crisp doubted it was a coincidence. Amanda Murphy was an original. “It would seem so,” he said. “It would seem so.”

  “I don’t see how that sorts out the confusion much.”

  “I disagree,” said Crisp. “It’s been my experience that the truth is not a puzzle you put together, it’s a puzzle you take apart. Each fact, each piece you remove, no matter how obscure in itself, reveals a bit of the picture beneath. If we pick away at those pieces long enough, Mr. Hanson, the truth will show itself. Or at least we’ll see enough of the truth to guide us to certain conclusions.”

  “I suppose so,” Hanson said reluctantly. Crisp’s unorthodoxy echoed like heresy in the halls of his formal indoctrin
ation.

  “The important thing is not to discard a fact because it doesn’t seem to make sense, or because it doesn’t fit a theory,” Crisp continued. “That’s what’s wrong with science today, don’t you think? Rather than letting the facts lead them to truth, scientists have adopted the habit of imagining a truth and forcing the facts to fit it. You see, any theory that isn’t fluid enough to be altered by fact atrophies, becomes this monolith that people of little imagination suppose to be truth. Evolution, for instance. The Big Bang . . .” Crisp was beginning to heat up on topics that had drawn him into debates with old friends at the Smithsonian and the National Academy of Sciences that lasted until the small hours of the morning. He could hear the silence at the other end of the phone raise its eyebrows and roll its eyes. “Anyway,” he synopsized, “the truth never changes, only the way in which we perceive it.”

  Hanson had been listening. He realized that as he looked at the crime through the eyes of this old man, the world that came into focus would be one in which he was a stranger. “There’s something else you’ll want to know . . .”

  Crisp let the silence prod the remainder of the statement from Hanson. “We found some other fingerprints.”

  “On the buttons?” Crisp conjectured.

  The pregnant pause that followed was punctuated with a sigh of resignation. “How did you know?”

  “Charlie took a picture of Andy Calderwood at the wake. He keeps an album. I looked at it with my magnifying glass. All the buttons matched.”

  Hanson concluded a brief mental battle. “I should tell you, when we opened the casket . . . after we took the pictures, we saw one of the buttons was just lying there. I thought that was strange, so I took it . . . and another one.”

  “Chain and anchor,” said Crisp.

  Hanson nodded on his end of the phone. “But it was a brand-new coat—so Charlie said. So someone must have changed the buttons for some reason, and in the process—”

  “Left fingerprints,” Crisp interrupted

  Hanson echoed. “Left fingerprints.”

  “They’re not Charlie’s prints?”

  “No, and they don’t belong to any of the Calderwoods. That’s about as far as we’ve gotten with it so far. They’re cross-checking against everyone they can think of.”

  “Of course, there are a lot of people on the island who’ve never been fingerprinted,” said Crisp.

  Hanson nodded into the receiver. “We may end up running the whole blasted town through before this is over.”

  “May I make a suggestion, Inspector?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Concentrate your efforts on the north end of the island.”

  “The north end? Why? There’s hardly anybody up there but summer . . .” Realization dawned all at once. “Beach sand.”

  “She was killed on McKenniston’s property, I’m convinced of that,” said Crisp. “And since there is only one road onto the peninsula, pretty well traveled that time of year, I’m assuming it was by someone whose presence wouldn’t have aroused suspicion.”

  “That’s not all you’re assuming,” said Hanson. They communed for a moment in thoughtful sighs and wheezes. “Anything else?” said Hanson at last.

  Crisp thought of the walk-in freezer up at the McKenniston’s. “Not for the moment.”

  “I’ll let you know what turns up on those prints, if anything. Good-bye, Mr. Crisp.”

  “Good-bye, Mr. Hanson.”

  Crisp was sleeping with his light on now. Not that it made any difference. She would come and stand in the corner, her lips would move, her blood would flow in endless, silent rivulets. Her eyes, though hidden in shadow, would, he knew, be fixed upon him, staring and unblinking. He would pinch himself beneath his covers, but, if sleeping, he wouldn’t wake, and if awake, wouldn’t sleep.

  “Winston.”

  He heard the word clearly. He saw her lips part before she spoke. He sat bolt upright in bed and stared at the familiar silhouette in the corner. “Amanda?” he said. His voice was hoarse and heavy. He cleared his throat. “Amanda?”

  The sleep in his eyes made halos of the light, and for half a second as he stared into the dark pockets in the corners of his room, trying to separate shadows from substance, he saw her as he’d never seen her. Undead. Unstaring. Her bright eyes brimmed with moisture and overflowed with vitality. The ghastly makeup was gone. The rust-edged wound was gone, and her beauty overwhelmed him.

  In the quiet of the night, Crisp loosed the ragged tether of his heart and, for the first time in a lifetime, fell in love. Tears welled in his eyes and washed the vision away.

  “Amanda,” he said softly.

  He was awakened by the smell of coffee. He’d moved to the little straight-backed chair in the ell sometime during the night and fallen asleep there. He was sore in places he’d forgotten he had.

  Slowly he opened his eyes. A colorless, lifeless light washed through the window and across the room, turning his jumble of bedclothes the color of a burial shroud. It was raining in sheets of perfect, perpendicular lines. He massaged his forehead and temples with both hands.

  “Winston!”

  Here was a voice of flesh and blood. Matty’s voice, melting through the gloom like the rattle of a key in his cell door. “Five minutes!” said Crisp.

  “What?”

  “Five minutes!” Crisp bellowed as loud as he could through the sleep in his throat.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Matty mumbled something about his food getting cold and him lying in bed all day. He smiled.

  By the time he had breakfast and Matty had read him the parts of the paper she thought he should hear, the sun had won its battle for the morning and was celebrating its victory in the water drops on the pussy willow outside the kitchen window. A slight breeze had picked up and was tossing the chickadees back and forth between the trees and the birch feeder that swung from the clothesline.

  “Well, it’ll be a nice enough day yet,” said Matty, who had been talking all along, but this was the first thing that had made it through the sleep that clogged Crisp’s brain.

  “We may get summer this year after all,” said Crisp. Two bluejays had descended on the feeder, chasing the chickadees away. And a squirrel was busily tearing the suet bag to shreds.

  “Least you don’t have to go to no funerals today,” Matty rejoined. “Not much of a crowd there, I hear.” She topped off his coffee.

  Crisp had ceased to be amazed that Matty knew everything there was to know. “Not many.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  Instantly his defenses were up and about, stirring one another with sharp jabs to the ribs and climbing the battlements. He’d always had the nagging suspicion she could read him like a book. He was determined not to let her get past the first chapter or two, if he could help it. “About what?”

  “Oh, anything that’s on your mind,” Matty replied disinterestedly. She cleared the table. “You just seem a little preoccupied, is all. I didn’t know but what you might want to get something off your chest. Helps to talk things out sometimes.” She scraped leftovers off his plate into the old blue plastic bowl she put outside every morning for neighborhood dogs. “You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to.”

  She draped a newspaper over her head and stepped out through the curtain of water that cascaded from the roof in the aftermath of the rain. She put down the bowl on the porch.

  “I’ve just been dreaming,” said Crisp. He knew she couldn’t hear with the runoff pelting on the newspaper that covered her head. He was trying it out.

  “Did you say something?” said Matty. She closed the door behind her, shook the newspaper over the sink, and spread it out on the sweater rack to dry before throwing it away.

  “I haven’t been sleeping well, I guess,” said Crisp. He considered this admission less likely to elicit unwanted probing. He was quite sure he didn’t want probing. Quite sure.

  “Could be that mattress,” Matty repli
ed. They both knew it wasn’t the mattress.

  “Mmm,” said Crisp.

  “Been dreamin’?”

  There was no defense against someone who was tall enough to peek over your walls. He didn’t respond.

  “ ’Bout that girl,” said Matty. This time it wasn’t a question.

  “Tell me something, Matty,” Crisp said sleepily. “How do you know these things?”

  Matty shrugged. She wasn’t going to tell him he talked in his sleep. Or that she listened. “Just . . .” She shrugged again.

  “Well, it’s awfully uncomfortable.”

  “I guess I thought you’d sleep better once she was in the ground,” said Matty. “Hoped so, anyway.”

  “Too many questions,” said Crisp. He put a little more Sweet ’n Low in his coffee and stirred it with his fork handle.

  “Like what?”

  Crisp got up and walked to the window. He thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his khaki pants. “Who’s the maestro?” he said, almost beneath his breath.

  “What?” said Matty. She was already in the pantry.

  “I feel like everything’s been planned, Matty.”

  “ ’Course it is. God planned it.”

  “Well, I wasn’t thinking on such an elevated plane, I’m afraid.” He walked to the pantry and leaned against the doorpost. “Whoever murdered that girl has . . . has . . . it’s like I’m a pool of water.”

  Matty was bent over the laundry. She twisted the furrows in her forehead into a question mark.

  “Be patient, now, I’m just trying to make a point,” said Crisp.

  “Well, make it in English,” said Matty.

  “I am. You have to listen to the whole thing.”

  The furrow relaxed.

  “Imagine a little pool of water in the dirt. Now, what happens if you trace a little line in the dirt right up to the pool?”

  “The water flows down the groove.”

  “Exactly,” said Crisp. “I’m that pool of water, you see? And I’m going right down the groove that somebody put there. The groove they want me to go down.”