A Show of Hands Page 5

  “Nope. I’m afraid you let your imagination run away with you this time, Winston.” The look in Gammidge’s eyes as he stared at the wound on the girl’s neck was that of a man trying to make sense of a senseless tragedy. “She could’ve got those scars on her hands any number of ways—climbing over a wire fence, tying a postal package, even flying a kite, for pity sakes. I’ve done it myself.” He covered the girl’s face again.

  “Nope. You just don’t strangle someone twice. Besides,” Gammidge concluded, “if she was strangled with rusty wire, any kind of wire, there’d be wounds on her neck, all around it, wouldn’t there?”

  Crisp smiled slightly and looked at the floor.

  “ ’Course there would,” Gammidge said, trying to balance the evidence on his hypothesis.

  “You’re probably right,” said Crisp. He realized he’d trespassed on Gammidge’s good will long enough. “They could have come from anywhere.”

  “ ’Course they could have,” said Gammidge. They went to the door and turned off the light. “Once we find out who those finger-prints belong to—”

  “By the way,” Crisp said matter-of-factly. “Did you happen to notice what color her hair is?”

  “Her hair?” Gammidge echoed incredulously. “Red as Hades, f’r pity sakes. Hard to miss that.”

  “That’s right,” said Crisp. “So was the wig.”

  “Wig?” mouthed Gammidge. “She was wearing a wig?”

  “I took it off and put it in the bag with the sweatshirt.”

  Gammidge stopped in his tracks. “Why didn’t Charlie Young notice it?”

  “He wasn’t looking for it,” replied Crisp. As he pulled the door shut, it creaked loudly on its hinges, like a cry from the dead. He turned and looked at Gammidge. “Curious, isn’t it?” he said.

  They stepped into the storm at angles and, wading to the far shore of the circle of streetlight, were absorbed by the darkness.

  Apart from Leeman Russell and the pool hall, there are two places on the island you can plug into the grapevine: Fifield’s hardware store and Irma Louise’s House of Beauty. This eminent list once included the barbershop, but Georgy Kirby died. Doubtful Bailey, the new barber, was from away, so nobody talked to him.

  Of course the beauty shop was the exclusive domain of the fair sex. There they heaped burning coals upon one another in absentia and, incidentally, did inexplicable things to their hair with foul-smelling fluids. In summer, when the door was open, you had to hold your breath for fifteen seconds on either side as you passed, or risk a lethal dose of whatever it is that turns ladies’ hair blue.

  Crisp spent his time in the hardware store. He even had his own chair, between Stump Adams’s and the door. Seniority would eventually move him closer to the stove, but he’d have to wait his turn. He was lucky anyway, being the only off-islander ever to have his own chair.

  Of course, the advantage of being closest to the window was that you got to see who was doing what on Main Street and relate the details to the others. The simplest observation, such as Smo Bodwell going into the post office, would elicit a personal and genealogical commentary that would put to shame the best efforts of those name-search companies advertised in National Geographic or the Enquirer. Not even the most insignificant event passed unnoticed, and of these events the store’s huge square windows offered an unimpeded prospect. Not to mention a clear view of the harbor and the motel. The entertainment there, in season, beat movies hollow.

  There was a lot of ice on the sidewalk today, so foot traffic was scarce. Conversation, therefore, turned on the only other topic of interest—the murder of Amanda Murphy. Crisp wedged his boots among the others under the stove, adjusted the green corduroy pillow in his chair, sat back, and propped up his feet on the edge of the display case.

  Drew Meesham was waiting on a lady who wanted shelving screws; otherwise, the chairs were full. Drew’s, of course, was closest to the stove; he owned the place. Petey Lamont was next. He wasn’t senior but had a special dispensation because he couldn’t hit the spittoon from any farther away. Beside him was Stump Adams, the island storyteller and oldest in the group. Between him and Crisp was Pharty McPhearson, who was also called Silent but Deadly, S. D. for short, not necessarily for the brevity and pith of his comments.

  “I never thought I’d live to see a murder out here,” said Stump as the conversation nodded. “Might as well be in New York.”

  “That’s right,” said Petey. “Next thing you know we’ll have to lock our doors at night . . . take keys out’ve the car.”

  Crisp took a butterscotch from the cast-iron skillet Drew kept full of candy for the kids who dropped by after school. The conversation needed a nudge in a more profitable direction. “I suppose the senator will get involved.”

  “McKenniston?” said Petey. “I doubt it. Ancient history by this time.”

  “This bein’ an election year, he won’t want to stir up any closets,” Stump observed.

  “Rattle any skeletons, you mean,” said Pharty.

  “Same thing.”

  Crisp tossed the candy wrapper at the spittoon and missed. He always missed. Petey habitually reached down, picked it up, and sniffed it. He loved butterscotch but the doctor had warned him off candy, so he got by on fumes.

  “McKennistons have been up there a long time, haven’t they?” said Crisp.

  “Since Stedman, the senator’s grandfather,” said Drew as he sat down. As usual he’d been keeping an ear on the conversation all along. If a customer got a few screws too many as a result, well, as long as they didn’t get too few. “Marshall used to come down here once in a while in the old days. Him and Briley was good friends.”

  There was a moment’s silence as everyone remembered Briley, who, though he had died more than twenty years before, old as Methuselah, was no less alive in the collective memory. Petey had Briley’s chair these days.

  “That was a long time ago,” Stump eulogized. They all nodded. Everything was a long time ago.

  “Before my time, I’m afraid,” said Crisp. His words hardly rippled the silence.

  Drew’s eyes were animated by memories. “Oh, them was some days, Win’.”

  “Some days,” Petey chorused.

  “Yessir.” Drew opened the squeaky door on the cast-iron stove and tossed in a birch log. The door slammed shut and the latch dropped into place. The birch bark offered a tattoo of snaps and pops, launching its soul in clouds of ember-trimmed ashes. “People from that end of the island come to town a lot more them days. They was a lot more social.

  “Them girls,” continued Drew, “always dressed in white . . . linen or muslin or whatever they call it. Just pressed. Some kind of big old straw hat with ribbons on it. I tell you, one’ve ’em tossed you a glance, you felt about ten feet tall.” He dropped his head back and closed his eyes.

  “ ’Course, they had a look that’d make you feel like the underside of somethin’ ugly, too,” said Pharty.

  “So I hear,” said Drew with a smile. “ ’Course, I never saw it myself.”

  The musty air, thick with the smell of linseed oil and turpentine, soaked up the ragged laughter that followed.

  “Not like today,” said Stump. He launched a lipful of tobacco juice at the spittoon in emphasis. “These girls come off the boat, floppin’ and hangin’ out like dogs in season. Pants so tight, you might as well strap your imagination to an anchor and heave ’er off the lee’rd bow.”

  Crisp thought of Matty and smiled. “Not a lot of mystery to it anymore, is there?” he said.

  “Mystery? The only mystery is how you stuff a hundred and fifty pounds of meat in a ten-pound sack,” said Stump. “Sex,” he continued with another spit. “I tell you, without a little mystery, a little romance, it don’t mean no more than a sneeze or a good fart.”

  “Cheap,” said Pharty.

  Stump turned his milky gray eyes toward the harbor but looked at something much farther away. “I’m glad Cassie ain’t alive to see what it’s come
to.” There was a requiem of silence for Stump’s wife of fifty years who had been dead ten.

  “She was a good woman, Stump,” said Drew.

  “She was,” said Stump. “She was.” All eyes turned from him in respect. “Raised four kids, buried three. Worked with me toe-to-toe, stroke for stroke all them years. Never complained. And maybe she was pretty, maybe not.” He sniffed. “But she was . . . beautiful.”

  Crisp measured the time until it was right to say something. “The McKennistons came to town more often in those days, you say?”

  “Sure did,” said Drew. “Every Sat’dy, at least. ’Course, there was always something goin’ on. Dances, plays, band concerts. Something.”

  “Nothin’ like that these days,” said Pharty.

  With a wag of the head, Petey agreed. “Nope. Not ’ny more.”

  “Saturdays,” said Crisp. If he’d learned one simple lesson in life, it was that patience seldom failed to yield the desired results. And in certain circles his patience was legendary. “Plays, you say?”

  “Sure,” said Stump. “You remember them plays over to the Memorial Hall, don’t you, Pr’fess’r? Gorry, it wasn’t that long ago they stopped havin’ ’em, was it?”

  “Back when TV come in,” said Petey.

  “TV,” said Stump, stuffing a diatribe into the inflection. “Sometimes them actors over to The Ledges’d put one on.”

  Mention of The Ledges pried a memory loose from one of the dustier parapets in Crisp’s brain, and it landed squarely on his heart: Debora Stalsberg, his first genuine summer love. Her father was a

  famous theatrical producer who had renovated the abandoned inn on James’ Island and opened it to Broadway actors in the off-season. An ancient shudder of excitement shimmied up Crisp’s back in scratchy woolen knee breeches.

  “They’d all live out to The Ledges,” said Petey. “Men and women both. Together.”

  “There was sin b’fore TV,” said Stump. “It just wasn’t so fashionable.”

  “Wasn’t never really a ‘how-to’ on the subject before TV,” Petey appended.

  Drew imagined some lint on his khaki pants and picked it off. “They put on plays they was goin’ to do down to New York when theater season come.”

  Pharty leaned forward and resituated his cushion. “‘Falls ’bout same as deer season, don’t it? That’s why I hardly ever make them plays.”

  An old ship’s clock on the wall opposite the men had the Millberry’s Magnesia logo etched in ornate frosted letters on its glass case. None of the men remembered Millberry’s Magnesia; that’s how long the clock had been there. Drew wound it first thing every morning, last thing every night, and it kept perfect time—seven minutes slow. Always had been. On the island, “I’ll be there ’bout Millberry time” meant a little late.

  The gentle ticktock of the ancient timepiece synchronized the silence that rushed in to fill the empty spaces. During lapses in conversation old eyes often settled on the pendulum in a ritual of self-hypnosis. It was the only thing that moved, gently knocking aside the seconds like dominoes.

  Crisp was having a hard time concentrating. Very unusual. He couldn’t get Amanda Murphy out of his mind. His thoughts wouldn’t be so troubling if he envisioned her as he had seen her—dead, pale, cold. An image like that sleeps fitfully forever in the subconscious of the beholder. That’s to be expected. But it was not the way he saw her. Somehow his brain had resurrected her, dressed her in a thin blue summer dress with tiny white flowers in the pattern, and put her in a big empty house where she wandered from room to room. He never saw her face directly, only in reflections—in windows as she stopped for a moment to peer out into the stark sunlight, or in smoky mirrors as she passed by. Room to room. Slowly. Silently. Room to room. Ticktock, ticktock.

  Crisp shook his head and rubbed his eyes.

  “Did any of the McKennistons ever get mixed up with those people?”

  “What people?” said Drew. “Actors?”

  Crisp nodded.

  “That’s the funniest thing,” said Petey. “I was just thinking about her.”

  “Her?”

  “Trudy McKenniston,” Petey replied. “She wasn’t McKenniston then. Stumpy, what was her name? Her folks had a place in Camden.”

  “Was it Rockford? Wilford?” Stump’s milky old eyes searched the floor for recollection. “Somethin’ ended in ‘ford.’ ”

  “Rutherford!” said Pharty.

  Stump slapped Pharty’s knee. “That’s it!” he exclaimed. “Trudy Rutherford.”

  “There was a girl, I hope to tell you,” Drew commented with a wheeze of exclamation. “Head turner, she was.”

  Petey agreed. “She coulda turned an owl’s head clear off the sprocket.”

  “I don’t remember her,” said Crisp.

  A customer came in. Drew slowly disengaged himself from his chair. “She was older’n us, Win’. Musta been eighteen or so when you started comin’. You was still in knee pants.”

  “But we noticed her,” said Petey.

  “I guess so,” Pharty concurred. “Wasn’t she somethin’?”

  Crisp applied a poker to the embers of his memory but couldn’t come up with Trudy Rutherford. “Nope. I don’t remember.”

  Drew smiled to himself as he followed his customer down one of the aisles overgrown with cast-iron skillets and brass soap dishes no one would ever buy. “You always was a little slow,” he said. Everyone laughed.

  “She was an actress?”

  “Onstage and off,” said Petey on the inhale as he passed the yellow butterscotch cellophane under his nose. “You remember that play she was in that time Briley fell outta that tree, Stump?”

  “Gorry, I forget that,” said Drew.

  “What tree?” said Crisp. “What happened?”

  “Well . . .” Drew looked at Petey with a distinct twinkle in his eyes. “Speakin’ of sex . . . the old-fashioned kind . . . I don’t guess it would turn heads today, but those folks were rehearsin’ outside—”

  “Built a stage right out from the porch on the east side there,” Stump said. “I remember. Us boys’d sit up in the trees and watch. Whistle at ’em, you know. Wasn’t we some obnoxious in them days!”

  “I know a few ladies who’d say we’ve only got worse with time,” said Drew with a laugh. “Anyway, the old man—what was his name?—owned the place.”

  “Mr. Stalsberg,” said Crisp. Everyone was surprised he’d remembered that.

  “That’s right!” said Drew. “Stalsberg. He’d written this play—”

  “Awful play,” Petey editorialized.

  “Awful,” Drew agreed. “Never amounted to anything. Anyways, it was about this Irish girl . . . played by Trudy Rutherford.”

  “She was the one part worth watchin’,” said Stump, smiling to himself.

  “I’ll say,” said Petey. “All of us boys had just about enough of that play by the time she come on, but when she did! . . .”

  “Ooo!” said Drew. It had been a long time since he’d said that. Probably longer for Stump and Petey. Nevertheless, they echoed the sentiment. “She had this beautiful long red hair. Shined just like copper in the sunlight.”

  “I’m surprised you noticed,” said Petey. “She coulda been bald, for all I remember.”

  Stump leaned toward Crisp and spoke into his good ear with earnest confidentiality. “She wasn’t overdressed, if you get my meanin’. Had this little skirt on, not much else.”

  “And the sun was behind her,” said Petey. Then he giggled, just like he had sixty-five years ago. Crisp thought of Matty.

  “Well, the wind was blowin’,” Drew resumed, “and every now and then a gust would come along and lift her skirt up to never-never land. Trouble is, the same gust would push this branch right in the way so we couldn’t see. Each time Briley’d lean forward a little more, ’til finally—”

  “Out he comes!” Petey exclaimed, jumping from his seat with a peal of joy, tossing his hands in the air and doing an arthriti
c pantomime of someone falling from a tree. He lowered himself to his seat on a cushion of laughter.

  Drew wiped tears from the corner of his eye. “They’d set up this table for a picnic right under the tree.”

  “Nice and shady,” said Stump.

  “Nice and shady,” Drew concurred. “And he landed smack in the punch bowl!”

  “Punch everywhere!” said Stump. “I remember! I remember!”

  The laughter that followed dissolved slowly into smiles. Crisp wondered how many places existed where a group of men in their seventies and eighties could share the same memory. “I’m sorry I missed it,” he said.

  “She was some pretty, though,” said Drew. “Looked some nice in that red hair.”

  “She wasn’t a redhead?” Crisp asked.

  “I don’t believe so,” said Petey. “I don’t remember what—”

  “No,” said Drew authoritatively. “She wasn’t a redhead. Blond, I think. Dirty blond. Had to give up actin’ when she married into the family,” Stump said.

  “She married the senator’s father?” said Crisp.

  Petey nodded. “They wasn’t thrilled about it, even so.”

  “Well, I don’t suppose she did too bad in the bargain,” said Crisp. “Not much stability in acting, from what I’ve heard.”

  “Oh, her family had money, Win’,” said Stump. “Prob’ly coulda bought an’ sold the McKennistons—”

  “Couple times over,” said Drew, returning to his perch.

  “Couple times over is right,” Stump continued. “New money, though.” From his vest pocket he removed a worn old corncob pipe that he wasn’t allowed to smoke and teased his lips with it. “Nope. They was just in love.”

  “What was the senator’s father’s name?” Crisp asked.

  “Marshall,” said Petey.

  “He was just as wild as she was at first,” said Drew. “ ’Member? Over to Rockaway all the time with that crowd, he was. Got old Stedman wound up sump’n fierce.”