Only in New England : the story of a gaslight crime (28 page)

Staring at the dusty books, I shook my head. They offered a psychological clue, perhaps. But where did that lead? As well identify the killer as a member of the human race.

Yet such blanket identification, too, contained a fallacy. The obvious fallacy of generalization. For there were many men and women who led worthy lives of good will in the Gaslight Era. Led them in spite of wretched schooling, homicidal nationalism and moralistic hysteria.

Perhaps Quackenbos and Barnes were no more harmful than chickenpox, and as soon forgotten. Perhaps Earnest and Lionel Bridewell learned something of value from the "old school" curriculum. Arithmetic, anyway. And possibly a mastery of elocutionary gestures took Earnest to the State Senate. Possibly Lionel's "Calling Tones" won him an entree to the better guest rooms of the Surf and Sand.

I was back where I had started. The books clued nothing, solved nothing.

I turned to the Saratoga trunk.

A surprise lay in store.

CHAPTER 18

Old trunks.

This one had leather strappings. On the side was a dim label: Wescott Express.

The dry hinges creaked.

Peering inside, I felt a little like the opener of an Egyptian mummy-case.

What had the household buried in this coffer? What do most people bury in attic trunks? Unwanted wedding gifts. Junk. Outgrown garments. Memento mori. Articles of no earthly use, but too valuable to be thrown away. Articles of no value whatever, but preserved because of magpie instinct.

Such as:

Twelve large, domed butter dishes, German silver, the metal tarnished an ugly black. Type of dish once used in center table for homemade butter. (Value? A couple of dollars. And why in the world would anyone have acquired twelve?)

One patchwork quilt, some of the patches missing.

One souvenir spoon, "Niagara Falls."

One china teapot, the spout broken off.

One high-button lady's shoe, right foot.

One lady's bonnet, deaconess type.

Some sheet music including Oh, Promise Me by Reginald de Koven, and Eben E. Rexford's 'Tis Only a Pansy Blossom.

And, at figurative barrel bottom, a small packet of letters and old bills.

Since Ed Brewster had previously been through most of this Bridewell residue, I had a feeling I was again in barren territory. Still, his eye could have missed something. I skimmed through the sheaf of bills.

So I was the one who almost missed it, there, in the dunnings for hay and grain, chickenfeed, carpet-sweepers, taxes, charcoal, wallpaper, horseshoes and kerosene. Plain as the bills themselves —indeed, their content—was the fact that the Bridewells were being dunned.

Wealthy tycoons? In 1908 several firms were threatening to turn Bridewell accounts over to collection agencies. In 1909 the village blacksmith was hammering at Old Abby. So was the local coal dealer. Earnest's Kelp Company was mortgaged. The Trawler Company was mortgaged. Please Remit. We cannot renew. You have just thirty days. Principal and interest expected by next ins't. In 1910 the Tax Office warned Old Abby that severe penalties impended. Surprised, I stared at the tax notice.

Perception came slowly, but it came. The realization that the Bridewells could not have been the rich overlords pictured in local legend. That, far from being a plutocrat, Abby was not what even the localites would have deemed "comfortably off."

But the truth was there in the Bridewell attic. Abby Bridewell was no opulent chatelaine, no bucolic Hetty Green. The family had never been rich. They had lost the Surf and Sand. I found a frayed letter which indicated that the hotel was sold to remote relatives on the Sybil Bridewell side of the clan. Apparently Captain Nathan had retained a small interest in the enterprise. But long before Lionel's incumbency as manager the ownership had passed into the hands of a Chicago concern. Evidently Abby had procured the management job for Lionel, and it was equally evident that Lionel had posed as proprietor. What easier way to impress (or enchant) a guest?

And the New Years' banquets given by Abby? The bills told that story, too. It seemed that village memory could inflate a chowder supper into a cotillion at the Waldorf-Astoria. But the audits suggested what vernacular called "sociables"—the kind undoubtedly expected of a State Senator's mother. Reading between expenditures, I could see Ed Brewster's big-eyed lobster thermidor reduced to a tuna fish salad, and the palatial crystal chandelier shrinking to a small cluster of glass bangles.

As for the Bridewell holdings in the P. and Q. Rapid Transit

Company, they had amounted, it appeared, to a total of some forty shares. Par value, four thousand dollars. Ultimate value, nothing. A gaudy brochure listed the company's original assets which, so far as I could see, consisted largely of Alger-type hope. I could not find Earnest Bridewell's name on the Board of Directors. In a sea-bound community which had little or no comprehension of capital investment, I suppose a few shares of stock had grown in imagination to half of Wall Street. And because Abby may have advised a townsman or two that she thought the trolley line a good venture, she was Jim Fisk in skirts when the venture came to the end of the line.

Apparently the three-thousand-dollar legacy aired at the murder trial constituted the sum and substance of the Bridewell "fortune." The rest of the family's reputed wealth was so much helium. The income, if any, from Earnest's meager enterprises was hypothecated. Lionel had saved little but debts. The Bridewell house and grounds were burdened with back taxes. Perhaps with taxes paid, the estate could have cleared two thousand dollars.

So Abby Bridewell had pinched pennies. She may not have been as gracious about it as Whistler's Mother. Whistler's Mother was never compelled to hold out against two nagging, badgering, foxy, unscrupulous and avaricious adult-delinquent sons. Earnest bullying, Lionel scheming. And the widow's savings, such as they were, dwindling away.

No wonder Old Abby had tried to collect monies owed her. No wonder she had pressed Cornelia Ord on a mortgage loan—if that story, too, was not so much local helium.

I did find an invoice which seemed to credit a down payment on a grand piano. It came to me—the idea could never be proved —that Old Abby could have bought Cornelia's Steinway to keep it in the family. Intending, perhaps, to return it to Cornelia if and when the Ord fortunes improved. Why not?

Evidently Abby had liked Cornelia, or she would not have invited her to the house. Regretting the forced sale of the piano, the old lady could have retrieved the heirloom from the dealer. Could have arranged its installation in the Surf and Sand be-

cause of insufficient room in the Bridewell parlor. Could have planned to bestow it on Cornelia after the final payments were made. Wouldn't a generous construction of Abby's motives be as valid as village gossip construing the contrary? Why else, when her purse was threadbare, would the harassed old lady have purchased a Steinway?

Among her papers I found evidence suggesting charity on Abby's part. Many of the receipts were unidentifiable. Over a period of years she had paid out regular monthly sums—ten dollars—fifteen dollars—for something unspecified.

The receipts were initialled, but I could make nothing of the initials. (Not blackmail. Blackmailers do not offer receipts.) The sums had gone to charity? To some missionary fund? To some needy person—Sybil Bridewell, say?

Sybil. Of course. Someone must have supported her—a recluse with no income. Someone must have paid for those baskets of groceries left week in, week out, at Sybil Bridewell's door. The baskets must have been sent from Babcock's, the only grocery in Quahog Point. For several decades Abby Bridewell had been part owner of Babcock's store. Who else would have provided for Sybil Bridewell? Old Abby was her sole remaining relative, unless Earnest and Lionel were counted. As I saw it, when it came to charitable contributions the Bridewell boys were of no account.

But I was seeing a new picture of Abby Bridewell. Not the Victorian matriarch in black bombazine and choker collar portrayed in the family album. Not the dowager Captain Bligh of local legend. Those were public images.

The album portrait of Abby Bridewell did not show her sending a check to an orphan asylum in New London. The public image did not display her as making a similar donation to a Providence orphans' home. I found the cashed checks and letters of thanks. Also a card acknowledging a donation to a foundling home in Newport. Another thanking Abby for contributing to a fund for homeless children in Gloucester.

To Old Abby, herself hard-pressed, such offerings must have been by way of widow's mites. And I found something else which controverted the public image. Evidently abetted by her Sena-

torial son, rumor had painted Abby as a virago who would deny an invalid husband a glass of water. Even Doc Hatfield, no friendly witness, had spoken up to refute this calumny. But what Hatfield apparently did not know—what her own sons apparently did not know—was that Abby herself bore the mark of a fatal pathological impairment.

In the attic residue I found the evidence. Apparently mistrusting Doc Hatfield, she had, in the summer of 1910, visited a celebrated surgeon then vacationing for a few days at the Surf and Sand. He must have given her discouraging word. A cryptic note advised "immediate treatment." Early in 1911 she had written to a sanitarium in Hartford, describing recurrent symptoms. The answering letter had doomed her with a diagnosis as coldly positive as a death sentence. We regret to inform you that our specialists here, etcetera, etcetera. The progress of your complaint as you describe it, etcetera. In a few more months, at best a year, and so on. While we must decline to operate on a patient of your years, we can hope to make you comfortable until such time as the Lord in His mercy, and so forth.

She was, as they called it in those days, "host to the worm." Evidence of malignant cancer. She had refused to confide in Doctor Hatfield. Had never told her sons. Too long she had held her knowledge within her. By January 1911 it was killing her.

I doubted if she were actually in her eighties. Victorian women seldom confided their age, although they were supposed to dress and act like grandmothers at forty. But she must have been at least seventy, suffering the nerves and anxieties which modern geriatricians tell us are buzzards that haunt the old. Too, Abby had other buzzards to cope with. Earnest and Lionel. And the realization that her days were numbered.

But she was not a usurious old Tartar.

Not a mercenary and skinflint grimalkin.

Not a domineering duchess ruling the lives of her sons.

She was a lonely old woman with shadows closing in around her. An aged widow struggling to maintain a competence for a pair of sleazy incompetents. She must have been weary, forlorn, frightened. She was selling her horses to pay her debts, leaving

her home, preparing to live in an alien town with a son who did not want her. Her minutes were being charged against her at the hourly rate, as in the mournful verses she had underlined.

Above her hovered the mental buzzards. Fear. Anxiety.

And over her chair hovered Earnest and Lionel. Waiting. Hoping.

But it seemed that someone—perhaps one of the boys— couldn't wait. I could taste the irony in my mouth.

Abby Bridewell, poor old soul, was already dying when a bludgeon struck her down.

The attic trunk contained two more surprises. These I came upon, dramatically enough, in the last of the correspondence— a packet tied with black ribbon—mostly letters of condolence penned on paper decorated with black fringe.

Dear Earnest: Heard the sad news, and know that to you and Lionel the loss must have come as a blow. . . .

It had come as a blow all right, I thought caustically, but not to Earnest and Lionel. The only blow in evidence was the one that smote their mother on the forehead. And glancing through the condolence mail, I could not help wondering what the con-dolers thought when they subsequently heard of Earnest's arrest for murder and of Lionel's shady involvement.

Could Lionel have actually believed his brother the murderer? It was a possibility I had not considered. On the stand Lionel had virtually accused Earnest. He had identified the bag of shot as belonging to Earnest, and had said he had seen it upstairs on Earnest's bed. Everyone, myself included, had supposed Lionel was lying.

But could he have told the truth? Unregenerate he may have been. Shifty. Slick as pomade. Yet what if he did see the shot-bag in Earnest's bedroom? What if he had, indeed, been convinced that Earnest was his mother's killer?

"Dear Earnest: We know your mothers passing was a shock to you. . . ."

Could Earnest have killed her? Certainly the testimony against him sounded like it, and his frantic efforts to establish an alibi looked black. His acquittal, however, rested on an alibi that seemed unshakable—the word of strangers, disinterested witnesses. The cattle dealers, McVest and Garvy.

'Wait a minute!" I thought aloud.

If McVest and Garvy were strangers, how was it they were able to recognize Earnest Bridewell with such absolute certainty? And if they were disinterested, why had they volunteered such vital information to Earnest's lawyers? The two Bedford men had left Quahog Point three days before the murder charge was leveled. They could not have heard of the case until they read about it in their home-town papers three days later. A man in Quahog Point is up for murder. They were in Quahog Point, yes, three days ago, when the murder presumably occurred. Well, it says here an old lady was killed in a house on the north side of the Point. They were on the south side. But now they were prepared to vow that a man they had seen on the south side— total stranger to them—was the accused. Did they recognize this man from a picture in the paper? (I saw no photographs of Earnest in the newspapers.) Even if they saw a newspaper photograph, what made them certain of their man? A figure seen at night in a dooryard and momentarily glimpsed later in the evening at a lamp-lit window?

I told myself I should have smelled that rat from the first. But when a case is alive with rats, you can miss a fast one. At any rate, Dear Earnest was back on my suspect-list.