Only in New England : the story of a gaslight crime (4 page)

Abby: Is that what makes them important? Dah!

Earnest: Mother, please!

Abby: Anyway, you're only there while the legislature is in session.

Earnest: But some of those people come here every summer. If only for looks, we ought to have an auto.

Abby: And buy gasoline?

Earnest: We can get an electric.

For once Lionel agrees with his elder brother. Certainly they should have a car. Up by the Light one of the summer people has one for sale. A red sports job with brass headlamps. A genuine bargain.

Abby: You don't know how to drive.

Lionel: I could learn, couldn't I?

Earnest: Why don't you keep out of this? (To his mother): We could get a chauffeur.

Abby: And double the cost? No!

Lionel and Earnest: But, Mother!

Abby: You've each got a good-enough buggy, and there's the surrey for social affairs.

Earnest: Look here! I'm getting sick and tired of having to debate every expenditure with you, Mother. You know our position in this community. That surrey is positively antiquated!

Lionel: Have it your way, Mother, we'd go to town in an ox cart.

Abby: Thanks to me, you don't go on foot. Either of you.

Earnest: Look here! Don't compare me to him! I'm getting sick and tired of having to answer for Lionel's arrears.

Lionel: Whose arrears?

Earnest: Yours!

Lionel: I suppose it was the hotel that ate up all the profits of the kelp business last year.

Earnest: I suppose it was the kelpers ate up all the hotel profits last season!

Abby: Now don't get your bowels in an uproar. You're neither of you showing a profit this year, and there's no use talking. You'll get no automobile out of me!

Or perhaps they debated finance on a higher plane. Stocks, bonds, debentures, percentages, mortgages. Or the current price of eggs. Given any difference of opinion, and contention in that close little parlor must have been inevitable.

Here they sat, those three, throughout the long Sunday afternoons (no work on the Sabbath for Sabbatarians)—throughout the longer winter evenings—evening after evening, winter after winter, year after year.

To be sure, Earnest Bridewell repaired to the State Senate for a few weeks annually. Lionel Bridewell remained away from home on occasion. But back they came, obedient pins to the maternal magnet. Or it might be closer to the truth to describe the magnetism as financial. Certainly love was not the attraction. The old homestead was at once a treasury and a trap.

How they must have rubbed each other raw in this isolated house on the edge of this isolated community. People with no intellectual attainments to provide mental escapes. People without recourse to such modern opiates as television, movies, or telephone. People who did not have the abstract whipping-boys we enjoy today—the image in the White House—Atom bombs and Outer Space—the convenient devils of Communism and Soviet Russia. None of these satisfying outlets was open to the Bridewells for an escape into the vicarious or for the venting of spleen.

Nor were they given to the reliefs of arts and handicrafts, nor even the petty household tasks that constitute occupational therapy for the average mortal. Nine months of the year (the hotel being closed) Lionel Bridewell toiled not, neither did he spin. Earnest, self-important, was above manual labors. Large frog in small puddle, he doubtless considered such homely occupations as the shoveling of manure or the mending of nets as beneath his dignity and station. As for octogenarian Abby, it seemed she spent most of each day in her rocker, playing monarch of all she surveyed. The house, I would learn, was served by an "outside couple"—a man-of-all-work, and a Cinderella who did the cooking.

So here sat Abby Bridewell and her sons—three minds with but a single thought. Money. Here the old lady thumbed through her account books, engrossed with balances, interest rates, sums, percentages. I could imagine her with pad and avaricious pencil, adding, multiplying, figuring.

I could imagine the sons also doing some figuring. Importunate Earnest juggling investments in his head. Covetous Lionel quietly calculating. How many dollars added up to a trip to Paris, and if

your mother were four-score years and some, what were the estimates on her life expectancy?

And how many pounds of lead are in a bag of shot? When did that problem enter into the mental arithmetic?

The calculator must have been a devious and offbeat introvert to come up with such a modus operandi. Of course, matricide in itself is a peculiarly abnormal crime. And one particularly rare in America where, for all the high incidence of juvenile and adult delinquency, the Mother Image has been the Whistler version, persistent even in a day when Mother may emerge from a beauty parlor looking like Marilyn Monroe.

But to sandbag Mother! Why this brutal assault and battery when a bag of shot could at least have been fired from a gun? Certainly possession of buckshot implied possession of a shotgun, and it seemed equally obvious that a shotgun was a quicker, surer and more impersonal means for an execution.

Gunfire meant a blast? Keep the buckshot in the bag by way of a silencer? But if murder had to be done, and silence were the desideratum, why not cyanide or arsenic—rat poison being handy to any country home—or asphyxiation while she slept (Mother forgot to turn off the gas; it was an accident)—or even, as she dozed, the gentle application of a smothering sofa pillow? But to catch her toiling up the stairs and hit her over the head! A Lizzie Borden might have given second thought to such an ambush. At least Mr. Borden was asleep when the axe fell, and Mrs. Borden was only Lizzie's stepmother.

I turned up Earnest Bridewell's picture in the album—the one wherein he stood in oratorical stance. While I was studying the portrait, Ed Brewster looked in from the vestibule.

"Sitting here in the dark?" He flicked on the lights. "Look, don't hesitate to use the house facilities. It's a dismal day."

"Time on my hands," I said, and held up the album. "Just browsing."

"I thought you might like to see the barn," Ed said. "There's some interesting old vehicles and sleighs out there. I got to go out and get a casting rod for Mr. Martin, case the weather clears and he'd like to try for stripers tonight. Like a breath of air?"

It sounded refreshing. Ed rigged me up in oilskins, and we went out through the kitchen. As I followed Ed out to the porch a gust of icy rain smote me in the face, and the wind wrenched the doorknob from my hand. The door flew wide, admitting the gale into the kitchen. Dish towels blew and the morning paper went sailing over the range. I had to struggle to close the door. It was that kind of day.

"Yesterday it's April. Today it's March. Typical Point weather," Ed said. "You can't count on spring until July."

But there was a salt tang in the blowing rain—better than the stuffy staleness of the Bridewell parlor. Earnest with his bag of shot had got me down.

I like old barns, and this one was a museum. While Ed hunted for the surf-casting gear, I roamed around in the cavernous gloom, peering at the ghostly contraptions and conveyances of a day that had passed away.

The barn housed a row of empty stables where horse-collars hung from the eaves, massive oxen yokes loomed in dusky corners and the walls were festooned with dangling harness. Beyond the stalls were the period vehicles—an ancient springer wagon, two high-topped buggies, a two-wheel ox cart, the family surrey. Overhead, suspended from high rafters, was a cutter of the type we used to call a Santa-Claus sleigh. And in a far corner was a one-horse shay.

A sadness lingered over these relics of yesteryear. The horse-collars were motheaten, the harness buckles brown with rust. Dust and decay had brought the conveyances to a standstill. There were no matched bays in the barn, no dobbin to draw the shay. The shay itself had collapsed like the one in the poem. And even that once-famous poem had departed from the national memory. Who recited Whittier any more? Or Longfellow? Or Lowell?

I went over to inspect the ancient shay.

Put on your old gray bonnet.

I picked up a leather feedbag and brushed off the cobwebs. A few dried flakes adhered to the rim of the bucket. Oats. And what had happened to the horse-blanket industry? To the carriage shops? To the wheelwrights, the blacksmiths, the salesmen who peddled buggy-whips, the street cleaners with their push-barrels, and the artisans who made the long-handled brushes?

Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud . . . ?

Ed came over. "Did you say something?"

"If I did, I was thinking out loud ... Do you remember horse-drawn fire engines, Ed?"

"Sure. They had one here. My old man was a Volunteer."

"With sparks coming out of the top?"

"Hell, this Quahog pumper sparked so it once set the Town Hall on fire."

"Did the Surf and Sand have a beach wagon?"

"A big yellow one with red wheels."

"Coast Guard must have used horses, too."

"You bet. You should have seen them run the surf boat down the beach."

"I don't see any saddles around the barn. Didn't the Bridewells ever ride?"

"Lionel used to have a horse. Smart roan with a star forehead. A single-footed pacer."

I picked up from the floor a heavy loaf of rusty iron with a scrap of leather buckled to its nose.

"That's a horse-block," Ed said. "The kind they used to throw out of a carriage when they parked the team at the curb."

"I know." Another piece of an entire civilization gone down history's drain. I handed it to Ed. "It would make quite a weapon, wouldn't it?"

"It would," Ed said, hefting the weight.

"But then, why not a plain old-fashioned hammer?"

"Eh?"

"I've just been thinking. I've never heard of anyone killed with a bag of shot."

"Oh, that," Ed said. "Old lady Bridewell."

"I suppose she was killed for her money?"

Ed nodded, "That was what the Prosecution claimed. The boys had been trying to get it for a long time, and the old lady was what I guess you'd call adamant."

"Murder seems the hard way under the circumstances. Close relatives and offspring usually try other means."

"Well, they did." Ed tugged his nose in recollection. "It all came out after the murder. Lionel, he'd been trying to break the old man's will. Writing to lawyers up in Boston for some years. Threatening a law action. And Earnest, he'd been taking another tack."

"What was that?"

"To have the old lady declared unfit to manage the estate. You know, non compost mentis. He'd been working on some sort of gimmick to get his mother committed to an asylum."

"That's a standard move in that sort of game."

"Only it didn't work," Ed said. "Neither did Lionel's scheme. Seems old Abby got wise to both attempts, and promised a legal showdown."

"But at her age why kill her? Wouldn't it have been simpler just to wait for her to die?"

"Abby Bridewell?" Ed shook his head. "That old lady was too stubborn to die."

"But she was well over eighty," I said smiling.

"And on her way to live a hundred," Ed said. "Told everybody she was going to, and she might have done it, to. Like I said, she was stubborn. All her family—the Joneses—was stubborn people."

"Stubborn?"

"Well, I'll tell you," Ed said. He dug a pipe from his pocket, sat down on a wagon-step, and motioned me to another. "You never knew people like them. Let me illustrate. . . ."

CHAPTER 4

Ed Brewster speaking:

"One day—this was back some years ago—I'm down to Gil-lion's Wharf. It's a gray November afternoon with a norther making up. Kind of like today. The steamer's there at the far end of the pier, waiting to go at four, and nobody much else except me. I wanted to see the captain, who's gone into town to Smeizer's or somewhere—wanted to give him a special delivery to post for me when he gets to Newport. That's beside the point. The point is, I'm there at the head of the pier, sitting in my car by the deserted taxi stand. I'm a good half hour ahead of sailing time, but I didn't want to miss the captain, who's liable to take off early on a day like that when passengers are unlikely as hen's teeth. Especially with weather building up and a sea running.

"I'm thinking: There won't be no passengers for Newport today—not from this God-forsaken resort. And I take a drink from a fifth I've brought along to keep me company and from catching pneumonia there at the pier. But I'm wrong. Just then I see this man coming around the bend of the road down from town. He's wearing a black sou'wester—so I know it isn't the captain, who wears a yellow one—and he's carrying a suitcase. A little man, hurrying along with his head bowed to the blowing rain.

"I'm wondering who he is, and why he didn't come down in a taxi—it's quite a long way from the Center, as you know, and he's getting soaked, not wearing a raincoat, although he's got on rubber boots. But I guessed none of the cabs were out, bad day like that, or maybe he couldn't wait for one.

"Anyway, he comes dowri the road, lugging this bag. I think

he's going to hurry on past the car, when he glances over my way, sees me sitting there, and cants across the road to speak to me. He's up to the windshield before I can get a good look at his face, and then I seem to recognize him. That is, he looks familiar, like somebody I've seen a long time ago, only I can't be sure.

"While I'm wondering who it is, he puts down the suitcase and taps on the side window. I run down the glass, and he looks in. He's got a brown face, quite an oldish man, real sea-going like, with squinty blue eyes. He starts to ask me what time the steamer goes or something. Then it comes to me.

"Wallace Ord! Like that. Man I hadn't seen in I don't know how many years. A Pointer. One of the Ord family. He'd left the Point to follow the sea when I was a kid, years ago. Why, I'd thought he was long since dead.

"I said it like that. 'Why, it's Wallace Ord!' and I opened the car door to let him in. He hoisted his bag, and he got in, spry as anything. 'Hello,' he said. He squinted at me. I'm afraid you got the advantage,' he said. I've not been around here for over seventeen years. Don't seem to know too many of the people.'