Chapter 25

	I like to deal with you, for I believe you do not lie or steal, and these are very rare virtues.
	HENRY THOREAU, in a letter to Lidian Emerson

The telephone rang in Mary’s library office. The thin hearty voice of Jimmy Flower was on the line. “That you, Mary? Look, sweetheart, one of these days I’ll get around to proposing to you in style, but right now I’ve got another kind of proposition. You know Lieutenant-Detective Homer Kelly? Good. Well, he was up to my house last night, and he was saying he wished he had some kind of advisor on this case who knew Concord, and all its history and literature and so on, you know, and the people involved in the Goss case, and somebody who was smart, too, and my wife Isabelle suggested Mary Morgan, and I said, say, that’s a good idea, but she’s already got a job in the library there with Alice Herpitude, and she said to me (Isabelle) that maybe Alice would give you time off, like every Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday, and I said I’d ask Alice. Well, the upshot is, I just spoke to Alice and she says that’s okay with her. How about it?”

Alice Herpitude was peeking around the door, nodding and smiling. Mary thought it over. She couldn’t get Charley into worse trouble by being on the inside. Maybe she could help him. Then again, helping Charley might mean hurting his brother. Mary stared at the little bust of Louisa May Alcott on her desk. Louisa looked noncommittal. “What did Lieutenant Kelly say about it?” said Mary.

“Oh, he thought it was great.”

Jump, Mary, jump. “Well, all right, I guess so.”

Mary walked over to the station at lunchtime to see what was expected of her. Homer nodded at her, and snapped open a card table and squeezed it into the corner of Jimmy’s office beside his desk.

“Grandiose appointments of your office completed just in time.”

“Tell me,” said Mary, “how a student of the Transcendentalists ever got to be a police lieutenant.”

“Other way around. My father was a cop in Cambridge. Hence, Kelly. So I was more or less brought up on the force. And my mother was a classicist. Hence, Homer. Classicists live in libraries. So I did my teething on any old chewed-up volume that was lying around. Sucked put all the glue, gradually gummed my way through a five-foot shelf.”

“Do you have a degree in anything?”

“You mean like a Ph.D. from Harvard? Look, my dear, the closest I ever got to Harvard was as a traffic cop like my father, shepherding Harvard students across Harvard Square. Picking up a law degree at Northeastern night school and reading Waldo and Henry on the side—those things were strictly extra-curricular.”

He walked her to the corner, and the conversation galloped along in a sort of airy antagonism. A shot, a parting shot, and then Homer shouted a ricochet across the street. Mary found herself walking down the Milldam with a big grin on her face. She collided with Alice Herpitude, who was coming out of the First National grocery store.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Alice. I wasn’t looking where I was going.” She leaned over and picked up Miss Herpitude’s packages.

“We’re such pygmies, Mary dear. I don’t know why you Olympians take any notice of us at all.”