Chapter 54

	The world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order …
	RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Fill in all the background, first. Homer Kelly lay at his ease on a settee, ignoring the handsome homelike atmosphere of Amherst’s Jones Library, leafing idly through old local papers. Elizabeth Goss had been Elizabeth Matthews before her marriage. When would she have announced her engagement? He started with the fall season of the year before and studied the society pages, examining solemnly the yellowed photographs of dewy young brides in bobbed hair. Most of them were dogs. Their shapeless finery didn’t help, and they had these tiaras that they wore low down on their foreheads, like Indian maidens.

But, say, here was one with class. Post-deb announces engagement to Harvard man of Concord, Massachusetts. Well, by jeeminy, here she was. It was Elizabeth Goss, nee Matthews. “Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Matthews announced the engagement of their daughter Elizabeth at a supper party yesterday evening at the Lord Jeffery Inn …” Homer’s eyes ran on, then did a doubletake and started over. Could this be the right Elizabeth Matthews? She wasn’t engaged to Ernest Goss, she was engaged to … but that was impossible. Homer looked at the photograph again. No, there was no mistake. It was Elizabeth Matthews, all right. So she had had another romance … here was a can of worms with a mightly peculiar smell …

Sniffing the new scent, Homer reared up off the settee and nosed around among the bookshelves. After a while he went to the desk and inquired the way to the Town Hall.

“Turn left, then right to Main Street, then left on Main across the green. It’s just a block or two this side of Emily Dickinson’s old homestead. You can’t miss it.”

Homer picked up his briefcase and did as he was bid. The Town Hall turned out to be a grandly ugly Romanesque structure so glowering and heavy that Homer pictured the earth beneath it densely compacted all the way to China. The Town Clerk’s office was down the hall to the right. The Town Clerk was out to lunch, but the girl behind the counter took some of the big canvas-covered folios of Births, Marriages and Deaths from the vault where they were stored and let Homer pore over them. When the Town Clerk came back from lunch, he found Homer crouched over one of the big volumes, his enormous forefinger moving along a line like that of a child just learning to read, his lips mumbling the words over and over.

The Town Clerk examined him with sharp analytic eyes. Making instant character analyses was his specialty. Take this chap, now. Odd-looking fellow. Giant. Obviously illiterate. Stringy brown hair cut in big scraps. Horrible tie. And say, look at that forefinger. Spatulate. He should have guessed. A criminal type if ever there was one. “What do you want, mister?” said the Town Clerk nervously.

Homer lifted his eyes and bored holes that went all the way through to the back of the Town Clerk’s head with the keenest glance seen in Massachusetts since Daniel Webster’s. “Tell me,” he said, “how long is the normal gestation period for human beings?”

Thrilling voice the fellow had. Come to think of it, he had very large prefrontal lobes. Obviously a fellow with plenty on the ball, a professor or something. Funny question though. “I dunno. Nine months, isn’t it? Nine and a half?”

Homer stared at the Town Clerk. His lips moved. Then he picked up his briefcase and whirled it around in the Town Clerk’s office in a huge circle. “Wahoo!” he said. “Me plenty heap awful smart!” The Town Clerk had to rectify his character analysis all over again. The man was a dangerous maniac, he should have seen it right away.

But Homer was going down the front steps three at a time. He was out on the street, charging back to the library, his mind alive with a wild idea. He tossed his briefcase on a library table and started assaulting the card catalogue and snatching books off the shelves. After two hours of tearing the meat out of them, he left their scattered carcasses on the table and ran down the street to the College Drug Store. He found the phone booth in the corner and wedged himself into it by a technique he had worked out years before. (You backed in, squeezed yourself into the seat, lifted your right leg and planted it on the farther wall, and then, ever so gently, you shut the door.) He began to make a series of long-distance calls.