He looked at the letter and sighed. A melancholy expression replaced his eager excitement.
“Poor man,” he said.
“Archie van der Lynden?”
He nodded. He reached over to the plate containing the orange peels, snagged the paring knife, cleaned it off on his sweater, and used it to slice open the envelope.
He pulled out a sheet of ruled paper that had obviously been torn from a spiral-bound notebook, all the messy little paper tags falling off it. He read it slowly, and then handed it to me.
Archie’s handwriting was large and sprawling, and the lines slanted downward, ignoring the thin blue rules. The letter read:
Dear Dr. Womble: Here at Inchness doing a little tune up, ha ha! The cigar thing fell thru, but I’ve got something better lined up for when I get out. If you want to make an investment, say the word, but if not, don’t worry, the new plan’s a sure thing and I hope to pay you back real soon. Yours, Archie.
“Cigar thing?” I asked.
“Some plan to take advantage of Cuba being open to tourism to import fine cigars more cheaply,” Dr. Womble said. “I don’t quite understand the details.”
“I think that’s what you’d call smuggling,” I said. “I hope you didn’t invest in it.”
“Oh, I never invest in any of Archie’s projects,” he said, displaying more common sense than I’d have expected. “I lend him money from time to time—at least we call it lending. I’m sure he really does intend to pay it back.”
He sipped his lemonade and seemed lost in sad contemplation. I considered several subtle ways of asking my next question and finally decided just to blurt it out.
“Do you have any idea where he is now?” I asked. “Because the chief wants to talk to him. As do I.”
“Probably still at Inchness,” Dr. Womble said. “It’s a residential rehabilitation center for drug and alcohol dependency. He’s been a patient there on and off for years now, and for the last ten years they’ve let him work there as a custodian. Which works out splendidly, because they can keep an eye on him, and readmit him as soon as he starts to relapse. But still—very sad. He showed such promise as a young man. Was it about Archie you came to see me?”
“Partly,” I said. “I had a few other questions, too. In all your years at Trinity, you’ve seen a lot of things that could have a bearing on Mr. Hagley’s murder.”
“Poor man.” Dr. Womble shook his head. “I’ll tell you anything I can. I can’t share anything that would be covered by pastoral confidentiality, of course.”
“Of course,” I said. “Let’s start with this: why did you arrange for the John Doe who was found at Trinity to be buried in our columbarium?”
I expected him be startled, but he only sighed. He took off his glasses and polished them on the bottom of his sweater, at approximately the same place where he’d cleaned off his paring knife. It didn’t exactly feel like a delaying tactic—more like something he needed to do to gather himself for the effort of explaining—as if he needed to see as clearly as possible in order to explain clearly. But since the part of his sweater he’d used had evidently received contributions from more than one past meal, his earnest polishing didn’t produce the results he expected.
“I only seem to have made things worse.” He sighed, and gazed sadly at the glasses, as if deeply disappointed in them.
Was he talking only about the glasses, or was he sidling obliquely toward some deeper revelation?
“Let’s see what I can do with those.” I held out my hand for the glasses. “I fix up Dad’s all the time.”
He surrendered them willingly enough, though with a slightly surprised look. I snagged an ice cube from my lemonade, warmed it in my hand to produce a few drops of water, and used a paper napkin from the table to give the glasses a thorough cleaning, lenses, frames, and all.
“The John Doe,” I prompted.
“Yes.” He blinked owlishly at me. “It was in the winter sometime.”
“January 12, 1995,” I suggested. “At least that’s the date inscribed on the John Doe’s niche.”
“January 12, 1995 it is, then,” Dr. Womble said. “What a wonderful memory you have. Yes, and we were expecting rather a big snowstorm. I went to visit all my shut-ins, partly because I knew it might be a few days before I could get out to them again, and partly to make sure they had everything they needed to ride out the storm. And it took rather longer than I expected. Of course my shut-in visits usually do for some reason.”
Actually, pretty much everything Dr. Womble did took longer than expected, even for those of us who were accustomed to his absentmindedness and distractibility. Books were usually the reason—books and conversations.
“It was very late—perhaps ten o’clock. I was coming back from Mrs. Petworth’s house, and trying to decide whether to stop by Trinity to make sure everything was ready for the snow or just go straight home before the roads got worse, when I ran into Archie.”
“Literally?” I asked.
“Very nearly. He was stumbling along the middle of the road a few blocks from Trinity and … well, he wasn’t quite himself.”
“Was he on drugs?” I asked.
“Only drink that day, as far as I could tell,” he said. “Not that alcoholism is that much better than drug abuse, of course, except for the fact that you’re not actually breaking the law when you buy spirits. And of course, the drug use followed all too soon. At that time he’d only been out of prison a few months, and a few of us were trying to help him make a new start. Not very successfully, as it turned out.”
His face fell as if Archie’s plummet from grace were entirely his fault. I thought of telling him it wasn’t, but sensed that the question could very well spark a long, philosophical discussion on the nature of responsibility that, however fascinating, wouldn’t bring me any closer to knowing what had happened either thirty years or two days ago. Fortunately I’d had some experience steering Dr. Womble back on track.
“So what did you do when you almost ran into Archie in the middle of the snowstorm?”
“I stopped, of course,” Dr. Womble said. “And coaxed him into the car. I tried to find out where he was staying—his mother had died a year or two before he got out of prison, so he couldn’t have been staying with her. He was rather vague about his plans, and after a bit, I came to the realization that perhaps he was embarrassed because he apparently hadn’t made any arrangements about where to stay and had no money for either a room or a bus ticket out of town. He ended up in our guest room for a few weeks until I managed to get him into a residential substance abuse program.”
A few weeks? Dr. Womble was a very good man, but Emma Womble had to be a saint for putting up with him all these years.
“At the Inchness Center?” I pointed to the return address on Archie’s letter.
“It might have been,” Dr. Womble said. “I’m afraid I don’t remember. It was so long ago—and only the first of many such stays, unfortunately. Such a sad story—a young man you’d have thought would have a bright future ahead of him. And yet his whole life was blighted by one unfortunate mistake.”
I was tempted to suggest that the fake jewel robbery probably wasn’t Archie’s first or only mistake, not by a long shot. Or that attempting to organize a complicated if unsuccessful plot to defraud an insurance company of several million dollars wasn’t exactly the sort of mistake that a basically honest and well-intentioned young man would stumble into all that easily. And to point out that Archie’s involvement with substance use appeared to have preceded the jewel robbery, since the person he originally tried to recruit to perform it was his drug dealer. But none of those comments would get me any closer to getting an answer to my question. And did all this have something to do with the John Doe, or had Dr. Womble forgotten my question and veered back onto Archie?
“Very sad,” I said, “but I don’t quite get what this has to do with John Doe being buried at Trinity.”
“Oh, yes.” Dr. Womble frowned and sat up straighter in his chair as if making a strenuous effort to get himself back on track. “Well, Archie was quite agitated. Kept calling me a good Samaritan and babbling about being attacked on the road to Jericho and killing fatted calves and—well quite a mishmash of vaguely Biblical-themed ravings. He did look as if he’d been in a bit of a scuffle, but unfortunately I made the understandable assumption that he was speaking metaphorically, and that in reality he’d gone a few rounds with the asphalt roadway.” He smiled wryly.
“Why unfortunately?”
“Because he was, after a fashion, telling the truth. Apparently he’d gone out to Trinity to visit his mother’s grave. This was before we started worrying about vandalism and locking up the columbarium. In fact, it was right after this that we did start locking it up—I thought that way people would have to come to the office in the daytime to get the key, and we’d have less chance of people tripping and hurting themselves in the churchyard.”
“Or being mugged there,” I suggested.
“That too.” He nodded. “Anyway, Archie told me that while he was leaving the crypt after visiting his mother’s grave, and somewhat distracted with grief, someone waylaid him in the graveyard; they’d fought, but Archie was able to escape. He was so … agitated and incoherent that at first I assumed he’d hallucinated the attack—he seemed rather confused about whether it was a man who had attacked him or a polar bear. And the next day he woke up so hysterical that for a while we thought he was having delirium tremens. He was quite obsessed with fear that the man who attacked him could have followed us home. So to calm him I went down to Trinity. I expected to find absolutely nothing—and instead, I found an unidentified man lying dead in the graveyard. A rather large man in a bulky white down jacket.”
He stopped and stared into the distance, as if seeing it all over again.
“What did you do?”
“Called the police, of course. And then, God help me, I went inside, called Emma, and told her to reassure Archie that he could rest easy because his assailant was dead.”
“And how much of this did you tell the police?”
“Almost none of it. I reported finding the body, of course. But for the rest—I thought I’d wait and see.”
“Wait and see what?”
“Who the man was. And how he’d died. I was afraid that if they knew Archie was involved, they’d jump to all sorts of conclusions. Assume the worst. He was out on parole, you see, and they might have sent him back to finish his sentence. Even if they didn’t, I was afraid the experience would derail him just as he was trying to make a new start. So I decided to wait, at least until the medical examiner had finished his autopsy and announced the results.” His face was drawn and anxious, as if he was still waiting for the autopsy.
“And what did it reveal?”
“Accidental death.” His face cleared slightly. “He’d been somewhat intoxicated, which probably caused him to stumble. He’d hit his head on a headstone, lapsed into unconsciousness, and frozen to death. So Archie wasn’t to blame.”
I wondered if he’d ever considered that the medical examiner might have reached an entirely different verdict if he’d known Archie had been there. Would John Doe’s wounds still have looked like accidental death if the medical examiner knew the deceased had been fighting with someone? Tripping and hitting your head on a gravestone was one thing; getting shoved into it was another. And who had been medical examiner in Caerphilly back then—had it been someone like Dad, who was almost too ready to suspect homicide? Or someone who would be quick to close the book on what looked like the accidental death of a drunken vagrant? Yes, if Dr. Womble had revealed what he knew, Archie would probably have been questioned and might even have been charged with … what? Self-defense? Justifiable homicide? Involuntary manslaughter? Not being one of those many family lawyers, I had no idea. But he’d have been charged with something, and maybe the charges would have been valid.
I could understand why Dr. Womble had worried about derailing Archie’s efforts to rebuild his life. But by the sound of it, Archie had managed to derail himself just fine without any help from the Caerphilly PD.
I suspected Dr. Womble had already thought of these points. Even if he hadn’t, what good would it do to reproach him with them after more than twenty years?
“You don’t think maybe Archie could have helped figure out who the John Doe was?” I asked instead.
“I showed him the picture,” Dr. Womble said. “He didn’t know the poor man. Even so, the shock of being attacked and then learning that his assailant had frozen to death had a profound impact on him. It shocked him into … well…”
“Sobriety?” I suggested.
“Well, no. But into a recognition of the need to make serious changes in his life. So I did everything I could to get him into a decent treatment program. As I said, I can’t remember if it was at Inchness or someplace else, but I made sure it was a very reliable place. That helped me get over the guilt.”
“Guilt about what?”
“That I hadn’t managed to save that poor unknown soul.” Dr. Womble looked stricken. “If I’d been more diligent about my stewardship of Trinity—I should have gone there to check that everything was battened down before the storm. Or if I’d done a better job of getting information out of Archie. In either case, maybe I’d have found the poor man before he succumbed to the elements.”
“Since Mrs. Womble was probably already worried sick about you being out in a snowstorm, I think you did the right thing by going straight home,” I said. “And maybe if you had stopped by the church, some other less careful driver would have literally run over Archie. And don’t expect me to give you a hard time about letting a poor drunk sleep it off unmolested. How were you supposed to know that someone’s life depended on a bit of information hidden in an alcoholic’s fuzzy brain?”
“You sound like the bishop.” Dr. Womble chuckled softly. “And yes, I understand that it’s a little morbid of me, dwelling on it like that. I don’t usually—or I didn’t until recent events brought it so forcefully back into my mind. But you did ask me why I arranged to have the poor dead man buried here at Trinity. It seemed the least I could do. And when I told Archie about it, he insisted on contributing what he could.”
“I gather that wasn’t much.”
“Not really.” Dr. Womble shook his head. “Sadly, his mother lost all her money before her death. Archie did have some income thanks to a trust fund from his grandfather Van der Lynden, but that was quite modest even thirty years ago.”
“And I doubt if old Mr. Van der Lynden made provision for inflation,” I said.
“Probably not,” Dr. Womble agreed. “Though he did make provision for Archie’s … feckless character. The trust was set up so Archie could never touch the principal. Not if he lived to be a hundred. So as the cost of living increased, he struggled until the maintenance job at Inchness came through.”
I found myself wondering if Dr. Womble had had something to do with the maintenance job coming through.
“What about Paul Blair?” I asked. “Who returned to Caerphilly as P. Jefferson Blair. You arranged for his niche, too, didn’t you?”
“Oh, yes.” Dr. Womble nodded. “It was the least I could do. I wasn’t able to save Jeff, you see. He was so unhappy—the estrangement from his family, the ruin of his intended career. The loneliness—he assumed no one would want a relationship with someone who had a prison record, and wouldn’t give anyone chance to change his mind.”
“The police report said he was killed by accident while cleaning his gun.”
“And even I know better than to take that at face value. No, it was suicide, and I failed to prevent it.”
“So you paid for his niche.”
“No, actually the college did. I suppose you could say I blackmailed them into it.”
He looked curiously pleased with himself.