15

What does the law protect? … If I avail myself
of it, it may help my sin; it cannot help my virtue.

Journal, March 16, 1842

The Concord police were only mildly interested in the death of Alice Snow. The pathologist’s report that she had died from a traumatic injury to the back of her head accorded so well with the position of her body on the steps of her mobile home that they paid little attention to his insistence that the wound was a rounded cavity, whereas the edges of the steps were sharply right-angled.

Homer made a fuss about it, too. “It didn’t happen on the steps, I tell you. I looked and you looked. There wasn’t any blood on the steps, just on the concrete where she was lying.”

“But you people were all over the place,” said Chief James Flower. “You should have cleared the area. You ought to have known better than let people mill around like that.”

“I suppose I should have. Listen, did you look for something round that somebody could have hit her with? That trailer was full of baubles. Oh, well, I suppose it was taken away by whoever was running across the hillside afterward. Did I tell you about that?”

Flower listened politely to Homer’s description of the movement in the bushes at the time of Alice’s death, and he looked curiously at Ananda Singh when Ananda said he had seen the same thing. It was only when Julian Snow reported his missing two thousand dollars that Chief Flower called in a homicide detective from East Cambridge, who interviewed Ananda With cold courtesy. Had Mr. Singh really picked up his two thousand dollars at Logan Airport, or had he stolen it from Julian Snow?

Fortunately the detective pursued the matter further. At Logan he found a woman teller who remembered the darling boy with the traveler’s checks from the bank in New Delhi.

At once the Cambridge detective lost interest in Ananda Singh. Probably Alice Snow had tripped over her own feet on the trailer steps. Or maybe it had been a simple break-and-enter with accompanying homicide by some crazy person from Walden Pond, some kid looking for drug money. And how would you track down anybody like that?

The detective’s interest flagged, and he went back to the Middlesex County Courthouse, opened a new file in his bulging file drawer, and forgot about Alice Snow.

So Ananda was off the hook. He spent a sparkling Sunday afternoon helping Homer comb the hillside behind Julian Snow’s mobile home. They were looking for a round object that could have been used to kill Alice Snow. They found nothing, only a small tube-shaped piece of rubber. “What is this?” said Ananda, holding it up for Homer to see.

“You mean you don’t know?” Homer was amused. “You want me to explain?”

“Oh, oh, I see.” Embarrassed, Ananda dropped the rubber object and covered it with last year’s leaves. “Perhaps someone made love here,” he said bravely.

“People make love everywhere. In cemeteries, in coal bins, at the North Pole, even on the steep slopes of glacial kettle holes.”

Ananda went on thrashing in the bushes, turning away from Homer. What an innocent child the boy was, thought Homer.

Afterward he passed along to Jimmy Flower the news that he had found nothing on the hillside below Julian Snow’s trailer. Jimmy didn’t pay much attention. Like the Cambridge detective, he too had filed away Alice Snow.

It wasn’t that Jimmy wasn’t interested in her case, it was just that so many other things kept coming up. On the day the final report from East Cambridge came in, there was a four-car accident at Crosby’s corner with three fatalities. There was also a theft from a parked motor vehicle on Walden Street, possession of a class-D substance at the high school, a woman driving under the influence on Route 2, and a runaway horse on Main Street.

The horse was Marjorie Bland’s, and she was deeply apologetic. “Poor old Carmencita, she’s so old, I think she’s senile. She charges at me whenever I open the gate. This time she got away from me. I’m terribly sorry.”

And then there was an embarrassing episode right there on the Milldam, involving a respectable tradesman accused of verbal assault. It was Taylor Baylor, whose shoe store had been part of Concord’s commercial community for thirty years. Taylor’s accuser was the sharp cookie who was buying up the town, the woman called Pink.

“I was walking quietly down the street,” Mimi Pink told the arresting officer indignantly, “when this wild man came up to me and began shouting, accusing me of destroying the town of Concord. He shook me. If my assistant hadn’t come to my rescue, I don’t know what would have happened next.”

And then Taylor Baylor shouted some more and ranted and raved. Officer Shrubsole might have added a charge of resisting arrest, if Taylor hadn’t been an old pal of his from way back. He let the charge go at verbal assault, and Taylor had to appear in court, fuming and unrepentant.

But the thing that was most distracting to the Concord Police Department was the announcement by the Concord Finance Committee that they would not endorse the department’s request for two new cruisers and a ten percent pay increase for everybody in Public Safety.

“It’s the financial crisis in the state,” the chairperson of FinCom explained to Chief Flower. “Local aid has been cut to the bone. At the special town meeting in October we’re going to recommend cuts across the board, in every single department.”

Chief Flower was angry. His retort was barely polite.

“Oh, I don’t blame you,” said the long-suffering chairperson. “Everybody else is mad at us, too. It’s a fiscal crisis in the commonwealth. Of course our local problem is worse because our town holds so much land in conservation. As you know very well, conservation land yields no taxes to support town services. What this town needs is some giant corporation to take over half the open land and start paying taxes through the nose. Just kidding, of course.”

“Jesus,” said Jimmy Flower. “I suppose it’s Henry Thoreau, right? Bunch of starry-eyed idealists want to save some swamp Henry Thoreau stood in up to his neck once upon a time. Well, I wish to hell he’d drowned in it. Damn Henry Thoreau anyway. Pretending to be so independent there at Walden Pond, when all the time he was stealing squash pies from Mrs. Emerson.”

“Apple,” said the chairperson of the finance committee gloomily. “It was apple pies he stole.”

“Apple? It was? I thought it was squash.”