34

One day we are in the busy scene of life and the next we are spoken of only as the things that were.

James Lorin Chapin
Private Journal, Lincoln, 1848

The continual succession of funerals in Old West Church was spoiling the Christmas spirit, just as people were trying to whip up their lagging enthusiasm for another annual orgy of festive insanity. George Tarkington’s funeral was followed almost immediately by Eloise Baxter’s. Eloise was found dead of kidney poisoning by a neighbor who noticed that her house was still snowbound long after the snow had stopped. The news of her death sped around the parish house during the Christmas Fair and cast a pall over the bright booths and the counters piled with home-baked food and potted plants and hand-knitted baby blankets. It was not so much shock that people felt anymore as a kind of numbness. It had been obvious to everyone that Eloise had been in peril for some time. Lately her trips to the dialysis machine in Boston had been increased to three every week.

Geneva Jones was beside herself with remorse. Geneva had been Eloise’s best friend. She stood behind the table of homemade Christmas decorations and berated herself to Barbara Fenster. “I didn’t call her. Oh, why didn’t I call her? My nieces and nephews were with me, and I was busy, but I certainly could have called her.”

Barbara struggled impatiently with one of Betsy Bucky’s crocheted candle ornaments. “Was it the storm? Oh, I wish we had known. Charlie could have driven her to the hospital.”

But Mary Kelly shook her head. “No, it wasn’t the storm. Ed Bell says she just didn’t want to go on. She’d had enough. She gave up before the snow began to fall. Look, Barbara, I think you’re supposed to tie them on. What a pest.”

“Oh, aren’t they darling!” cried Mabel Smock, pouncing on Betsy’s handiwork. “I’ll take six.”

Flo Terry went from the Christmas Fair straight to her husband’s office in the Town Hall and told him about Eloise. “You’ve got to do something,” she said to Pete. “It’s a plague. It’s catching. It’s never going to stop.”

“What can I do?” said Pete helplessly. “I can’t arrest a dead woman for failing to go to the hospital.”

“But some of those people were murdered in cold blood. Remember what you told me about Carl Bucky?”

“I only said what Homer Kelly said.” Pete looked gloomily at his wife. “He said Carl’s wife fed him to death. You want me to arrest Betsy Bucky? You want me to go over there and knock on her door and say, ‘Sorry, madam, I’m taking you in on suspicion of being a good cook?’”

“What about Arlene Pott?” said Flo relentlessly. “Arlene was murdered in her bed.”

“Well, that’s right,” agreed Peter solemnly. “And her husband is now serving a life sentence in Walpole State Prison. If this were Florida, they’d execute him with a lethal injection. Would that satisfy you? Why don’t you go live in Florida?”

“That’s two,” said Flo, determined to carry on, holding up a third finger. “And Rosemary Hill, she was a suicide.”

“That’s true. The poor woman was suffering from cancer of the bowel.”

“Four, Phil Shooky. Five, Thad Boland. Six, Agatha Palmer. Seven, Percy Donlevy. Eight, Bill Molyneux. Nine, Claire Bold. Ten, George Tarkington. Eleven, Eloise Baxter. Eleven people in Old West Church since September! What if it never stops? Suppose it goes on and on until there aren’t any parishioners left?”

“Well, then they could use the church for a bowling alley,” said Peter heartlessly. “Or the Baptists could take over. Why not?”

But Flo’s nagging wasn’t the only pressure on Peter Terry. One day the editor of the local paper, the Nashoba Bee, called him up.

“It’s just these obituaries, that’s all. So damned many of them. I had a letter the other day, a letter to the editor, only I suppressed it. Some fundamentalist wanted to know why all the humanists were dying off. I think she was hinting it was a judgment of God. But, you know, I can’t help but wonder myself if something’s wrong. Do you think all those people passed away from natural causes?”

“You’re just like my wife,” said Peter, leaning lazily back in his chair. “She thinks somebody’s trying to wipe out Old West Church systematically. You know, picking them off one by one, until everybody’s gone.”

“Well, maybe she’s right. I have a suspicious nature myself. I just thought I’d ask.”

“Well, don’t you worry. I’m looking into it,” and then Peter hung up the phone and opened his desk drawer and took out his lunch and ate it thoughtfully.

The undertaker, too, was jogging his elbow. Ralph E. Benbow was a clever and observant man, and a certain similarity among the corpses assigned to his care had not escaped him. Five of them—Agatha Palmer, Bill Molyneux, Phil Shooky, Thad Boland, and Eloise Baxter—had been marked with pinpricks in the same places on their right arms, just above their wrists on the inside.

“Eloise Baxter, too?” said Peter, surprised. “But she died from her own poisons, didn’t she? Because she couldn’t get to the dialysis machine in that big snowstorm? Or else she was tired of the whole thing, that’s the rumor. I was there in her house afterward, and I can tell you there wasn’t any hypodermic needle anyplace in that house.”

“Well, maybe somebody else administered a fatal dose of something,” said Ralph Benbow.

“In the middle of the snowstorm? But there weren’t any footprints going and coming, just ours and that neighbor woman’s, the one who discovered the body.”

“Maybe somebody came in during the first part of the storm, and finished her off and went away again, and then the storm went on and the footprints were covered with fresh snow. She had a Bible, too, isn’t that right? Like Agatha Palmer and Phil Shooky?”

Peter was feeling more and more unsettled. There had even been discreet inquiries from a couple of insurance investigators, who had wanted to be reassured that their policyholders had perished of natural causes. The Paul Revere Insurance Company had gone so far as to hold back its first payment to Judy Molyneux because of “unresolved difficulties.” Outraged, Judy had stamped into Pete’s office demanding a signed statement, and then she had stamped out again, heading for the hospital and a signature from Dr. Spinney. Judy was really mad.

As a police chief, Peter Terry was no ball of fire. But now, after all this prodding, he sought out Homer Kelly in the basement of Flo’s library and asked him what he thought about the eleven funerals in the Old West Church.

Homer professed himself ignorant as a newborn babe. He didn’t know what was going on. A lot of coincidences, as far as he could make out.

“But they keep happening. Do you think they will ever stop? This parade to the graveyard? My wife is giving me a hard time. She thinks I should do something about it. But what can I do? Stand up in church in my uniform and wag my finger and say, ‘Naughty, naughty’?”

“Oh, I suspect it’s all over,” said Homer uncomfortably, and Pete thanked him and apologized for interrupting him in the course of his researches, and went away.

But Homer wasn’t altogether sure the continuous procession to the cemetery had come to an end. There was still one member left alive in the Merciful Society of the Blessed Dead—Ed Bell. What if Ed were sick too? Would Ed Bell be found asleep one of these mornings, so profoundly asleep that he couldn’t be waked up?

Homer cornered him the next Sunday after church and asked him point-blank. “Listen here, how are you?”

“Me?” said Ed, looking at Homer with surprise. “Oh, fine, I’m just fine. How are you?”

“How am I?” Homer was nonplussed. “Well, as a matter of fact, I haven’t been feeling too well lately.” Homer put a pitiful hand on his shirtfront. “Tendency to, you know, digestive upsets. Belching, that kind of thing.”

“Belching?” Ed tapped Homer sympathetically on the necktie and told him about his own prescription for excessive belching, a mixture of baking soda and whiskey. “Sure cure,” he said wisely. “And your good wife? She’s well, I hope?”

Then Ed turned away, and Homer watched him move among the after-church crowd, while faces lit up at his approach, and hands reached out. None of those good people had the least idea that Ed was a fellow conspirator in the deaths of all those longtime members of the congregation. Suddenly Homer felt his insides clench and tighten, his sphincters squeeze shut, his digestive apparatus convulse in constipated spasm. Everything was rigidifying, coalescing. Peristalsis had abruptly ceased.

Homer groaned. He knew what was happening. It was a physical response on the part of his body to the new strictures he was laying on his mind, in his determination that no one must find out about the existence of the Merciful Society of the Blessed Dead. From now on he must make a mighty effort to keep his suspicions bottled up, to become a monument of impassive stone. Eyes, mouth, all bodily orifices must be sealed. No one must guess Ed’s part in the long succession of funerals.

“Oh, Lord,” whimpered Homer, clutching his vitals, picturing Ed Bell sitting in the dock while some hardened prosecutor for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts accused him of multiple murder.

Poor Ed, the angel of mercy, the saint of Old West Church!