Only in New England : the story of a gaslight crime Read online

  "Stingy?" Ed held out a fist. "I recall one time I missed their newspaper. End of the month she came down to the printer's office and demanded two cents off her bill. She used to go down to Thorn's and buy stale fish. She was tight, miserly, mean, saving, scroungey, nickel-pinching and grasping."

  Ed's wife protested, "She couldn't have been that bad."

  "She wasn't one of these sweet-type mother tyrants," Ed assured. "She was the kind who peed carbolic acid."

  "Ed!"

  "But she had brains."

  Luke said, looking significantly at his watch. "Tell about the murder."

  "She got her brains knocked out," Ed said'.

  "Where?" The abruptness of his statement had brought me upright from a chair.

  "Cellar stairs," Ed said. "Here, I'll show you."

  We went through the vestibule to the dining room, through a pantry into the kitchen. One of those wide old-fashioned kitchens roomy enough for three or four rocking chairs in addition to a

  six-foot sink, a king-size range and a red-and-gold coffee mill.

  There were doors to a back store room, a back washroom and a side porch. But the one that fascinated me was a small, heavy door at the right side of the kitchen. It was reinforced with iron bands, and the hinges had the look of Revolutionary War metal-smithing. The handle was an iron hoop.

  "This is the oldest part of the house." Ed said. He tapped on the door. "Timbering's hand hewn."

  He swung the door open and switched on a nearby kitchen light, and we looked down.

  Steep and narrow steps descended into a well of darkness. A smell of must came up the steps. An exhalation of raw earth and cobwebs and stale air more than faintly forbidding. Streaked with shadow, the wall of the stairway revealed primitive masonry— lumpy cobblestone imbedded in cracked plaster. On the open side a wooden handrail reached up out of the dark like a bony arm.

  Ed said, "She got it coming up the steps."

  "When?"

  "Spring of 1911."

  "I mean, time of day."

  "Evening."

  "What was the weapon?"

  "They found a heavy bag." Ed shaped a pouch with his hands. "With blood on it."

  "So she was sandbagged!" I was surprised by the unusual device.

  "Bag of lead. Heavy buckshot."

  "Who did it?"

  "Nobody saw it done. But suspicion fell right off on Earnest Bridewell."

  "The State Senator."

  "There were other people, too," Ed said slowly. "The case had angles. Four or five parties were suspected. If you—"

  "Ed," his wife interrupted, "these gentlemen want to get up early in the morning and go fishing."

  Ed closed the cellar door. He said, "Goodnight, boys. See you in the morning."

  CHAPTER 3

  We did not get up early in the morning and go fishing. I was awakened by a summoning aroma of bacon and eggs. The gloom suggested five A.M. Then I saw the watery windows and heard the downpour. My wrist dial pointed to nine:ten.

  We ate breakfast with the lights on. When it rains at the shore, it really rains. From the window I could barely see the boxwood hedge. The dooryard was a lake. The April garden resembled greenery afloat at the bottom of an aquarium.

  Ed came in from the barns, looking glum. "Whoosh," he said, taking off oilskins. "You can hear the surf a mile away. I'm sorry, Luke."

  Martin glared at the window. "I'm going back to bed." He stamped up the stairs, fuming. Never frustrate the Compleat Angler.

  Ed told me I was welcome to his library, and he showed me into a small sitting room behind the dining room. He said it used to be the sewing room. Only room in the house he had tampered with and done over. His tamperings were tasteful. Pine paneling. Bookshelves. Fish and wildlife prints. A rack of guns. A touch of Abercrombie and Fitch in a mansion out of Currier and Ives.

  When he excused himself (chores), I settled down with a book on shotguns. But I couldn't become less interested. The room was comfortable, but with the gray rain blowing against the windows, I felt shut in, uneasy. I thought of donning oilskins and walking down to the Center for a look-see. No. Nothing is twice as depressing as a shore resort out of season unless it be a rundown shore resort out of season.

  And abruptly I was thinking: "Bag of shot. That's an odd weapon!"

  Ed and his wife were busy somewhere out back. I roamed into the dining room, into the queer front vestibule, into the parlor.

  In the rainy gloom the parlor had somehow contracted. The black marble fireplace monopolized the wall space. The sofa crowded the chairs. There were too many bits and pieces in the whatnot. The gramophone's absurd morning glory thrust its neck out obtrusively.

  Ed Brewster had left the family album on the marbletop drum table beside the sofa. I picked up the album and sat down. As I did so, all the furniture seemed to crowd around me. When I thrust out a leg, Abby Bridewell's rocker kicked me in the shin. The Eye over the mantel, protuberant, staring, watched me. I opened the album to a Brady-type photo of Abby Bridewell flanked by Earnest and Lionel, and three more people crowded into the overstuffed room.

  I could almost see them—Abby in her matriarchal chair— Earnest at the fireplace—Lionel replacing me on the sofa. Time: 3:00 P.M. They have just completed one of those Victorian repasts that went from soup to nuts, complete with mutton and dumplings, boiled potatoes, ham simmered in milk, fried eggplant, glazed carrots, boiled coffee, spiced pears and a glutinous floating island. Weighted with custard, calories and contention, they make preparations to digest the surfeit.

  The old lady, smelling of mothballs and cologne, begins to rock. Earnest palms a pepsin tablet and loosens his satin vest. Lionel, working a regurgitative toothpick, looks from one to the other combatively. As though by mutual agreement the argument begins.

  Earnest thinks they ought to buy a car. It doesn't look right for a man in his position to be going around in a buggy.

  Abby: What's wrong with a buggy?

  Earnest: You don't see many buggies in the State capital today, Mother. All the important people are driving automobiles.

  Abby: Is that what makes them important? Dah!

  Earnest: Mother, please!

  Abby: Anyway, you're only there while the legislature is in session.

  Earnest: But some of those people come here every summer. If only for looks, we ought to have an auto.

  Abby: And buy gasoline?

  Earnest: We can get an electric.

  For once Lionel agrees with his elder brother. Certainly they should have a car. Up by the Light one of the summer people has one for sale. A red sports job with brass headlamps. A genuine bargain.

  Abby: You don't know how to drive.

  Lionel: I could learn, couldn't I?

  Earnest: Why don't you keep out of this? (To his mother): We could get a chauffeur.

  Abby: And double the cost? No!

  Lionel and Earnest: But, Mother!

  Abby: You've each got a good-enough buggy, and there's the surrey for social affairs.

  Earnest: Look here! I'm getting sick and tired of having to debate every expenditure with you, Mother. You know our position in this community. That surrey is positively antiquated!

  Lionel: Have it your way, Mother, we'd go to town in an ox cart.

  Abby: Thanks to me, you don't go on foot. Either of you.

  Earnest: Look here! Don't compare me to him! I'm getting sick and tired of having to answer for Lionel's arrears.

  Lionel: Whose arrears?

  Earnest: Yours!

  Lionel: I suppose it was the hotel that ate up all the profits of the kelp business last year.

  Earnest: I suppose it was the kelpers ate up all the hotel profits last season!

  Abby: Now don't get your bowels in an uproar. You're neither of you showing a profit this year, and there's no use talking. You'll get no automobile out of me!

  Or perhaps they debated finance on a higher plane. Stocks, bonds, debentures, percentages, mortgages. Or the cu
rrent price of eggs. Given any difference of opinion, and contention in that close little parlor must have been inevitable.

  Here they sat, those three, throughout the long Sunday afternoons (no work on the Sabbath for Sabbatarians)—throughout the longer winter evenings—evening after evening, winter after winter, year after year.

  To be sure, Earnest Bridewell repaired to the State Senate for a few weeks annually. Lionel Bridewell remained away from home on occasion. But back they came, obedient pins to the maternal magnet. Or it might be closer to the truth to describe the magnetism as financial. Certainly love was not the attraction. The old homestead was at once a treasury and a trap.

  How they must have rubbed each other raw in this isolated house on the edge of this isolated community. People with no intellectual attainments to provide mental escapes. People without recourse to such modern opiates as television, movies, or telephone. People who did not have the abstract whipping-boys we enjoy today—the image in the White House—Atom bombs and Outer Space—the convenient devils of Communism and Soviet Russia. None of these satisfying outlets was open to the Bridewells for an escape into the vicarious or for the venting of spleen.

  Nor were they given to the reliefs of arts and handicrafts, nor even the petty household tasks that constitute occupational therapy for the average mortal. Nine months of the year (the hotel being closed) Lionel Bridewell toiled not, neither did he spin. Earnest, self-important, was above manual labors. Large frog in small puddle, he doubtless considered such homely occupations as the shoveling of manure or the mending of nets as beneath his dignity and station. As for octogenarian Abby, it seemed she spent most of each day in her rocker, playing monarch of all she surveyed. The house, I would learn, was served by an "outside couple"—a man-of-all-work, and a Cinderella who did the cooking.

  So here sat Abby Bridewell and her sons—three minds with but a single thought. Money. Here the old lady thumbed through her account books, engrossed with balances, interest rates, sums, percentages. I could imagine her with pad and avaricious pencil, adding, multiplying, figuring.

  I could imagine the sons also doing some figuring. Importunate Earnest juggling investments in his head. Covetous Lionel quietly calculating. How many dollars added up to a trip to Paris, and if

  your mother were four-score years and some, what were the estimates on her life expectancy?

  And how many pounds of lead are in a bag of shot? When did that problem enter into the mental arithmetic?

  The calculator must have been a devious and offbeat introvert to come up with such a modus operandi. Of course, matricide in itself is a peculiarly abnormal crime. And one particularly rare in America where, for all the high incidence of juvenile and adult delinquency, the Mother Image has been the Whistler version, persistent even in a day when Mother may emerge from a beauty parlor looking like Marilyn Monroe.

  But to sandbag Mother! Why this brutal assault and battery when a bag of shot could at least have been fired from a gun? Certainly possession of buckshot implied possession of a shotgun, and it seemed equally obvious that a shotgun was a quicker, surer and more impersonal means for an execution.

  Gunfire meant a blast? Keep the buckshot in the bag by way of a silencer? But if murder had to be done, and silence were the desideratum, why not cyanide or arsenic—rat poison being handy to any country home—or asphyxiation while she slept (Mother forgot to turn off the gas; it was an accident)—or even, as she dozed, the gentle application of a smothering sofa pillow? But to catch her toiling up the stairs and hit her over the head! A Lizzie Borden might have given second thought to such an ambush. At least Mr. Borden was asleep when the axe fell, and Mrs. Borden was only Lizzie's stepmother.

  I turned up Earnest Bridewell's picture in the album—the one wherein he stood in oratorical stance. While I was studying the portrait, Ed Brewster looked in from the vestibule.

  "Sitting here in the dark?" He flicked on the lights. "Look, don't hesitate to use the house facilities. It's a dismal day."

  "Time on my hands," I said, and held up the album. "Just browsing."

  "I thought you might like to see the barn," Ed said. "There's some interesting old vehicles and sleighs out there. I got to go out and get a casting rod for Mr. Martin, case the weather clears and he'd like to try for stripers tonight. Like a breath of air?"

  It sounded refreshing. Ed rigged me up in oilskins, and we went out through the kitchen. As I followed Ed out to the porch a gust of icy rain smote me in the face, and the wind wrenched the doorknob from my hand. The door flew wide, admitting the gale into the kitchen. Dish towels blew and the morning paper went sailing over the range. I had to struggle to close the door. It was that kind of day.

  "Yesterday it's April. Today it's March. Typical Point weather," Ed said. "You can't count on spring until July."

  But there was a salt tang in the blowing rain—better than the stuffy staleness of the Bridewell parlor. Earnest with his bag of shot had got me down.

  I like old barns, and this one was a museum. While Ed hunted for the surf-casting gear, I roamed around in the cavernous gloom, peering at the ghostly contraptions and conveyances of a day that had passed away.

  The barn housed a row of empty stables where horse-collars hung from the eaves, massive oxen yokes loomed in dusky corners and the walls were festooned with dangling harness. Beyond the stalls were the period vehicles—an ancient springer wagon, two high-topped buggies, a two-wheel ox cart, the family surrey. Overhead, suspended from high rafters, was a cutter of the type we used to call a Santa-Claus sleigh. And in a far corner was a one-horse shay.

  A sadness lingered over these relics of yesteryear. The horse-collars were motheaten, the harness buckles brown with rust. Dust and decay had brought the conveyances to a standstill. There were no matched bays in the barn, no dobbin to draw the shay. The shay itself had collapsed like the one in the poem. And even that once-famous poem had departed from the national memory. Who recited Whittier any more? Or Longfellow? Or Lowell?

  I went over to inspect the ancient shay.

  Put on your old gray bonnet.

  I picked up a leather feedbag and brushed off the cobwebs. A few dried flakes adhered to the rim of the bucket. Oats. And what had happened to the horse-blanket industry? To the carriage shops? To the wheelwrights, the blacksmiths, the salesmen who peddled buggy-whips, the street cleaners with their push-barrels, and the artisans who made the long-handled brushes?

  Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud . . . ?

  Ed came over. "Did you say something?"

  "If I did, I was thinking out loud ... Do you remember horse-drawn fire engines, Ed?"

  "Sure. They had one here. My old man was a Volunteer."

  "With sparks coming out of the top?"

  "Hell, this Quahog pumper sparked so it once set the Town Hall on fire."

  "Did the Surf and Sand have a beach wagon?"

  "A big yellow one with red wheels."

  "Coast Guard must have used horses, too."

  "You bet. You should have seen them run the surf boat down the beach."

  "I don't see any saddles around the barn. Didn't the Bridewells ever ride?"

  "Lionel used to have a horse. Smart roan with a star forehead. A single-footed pacer."

  I picked up from the floor a heavy loaf of rusty iron with a scrap of leather buckled to its nose.

  "That's a horse-block," Ed said. "The kind they used to throw out of a carriage when they parked the team at the curb."

  "I know." Another piece of an entire civilization gone down history's drain. I handed it to Ed. "It would make quite a weapon, wouldn't it?"

  "It would," Ed said, hefting the weight.

  "But then, why not a plain old-fashioned hammer?"

  "Eh?"

  "I've just been thinking. I've never heard of anyone killed with a bag of shot."

  "Oh, that," Ed said. "Old lady Bridewell."

  "I suppose she was killed for her money?"

  Ed nodded, "T
hat was what the Prosecution claimed. The boys had been trying to get it for a long time, and the old lady was what I guess you'd call adamant."

  "Murder seems the hard way under the circumstances. Close relatives and offspring usually try other means."

  "Well, they did." Ed tugged his nose in recollection. "It all came out after the murder. Lionel, he'd been trying to break the old man's will. Writing to lawyers up in Boston for some years. Threatening a law action. And Earnest, he'd been taking another tack."

  "What was that?"

  "To have the old lady declared unfit to manage the estate. You know, non compost mentis. He'd been working on some sort of gimmick to get his mother committed to an asylum."

  "That's a standard move in that sort of game."

  "Only it didn't work," Ed said. "Neither did Lionel's scheme. Seems old Abby got wise to both attempts, and promised a legal showdown."

  "But at her age why kill her? Wouldn't it have been simpler just to wait for her to die?"

  "Abby Bridewell?" Ed shook his head. "That old lady was too stubborn to die."

  "But she was well over eighty," I said smiling.

  "And on her way to live a hundred," Ed said. "Told everybody she was going to, and she might have done it, to. Like I said, she was stubborn. All her family—the Joneses—was stubborn people."

  "Stubborn?"

  "Well, I'll tell you," Ed said. He dug a pipe from his pocket, sat down on a wagon-step, and motioned me to another. "You never knew people like them. Let me illustrate. . . ."

  CHAPTER 4

  Ed Brewster speaking:

  "One day—this was back some years ago—I'm down to Gil-lion's Wharf. It's a gray November afternoon with a norther making up. Kind of like today. The steamer's there at the far end of the pier, waiting to go at four, and nobody much else except me. I wanted to see the captain, who's gone into town to Smeizer's or somewhere—wanted to give him a special delivery to post for me when he gets to Newport. That's beside the point. The point is, I'm there at the head of the pier, sitting in my car by the deserted taxi stand. I'm a good half hour ahead of sailing time, but I didn't want to miss the captain, who's liable to take off early on a day like that when passengers are unlikely as hen's teeth. Especially with weather building up and a sea running.