Shortest Day Read online

  The Shortest Day

  Murder at the Revels

  A Homer Kelly Mystery

  Jane Langton

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media Ebook

  Contents

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  Afterword

  Preview: Dead as a Dodo

  Copyright Page

  FOR STEWART GUERNSEY

  So the shortest day came,

  and the year died,

  And everywhere down the centuries

  of the snow-white world

  Came people singing, dancing,

  To drive the dark away.…

  Susan Cooper

  PART ONE

  THE CALL FOR ROOM

  Room, room, brave gallants all!

  Pray give us room to rhyme!

  We’ve come to show activity upon this wintertime.

  Activity of youth, activity of age,

  Such activity as you’ve never seen on stage!

  Saint George and the Dragon

  CHAPTER 1

  O I shall be as dead, mother,

  As stones are in the wall;

  O the stones in the streets, mother,

  Shall sorrow for me all.

  “The Cherry Tree Carol”

  The death of the folk singer from the South was a bitter disappointment to everyone who had bought tickets for the Christmas Revels. Last year, in every performance, he had captivated the audience in Memorial Hall. Middle-aged women were crazy about him. Already this year several women students from the Harvard Business School and another from the Law School had tried to date Henry Shady, even though he had only a fourth-grade education, having spent most of his life excavating bituminous coal in Filbert, West Virginia.

  Mary Kelly was a witness to the accident, or almost a witness. She heard the sound of the approaching car and then the thud and the squeal of brakes. But her back was turned. She was climbing the steps of Memorial Hall on her way to a Revels rehearsal. She whirled around and saw the big Range Rover heave backward and thump down off the body. As the driver burst out of the car she ran down the steps, and both of them bent over the poor kid with the crushed skull.

  It was apparent that he was beyond help. At once Mary recognized the crude country haircut and cheap overcoat belonging to Henry Shady. Sickened with pity, she stood up, then staggered back as the demented driver fell on her, sobbing, and clung to her, choking out the same words over and over, “He ran in front of me. I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t stop.”

  A crowd was gathering. Revels people on their way to the evening rehearsal stopped to see what was going on and gasped in stunned recognition. “Oh, my God, it’s Henry.”

  “Who?”

  “Henry Shady.”

  “Oh, no, not Henry Shady.”

  Mary was still caught in the grip of the sobbing driver. “Look,” she said, trying to speak over his shoulder, “would someone—please call the police? There’s a phone—inside the door.”

  And then all the rest of the Revels people poured out the north door of Memorial Hall and stood in a shocked ring around the body of Henry Shady. A flashlight flickered over his ruined face, someone said “Don’t,” and the light vanished. There was the sound of weeping.

  Mary was frozen in a grim geometrical tableau—she and the driver were a clumsy vertical, Henry Shady was the horizontal, the onlookers were an enclosing circle. Would the police never come? Then the driver loosened his hold on her neck and cried, “Sarah,” and the circle opened to let someone through. “I’m sorry, Sarah,” gasped the driver. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  Sarah Bailey cast one look down at Henry Shady, then reached out her arms to the man whose car had run over him. They stood together in the hush, clinging to each other, rocking a little back and forth, Sarah murmuring like a mother comforting a child.

  Oh, God, how terrible, thought Mary. The poor heartbroken driver must be Morgan Bailey, Sarah’s husband. Sarah was the director of all that was going on in Memorial Hall’s Sanders Theatre; she had discovered Henry Shady in the first place, and invited him northward last year, and made him once again the ornament of this year’s Revels. And now it was Sarah’s own husband who had killed him! No wonder the poor guy kept sobbing and protesting that it wasn’t his fault. “I couldn’t help it, Sarah. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  Thank God, the police cruiser was pulling up at last, followed by an ambulance with its lights flashing.

  The police took the names of witnesses—only one in this case, Mary Kelly. “And I wasn’t really a witness,” said Mary. “I mean, I didn’t really see it when it happened. I just heard the squeal of brakes and the noise of the impact. No”—Mary corrected herself—“the impact and the squeal of the brakes.”

  The officer did not notice the distinction. He asked a few questions of Morgan Bailey, then bundled him into the cruiser with Sarah and drove away, as the body of Henry Shady disappeared in the back of the ambulance.

  The slam of the ambulance door was a note of finality. The circle of onlookers drifted away, whispering, consoling one another, crying a little.

  One of them was Arlo Field. Arlo was supposed to be taking the part of Saint George in the Revels, but he didn’t know if he could handle it or not. He had been thinking of backing out. He was a scientist, not one of your artsy-fartsy kinds of people.

  But now he changed his mind. Sarah had enough troubles. He couldn’t give her one more. Silently he turned away, and then someone touched his arm.

  It was one of the Morris dancers. “Tom says, come back on Friday at the same time. Okay?”

  “Okay,” murmured Arlo. “I’ll be there.”

  In the Cambridge Police Headquarters, on Western Avenue, the sergeant interviewing Morgan Bailey abandoned the severity he usually assumed in handling careless drivers—this one seemed so inconsolable, so tortured by shame and sorrow. Instead of condemning Morgan, Sergeant Hasty did his best to comfort him.

  “It looks to me like an accident, pure and simple. I mean, there was no liquor involved. You’ve got a clean driving record. But the poor guy’s family may want to press charges. I suggest you hire a lawyer.”

  Sarah Bailey thanked him. Morgan tried to thank him, but he was still almost unable to speak.

  Sergeant Hasty reached over to pat his arm. “Have you got a pastor? That would be the best thing. Talk to your priest, or, you know, your minister. Whatever.”

  As it turned out, no action was taken against Morgan Bailey. No one pressed charges. Henry Shady’s mother, down there in Filbert, West Virginia, was prostrated when the local police called her with the news that her youngest son had been killed in a traffic accident in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but it never occurred to her to sue. Mrs. Shady was a simple hill woman. She didn’t have the city sophistication to think in terms of million-dollar litigation. The splendor and might of civilized law practi
ce, the stylized grandeur of suit and countersuit among the prosperous law firms of Boston’s State Street, were entirely out of her ken. Heartsore, she knew only that she would never see her son again.

  CHAPTER 2

  O mortal man, remember well,

  When Christ died on the rood,

  ’Twas for our sins and wicked ways

  Christ shed his precious blood.…

  “Sussex Mummers’ Carol”

  After explaining to the police what she had seen of the accident that killed Henry Shady and what she had not seen, Mary Kelly walked across the Yard to Harvard Square, took the T to the Alewife parking garage, extracted her car, and drove home to Concord to tell the news to her husband, Homer.

  “Christ,” he said, “the poor kid. I remember him from last year. Big young guy, sort of graceful, with a really nice voice? Too bad.” Homer had been making himself a lonely dinner of scrambled eggs and onions. Now he took the pan off the fire and dumped in a couple more eggs.

  Mary slumped into a kitchen chair and put her head in her hands. “You know, there were two or three funny things. I’ve been thinking about them on the way home.”

  “Funny things?”

  “Oh, you know, strange. Why was this guy’s big Range Rover up on the sidewalk? You’d think he would have been driving straight along Kirkland Street when poor Henry suddenly appeared out of the darkness, and then, wham, he would have run into him, so the car would still be right there on the street.”

  Homer swirled the eggs in the pan with a big spoon. “Did anybody ask him about that?”

  “Oh, yes. He said he swerved up over the curb to try to avoid the pedestrian, but the guy dodged the wrong way, so he couldn’t help running into him.”

  Homer held his big spoon in the air and tried to picture the swerving car, the victim trying to jump out of the way, the fatal mistake. “Sounds plausible, I guess.”

  “I know, it sounds all right, but it’s hard to see it happening. Homer, the eggs!”

  Smoke poured from the frying pan. Homer yanked it off the fire and tried to stir the blackened mass of eggs and onions. They reeked of burning. “Goddamnit,” he said, “it’s your fault for distracting the master chef with your horrible stories.”

  “Here, Homer, let me do it.” Mary took out another pan and found an onion in the basket under the counter.

  “Well, go ahead, what else was there?” said Homer grumpily, backing out of the way.

  “What else?”

  “You said there were two or three funny things.”

  “Oh, right. Another thing was the order of events. I mean, hearing the accident with my back turned, I think the thud came first and then the squeal of brakes. You’d think it would be the other way around. You know, the squeal of brakes and then the sound of the impact.” Mary turned and looked anxiously at her husband. “Wouldn’t you, Homer?”

  Homer laughed. “Listen, my darling, who is it around here who’s always being blamed for acting like the lieutenant detective he used to be instead of a nice respectable teacher at an ancient institution of higher learning? Me, that’s who. And now here you go, probing and prying and drawing crazy conclusions on no evidence at all. Forget it. It’s bad enough, that poor kid coming up from the country to nasty old Massachusetts to be slaughtered on the street by some overeducated Ph.D. Let it go. After all, you’re a nice respectable teacher at the same institution. It’s none of your business.”

  “Right,” said Mary, slamming down the frying pan. “I’ll just tie on my apron and stay home and make my husband’s supper.”

  “Well, excuse me.”

  “Oh, shut up, Homer, just shut up.”

  In the fuming atmosphere of the smoky kitchen and the emotional backwash of the tragic scene she had witnessed, Mary forgot the third thing until early the next morning. Then, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and regretting the darkness of early December, she remembered how good it had been to wake up in the same room only two months ago. On an October dawn the bedroom would be flooded with autumn sunlight, and often a squadron of noisy migrating geese flew over the house to land on the river.

  Mary sat up and poked Homer. “Listen, there was a third thing.”

  “Whumph?” Homer rolled over the other way and pulled the covers over his head.

  “That accident yesterday, there was another odd thing about it.” Mary lay down again and wrapped her arm around Homer. “I heard a bird go over, squawking.”

  Homer burrowed deeper into his pillow and muttered sleepily, “A bird?”

  “I swear it sounded like wild geese flying over the river. I mean, you wouldn’t think there’d be geese in Cambridge, would you, Homer? Right now, in the darkest days of the year?”

  CHAPTER 3

  When Joseph was an old man,

  An old man was he,

  He courted Virgin Mary,

  The Queen of Galilee,

  He courted Virgin Mary,

  The Queen of Galilee.

  As Joseph and Mary

  Were in an orchard good,

  There were apples, there were cherries,

  As red as any blood,

  There were apples, there were cherries,

  As red as any blood.

  Then Mary spoke to Joseph,

  So meek and so mild,

  “Joseph, gather me some cherries,

  For I am with child.

  Joseph, gather me some cherries,

  For I am with child.”

  Then Joseph flew in anger,

  In anger flew he,

  “Let the father of the baby

  Gather cherries for thee,

  Let the father of the baby

  Gather cherries for thee”…

  “The Cherry Tree Carol”

  It was a crisis. Henry Shady’s death was a terrible shame, but there was no time to mourn. The hole in the program for this year’s Revels had to be filled.

  Sarah Bailey and Tom Cobb sat on one of the benches at the front of the mezzanine in Sanders Theatre, staring at the stage. Around Sanders all the immense volumes and compartmented spaces in Memorial Hall were empty. Sarah and Tom were alone in the building.

  The bare stage was unlit. The marble figures of James Otis and Josiah Quincy gleamed pale at either side, but there was no life in their changeless gestures. Otis clutched a marble document labeled STAMP ACT, Quincy handed a diploma to no one in particular. The gold-and-scarlet Harvard shields praising VERITAS at the back of the stage glowed only dimly, and the carved wooden faces of the bears and foxes above the stage were noncommittal. It hardly seemed possible that a horde of dancers and singers would soon be capering and singing all over the dusty wooden stage, while a host of fiddlers fiddled and a crowd of pipers piped and seven trumpeters tooted their glittering horns, to fill the hall with the promised profusion of Christmas merriment.

  Of course, it wasn’t just the festival of Christmas they would be celebrating, it was also the winter solstice. Some of the Revels themes had nothing to do with the birth of Jesus. They were pagan stories, they were magic, they were ancient rites challenging the cold of winter in its darkest time, awakening the growth and greenness of the spring. And some were wassails praising the joys of good brown ale, and some were haunting entreaties to the wild deer in the forest, appeals by the hunters to the hunted to allow themselves to be killed. And always there was the stamping and leaping of the Morris dancers, which had no connection with the Christian nativity at all.

  But this year it wasn’t enough. Tom Cobb was alarmed. What if they had to cancel the whole thing? If the program fell apart, there would be no Revels this year, no celebration of Christmas or the solstice or brown ale or the hunting of the deer, no Morris dancing. The death of Henry Shady had upset the entire schedule of dances, carols, choruses, children’s songs and games, and the whole cluster of episodes centering around the story of Saint George.

  Tom looked sideways at Sarah, his codirector. After Shady’s death, how was she holding up? Sarah had
been a sort of foster mother to Shady; in fact, you couldn’t help wondering if she had been something even warmer and closer. And Henry had worshipped her, anybody could have seen that.

  She seemed all right. But, poor Sarah, she must be walking an emotional tightrope. On the one hand she needed to grieve for Shady, but at the same time she had to comfort her fool of a husband, who had run over the poor kid from West Virginia. Her eyes were red, as though she had wept her share of tears, but otherwise she seemed like herself. Thank God, because there was nobody else who could fill her shoes.

  Tom assessed the matter shrewdly. It was true, no one else in the entire Revels company could manage the annual production of the Christmas Revels with anything like Sarah’s high-spirited competence and good judgment, certainly not Tom Cobb, her codirector. Of course, there was always Walter Shattuck, the Old Master, but Walt was no longer interested in running things. He was called the Old Master because he had founded the Revels in the first place, but he wasn’t really old at all, and he had long since stopped acting as general manager. Now his only contribution to the annual celebration was his captivating voice—but that was a great contribution indeed. No one, not even the charismatic young folk singer from West Virginia, could sing like Walt. Now that Henry Shady was dead, they would surely have to fall back on Walt’s spellbinding baritone to fatten their diminished program.

  They had to decide. They had to choose something, and choose it right now—a whole chunk of guaranteed surefire Revels sorcery.

  “We could always do ‘The Cherry Tree Carol’ again,” said Sarah.

  “Oh, God, Sarah, we’ve done it so often before.” Tom broke a chocolate bar in two and offered her a piece.

  Sarah took it hungrily. “But everybody loves ‘The Cherry Tree Carol.’ We’ve got the costumes. We’ve got that girl who took the part of Mary last year, and the guy who does the tree with the cherries growing out of his fingers, and we’ve got Walt to sing the song. And what about you? The way you took the part of Joseph was so perfect.”