A Deadly Snow Fall (25 page)

“Lack of trust. Old Edwin was agreeable to
letting me go first to find it, but he didn’t trust me to bring it
to him. Of course, I played it just right to instill that idea in
his head. He was afraid I’d steal it and publish it myself. Edwin
trusted no one.”

The Chief groaned. James shifted his feet and
I just sat there incredulous to think how this seemingly harmless
woman could twist people around her finger and wondering if we’d
ever know the real truth. Chief motioned for Emily to continue.

“By the time I arrived at the Monument, I had
a half hour to climb and get ready for the old miser. I even,
briefly, began to feel sorry for him. But that wasted feeling
quickly passed. The man had caused me years of misery so he
deserved what he got, snow or not.”

“Get back to the axe, Emily.”

Emily smiled her most ingratiating smile at
Chet. “Waiting for the old man, I reached around and felt the axe
in my pack and wondered if I, like Lizzie Borden, could give her
father forty whacks.”

“Emily!”

“Sorry, Chief. It was very dark. No lights
around the top since the town budget slashed them. Used to be so
nice looking up at the beacon glowing over the town every night.
However, strangely enough, there was a full moon that night and
even though the snow was still falling, it managed to shine through
faintly. Like a weak spotlight hidden in the shadows, it passed
through my mind that it would be fun to pretend that I was Edward
Granger. I could speak to Edwin in a deep voice and really scare
the beans out of him. He was so easy to frighten.” Emily smiled but
the Chief frowned.

That’s when it occurred to me that it must
have been Emily who dropped the cement block and lobbed the rock at
poor old Edwin. Murder attempts or simply harassment? Don’t you
just hate it when someone reads your mind? This time, however, it
was not the spooky Eloise but Emily.

“If I may digress for a moment, Chet, I must
confess to dropping the cement block from the roof of the
Canterbury Tales Leather Shop and throwing the rock across
Commercial Street at the old miser, but I only meant to scare him.
I wasn’t trying to kill him, just unnerve the silly old man. I used
to play softball in school and I was pretty good. I did scrape his
nose with the rock although that was just pure luck. Never make it
to the Red Sox, I guess.”

She looked directly at the Chief knowing he
was an avid Red Sox fan and this might have been just a
lighthearted moment among friends, but for the true nature of the
scene that Emily was directing like a professional.

“What did you do to Edwin, Emily, up in that
cold tower?” I could tell that the Chief’s reserve of energy was
growing thin. It was almost two in the afternoon and none of us had
had our lunch.

“I heard the old bat huffing and puffing and
groaning. Then, after a good, long time, he was there, at the top
of the stairs. He didn’t see me in the deep shadows. Quite frankly,
Chet, I had expected that the old man would die on his way up and
save me the trouble. I knew immediately that I couldn’t use the axe
on his ugly egg head. I thought about simply jumping out of the
shadows and yelling BOO!”

“So, you didn’t hit him with your axe?”

“No, Chet, I did not. In the darkness, when I
first arrived, I went to adjust the axe because the handle was
sticking into my back. I rested the backpack on the ledge and
removed it and that was when I heard something fall. I reached over
the ledge but it had dropped further than my arm could reach. Then
I remembered the large Limburger cheese I’d purchased at Souza’s
that morning. Well, no time to search for it then, so I adjusted
the axe and slipped further into the shadows. One look at the axe
and I knew that I couldn’t split that man’s head like kindling.
Even filled with hate as I was.”

I looked at James and wordlessly, by holding
my nose, reminded him of the disgusting smell we’d encountered up
in the tower. He grinned and nodded knowingly. Limburger cheese, of
course.

“Edwin stopped on the next to top step. He
was gasping for breath and clutching at his heart. He let out a
terrible gasp and a kind of gurgle.” Emily stopped talking. No one
spoke.

Emily slipped back into her old, sweet, pink
and white persona. “After all the misery he’d caused my mother and
me, I suddenly found myself feeling sorry for the miserable old
miser. Imagine that?”

Frozen in our seats, we remained like marble
statues.

“I moved out of the shadows and he recoiled
in fear. I suppose he thought it was Granger’s ghost. He shot out
both hands in an attempt to push me away from him and in so doing
lost his balance. Down he went banging into the wall, bouncing on
the steps, hitting the banister, like a plastic toy, tumbling and
rolling. Suddenly, I was racing after the miserable old man’s
falling body.” Emily’s voice increased in volume and grew shaky.
“After all, even though I hated him he was my father and I had to
do something. Not that I expected him to be alive after the first
few hits against the stone wall or the metal steps. I think I heard
bones breaking but never a word from him. No screams so he must
have been quickly dead. But still….”

The Chief stared at Emily, his look seeming
to alternate between compassion for Edwin and confusion as to how
he would handle so peculiar a case. We all drew in a huge,
collective breath and waited. How could any of us have expected a
third possibility? Not suicide and not murder. Edwin Snow had died
by accident?

“There is nothing more deceptive than an
obvious fact,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock
Holmes.

“When he hit those jagged broken steps that
I’d carefully maneuvered around and evidently he had as well on his
way up, he sort of catapulted forward and flew headlong onto the
cement floor at the bottom of the steps. I froze in place at the
top of the final stretch of stairs. I watched him land squarely on
the top of his Humpty Dumpty head. His skull cracked loudly. Inside
the icy narrow tower, I heard that crack reverberate off of the
granite walls.” Emily slumped in the chair.

With her last words, the sun disappeared as
if on cue. Dark clouds rolled across the sky blotting out the light
and, off in the distance, a rumble of thunder punctuated Emily’s
astonishing story.

The Chief was the first to speak. “What did
you do then, Emily?”

“When I finally reached him, he had no pulse.
So, I dragged him outside and through the snow and left him there
like a broken doll. I watched as the snow increased, covering his
body in a white shroud. Then, I cleaned up the blood at the foot of
the stairs with buckets of snow. I’d found both a bucket and a
broom there and between the two, I left the entryway as clean as a
whistle. Wouldn’t want Bill to be troubled by such a mess.”

“Chief, may I ask Emily just one more thing?”
I asked and the Chief nodded.

“Emily, I assume that your mother sent you
here to see if you could win over your father and I am sorry that
he made it so difficult for you. I just wonder if you might satisfy
my curiosity,” I turned around to take in the other faces there,
“and I am sure, that of many others in town who have heard the
story. Why did your mother, Rosita Gonsalves, leave Edwin Snow at
the altar?”

“Mother did not leave that miserable old coot
at the altar. He rejected her. When she told him the night of their
rehearsal dinner at the best restaurant in town in the day, The
Captain Winslow Tavern, that she was pregnant with his child, he
nearly tore her head off. He didn’t want children because he was
afraid of passing his genes along. Well, at the time he didn’t know
about genes, but he was sure that his father and he had some kind
of bad blood that made them mean and he didn’t want any child to
suffer as he had. My mother had brought out the good in him but he
feared that the bad blood would be passed on to a child. Thus,
there must be no offspring. Of course, it was too late for Mother;
I was already started. What was she to do? She ran. She went to
Bill’s house and he took her in because he’d loved her since they
were children. He tried to convince her to go away with him, but
she was so confused and hurt she just needed to get far away from
the town. She decided to make a clean break, have her baby in a
distant city and do her best to care for the child Edwin had
rejected.”

I needed verification of my theory of why
Edwin showed up for a wedding and faced a church full of guests who
he knew would see no bride that day. “Emily, did he ever tell you
why he showed up for his own wedding knowing that Rosita would not
be there to marry him?”

“Don’t look so puzzled, dear. There’s a
simple explanation. The man was desperate. No one liked him and he
didn’t have the talent for making them like him. My mother had but
she was gone. He had driven her away. So, and here I am guessing
because I never asked him, he decided to show up and appear to be
left at the altar. He figured that the town’s pity was, at least,
a, shall we say, caring emotion. No matter how much they disliked
him, only completely heartless people would fail to feel sorry for
the deserted man.”

Just as I’d seen it in my mind’s eye. Poor,
poor lonely, unloved Edwin.

The Chief pulled himself together, took a
deep drink of coffee and then stood and came around his desk until
he was looking down on the tiny woman dwarfed by the large chair.
His business-like demeanor spoke volumes.

“Thank you, Emily. I want to believe your
story, but first I need to see that axe of yours. Just in case it
has evidence of blood on it. I’m afraid we will have to hold you
overnight until we check that out. Where is that axe now,
Emily?”

“Gone to sea.”

“What? You threw it into the sea? Why? Do you
realize that that just compounds our case against you? We have to
prove that you did not split Edwin Snow’s head with it.”

“I guess you will just have to trust my word
based on all the years you’ve known me then, won’t you, Chet? I can
assure you that I did not use the axe, but I just wanted to toss it
away anyway.”

“Where did you toss it, Emily? The wharf? The
beach behind your shop? Just pinpoint the location and we will go
and look for it.”

“I tossed it onto the fishing trawler that
came in that night. After I left the body, I headed down to the
wharf and watched them pull in and tie up. After it seemed that
everyone had gone to bed on the trawler, and a few of the local men
had gone up the wharf headed home, I tossed it onto the deck. I
watched it kind of bounce and then disappear under some piled up
boxes. I suppose I needed to relieve the stress the fall had caused
me. I felt much better after I tossed it.”

“Damn, Emily, I have to make a case to try
and save your neck and you are not making it easy for me, now are
you?”

“Guess not, Chet. Sorry. Will they let me
take Eloise to prison with me, Chief?”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Emily spent the night in a cell made
comfortable with a plump down pillow, sheets and quilts supplied by
me from the inn. James and I looked in on her later to find her
sleeping like an untroubled baby. The Chief had sent James to put a
padlock on the Fairies in the Garden shop and a sign saying,
“Closed for Repairs
.
” James and I went back to the inn and I
made a quick pasta carbonnara for our supper. Sitting over tea and
pumpkin ginger ice cream I’d made in my new electric ice cream
maker, we reviewed the astounding day.

“Do you believe her, James?”

“I’m just not sure, but if the axe is ever
located it will be checked for blood. All the fishing trawler
captains have been notified to look for it. Meantime, the floor
just inside the door to the monument will be checked with a special
light that picks up blood even after it’s scrubbed away with even
the strongest cleaner. If Emily’s story is proved credible after
these checks, then the next step will be up to her lawyer.”

“Has her mother been notified, James? Poor
Rosita; it will be so tragic for her to hear what her daughter did
as a reaction to her long desperate need to know her true
father.”

“The Chief will be calling her tomorrow. You
did a great job, Liz, despite my concerns for your safety.” The
remainder of the evening was comforting for us both, needless to
say. Then, we too slept like untroubled, if not babies then at
least, successful investigators.

It was only later the next day that I
remembered the one more thing I had figured out that I needed to
tell James. I reached him at the police station. “Hi. What’s up,
lovely Liz?’

“James, remember Mary talking about the
ghosts in Ned’s house?”

“Sure, burned the buggers to cinders didn’t
that nasty fire?”

“As you and the arson squad are still
questioning who started it, if not how it started, I think I have
the answer.”

“The ghosts themselves. Playing with matches,
love?”

“No. I seriously believe it was Mary. She
believes in ghosts and knew that Aunt Libby sent them from the inn
to the Snow house.”

“Listen to you. A ghost believer yourself,
now. And the will o’ the wisp and the mysterious pookah horses of
Ireland, as well, I assume. Not to mention, Big Foot.”

“Get a grip, James. Mary was so pleased when
the Snow house burned. Well, not pleased to see the grand old place
go, but pleased that the fire was a funeral pyre for the so-called
ghosts. And no, I do not now believe in ghosts. I am simply
reporting what was said to me. I know also that Emily told her that
burning was the next best way to rid a place of ghosts. Exorcism
being the number one way, but burning being just as effective, Mary
set fire to the Snow house. I’m very sure of it. Probably too late
for a confession, however.