The Transcendental Murder Read Online Free Page A

days, remembering the Chinese laundry and Pierce’s Shoe Store and the meat-market with the carcasses hanging out back. “Ooh, I used to be so scared to go back there,” said Grandmaw. “Remember, Alice?”
    â€œWell, no, Florence dear. Don’t forget, I’m practically a newcomer. I’ve only been here twenty-five years this fall.”
    â€œOh, of course, I was forgetting.”
    Someone was sitting down in the empty chair on the other side of Mary. “Oh, hello, Teddy,” said Mary.
    Teddy Staples started to say hello, then he changed it halfway to how are you, and it came out, “Hew, hew! How, how!” One of the staples that held his shirt together popped into Mary’s lap. Mary liked Teddy, and she put her hand affectionately on his arm.
    â€œHave you seen any more of Henry’s birds?” she said.
    â€œI-I-I-I saw a pied-bill g-grebe the other day,” said Teddy, his melancholy face brightening. Then it fell again. “But I’ve seen plenty of them before. There’s just one I’ve really got to-to …” He started to cough, and couldn’t stop. Mary slapped him on the back. Poor Teddy. His life was a simple, rounded eccentricity, a charming obsession, founded on two facts. One fact was that Teddy was the remote descendant of that same Samuel Staples who had locked up Henry Thoreau in the Town Jail. The other was the oddity that he had been born on the same day in 1917 that Thoreau had been born in 1817. Adding these two giant facts together, Teddy had come to believe that his life must be dedicated to Henry Thoreau’s memory, and to the reliving of Henry’s life as far as he was able. By some absurd sense of fitness, Teddy Staples mended his clothes with a Woolworth stapler, ka-snap, ka-snap. His one set of loose garments was a sort of masterpiece or tour de force of stapling, glittering at stress points with little silver dashes. Like Thoreau at Walden Pond, Teddy lived alone on the shores of the Sudbury River, where it opened out into Fairhaven Bay. Thoreau had made pencils and surveyed lot lines—Teddy won a narrow living as a stonemason. “M-M-Mary,” he said, “I wonder if I-I-I …” Then the meeting was called to order.
    Howard Swan did it with his usual grace. He was an all-round good fellow, and aside from Miss Herpitude and Mary and Teddy Staples, the only member of the Alcott Association remotely resembling a scholar. The rest were Louisa Alcott enthusiasts, proud of their responsibility for preserving the shrine to the memory of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Howard stood up tall with the candlelight reflecting softly from his head (so nobly bald, with a light fringe of hair like Bronson Alcott’s) and begged the officers of the association to be brief. The officers tried heroically, but failed. Old Mr. Pusey was already asleep on Jo’s bolster. Mary glanced at Ernest Goss, sitting beside Mr. Pusey on the sofa. He was anything but sleepy, nervously drumming his fingers on his briefcase. What was he impatient for? The speaker?
    Homer Kelly was introduced at last. He reared up in front of the niche Branson had built for his bust of Socrates and put his notes on the table beside the plaster Rogers Group (“Taking the Oath”). His cowlick grazed the ceiling and the butterflies shone crassly on his tie. He began to talk about Margaret Fuller.
    Mary listened soberly, smiling slightly when he was witty at poor Margaret’s expense, disagreeing inside. Poor wretched Margaret. Mary had to admit that there was something vaguely repellent about the miserable woman, but this was hardly fair. She was too easy and quivering a target, and Homer Kelly wasn’t the first to take pot-shots at her. “Bulgy-eyed spinster”—oh, that was mean. He diagrammed cleverly the greasy little pigtails Margaret had looped in front of her ears. He imitated hilariously the famous serpentine motions of