Read Online The Glass Village by Ellery Queen - Free Book Online Page A

authorities—”
    â€œI’m the proper authority in Shinn Corners, Judge,” said Burney Hackett, “now, ain’t I? Duly elected constable. The law states I may call the county sheriff to my aid, when necessary . Well, it ain’t necessary. Soon’s my posse forms, we go huntin’.”
    â€œBut the summoning of a posse comitatus is the function of—” Judge Shinn stopped. “Hunting? For whom, Burney? What are you holding back?”
    Hackett blinked. “Not holdin’ nothin’ back, Judge. Ain’t had a chance. Prue Plummer phoned me here soon’s I hung up after talkin’ to you. Says she mistook your two rings for her three. As usual. Anyways, she listened in. Well, Prue had somethin’ to tell me before she began phonin’ the news around the Corners. A tramp stopped at her back door ’bout a quarter of two today, she says. Dang’rous-lookin’ furriner, spoke a broken English. She couldn’t hardly understand him, Prue says, but she figgered he was after a handout. She sent him packin’. But here’s the thing.” Hackett cleared his throat. “Prue says she watched this tramp walk up Shinn Road and go round Aunt Fanny’s to the back.”
    â€œTramp?” said the Judge.
    He glanced at Johnny’s back. Johnny was looking out the north window at Aunt Fanny Adams’s barn and lean-to and the Isbel cornfield beyond.
    â€œTramp,” nodded Constable Hackett. “There’s nobody in Shinn Corners’d beat in the head of Aunt Fanny Adams. You know that, Judge. It was that tramp murdered her, and it’s a cinch he can’t have got far on foot in this pourin’-down rain.”
    â€œTramp,” the Judge said again.
    The siren shut off in mid-scream, leaving a shimmer of silence. Then there was confusion in the garden and the road. The swishy movement of feet in the kitchen, the creak of the swinging door, a wedge of eyes.
    Judge Shinn suddenly pushed the door in and he and Burney Hackett went into the kitchen. Johnny heard angry female murmurs and the old man saying something in a neighborly voice.
    The rain was still driving hard in crowded slanting silver lines, putting up a screen beyond the window through which the cornfield wavered. Water was pouring off the Adams barn in the back yard and the pitched roof of the small lean-to attached to it, a two-sided affair open at the front and rear. Johnny could see through to the stone wall of the Isbel field as if the lean-to were a picture frame.
    He turned back to the painting on the easel.
    She had caught in her primitive, meticulous style all the raging contempt of nature. The dripping barn, the empty lean-to, every stone in the wall, every tall tan withered stalk in the rain-lashed Isbel field, every crooked weeping headstone in the cemetery corner, cowered under the ripped and bleeding sky.
    And Johnny looked down at the crumpled bones, and he remembered the dark gray face, the timid, burning eyes, the green velour hat, the rope-tied satchel, the spurting shoes as their feet fled in the downpour … and he thought, You were a very great artist, and a beautiful old woman, and there’s no more sense in your death than in my life.
    Then the Judge and Samuel Sheare came in with a staring man between them, and the Judge said in the gentlest of voices, I’m sorry, Ferriss, that death had to come to her this way; and the man shut his eyes and turned away.
    When Mr. Sheare said in his troubled way, “We must not, we must not prejudge. Our Lord was poorest of the poor. Are we to lay this crime on the head of a man merely ’cause he must ask for food and walk in the rain?”—when the minister said this, Fanny Adams’s grandnephew raised his head and said, “Walk in the rain? Who?”
    They had taken him out of the studio into Fanny Adams’s gleaming dining room, and Prue Plummer was there with Elizabeth Sheare,