Read Online The Memorial Hall Murder by Jane Langton - Free Book Online

as far as you can, the pallbearers will just squeeze in here alongside.”
    One of the pallbearers was a young red-headed boy with a big nose. The President of Harvard recognized him immediately, because he often saw him in Massachusetts Hall, washing windows and emptying wastebaskets. The whole thing was a plot, a conspiracy to make the President of Harvard look ridiculous, squeezing him into his own pew in the front of the church between a janitor and a prostitute. It was just one more example of the way everything connected with Ham Dow had brought him bad fortune from the beginning. Well, it was the last time. From now on the pew would be his alone. The white Corinthian columns with the rams’ heads and the four signs of the gospels and the doves of the holy spirit, they would be his too, in a manner of speaking, and the fanciful pulpit, and the serene classical spaces filled with music. No longer would he have to share them with Hamilton Dow.

    James Cheever folded his arms on his chest and glanced to the side and nodded across the aisle at Julia Chamberlain. Julia was sitting beside Sloan Tinker, looming above Tinker and the whole row of gray-headed faculty, looking as usual like one of the caryatids on the Acropolis. Julia was blowing her nose dolefully. It passed through President Cheever’s mind to wonder if she would grieve for him, if it were his own funeral rather than Dow’s. Because it had come down to that, very nearly. A choice. Oh, Julia had pretended to be impartial. But her bias showed through. Her true feelings were perfectly clear.
    Who was that climbing into the pulpit? Oh, good lord, not Charley Flynn? Wouldn’t you just know. James Cheever fixed his eyes on the choir screen, refusing to look at the idiot as he put his hand in the pocket of his blue jeans and began the eulogy. But, in all the pews to left and right, people were sniffing, sobbing, breaking down. The President of Harvard reached into his breast pocket for his handkerchief and passed it across his nose. It should not be said of him that he was lacking in feeling.
    â€œHomer, here we are.” Mary was beside him in the crowded vestry, coming up from the locker room downstairs with Vick.
    Vick’s fingers pierced Homer’s coat sleeve. “Homer,” said Vick.
    â€œWell, now, Vick,” said Homer, patting her on the back, “the music was magnificent. You did him proud.”
    Vick’s hair had been twisted into thick pigtails and pinned up at the back of her head, but now the pressure inside her skull burst the pins. Her pigtails sprang loose and one braid came apart, its three rivers of red hair untwisting in one flood. “Yes,” said Vick. “I think he would have liked it. Nobody was allowed to cry. I mean, until we were all through. Then we cried buckets. Now listen, Homer, what are you going to do about it? I mean, it’s your turn now.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, what am I going to do?” Homer stepped out of doors onto the porch, urged along by the throng pressing up against his back. “My dear girl, I’m no longer an official member of any law-enforcing body. I can’t—”
    â€œBut don’t you care?” Vick hung on to Homer and pounded his arm. “Oh, I know you didn’t really know him, or anything like that, but just the same. Mary, he’s got to do something, doesn’t he?”
    â€œHomer, dear,” began Mary, “I really think—”
    â€œNow look here,” said Homer. “There are at least four or five different outfits already involved in this investigation: the Boston Police Department, the Cambridge Police Department, the Cambridge Fire Department, the Harvard Police, and the United States Treasury Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Not to mention the FBI. So what possible reason could there be for me …?”
    â€œBut they don’t have the personal sort of close-up, you know,