The Glass Village

They splashed up the path of the Adams house to the front door, which resisted. Judge Shinn rattled the brass knocker, pounded.

“Burney! It’s me, Lewis Shinn!”

“I locked it, Judge,” said Burney Hackett’s voice. “Come around the side to the kitchen door.”

They raced around to the east side of the house. The kitchen door was open to the rain. In the doorway stood Constable Hackett, very pale, with a yellow undertinge. The cold water was running in the sink near the door, as if he had just been using it. He reached over and turned off the tap and said, “Come on in.”

A puddle of muddy water lay inside the doorway. The muddy tracks of Hackett’s big feet were all over the satiny inlaid linoleum.

It was a small modern kitchen, with an electric range and a big refrigerator and a garbage disposal unit in the sink. On the kitchen table stood a platter of half-eaten food, boiled ham and potato salad, a dish of berry pie, a pitcher of milk and a clean glass.

There was a swinging door on the wall opposite the outer door, and the Judge went to it slowly.

“Let me,” said Johnny. “I’m used to it.”

“No.”

The old man pushed the door aside. He made no sound at all for a long time. Then he cleared his throat and stepped into the inner room, and Johnny stepped in after him. Behind Johnny the telephone on the kitchen table rattled as Constable Hackett asked fretfully for a number.

The studio was almost square. Its two outside walls faced north and west and were all glass, with a view of Merton Isbel’s cornfield to the north and, on the west beyond the stone wall, the church and cemetery. The cornfield stretched to the flat horizon.

She looked small lying on the floor, little more than a bundle of dry bones covered by a smeared smock, the rivulets of blood in the wrinkles already turning to the color of mud, the single exposed hand with its wavery blue veins — like a relief map of its ninety-one years — still grasping the paintbrush as if that, at least, could not be taken from her. The hand lay old and shriveled, at peace. On the easel behind her stood a painting. The palette she had been working with daubed the floorboards gaily under the north window, where it had fallen.

Johnny went back into the kitchen. He yanked a clean huck towel from a rack above the sink and returned to the studio. Burney Hackett put down the phone and followed.

Johnny covered the head and face gently.

“Two-thirteen,” said the Judge. “Remember the time. Remember it.” He turned to the blackened fireplace on the wall opposite the north picture window and pretended to be studying it.

Johnny squatted. The weapon was on the floor almost within her reach. It was a long heavy poker of black iron, fire-pocked and crusted with the smoke of generations. The blood on it was already dry.

“Does this poker come from the fireplace?” Johnny asked.

“Yes,” said the Judge’s back. “Yes, it does. It was made by her grandfather, Thomas Adams, in a hand-forge that once stood on this property. The past, she couldn’t get away from the past even in death.”

Who can? thought Johnny.

“Even this room. It was originally the kitchen and it’s as old as the house. When Girshom died and she began to paint she blocked off the east end for a small modern kitchen and turned the balance into a studio. Knocked out the north and west walls for light, had a new floor laid, supply cabinets built... But she left the old fireplace. Said she couldn’t live without it.” Judge Shinn laughed. “Instead, it killed her.”

“Two-thirteen,” said Burney Hackett.

“I know, Constable,” Johnny said softly. “You didn’t touch the locket?”

“Nope.” Hackett’s tone was stiff.

The oldfashioned locket-watch on its gold chain that Johnny had noticed Fanny Adams wearing the previous day was still around her neck. It had died, too. One wild, mad blow had missed her head and scraped down the front of her, smashing the cameo and springing the locket-face, so that the face stood open and the cracked and silenced dial with its delicate roman numerals fixed the moment of eternity. Two-thirteen, it said. Thirteen minutes past the second hour of the afternoon of Saturday, July the fifth. The sooty streak left by the tip of the poker on the battered watch case was as definite as a crossmark on a calendar.

Johnny rose.

“How did you find her, Burney?” Judge Shinn had turned back now, his long Yankee face hardened against the world, or perhaps himself.

Hackett said: “I been after Aunt Fanny for a long time to buy herself adequate p’tection for her pictures. Lyman Hinchley’d wrote her up for fire insurance on the house and furnishin’s, but not near enough to cover all them paintin’s she’s got around. Most a hundred in that slidin’ closet, worth a fortune.