The Glass Village

“Not to me,” said Ush Peague.

“It’s corn,” said Ferriss Adams.

“Yes, Mr. Adams,” said Johnny, “it’s corn — corn as the good Lord intended corn to look on the ninth day of July. The plants stand a little better than kneehigh; like all early July corn, they’re young and green. But now I ask you,” and Johnny suddenly pointed to the stalks in the painted cornfield on the canvas, “to observe the corn in her picture. Mr. Casavant, did Fanny Adams — who always painted exactly what she saw — see tall withered cornstalks where nature placed small green ones?”

Casavant turned a beautiful rose color. “By George,” he mumbled. “It’s autumn corn!”

“So this can’t be the painting Fanny Adams was working on when she was murdered. But if you want to argue, I can nail it down. This is a finished painting, according to Mr. Casavant. It’s a painting of the scene visible from this window, with the addition of a rainstorm. Again, if we’re to accept Mr. Casavant’s expert knowledge, Aunt Fanny wouldn’t have painted in a rainstorm unless rain were actually falling — that is, if this were the painting she was working on Saturday, she must have started it as a scene without rain, but as she was working the rain began to come down and so she painted it into her picture.

“But on Saturday,” said Johnny, “the rain didn’t start until two o’clock. So she couldn’t have begun to paint the rain in until two. Yet thirteen minutes later, the time of her death, the painting’s supposed to be finished! I think Mr. Casavant will agree that, no matter how fast a worker Fanny Adams was, she could hardly have painted this rainstorm in in its present finished form in a mere thirteen minutes.”

“No, no.” Casavant nibbled his perfect fingernails.

“So I repeat, this is the wrong painting.”

They studied the canvas.

“But what’s it mean?” asked Andy Webster, bewildered.

Johnny shrugged. “I don’t know, beyond the obvious fact that somebody switched paintings on the easel. Removed the picture she was actually working on and substituted this one. The question is, What happened to the other painting? Seems to me we ought to look for it.”

But he did know. Or thought he knew. Johnny was a hunch player. In a world in which the odds went crazy it seemed as reasonable a way of life as any. He wondered if he would be proved right.

They were banging the slide-doors of the cabinets and beginning to haul out canvases when Roger Casavant smacked his pale forehead with his palm, “Wait! She kept a master list in here... she’d assign a number and title to a picture when she started one. Didn’t she keep it—? On the top shelf somewhere!”

“One side, slow boy,” grunted Usher Peague. “Found!”

It was a sheaf of plain yellow papers clipped together.

They crowded around the newspaperman.

“God bless her practical old soul,” said Johnny, “if she didn’t even check off the ones she’d sold!... Wait, wait. Number 259, not marked sold. September-something. What is that?”

“September Corn in the Rain,” read Judge Shinn.

“That’s it!” Johnny was at the easel turning the painting over. “Ought to be a number on it somewhere... There was! But it’s been scraped off. See this paper shred still stuck to the frame?” He turned the painting face up again. “Any doubts? This is September Corn in the Rain. And now I remember something, Judge. Orville Pangman’s crack Friday morning about the rains last September coming too late to save the crop — he lost practically his whole stand of corn because of the drought! September corn isn’t normally this dried-up-looking, is it?”

“No,” muttered Judge Shinn. “You’re right, Johnny. Last September’s corn grew to a good height, but it went completely to pot one night between sunset and dawn.”

“Here’s a notation of the one she was painting,” cried old Andrew Webster. “The last entry on the last sheet.”

“Let’s see!” said Johnny. “Number 291, July Corn... Search the backs of the canvases for a Number 291!”

They found it midway in the rack, where it had been thrust apparently at random.

“Easy! Gently! This has unique value,” snarled Roger Casavant. He turned July Corn to the light. Then he removed the canvas that was on the easel, propped it against the window, and put the new canvas in its place.

The differences from September Corn in the Rain were evident even to a layman’s eyes.

“No F.A. on it,” said Judge Shinn. “So she didn’t get to finish it—”

“Not nearly finished,” said Casavant impatiently. “It’s the same scene painted in the same perspective and from the same vantage point. But observe her treatment of the rain. She’d hardly begun to paint it in. She hadn’t even got around to making the stones of the fence look wet, or the foreground or barn roof. And the leaves of the young corn are still vigorously erect, not beaten down as they would have to be if she’d begun the painting as corn in a rainstorm.