All but impossible, p.7
All But Impossible, page 7
We went over everything again, mainly for her benefit, though I knew from my own experience that it never hurts to talk over these things. Mary was quick to begin analyzing the problem. “You both saw him walk up on the porch?”
“That’s right.”
“And he couldn’t have come off it without your seeing that too. He couldn’t have gone through the woodshed door, or the floor, or the roof of the porch. He could only have gone into that house while the storm door was open, obscuring your view.”
“And either Mrs. Gaines knew about it or she didn’t,” the sheriff chimed in. “But where did he hide?”
“He might have slipped out a window or something,” Mary suggested.
“Not without her seeing him, aiding him,” I said. “Remember, we were only an instant behind him, and she let us in at once. She wouldn’t have had time to wait at a window and close it after him, and when I circled the house myself a few minutes later all the windows were closed.”
Mary’s face suddenly glowed with triumph. “All right, how’s this? Philby had to enter that house. He couldn’t have gone anywhere else. Yet he had vanished a moment later. Keep in mind two things. First, Abby Gaines had business dealings with the murdered man, sold him a good share of the farm after her husband died. Maybe he cheated her or she thought he had. Second, you’ve described James Philby several times as a small or short man. His mustache and slicked-back hair could easily have been fake.”
“What are you trying to say, Mary?”
“I forget whether it was you or Sherlock Holmes who first said that when you’ve excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. The missing James Philby and the widowed Abby Gaines are the same person.”
* * *
Sheriff Lens and I stared at each other. “Well, I don’t know,” he muttered.
“That seems awfully far-fetched. But it might be worth another drive out to her place. What do you say, Doc?”
I stood up. “Let’s go.”
“I’m coming too!” Mary Best decided. “We can shut the office, can’t we?”
It was only ten minutes to closing time. “Sure, come along.”
On the way out the highroad, Mary sat in the back seat and continued to build her case. “You never saw the two of them together, did you? And Philby never came around until after Jesse Gaines died. He wasn’t needed then. He wasn’t needed until Abby was alone and plotting her revenge on the man she felt had stolen her property.”
“You might have something,” Sheriff Lens said grimly. “We’ll see.”
“There’s more. I mentioned Sherlock Holmes before. Didn’t either of you notice the similarity between James Philby’s name and that of James Phillimore,
in one of Holmes’s unrecorded cases? Phillimore was said to have gone back into his house for an umbrella and vanished. James Philby went back to Abby Gaines’s house for a lightning rod that first time, and vanished.”
I had to chuckle at that, at the weird twists that fate sometimes played.
But we were almost at the Gaines house, and I couldn’t let the game go on any longer. “Mary, Mary—James Philby and Abby Gaines are not the same person. They could never have been the same person. I’ve been treating Abby Gaines for a year—”
“I know that but—”
“—and Eileen Crawford told me Philby helped out with the harvest last year, working alongside the other men with his shirt off.”
“Oh. Then how—?”
“Let me off here by the driveway. You two wait in the car.”
I avoided the house and went directly to the barn at the rear of the property.
Though it was almost suppertime, there was still plenty of daylight left. I entered the old barn through the big sliding door and looked around, taking in the hayloft and the empty stanchions where cows had once been confined for milking. Sheriff Lens had been out here, I knew, but only briefly. I lit a match and dropped it onto a small pile of straw at my feet.
It took about five minutes for the barn to fill with the aroma of burning straw. I was about to stamp out the fire and give up when there was a slight movement in the hayloft directly above me. A figure emerged and started down the rickety wooden ladder. It was the missing salesman, James Philby.
“I’m glad to see you back with us again,” I said.
“Put out that fire before you burn the place down!”
I stamped it out and followed him from the barn. “The sheriff’s waiting at the end of the driveway,” I pointed out, in case he was thinking about running away. “Why did you kill Douglas Crawford?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got plenty of time.” I saw that Abby Gaines had come out on her porch to see what was going on.
“He had some business dealings with my father years ago. My father killed himself and I always blamed it on Crawford. It was the biggest thing in my life, and when I mentioned it to him he didn’t even remember it.”
“So you killed him.” We were walking slowly out past the house. The sheriff and Mary had gotten out of the car to meet us.
“Yes. I tried twice last year and failed both times. I sold him a sundial with a particularly sharp pointed gnomon, hoping I could trip him so he’d fall onto it. That didn’t work at all. I helped with the harvest and was invited to supper, and I poisoned his soup, but he and his wife changed places at the last minute and I had to tip over the bowl to keep her from being poisoned.
She must have thought I was awfully clumsy. This time I decided I’d waited long enough. I shot him with my rifle and gambled on making a getaway. After dark tonight I’d have headed across country.”
“After arranging to disappear at the Gaines’s front door.”
“I tried it with you and the trick worked fine. I figured it would work just as well with Sheriff Lens.”
“Both times your car was just off the road, so we couldn’t get around it. We had to watch your little drama from the road, where the storm door provided the perfect shield.”
Sheriff Lens had come up with his handcuffs. “Perfect shield for what, Doc? Was Abby Gaines involved after all? Was she hiding him?”
“No, no. The poor woman is completely innocent. I imagine he chose this place simply because it had a barn that wasn’t being used. There are lots of good hiding places in an old barn. But he had to focus our attention on the house, not the barn.”
“How’d you do it, Philby?” the sheriff asked.
“Let Dr. Hawthorne tell you. He seems to know everything.”
“My big mistake was in assuming that woodshed door was always locked,” I continued. “Of course it wasn’t. I stood right here and watched Crawford open it to put some cans of maple syrup inside. In truth it was usually unlocked, like the Gaines front door. You simply stepped through the woodshed door and bolted it behind you, both times. Then, while the house was being searched, you ran out the back door to the barn and hid there. The first time, you probably found just the hiding place you needed.”
“Wait a minute!” Mary Best objected. “You said yourself, Sam, that he couldn’t reach the woodshed door while still holding the storm door open to block our view. They’re ten feet apart.”
“We all forgot one important fact. Both times he worked the trick, Philby was holding a six-foot-long lightning rod in his hand. He’d left it next to the front door the first time. He held the storm door open with the lightning rod until he reached and opened the woodshed door. Then, as he pulled the lightning rod into the woodshed after him, the storm door swung shut on its spring.”
“I’ll be damned!” Sheriff Lens said.
“That reminds me,” Philby told us suddenly, “I left my lightning rod in the hayloft. Can I go back to the barn for it?”
“Get in the car,” the sheriff ordered. “Your disappearin’ days are over.”
The Problem of the Leather Man
Ever since I’d moved to southern New England in the early 1920s [Dr. Sam Hawthorne told his guest, lifting the glass for a sip of brandy], I’d heard occasional stories about the Leather Man. At first I thought it was a mere legend to frighten the children at night, but later I learned that there really was such a person—a laconic wanderer dressed in a homemade leather suit who toured Connecticut and eastern New York State for some thirty years until his death in 1889.
The summer of 1937 was when the Leather Man returned, and in Northmont we weren’t ready for him. It was Sheriff Lens who roused me with a phone call at three in the morning on the first day of August.
“Hawthorne,” I mumbled into the bedside phone.
“Doc, I got a bad accident out on Turk Hill Road, near Putnam. You were the closest one to call.”
“I’ll be there,” I answered shortly and hung up. My head was back on the pillow when I jerked myself awake and clambered out of bed. I wiped my face with a wet washcloth, dressed quickly, and hurried out to my car. Except for an occasional patient in labor, it was rare for me to be called out at that hour. Although automobiles had become more numerous on the roads around Northmont, accidents were infrequent.
I reached the scene of this one within fifteen minutes of the sheriff’s summons. A black Ford had run off the road and turned over in a ditch. Sheriff Lens’s car was on the road about ten feet away and the sheriff himself was doing the best he could with the badly injured driver. A woman from a nearby farmhouse stood watching from a safe distance.
“How bad is it?” I asked the sheriff.
“Bleedin’ from the head, Doc,” he answered quietly, standing up to greet me in the glare of his car’s headlights, “It’s March Gilman.’’
I knew Gilman from the Rotary meetings, though he’d never been a patient or close friend. He was a man around forty with a successful feed grain business in town, and a reputation of chasing after ladies.
“Bad wound,” I said, dropping to my knees beside him. “Have you called the ambulance?”
“Right away, but they were having some engine trouble. That’s when I phoned you.”
I leaned closer to the bleeding man. “March! March, can you hear me?
His eyes flickered open for just an instant. “What—?”
“You’ve had an accident, March.”
“Leather . . . the Leather Man—”
“What’s that?” I asked. I’d heard him clearly enough but I didn’t understand the words.
“Leather Man . . . in the road. Tried to avoid him and . . . went into ditch.”
“What Leather Man, March? Who was he?”
But that was all he said, and in the distance I could hear the clanging of the ambulance bell along the dark dirt road. I tried to stanch the flow of blood from his head until it arrived, but I knew the life was draining out of him.
As they were loading him into the ambulance, the woman who’d been watching moved closer. When she stepped into the light I recognized her as one of the teachers from the Northmont grammar school. “Miss Whycliff—I didn’t realize it was you.”
“I still live here in the homestead,” she replied, arms folded across her breasts as if to protect herself from the mild night air. She was an attractive but plain woman in her late thirties, unmarried and carrying on with life after the death of her parents. There were women like her in most rural communities.
“What happened here?” I asked as Sheriff Lens saw the ambulance on its way.
“I don’t really know. He must have been driving fast. I heard the car go by the house and then skid and go into the ditch. I think it woke me up. I threw on some clothes and when I saw he was injured I phoned the sheriff at once.”
“Did you see anyone else?” Sheriff Lens asked as he joined us. “This Leather Man he mentioned?”
“No one. But of course the road was dark.” She hesitated. “There was a Leather Man in these parts long ago. I don’t know much of the legend, but our local historian could tell you.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” the sheriff told her. “The fella you’re talkin’ about’s been dead nearly fifty years.”
“Some people have seen him this summer,” she replied. “I’ve heard talk that he’s back.”
“Rubbish!” Sheriff Lens told her. He was not one to believe in things he hadn’t seen for himself.
Hannah Whycliff shrugged. “Will you send someone to tow this car out of my front yard?”
“First thing in the morning,” he promised.
He drove to Pilgrim Memorial Hospital then, and I followed in my car. March Gilman was dead by the time we arrived.
Mary Best was busy with her office chores, getting out the August first billing, when I arrived a little before ten. “I just phoned you, Sam. I was worried when you weren’t here at nine.”
“I had a three a.m. emergency, so I decided to sleep an extra hour.”
“The accident that killed March Gilman?”
I nodded. “I suppose the news is all over town.”
“Pretty much. I gather he was someone important.”
“Small-town important,” I told her. Mary had taken over as my nurse after April married and moved to Maine. Sometimes I forgot she’d only been in Northmont two years and didn’t yet know everyone. “What’s my schedule for today?”
“It’s pretty slow. Mrs. Ritter at ten-thirty and Douglas Greene at eleven, and then you’re free for the day.”
At noon I drove over to see Sheriff Lens. “Just looking at the hospital report on March Gilman,’” he said. “Died of massive head injuries. No surprise there. He had a bad bleeding wound and a lesser one that probably caused a mild concussion.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t do anything to save him.” I sat down by his desk.
“But this business about the Leather Man still bothers me. Hannah Whycliff said the town historian would have information about the legend. Would that be Spencer Cobb?”
“Only one I know, and he’s sorta unofficial.”
Spencer Cobb had an office in our little library building on the far side of the town square. I found him on a short stepladder, checking an atlas of old New England maps in a leather-bound volume with a scuffed and disintegrating cover. “Hello, Sam,” he greeted me. “What can I do for you?” He was white-haired, though barely fifty, and smoked a pipe almost constantly.
“I’ve got a historical question for you, Spencer. Ever hear of the Leather Man?”
“You’re really going way back now. Come—sit down while I dig out some old references.” He was actually the county surveyor, but since the job only occupied a small part of his time he’d taken on the additional duties of Northmont’s historian.
Presently he laid an old photograph before me on the desk. It showed a scruffy man in his fifties seated on a wooden bench eating a piece of bread or a bun. He was clad entirely in a bulky, shiny garment with crude stitching plainly visible. The pants and coat seemed to be made of the same patchwork material—leather scraps held together by thongs. He wore a visored cap and boots that seemed to have wooden soles. Resting next to him was a leather bag perhaps two feet square.
“This was the Leather Man,” Spencer Cobb said. “The photograph was taken not long before his death in 1889.”
“Tell me about him.”
Cobb struck a match and relit his pipe. “He first appeared in this area in the late 1850s, dressed as you see him here. For the next thirty years, summer and winter, he followed a particular route, walking along country roads from the Hudson River on the west to the Connecticut River on the east. It took him about thirty-four days to complete each circuit of three hundred sixty-five miles. He came as regularly as the full moon, though every thirty-four days instead of the moon’s twenty-nine or thirty days. Once they established his route, some thought it had a mystic significance, with the three hundred sixty-five miles standing for the days of the year.”
“Who was he? Did anyone know?”
“He rarely spoke—only a few words in broken English. Though he had his regular stops, if anyone questioned him too closely would abandon that stop in the future. People were frightened of him at first, but they came to know him as a peaceful man who wanted no trouble. It was believed from his accent that he was French.”
“What happened to him?”
“In December of 1888 someone noticed a sore on his lip that appeared to be cancerous. He was taken to a hospital in Hartford, but promptly ran away. The press identified him as a Frenchman named Jules Bourglay who’d fled his homeland following business losses and a tragic love affair. However, none of this was ever proven, and when the Leather Man died of cancer the following March, his meager belongings offered no clue to his identity.”
“A fascinating story,” I agreed, “But there have been recent reports—”
Spencer Cobb nodded. “I know. The Leather Man is back. I’ve been hearing stories all summer. Since I don’t believe it ghosts I can only assume that someone is retracing the old route, for reasons of his own.”
“I have a road map in the car. If I bring it in, could you outline the route for me?”
“Certainly, I have it in one of these old newspaper clippings. There’s a great deal of material available because so many people at the time kept scrapbooks of his comings and goings.”
I watched while he carefully copied the route of the Leather Man. If this new traveler was retracing the old route, I figured I should be able to locate
him without too much difficulty. I’d become fascinated by the story, and curious about what he knew regarding the accident that killed March Gilman.
“Thanks, Spencer,” I told him. “You’ve been a big help.”
I went back to the office and plotted the distances on the map. “Why are you doing all this?” Mary Best asked, “What happens if you find him? Are you going to walk with him?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard!”
“Look, he’s covering three hundred sixty-five miles every thirty-four days. That works out to better than ten and a half miles a day, every day. Why should anyone in his right mind do such a thing?”
