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I Was Suspected of Murder

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(page 4 of 5)

Within three months pulse rates in the two towns had returned to near normal. I had by then made my own home in Marblehead, on one of its picturesque harborside streets. In time I married, lived on there after I left the Swampscott schools to be a teacher and dean at a nearby college, and never again heard directly about my few hours as a murder suspect. Quite obviously, since they never spoke of it, neither my mother nor the friends in Andover had ever been questioned. My wife and the few close friends to whom I sometimes mention the ugly predicament seldom respond with more than smiles and words of sympathy or mild amusement. Still in my own mind, however, lingers a dark shadow that does not go away.

The neighbor I talk with across a picket fence, or a visitor sharing the view from our living room, may seem suddenly to shudder, as if recalling a rumor from long ago. Or the friendly cop at a downtown coffee counter will pause in our conversation, perhaps remembering my name in some mothballed department file. True, my former Swampscott principal, whom I came to know before his death as a man who wanted to think ill of nobody, always appeared to believe the two detectives had been checking on my accident with the car. But wouldn't he have linked their visit and the crime, and have wondered at moments if he had a murderer on the faculty of his suburban high school? Is there, too, on fire-lit evenings when fall nor'easters drive salt spray against our windows, a question in my wife's eyes she cannot bring herself to ask?

On Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend in 1976, again with rain falling and winds rising, I paid a late afternoon call on Inspector Clem Rodgers at his home in Marblehead. Though over the years we had developed a first-name acquaintanceship without once mentioning Beryl Atherton, I supposed that he, too, had thoughts about my involvement in the case. Today, as always, he greeted me cordially, then stared hard when I said I hoped to do an article on the town's only murder in more than fifty years. Did I realize, he asked, that the crime had occurred precisely twenty-six years ago tonight, almost within the hour? I nodded. Would he rather not talk about it? After a moment he shook his head. What was it I wished to know?

Though long retired from active duty, the inspector was clearly moved as he gave his answers. He told of the bloody shambles he encountered in the Atherton kitchen that gray Monday and the long dragnet that went out. There were state and local interrogations of sneak thieves and similar offenders, patients furloughed or recently discharged from mental hospitals, pupils and teachers then or formerly in the schools, anyone ever mentioned in the victim's drab little diary. He was sure that police had at some point interviewed the actual killer. With no statute of limitations on murder, a continuing watch had been kept on certain persons, several of them well known in town, who without new evidence could not in decency be questioned further.

"It's incredible," he said. "We never even came close." He ground a large fist into his open palm. "My God, how can anyone do a thing like that and live with it!"

I asked if over the years he had formed a theory about the person who had. Only, he answered slowly, that it almost had to be someone who knew the usually unlocked house, who would return two knives to their proper drawer -- someone unbalanced enough to strike that way, clever enough to hide all evidence, and callous enough to bear the memory. The cross-like cutting of the throat, he was sure, had no significance except as a crazed gesture to make sure the victim, already dead from strangulation, would never rise to talk again. It was no more rational than the breaking and scattering of the single blade.