Carol-Lynn Waugh - The Twelve Crimes of Christmas

“Damn!” Lens exploded. “He closed the door after him. Is he running away from us?”

I tried the belfry door, but it was bolted from the other side. “He’d hardly run up there to get away from us. There’s no other way out.”

“Lemme at that door!”

It was an old church, and a powerful yank by Sheriff Lens splintered the wood around the loose bolt. Another yank, and the door was open.

Lens led the way up the wooden steps. “We’re comin’ up, Parson,” he called out.

There was no answer from above.

We reached the belfry and pushed open the trap door above our heads. The first thing I saw was Parson Wigger outstretched on the floor a few feet away. He was face up, and the jeweled hilt of a small gypsy dagger protruded from the center of his chest.

“My God!” Sheriff Lens gasped. “He’s been murdered!”

From the trap door I could see the entire bare belfry and the snow swirling around us outside. It seemed there was not another living creature up there with us.

But then somethin’ made me turn and look behind the open trap door.

Carranza Lowara was crouched there, an expression of sheer terror on his face.

“I did not kill him,” he cried out. “You must believe me- I did not kill him!”

It was the damnedest locked-room mystery I ever did see, because how could you have a locked room that wasn’t even a room-that was in fact open on all four sides? And how could you have a mystery when the obvious murderer was found right there with the weapon and the body?

And yet-

First off I’d better tell you a bit more about that belfry itself, because it was the first time I’d ever been up there, and some things about it weren’t obvious from the ground. The big bell was gone, all right, though the wooden frame from which it had hung was still in place. There was also a round hole cut in the floor, maybe four inches in diameter, through which the heavy rope for ringing the bell had passed.

But the thing that surprised me most about Parson Wigger’s belfry was the thin wire mesh fencing tacked up over all four open windows. It was like chicken wire, with gaps of a couple inches between the individual strands. Since it obviously wasn’t meant to keep out flies it took me a moment to figure out its purpose.

“Birds,” Sheriff Lens explained, noting my puzzlement “He didn’t want birds roosting up here.”

I grunted. “You can’t even see it from the street, the wire’s so fine.”

Wigger’s body had been taken away, and the gypsy had been arrested, but we lingered on, starin’ through the wire mesh at the street below. “The news has really spread,” Lens observed. “Look at that crowd!”

“More than he had for services. Tells you somethin’ about people, I guess.”

“Think the gypsy did it, Doc?”

“Who else? He was alone up here with Wigger.”

Sheriff Lens scratched his thinning hair. “But why kill him? God knows, Wigger was a friend o’ theirs.”

There was a sound from below, and Eustace Carey’s head emerged through the open trap door. “I just heard about the parson,” he said. “What happened?”

“He was showin’ the gypsies the view from up here. They all came down except Lowara, an’ I guess he musta hid in here. We saw Parson Wigger down by the front door, lookin’ out at the gypsies gettin’ ready to leave, and I wanted to talk to him. He seemed to run away from us, almost, an’ bolted the steeple door after him. By the time Doc Sam and I got up here, he was dead, with the gypsy’s knife in his chest.”

“No one else was up here?”

“No one.”

Carey walked over to the west side of the belfry, where the wind-driven snow covered the floor. “There are footprints here.”

“He had a lot of gypsies up here lookin’ at the view. Footprints don’t mean a thing.” Sheriff Lens walked over to the open trap door.

Suddenly I remembered something. “Sheriff, we both agree that Wigger looked as if he was running away from you. What was it you were so anxious to see him about?”

Sheriff Lens grunted. “Don’t make no difference, now that he’s dead,” he replied, and started down the stairs.

The next mornin’ at my office I was surprised to find April waitin’ for me. It was a Saturday, and I’d told her she needn’t come in. I’d stopped by mainly to pick up the mail and make sure no one had left a message for me. Most of my regular patients called me at home if they needed me on a weekend, but there was always the chance of an emergency.

But this time the emergency wasn’t the sort I expected. “Dr. Sam, I’ve got that gypsy woman, Volga, in your office. She came to me early this morning’ and she’s just sick about her husband bein’ arrested. Can’t you talk to her?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Volga was waitin’ inside, her face streaked with tears, her eyes full of despair. “Oh, Dr. Hawthorne, you must help him! I know he is innocent! He could not kill Parson Wigger like that-the parson was our friend.”

“Calm down, now,” I said, taking her hands. “We’ll do what we can to help him.”

“Will you go to the jail? Some say he will be lynched!”

“That can’t happen here,” I insisted. But my mind went back to an incident in Northmont history, after the Civil War, when a black man traveling with a gypsy woman had indeed been lynched. “Anyway, I’ll go talk to him.”

I left her in April’s care and walked the three blocks through snowy streets to the town jail. Sheriff Lens was there with an unexpected visitor-Minnie Haskins.

“Hello, Minnie. Not a very pleasant Christmas for the town, is it?”

“It sure ain’t, Dr. Sam.”

“You visitin’ the prisoner?”

“I’m tryin’ to find out when they’ll be off my land. I was out there to the caravan this mornin’, and all they’d say was that Carranza was their leader. They couldn’t go till Carranza told ’em to.”

“I thought you give them permission to stay.”

“Well, that was before they killed Parson Wigger,” she replied, reflecting the view of the townspeople.

“I’d like to speak with the prisoner,” I told Sheriff Lens.

“That’s a bit irregular.”

“Come on, Sheriff.”

He made a face and got out the keys to the cell block. We found the gypsy sitting on the edge of his metal bunk, staring into space. He roused himself when he saw me, somehow sensing a friend. “Doctor, have you come to deliver me from this place?”

“Five minutes,” Sheriff Lens said, locking me in the cell with Lowara.

“I’ve come, Carranza, because your wife Volga asked me to. But if I’m going to help you, I have to know everything that happened in the belfry yesterday.”

“I told the truth. I did not kill Parson Wigger.”

“What were you doing there? Why didn’t you leave with Volga and the others?”

He brushed back the long raven hair that covered his ears. “Is it for a gadjo like yourself to understand? I stayed behind because I felt a kinship for this man, this parson who had taken the roms unto himself. I wanted to speak with him in private.”

“And what happened?”

“He went down after the others had left the belfry and stood in the doorway, looking after them. Then he came back upstairs, quite quickly. I heard him throw the bolt on the door below, as if he feared someone might follow him. When he came up through the trap door my back was turned. I never saw what did it. I only heard a slow gasp, as of a deep sigh, and turned in time to see him falling backward to the floor.”

“You saw no one else?”

“There was no one to see.”

“Could he have been stabbed earlier?” I asked. “Down in the church?”