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  THE EDNA FERBER MYSTERIES

  Lone Star

  Escape Artist

  Make Believe

  Downtown Strut

  Café Europa

  Final Curtain

  Cold morning

  Old News

  Mood Indigo

  Run Cold

  Indian Summer

  INDIAN SUMMER

  INDIAN SUMMER

  AN EDNA FERBER MYSTERY

  ED IFKOVIC

  © 2020 by Ed Ifkovic

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN: 9798626369724

  In memory of Jeff Nelson and Walter S. Tevis

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  CHAPTER ONE

  On a brassy late October day I stepped off the slumberous New York New Haven at Stamford, then boarded the two-car local headed north to Danbury, and at mid-afternoon, the autumn sky rich with a lemony sun, I arrived at Rawley’s Depot. The only passenger to step off the train, I stood there, surrounded by three sensible bags and a portable typewriter at my feet, and stared at the square, peeling clapboard building with a high-pitched roof, its “Rawley’s Depot, pop. 3003” sign weathered and a little lopsided. The place seemed deserted, though a battered Model T was parked alongside the building. A slight breeze rustled the overgrown shrubbery shrouding the entrance.

  A thick and lazy voice, a little rheumy, jolted me, coming from behind me.

  “Ma’am.” I turned. “Miss Ferber?”

  I nodded at a tall man who stepped from the dim shadows of an overhang. He half-bowed and doffed his hat. Then he grunted, cleared his throat, turned to spit a wad of odoriferous tobacco off to the side, and coughed. I nodded again. He bowed again. “I’m Eben Travers.” But he didn’t pause, retrieving my bags, even my typewriter though I reached for it possessively, and he walked away, balancing his load and assuming I’d follow.

  You saw a rangy man, New England crusty, of an age somewhere between fifty and fossilization, skin leathery and mahogany toned, pocked, a furrowed brow that gave his deep-set black eyes, lost under untamed brows, a menacing look. Dressed in faded denim and flannel work shirt, with a railroad cap atop a head one size too large for it, he didn’t walk—he lumbered, his body swaying left and right, as though adjusting for hurricane wind. He turned to face me. “Lucky. Train’s on time today. Ain’t usual, ma’am.” Without waiting, he turned back to the walkway and I found myself smiling: the syrupy Down East accent, that rich tang of elongated flat vowels and sharp-as-nails consonants. But here was no comic yokel: there was something in the eye at the very moment he addressed those words to me. Something there—cynicism, perhaps, some mockery, wariness. Hostility maybe? The New Englander’s innate distrust of strangers, of wanderers onto this rocky, unforgiving soil.

  He led me to a small parking lot and pointed. “Miss Carlotta’s vehicle,” he muttered, finally settling me into the back seat of an oversized Pierce Arrow, some sleek contraption with smooth-as-can-be black leather seats, and the outside an embarrassing rich plum gloss. Vaguely decadent, to be sure—and made more so by the incongruous Eben Travers situating his bulky weight behind the wheel.

  “Quite the automobile,” I said to his stiff back as he maneuvered the car onto a road.

  Silence for a moment, then the slightest shrug of a shaggy head, with a quick look back at me, his eyes then back on the road. But the crack of a grin exposed broken, brown teeth, a missing front tooth, a gap that made him look vaguely jack-o-lantern. “Horse better company,” he chuckled, more to himself than to me.

  “Not too happy with newfangled America?”

  He chose not to answer, though I noticed his neck redden. Yet the man was skillful on the dusty road. A born driver, his right hand gripped the wheel, the other arm slung casually out the open window, fingers playing with the cool air. The afternoon breeze was balmy for October, typical Indian Summer, but, almost as an afterthought, he seemed to remember the middle-aged shrinking violet in the rear seat, so he cranked up the window, glanced back at me, eyes squinted. I settled back, caught by the shriek and bluster of passing colorful foliage: the burnt brown, the crimson, the marmalade confection of spindly oak, blazing sugar maple, skeletal white birch, blotchy beech.

  The automobile slowed as it crested a small hill, purred quietly, and stopped. I looked out the side window at a small coppice of shaggy sumac and twisted vines, a wilderness shelter off the road. “This here hill is called Caleb’s Rise. Story is, back in slavery days, a Negro name of Caleb would climb from the valley down there, stand here on a night of full moon, and yell all kinds of incantations into the night sky, his voice echoing back from Hemlock Ridge, other side of the valley.” Eben paused. “Care to look that way?” I followed the direction of his pointed finger. Sweeping down from the welter of vine and briar, through the tight-growing saplings, I saw a stretch of land, a narrow valley, with three imposing homes along one side of a narrow farm road, isolated, lonely looking. “Miss Carlotta’s Sugar Maple Inn is the one in the middle,” he told me. And I stared at a faded saltbox with a lean-to off the side—a wobbly structure with a shabby worn exterior with three chimneys, each one more decrepit than the last. I frowned. This was to be my home for the next week? “The other side of the valley—yonder—is what we call Hemlock Ridge, ma’am. Black forest stretching up over them mountains.”

  “And you live where, Mr. Travers?”

  Again, I followed the line of his bony finger to a squat bungalow, a tiny tenant house, a few hundred yards back from the Inn.

  “I live that way, near to River Road,” Eben said. I saw a meandering river at the bottom of another sweep of hill.

  “You’re the caretaker?”

  He shook his head. “Sort of. Though I like the description of jack of all trades, ma’am.” Then he looked me full in the face. “Rightly, truth to tell—and it won’t be the last time you’ll hear me tell it, being it’s my favorite story—I should be sitting in the front room of the Inn. That’s my proper place.”

  “How so?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “And the neighbors?” I asked, glancing at the other two houses, each a respectable distance from the Inn.

  “I’ll let Miss Carlotta do your introductions.” Flat out, humorless.

  “Are you married, Mr. Travers?”

  “The wife is dead these many years.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He looked back quickly, quizzical. “For what?”

  I bit my tongue. “You know, sir, it’s something people say.”

  He shook his head, chuckled to himself, then sputtered through narrowed lips, “Some people better off dead.”

  That shut me up.

  The Pierce-Arrow resumed its short journey down the hill, away from the grove of trees and onto the dusty town road, approaching the imperturbable houses situated like quiet sentinels set against that awesome backdrop of black hemlock-shrouded mountain. There was a look of utter permanence to the three structures. There
was the Inn, with its wintry decay and rambling additions; then an imposing brick home in the shadow of Hemlock Ridge, a blocky, square house, with a center chimney, and garish, orangey shutters sagging against faded red brick, a harlot’s generous makeup. And the third house, a late Victorian clapboard gingerbread, a painted lady, with peeling green and yellow paint, missing shutters, roof tiles askew, a drunkard’s morning after.

  There was a man standing idly in the dirt-packed yard of the Victorian, and Eben actually sped up the car, seemed ready to spit. “And who is that?” I asked.

  “Nobody to say a decent hello to.”

  Well, I guessed I’d been told! I stared at the man standing near the lane, arms crossed, brow furrowed, a shock of a man with sandy blond hair turning now to pale white, a large man, dumpy, paunchy. But an unhappy man, it seemed, a disgruntled soul, so evident from the rigid mountain-man stance.

  “And why is that?” I asked.

  Eben tucked his tongue into his cheek, waited. Then slowly he drew out his words. “Don’t cotton to us old-timers, that one. To us—first comers.”

  “You mean the old Yankees? The—the Puritans?”

  He glanced over his shoulder at me. “His name’s Stanley Lupinski. Don’t that tell you it all?”

  As we cruised by the immobile Lupinski, the man peered into the automobile, craning his neck, and for a brief second he and I held eye contact. Not pleasant, I’d be the first to admit. Looking back over my shoulder, I noticed he was still there, a statue made of faulty clay, that frown on his dour, lined face now deepening into bafflement.

  Eben pulled into the driveway at Carlotta’s home, came to a smooth stop alongside a lopsided and flaking sign that announced: Sugar Maple Inn, Philander Trial, blder, c. 1772. I found myself staring at the pile of old house, with its pale gray clapboard siding, its twelve-on-twelve windows, its curious saltbox roof slanting dramatically down to the backyard, its overgrown lilac and forsythia bushes crowding the foundation and jutting up to the eaves. A shadow perhaps of a once magnificent Inn, the nighttime haven for the weary traveler in a brand-new America at the time of the Revolution.

  Carlotta rushed out the front entrance, stood there with a grin on her face, and I felt something shift within me, unpleasant. Carlotta looked as if she had just executed a well-timed stage entrance, front center, downstage. She wore a black cocktail dress with a deep-cut sequined collar, and even from where I sat I observed the heavy makeup, rich bronze pancake rouge and glowing, kewpie-doll ingénue lipstick. Her hair had been styled into a lopsided, almost masculine wave, with frilly bangs—still the oh-you-kid flapper look that was dated these days, even on younger women. I did not know what I expected in this bucolic village—certainly not a woman in an apple-stained kitchen smock, some misshapen Mother Hubbard, but this—this? But I smiled in spite of myself. Ever the actress, albeit a retired but still celebrated one. Carlotta Small, a woman fifty-fivish now, if a day, still slender as a marsh reed, more Clara Bow than Lillian Russell, to be sure. No hourglass figure on her.

  “Edna, Edna, you actually came,” she screamed, embracing me, and I thought I saw Eben, loaded down with my bags, wince.

  Inside the home, seated in a kitchen nook on a ladder-backed kitchen chair, wobbling slightly—a priceless relic? I wondered—I sipped tea and munched on crisp molasses gingersnaps, while Carlotta bustled around me, fluttering like a light-dizzy moth, someone seemingly receiving her first guest in decades. “You’ve never been to my home,” she cooed. “The Inn.”

  “You never invited me,” I said tartly.

  She paused. “Well, now remedied.” A deep sigh. “I want you to be at home here. I want to be part of the creative process of your wonderful novel.”

  I said nothing for a moment, then: “Ah, yes,” I said quietly. “My wonderful new novel.”

  “I’m so glad I bumped into you that day.”

  Strolling one afternoon on Broadway, pausing before a weathered poster advertising the musical Show Boat—I’d looked around, sheepish, afraid I’d be recognized and accused of undue vanity—I’d spotted Carlotta, a favorite dinner companion, frequently at George and Bea Kaufman’s. Or at luncheon with Aleck Woollcott at the Algonquin. Everyone knew Carlotta Small, of course. That veteran actress was still a cynosure, an actress who abandoned the glorious footlights with little comment. She gave it all up—for what? Twice in fact, and each time hiding from her loyal followers.

  “I hear you’re doing Connecticut in your new novel,” she’d said glibly in that throaty cigarette voice her fans celebrated, a comment that piqued me a bit. Doing Connecticut? Did Stephen Crane do the Civil War? Did Hawthorne do Salem? Well, hardly. Carlotta had been dressed in a pitch-black, crimson-lined cloak, ermine-edged, and was wearing a sloppy Parisian beret atop coal-black dyed hair, dramatically cut in the mode of an Art Deco flapper, and on her face the emphatic stage makeup she always appropriated—inappropriately, I always mused—for New York suppers and nightlife. You saw a dynamic, animated woman, the face mobile and expressive, the hands always fluttering like scattered starlings, the lacquered red nails glinting in the light. “Come visit me,” Carlotta had begged, an invitation to stay at her ancient Connecticut farm, nestled in a leafy valley outside Danbury.

  Yes, good theater talk, good hearty food, bracing country air, a serene, uneventful week of leisurely musings and ambling through kaleidoscopic foliage, those bright wonderful days of a splendid Indian Summer. Towering maples and vaulted oaks, painted scarlet, russet, orange and yellow, sweeping up the mountainside, banked by miles of thick black hemlock under cobalt blue skies. I’d be soaking up the scenery, eavesdropping on town folk in the general store, eating cider doughnuts at some mill—to reinvigorate my new novel that dealt with the collision of old Puritan Yankees with the red-blooded Polish immigrants, backs bent in farm fields under withering noon sun. A backdrop for my saga that moved like a locomotive from the eighteenth century into the twentieth, a sweep of generations.

  It was Walter Lippman’s fault, my sitting in Carlotta’s kitchen. After all, if that unflappable and indefatigable journalist hadn’t mentioned Connecticut and Long Island and all those depleted, gasping Yankee farms and all those new-blood robust Polish interlopers—well, I would probably have stayed in Manhattan, enjoying my fabulous Broadway celebrity, churning out a short story gestating in my mind—the one about the chubby Italian greengrocer at Lexington and Fifty-third, and his star-struck daughter. On a dusty Long Island back lane with Walter, nearing a smoky twilight, I’d encountered a strapping, handsome Pole, some six-foot robust man-boy who literally took my breath away. Walter mentioned the Polish immigrants revitalizing the old Yankee homesteads. Suddenly I’d come alive. And that led to American Beauty, a slow and arduous novel to write. Simmering in early spring, taking some shape in the hot summer—a thousand painful words a day, faithfully, three typed sheets a day, maybe, two fingers tapping on the typewriter—it stalled woefully as fall arrived. I was stranded in the world of truck farming Connecticut, all rocky soil and chiseled glacial ridge, all storied Housatonic waters and barn-red clapboard saltboxes and chipped white picket fences.

  That difficult novel controlled my life, what with America reeling from the staggering Wall Street crash the year before. Some folks were talking Depression with a capital D. Vast money lost, some of it mine, lives shattered—my friends shell-shocked—but I still wrote in my workroom from nine to three, faithfully, sometimes in a stupor, sometimes blurry-eyed, rarely with those euphoric moments a sudden turn of phrase allowed me. But then it stopped. The crisp white sheets of paper remained stark and bare in the typewriter. So there I was, as the balmy days of autumn arrived, planted at my typewriter, and nothing moved. The domineering Orrange Oakes, fierce Puritan pioneer, stood on his lush and virginal acres, but the plot line, my tale of robust Polish blood that was the dynamic of the book, the force for change—well, that refused to budge.

  Carlotta’s invitation, I thought, would save me.

  Now, stari
ng across the table at me, she was talking rapidly. “You have the room with a view.” She pointed over her head. “Stretching across acres and acres of grass and river and distant hills.”

  I smiled. “Thank you, Carlotta.”

  As we sipped the delicious, bracing tea, I surveyed the old cooking wing of the sprawling Inn: low ceilings, tin-plated and dusty; irregular wide, hand-hewn floorboards, with thick peeling barn-red paint; ancient, sagging cupboards, dark and worn. But a room with modern appliances, a gleaming white enamel stove polished within an inch of its life, its sparkling surface covered with cast-iron pots I surmised Carlotta never used. That was for the help.

  “Tell me about your book.” She leaned in.

  “I don’t talk about my writing when I’m writing,” I announced.

  “Ah,” Carlotta said, sitting back, sighing. “A jinx, perhaps. I’ve heard others say the same thing. Augustus Thomas once told me that.” She paused. “Or was it Eugene O’Neill. One of the greats.”

  I heard catlike movement behind me, a shuffling of lazy, slippered feet. Martha Small, the older sister I’d never met, stood in the doorway, tentative, as though uncertain of her welcome. I’d been told she’d never come into the city to see her acclaimed sister perform on Broadway, not once, never, purposely so.

  “Martha,” blurted out Carlotta, loudly. “Edna is here.”

  Martha put out her hand and I shook it. A surprisingly robust grip. I didn’t know why women shook hands, especially the hearty, glad-hand some women effected. It always struck me as masculine province, and women who insisted on the ritual, well . . . they shouldn’t.

  “I’ve read your work.” Her voice was soft and wispy.

  I nodded.

  “Every word,” Carlotta interrupted. “Your short stories. Your novels.” She made a guttural sound from the back of her throat. “Never has seen me deliver even one onstage line, but she can recite whole pages from The Girls.”