Nine Lives(27)

Sam’s friends and colleagues had been mostly surprised when he’d applied for the job in Kennewick, Maine, making jokes about how he was going to double the number of Jamaicans living in New England. But Jean Landry, the chief of police, during Sam’s goodbye party, was the one who actually figured out Sam’s real motivation. During her brief speech, she’d said, “I always knew that Sam, down deep, really wants to be Jessica Fletcher from Cabot Cove, Maine, and now he’ll get his chance.” And it was partly true. Although he returned to visit England often, even after his grandmother’s death, he knew he couldn’t work there. But he could work in New England, start a new life in a Maine village, and at least feel as though he was living the life he was born to live.

Staring at his grandmother’s Agatha Christie books, arranged chronologically, he pulled out his hardcover edition of the book that would eventually come to be known as And Then There Were None, or Ten Little Indians. But the version that Sam Hamilton owned, in hardcover, bore the original title: Ten Little Niggers.

Sam remembered that after he’d finished Sleeping Murder he’d asked Nana Pat what he should read next.

“There’s a book I think you’d really like,” she said, “but I think I should buy a new copy for you.”

“You don’t have it?”

“I do, but it has a not-so-nice title. In fact, it was so not nice that they changed it. They’ve changed it a couple of times, actually.”

She’d shown him the book and explained that it came from a nursery rhyme that had been popular many years ago. Sam had been fascinated, especially by the cover—a white, ghostly hand plucking at ten little African figures, some standing, some brandishing spears, some lying down. He’d read the book, of course, in one terrifying afternoon, not wanting to wait for Nana Pat to order a more appropriately titled version from the village bookstore.

Afterward, he’d followed her around the house while she’d tidied up, wanting to talk about what had happened in the novel, the scariest murders, the phonograph recording in which all of the victims had been accused of their crimes, how long the bodies were on the island after everyone was dead.

“Don’t you want to know about the title?” she’d asked.

“I thought that it meant that everyone who got invited to the island was Black, but I don’t think they were.”

“No, they were all white. But don’t go telling your parents that I let you read a book with that word in the title. Tell them it was called And Then There Were None.”

“Dad uses that word all the time.”

“What word?”

“Nigger.”

“Does he?”

“Not all the time, but some of the time.”

“It’s okay for him, I guess, but it wasn’t okay for Agatha Christie. Maybe it was at the time, but not now.”

“How long does it take to die by hanging?” he’d asked.

Or something like that, probably. Sam brought the well-preserved hardcover with him to the leather club chair he liked to read in. On a whim he’d looked up what this particular copy was worth and discovered that it would go for about ten thousand dollars, despite the racist name, or maybe because of it. Not that he was planning on selling it, or any of his other beloved books. But he had decided to reread it, not for the first time. Whatever was happening with Frank Hopkins and the eight other unlucky souls on that list bore some resemblance to this particular novel. He opened it up to chapter one and read the first sentence: “In the corner of a first-class smoking carriage, Mr. Justice Wargrave, lately retired from the bench, puffed at a cigar and ran an interested eye through the political news in The Times.”





9





SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 4:39 P.M.


Just as he’d expected on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, Arthur had been the only visitor at the Mead Art Museum to see the medieval devotional objects exhibit. There were about fifty pieces, all of which had been borrowed from a museum in Germany, and Arthur spent time looking at each one, reading each note. He was interested, but also strangely unmoved. There was a lovely bust of a female saint, carved in wood, several crucifixes, and multiple images of the Virgin Mary. He loved imagining these objects in their rightful time and rightful place, the mesmerizing effect they would have had on medieval parishioners, those poor people unlucky enough to be born in the Middle Ages. But the objects had no real emotional effect on him, except for maybe one piece. Two pieces really, a pair of beads that had been carved to be part of a rosary. Each bead had a face, one male, one female, healthy and full-cheeked on one side, but on the opposite side they were rendered as skulls and a few pieces of tattered flesh. On one of them it looked as though a lizard had burrowed into its chin. The note said they were memento mori beads, simple reminders that we are alive only a short time, and that we all have the same fate, to one day rot away.

Arthur was so taken with the beads that for about five minutes he seriously contemplated stealing one of them. He even ran his eyes along the ceiling to look for cameras, but then a museum guard, a tall, hunched-over woman with Coke bottle glasses, wandered by, and Arthur abandoned the plan.

But for the rest of the day he thought about the beads. The truth was, despite his church going, Arthur had struggled with his faith since Richard died. Actually, he’d struggled with his faith before then, since around the time he was rejected by his religious father for his sexual orientation. But after the accident—after coming to in the hospital to find out that Richard and their dog Misty were both gone in an instant, leaving him alone and crippled—all thoughts that he somehow lived in an ordered and benign universe were gone. He continued to attend church, and to periodically do the Sunday flowers, but only out of a sense of obligation and a way to fill some hours. And because he liked the kind of people who attended church, especially the older women. They seemed to have an appreciation for life, even for the small pleasures. And maybe he liked that they doted on him.