The Good Friday Murder Read Free Page A

themselves, dangers from cars tearing down Central Avenue, danger of drowning in the brook that runs behind the Aldrich property, all kinds of dangers. I won’t go into all of them again. That’s the problem of the Greenwillow Association, not our problem. If they think they can cope with all of that, more power to them.” I noticed he was glancing at notes he held in one hand, and I wondered if we would be out of here before daylight. “But our problem—and I mean the problem of every man, woman, and child in Oakwood—is who they let live in that house. We can’t have a convicted murderer in our midst even if he didn’t murder anyone for forty years. You can’t ever tell with people like that.”
    “Point of order, point of order!” a woman shouted from the rear.
    “What’s your point of order?” the mayor asked wearily.
    “No one in that house is a convicted murderer. Mr. Harris knows that. Everybody in this room knows that.”
    The mayor banged his gavel. “That’s not exactly a point of order, Sally,” he said. “You better sit down and let Walter finish.”
    “You can’t let him spout lies, Mr. Mayor,” the woman shouted.
    “Walter,” the mayor said, “try not to spout lies. Okay?”
    “You bet,” the man in the front row said, and continued his tirade.
    When he sat down, someone jumped up and asked for amotion that all discussion be held to two minutes. The motion was soundly defeated. A second motion was made to limit discussion to four minutes. That one passed.
    I did a little quick arithmetic. If a hundred people spoke, we would have nearly seven hours of discussion before the question came to a vote. They would carry me out. Or perhaps I would just lie down on several of these very uncomfortable wooden folding chairs and sleep-after the vote.
    I sat and listened for almost three hours. It was encouraging that a determined group of people, all sitting together on the other side of the room, were solidly in favor of letting Greenwillow into Oakwood. They brought up just about every point that I had noted on a pad this afternoon, but certainly it would do no harm to repeat them in my own words.
    What seemed clear from the negative contingent was that they had largely abandoned the rather silly objections that Walter Harris had begun his oration with—the “dangers” to the Greenwillow residents, obviously a collective euphemism for people’s fear of having a group of retarded adults in their midst.
    Instead, they had latched on to the murderer in the group. As I listened, I found myself completely out of sympathy with their position. To believe that the quiet, sad man sitting in the chair in the Greenwillow lounge could have killed his mother, could have used a weapon as intimate as a knife to draw her blood, required more imagination—or less information—than I had. I didn’t think James Talley could be angered to the point of wanting to kill, much less make the attempt.
    But these people believed it, and the belief was making them afraid. In the years I had known her, I had often heard my spiritual director, now the Mother Superior at St. Stephen’s, say, “You may be smarter than they are and you may know more than they do, but that’s no excuse to patronize them.” And on one occasion she had said, “If they believe something, that’s reason enough to respect it.” Just because I wanted Greenwillow to have the house on Central Avenue,just because I wanted Gene nearby in a better home, I couldn’t dismiss these people’s specious arguments and real fears, however much I disagreed with them.
    I decided the time had come to speak up. I would reiterate a point that had been made before and I would make a suggestion. There were still hands raised, still people rising and making their feelings known, and it was already past midnight. If I didn’t get my chance soon, I might lose what little energy I had left.
    I raised my hand.
    The mayor recognized two people before he pointed