Summary
A widow’s black crinoline drifts across Cuttleback’s dusty platform like a bruised flag of truce; Mrs. Lehr, nebula-eyed, returns to the clapboard mausoleum she once called home, towing two whirlwind daughters whose laughter slices the stale air like thrown knives. Job Jenkins—gnarled as an apple-tree root and twice as possessive—has spent a decade turning the estate into a private museum of grievances; every shutter hinge creaks his protest when the rightful heir steps back inside. Daniel Whitcomb, the town’s legal laureate, keeps his heart in a drawer labeled “what might have been,” but the newspaper notice rattles the drawer open: letters unsent, kisses unfinished, a whole atlas of regret. While the adults orbit one another in a slow-motion waltz of sidelong glances and swallowed confessions, the girls choreograph chaos—swinging from rafters, bartering marbles for secrets, baptizing scarecrows in the trough—until their racket unearths a darker pantomime: a barn combusts, a skull grins from the embers, and the town’s appetite for tidy villains fixes on gentle, moon-faced Manny, who can’t spell “murder” yet becomes its synonym. Trial by prejudice proceeds with the ruthless elegance of a clockwork guillotine; circumstantial gears grind, the gavel falls, the chair awaits. It is the children—those pint-sized saboteurs of certainty—who tunnel beneath the verdict, unearthing Job alive, bewildered, smelling of soil and sour mash, to shatter the scaffold of assumptions. In the aftermath, love re-knits: not the tremulous candle of old romance but a sturdier hearth, with room for two silver-haired conspirators and a pair of matchmaking imps who have learned that justice, like ivy, grows fastest when you aren’t looking.
Synopsis
After her husband's death in the West, Mrs. Lehr, a young widow who grew up in Cuttleback, decides to return there with her two daughters, Jane and Katherine, and make her home on the old family estate which had been looked after in her absence by Job Jenkins, a caretaker who had been in the Lehr family's employ since boyhood, and by now he has been the estate's sole occupant for so many years that he regards it as part of his life, and is disturbed when his mistress returns with her children. Daniel Whitcomb, Cuttleback's leading attorney, reads with interest the notice in Cuttleback's newspaper about Mrs. Lehr's intended return, and ponders the romance that connected his and her life before she left for the West. He wonders if her return will awaken the old-time affection he felt she once had for him. He remembered that before she left Cuttleback she asked him to see her, but his mothers desperate illness prevented him. He had written, but his letter did not reach her until she was the wife of another. She replied informing him of her marriage and hinting at her disappointment in his not having seen her before she left, but absolving him from any intention to purposely slight her. It happened that Mrs. Lehr and Mr. Whitcomb did renew their old love story. While this goes on, her little girls make things hum around the estate and tax old Job's patience to its limit. The girls form a warm attachment to slow-witted handyman "Manny," who finds time between chores to amuse them and become their faithful attendant. One day Job's belongings are removed from his room and the faithful old gardener drops out of sight, on a day when a barn on the Lehr estate is destroyed by fire. A charred skull found in the ruins forms the basis for a murder charge brought against dull-witted Manny by the town constable. Mrs. Lehr believes him guiltless, but can't prove his innocence, and the children "just know" he never killed Job or anybody else, but, like their mother, can't prove it. Mrs. Lehr seeks Daniel Whitcomb's aid, but he refuses her plea and states his belief that Manny is guilty. This breaks up his love affair with Mrs. Lehr and earns him the dislike of her daughters. Manny is tried and convicted, wholly upon circumstantial evidence, and he's being led to the electric chair when the girls arrive with the supposed victim Job, whom they had accidentally found and who knew nothing of Manny's predicament. Everything is cleared up and Katherine and Jane get a new daddy.
