The Angel and the Jabberwocky Murders (11 page)

I greedily gobbled a couple of cheese balls. “Must be a cause to celebrate?” But Augusta only smiled.

The first message was from Jo Nell wanting to know what in God's name Willene Benson was thinking of running off like a bat out of hell without so much as a by-your-leave! The second was Claudia Pharr asking for the recipe for my grandmother's Mimmer's Lemon Mystery since she was hosting her bridge club next week. The third message was from my daughter, Julie.

“Mama, guess what? I'm moving up! I've been offered a position as Lifestyles Editor at a much larger newspaper in Cedartown, Georgia, and I'm to begin in two weeks! I've found a cute little two-bedroom apartment not too far from the paper so there'll be room for you to come and visit. And, as you might guess, all contributions of household goods and furniture will be greatly appreciated. Call for details!”

I called. “Congratulations!” I said when my daughter answered. “That's fantastic! When will you and Buddy be moving?”

Julie has a live-in boyfriend I call Buddy-Boy Bubba whose main goal in life is to consume large quantities of beer, watch perpetual basketball, and complain that he can't find a job that fulfills him. I have swallowed my feelings about BBB so many times they are beginning to fester in my gut, but in the interest of mother-daughter relations I've learned to chomp down on a hard stick and keep my opinions to myself.

There was a moment of silence on the line. “I'm not sure, Mom,” Julie said. “Buddy's looking around for a job there but he hasn't had much luck.”

Imagine that, I thought and clenched my teeth to keep the words inside. “I'm sure something will turn up,” I said.
Not!
“Now, tell me what you need and I'll take inventory in the kitchen. And what about that old rolltop desk in the upstairs hall? You always said you wanted it.”

“What do you say to another glass of wine?” I asked Augusta when I got off the phone.

She had the bottle ready.

Paula Shoemaker checked the cornbread baking in a Dutch oven on the hearth. “What a relief to get away from Sarah Bedford for a while! Seems the police are everywhere you look…uh-oh! I think this cornbread's baked long enough. It's getting really brown on top.”

“Then take it off—hurry!” Debra watched as she moved it away from the ashes. “It smells wonderful!”

Celeste looked up from her churning. “Is it just me, or do the rest of you feel like people are eyeing you suspiciously? I'll swear, I'm getting paranoid!”

“I know what you mean,” Paula said. “I wish they'd hurry and get to the bottom of all this. It's impossible to concentrate on anything else.”

But as my hands-on history class bustled about the kitchen at Bellawood preparing a made-from-scratch dinner the old-fashioned way, they soon discovered they didn't have time to think of murder.

“Ouch!” Miriam Platt stuck a finger in her mouth. “I must've shredded half my knuckles with those sweet potatoes. Are you sure the pioneers didn't have food processors? This grated sweet potato pudding had better be worth all the blood I'm sacrificing.” She stirred in eggs, milk, butter, and spices, spooned the concoction into a cast-iron pan, and gently shoved it into the coals.

“Don't worry, it'll blend in with the pink,” Paula assured her. “And it's yummy! My grandmother makes it, but you have to stir it a lot.”

A thick soup of dried beans flavored with a ham bone bubbled in a large black pot that swung out over the flames where a smaller pot of dried apples simmered.

Celeste looked up from her churning in the corner. “My arms are killing me! I've been churning this stuff for ages. It's somebody else's turn.”

Debra looked at her watch. “Five minutes—that's all you've churned since I spelled you the last time. I'll relieve you after ten and not a second sooner. Besides, I have to find a centerpiece for the table. It looks bare.”

The class had arrived at Bellawood that morning in a body—well, maybe I shouldn't use that word—with skeins they had dyed earlier, and Mary Barton, the only person I know who can actually make cloth with that big monster of a loom in the downstairs bedroom, showed us how it was done. It wasn't easy.

By noon the girls had learned how to make a warp on a warping frame and thread a four-harness loom for a plain weave. When Mary left later, her eyes were crossed and she babbled incoherently, but each member of the class had had a turn at weaving a few inches of cloth.

After a bag lunch, we tackled the demanding particulars of cooking our dinner over an open fire, and for a while I felt safe there in another time where I could pretend the horrors of the past few weeks had happened somewhere else. The others seemed to relax, too, as they tended to the simple basic chores women performed hundreds of years ago—well, maybe except for Celeste, who decided she really didn't care for butter after all.

The weather had turned damp and cold, but we were warm—almost too warm—by the kitchen fire, where the apples and sweet potato pudding gave out warm spicy smells, and even the most troubled class member giggled over Celeste's comical battle with the butter churn.

We had all worked up an appetite by the time the food was ready, and bright-red berries from a hearts a burstin' bush in a brown earthenware jug gave the old pine table a festive look. What a shame, I thought, that Leslie Monroe wasn't in the class. If she had to work this hard for her dinner, maybe she would be hungry enough to eat.

The meal was delicious—including the sweet potato pudding—and Celeste and her fellow churners had even managed to produce enough butter to spread on the cornbread. Of course cleaning up was awful. We had to heat our dishwater over the fire, and the bottoms of the pots were black with carbon. When the girls left to drive back to Sarah Bedford, every one of them was smudged with soot and smelled of wood smoke.

I stayed behind to put a few things away, and was drying the last of the crockery when I heard a car outside and a familiar blast of a horn. Ellis.

Ellis Saxon and I have been best friends since we both wore lace-trimmed socks and smocked dresses, and I found out early on there wasn't much she was afraid of. She thought nothing of climbing the water tower behind the depot; jumped from our garage roof to the top of the apple tree that was so far away I couldn't even look; and was the only one of us who dared to snatch a rose from a bush in the cemetery during the dark of night on that scavenger hunt back in junior high. My brother Joel, who went on to become a scientist, always said Ellis had more energy that mc
²
. When Ellis Saxon enters a room I almost expect curtains to billow in her wake. This time she was followed by a gust of cold air—and Augusta.

Holding out her hands, Augusta gravitated to the dying fire. “It's freezing out there,” she said, wrapping herself in her voluminous green cape with the shimmering plum lining. “Is there anything hot to drink?”

“I think there's still some sassafras tea in the pot,” I offered, pulling a chair closer to the fire. “Here, sit and take off the chill. I'll warm it up—might take a minute.”

“I'll pass,” Ellis said, watching me pour the pink liquid into an enamel mug and set it in the embers, “but I'd sure like some of whatever that is that smells so good.” She sniffed at the dab of leftover pudding the girls had spooned into a plastic container brought for that purpose. Ellis frowned. “Looks strange. What is it?”

I told her. “The girls loved it—and it won't kill you. It's Augusta's recipe.”

“Well, maybe just a taste…” Ellis dipped in with a spoon. “Hey, this is good!” She dipped again, and then again until she'd eaten it all.

“I thought you were on a diet,” I reminded her. “What happened?”

“I've had about enough of that.” Ellis struck a dramatic pose. “As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again!”

“Haven't I heard that somewhere before?” Augusta asked. With a dish towel she removed her mug from the hearth and took a cautious sip. “Mm…nice. It's been a while since I've tasted this.”

I banked the coals with ashes and hung the stubby fire shovel on its nail, dreading to leave the warmth of the room.

“What do you think about the latest development at the college?” Ellis asked.

“What development?” I asked.

“Haven't you heard about the letters?” she said. “No, I guess you haven't, being out here all day. This girl who was killed—D. C. Hunter, and the one before her, too, got some kind of weird note—a quote from Lewis Carroll's
Through the Looking-Glass
.”

I glanced at Augusta and we said “aha” at the same time. “Where did you hear that?” I asked.

“It was in
The Mess
this morning. Josie Kiker found out about it somehow, and now the radio and TV people have picked it up. It'll be all over the Columbia paper tomorrow, wait and see.” Ellis frowned. “What do you mean, ‘aha'?”

“I suspected there must have been some kind of written message because of what Duff Acree said that day we found D.C.,” I told her. “He discovered some letters in her room and said it looked like another one—‘Just like that other girl got.'”

“I knew it was only a matter of time before that editor at the newspaper got to the bottom of that story,” Augusta said. “You could see she was chomping at the ground and pawing the bit.”

“She was at that,” I said, trying not to look at Ellis, who was obviously trying not to look at me.

“Did both young women receive the same quote?” Augusta asked.

“It was from the same poem but a different verse,” Ellis said. “Remember that silly rhyme about the Jabberwocky, Lucy Nan? Betsy Ann Overcash could say it by heart when we were in Mrs. Dixon's literature class.”

“She always was a show-off,” I said. “What did it say?”

“Do I look like Betsy Ann Overcash? Something about a blade. Decidedly graphic and to the point—if you'll excuse the expression.”

“I think I've seen a copy of that book in the bookcase over at the main house,” I said. “Just give me a minute to look.”

“I'll go along,” Augusta offered.

“And risk getting chilled all over again?” I said. “Stay warm. I'll be right back.”

Although most of Bellawood is wired for electricity, the kitchen house is not, so only the anemic glow of the lantern shone out as I crossed through the blustery dark to the back door and hurried to flip on a light. Darting a look over my shoulder, I wasn't surprised to see Augusta standing in the kitchen doorway watching after me.

I knew the tall glassed-in bookcase in the front parlor contained several volumes of its former owner's cloying verses, but there were other works there as well, and I finally found Lewis Carroll's book wedged between
Uncle Remus
and
Oliver Twist
.

Back in the kitchen we gathered at the long pine table where Ellis thumbed carefully through the brittle old pages. “Here it is!” She marked the passage with a finger. “Good Lord, it gives me the creeps. Listen, this is what Rachel Isaac received the day before she drowned:

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

Ellis looked up, frowning. “Now what in the world could they have meant by that?”

“I suppose it could be some kind of warning,” Augusta said, reading the lines over her shoulder. “The tulgey wood…She drowned in the college lake, and the lake was in the woods.”

“What did she do about the note?” I asked Ellis.

“They didn't go into detail in the newspaper, but her roommate said she thought it was a joke.”

“What about the other girl?” I asked. “What about D. C. Hunter?”

Ellis put the open book in my hands. “Gets a little gory.”

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

A sickening kind of shudder went through me. Back in the ninth grade we had laughed over Carroll's nonsensical verse. It wasn't funny now. This must have been what was in the letter the police found in the Hunter girl's room.

“Were the verses typed or handwritten?” Augusta asked. “I've read where they're sometimes able to trace—”

But Ellis shook her head. “Came from a book. Somebody made a copy of a page from the book and glued the verse to a piece of notepaper.”

I looked at the poem again. “Wonder why they started in the middle?”

“The middle of what?” Ellis asked as she and Augusta followed me outside. I was glad for their company as I stood in the darkness to lock the heavy oak door.

“The middle of the poem. Didn't you notice? The person who sent them only used the fourth and fifth verses. Do you think maybe he sent the first three to somebody else?”

“The girl who died in the fall from the Tree House might have received one,” Augusta said, explaining to Ellis what we had learned from Josie Kiker. “And there're still more verses to go.”

When I got home that night I found my old copy of
Through the Looking-Glass
and looked up the poem again.

“If the killer had sent them in order,” Augusta pointed out, “Carla Martinez should've received this third verse before she fell—or was pushed—from the Tree House:

He took his vorpal blade in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

I wondered how long the murderer waited in the Tree House and contemplated shoving that girl to her death.

“Why Jabberwocky? What does that have to do with anything?” Weigelia asked the next day. She had dropped by to borrow my thirty-cup percolator for her upcoming family reunion and wanted to know what the fuss was all about.

“Beats me,” I said. “I thought you might have some inside information from your cousin Kemper, but if you think about it, it sort of fits the way these girls died.” I told her about looking up the verses.

Weigelia shook her head and made what I call her “woebegone” face. Today she wore a bright red hat with shoes to match and her new black dress with the velvet collar for an afternoon meeting of the Blessed Sisters of Praise and Glory. “I don't know what's goin' on over at that school, but I don't like it one little bit! I told Celeste she should come home and stay until they catch that devil what's doin' all this, but she won't pay me no mind.”

The weather had turned warm and sunny and I had dusted off the front porch chairs where we sat drinking some of Augusta's apricot tea. Ellis found us there a little later when she came by with a set of dishes Julie had always admired. “Thought she might be able to use these in her new kitchen,” she explained. “Bennett's aunt Eunice gave them to us when we married, and you know I've never cared much for blue,” she said, setting the box on the floor.