“They just left her there—left her to drown,” I said. Even though the girl had been killed several years before, reading the article made the tragedy seem fresh and new. “Who would do such a thing?”
“That’s what we want to find out.” Augusta nodded toward the screen in front of us. “Let’s see what else it says.”
Like D. C. Hunter, Rachel was fully dressed in shorts, T-shirt, and sneakers, and her roommate said she had gone to the Old Lake to jog. The weapon used to strike the girl was never found, I read, but a coroner’s report didn’t rule out the possibility it might have been a stout stick later camouflaged by others of its kind in the lake’s murky waters.
Rachel Isaacs’s smiling photograph looked out at us from the front page of The Messenger. It was made the week before her death, the article said, for a college annual she would never see. She was a freshman and looked it: pretty, heart-shaped face, bright smile, short dark hair that appeared to be naturally curly. And the expression in her eyes gave the impression she had just heard a really good joke and couldn’t wait to tell it.
Friends planned to dedicate a sundial in her memory in the campus garden, I read, and the girl’s roommate was so distraught she was under a doctor’s care.
Augusta shook her head. “It seems as if she had absolutely nothing in common with D. C. Hunter, yet the two were killed near the same place at approximately the same time of year.”
“There has to be some kind of mad reasoning behind all this,” I said, “but I can’t imagine what it might be.”
“The article doesn’t mention the Isaacs girl receiving any kind of note or letter,” Augusta said, scanning the story again. She glanced at the office across the hall. “Do you suppose the editor might remember anything about it, or has she not been with the paper that long?”
Josie Kiker had been editor of the tiny weekly for over twenty years, and it didn’t look as if her desk had been cleared since she’d started. When I poked my head in the doorway she looked up from her computer and stretched, shoving a mop of gray-streaked red hair from her forehead. “Did you bring me a scoop or you just out slumming?” With a sudden kick, she sent a straight chair sliding in my direction. “Have a seat. I need a break anyway—back’s rebelling.” Josie pushed up her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “What can I do for you?”
I told her what I had overheard the policeman say about D. C. Hunter supposedly receiving some kind of mysterious letter. “Just like that other girl got.”
She reached for a pot of what looked like liquid coal that simmered on top of the filing cabinet. “Coffee?”
I thanked her but declined. I try not to drink anything you might have to scoop out with a shovel. I told her how the girls in my class had discovered D.C.’s body and how the police had examined her mail. “We—I—thought you might remember something like that happening when Rachel Isaacs was killed,” I said.
Josie tossed down her brew like it was a shot of bourbon. “Seems like I did hear there was a message of some kind, but the police were real closemouthed about it. Never gave out so much as a hint. When nothing ever came out about it, I just assumed it was one of those rumors that circulate through the gossip mill.” Shoving her coffee mug aside, the editor leaned across her desk. “Did you actually see these letters? How do you know they were meant for the Hunter girl?”
“That’s what Sally, her roommate, told police. She’d been collecting the mail and leaving it on D.C.’s desk. I was there when they asked her for permission to enter the room and take them.”
She frowned. “How many letters were there?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Four or five, maybe, but the attention seemed focused on one,” I told her.
“I don’t suppose you know what it said?” She tilted her head to look at me. I didn’t even have to answer.
Josie Kiker had the look of a bloodhound in her eyes and I wouldn’t have been too surprised if she had dropped to the floor and begun to sniff. Instead she leaned back in her chair. “Wonder if it held some kind of threat?”
I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine, but it sounds as if it might be something that would tie the two murders together.”
The smell of scorched coffee filled the small room, and Augusta, standing behind the editor, wrinkled her nose at the sight of the stained pot, which looked as if it hadn’t been scrubbed in this decade.
I turned away to hide my smile, but thankfully Josie didn’t notice. “They’ll say Claymore Hornsby did it,” she said, studying a spot on the ceiling, “but I just can’t see it.”
“Was he here when the other girl was killed?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, Clay’s been at the college for seven or eight years now and had a roving eye for as many, but I never thought he’d actually do anything about it. You’ve seen his wife, I suppose?”
I shook my head. “Not that I can remember.”
“Well, as the old fellow says, ‘She ain’t got nary turn for inticin’.’ Plain as a rag mop, Monica is—but then he knew that when he married her, didn’t he?”
I said I reckon he did and tried to signal Augusta it was time to go. I wouldn’t put it past her to go into a cleaning frenzy right then and there. “I just hope they’ll soon find out who did it,” I told her. “Two unsolved murders in less than five years isn’t going to look good for Sarah Bedford.”
Josie Kiker made a noise that was somewhere between a shish and a grunt. “Two is all they admit to, but I’ve wondered since about that other girl.” She nudged her glasses into place and frowned at the computer screen.
“What other girl? You mean there was a murder before Rachel Isaacs’s?”
“Accident, they said. Fell from the Tree House. You know, that circular platform around the big oak on the front campus. They use it mostly on Class Day.”
I sat back down. “I don’t remember that. When did it happen?”
“’Bout nine years ago, I think. I can look it up. Seems it was a girl from somewhere in upstate New York.”
Josie bustled out of the room, bypassed the microfilm, and went to a narrow alcove where I heard her shifting through bulky bound copies. Her glasses had slid midway down her nose when she returned dusting off her hands a few minutes later. “Martinez,” she announced. “Carla Martinez.” She looked at me across her rat’s nest of a desk. “Happened in early October—just like the other two.”
Nine years ago in October. That was about the time our daughter Julie, still in high school, had been hospitalized with a severe bout of flu that developed into pneumonia. I had been so preoccupied with worry I hadn’t kept up with what was going on at the college—or anywhere else in town. If there was a connection with the three girls’ deaths, that would mean a gap of five years between the first two, yet it was hard to believe it was coincidence. I also considered the fact that Stone’s Throw was usually a slow news town and that Josie Kiker rarely had a chance to unearth a good story. Her hands paused now over the keyboard, aching back apparently forgotten in her eagerness to dig up old bones. “And guess who discovered the body?” she said.
I frowned. “Not Londus Clack?” I darted a look at Augusta, who was making her way to the door with a look of purposeful intent, and I knew she was headed for the bound copies.
“The very same. Found her early in the morning as he was setting out mums—always plants that pretty purple kind along the flagstone walk there. Everybody seemed to think she’d fallen the night before. Died of a broken neck. Doc Worley—he was coroner then—said she’d been dead about six or seven hours.”
“What was she doing in the Tree House that late at night?” I asked.
“Who knows. Some of the girls in her dorm said she’d gone over to the practice rooms like she always did after supper—she was a piano student, you know—and she was wearing the skirt and sweater she’d worn to class the day before.” The editor nodded toward the door behind me. “I left that issue out if you want to see it, but I doubt you’ll learn much there.”
Carla Martinez had large dark eyes and long straight hair that could have been light brown. She wasn’t smiling in the picture and looked as if she might be the studious type. In fact, the article revealed she had come to Sarah Bedford on a partial scholarship and planned to major in music. She was a freshman.
I looked up at Augusta, who stood waiting. “What now?” I asked. She didn’t answer, but as she fingered her glowing necklace the stones turned from brilliant sapphire to the mesmerizing cobalt of deep, deep water.
“Brendon Worthington—he was dean of the School of Music then—said Carla was one of the most promising pianists he’d ever taught,” Joy Ellen Harper told me a few days later. “It just tore him up when that happened. She was only seventeen, you know.”
“What do you think happened?” I asked. “She doesn’t sound like the type to be hanging out in a tree house in the middle of the night.”
“Could’ve been a prank, I guess. Underclassmen aren’t supposed to go up there. The Tree House is off limits to everybody but seniors, although I doubt if any of them give a hoot about it. The college makes a big deal out of it on Class Day.” Joy Ellen shook her head and frowned at the blue book she was grading. “What in the world’s gotten into that girl? Didn’t even try to answer half these questions.” She slashed a red F on the inside cover and tossed the book aside.
“I really didn’t know the Martinez girl,” she continued. “She wasn’t in any of my classes, but you’re right, she didn’t seem the type for midnight stunts. Kind of a shy little thing. We all just assumed she fell.”
I glanced at the name on the failed exam. Leslie Monroe. I knew she had studied. I’d seen her cramming with a stack of books the day I’d brought the cookies from her aunt. She had seemed worried even then. Poor Leslie! She wasn’t going to take this well at all.
“Where can I find Dean Worthington?” I asked. “Is he still around?”
“No, Brendon retired soon after that. He died a couple of years ago.”
I sat on one of the desktops. “What about Dr. Hornsby?”
Joy Ellen let the blue book drop. “Claymore Hornsby? Uh-uh. Clay came here after old Amos Crockett died. Good English teacher, Professor Crockett, but a bit on the eccentric side. Died during midterms and they had to find a replacement fast. No, Clay couldn’t have had anything to do with that girl’s death.”
She turned the red pencil in her fingers. “You know, I’d almost forgotten that incident. That’s awful, isn’t it? But it happened soon after classes started that year. The girl hadn’t been on campus long.”
Joy Ellen tossed aside her pencil and leaned back in her chair. “Hornsby’s admitted he had a fling with D. C. Hunter, but he swears he broke it off that Friday night and didn’t see her again.”
“That was the night before she died…how do you know this?”
I must have had a strange expression because Joy Ellen laughed. “Campus grapevine. And it was in this morning’s paper. I’m surprised you didn’t see it.”
“Haven’t had a chance,” I said. “But I did stop by The Messenger over the weekend to look through some old issues. Did you know that Londus Clack was the one who discovered the Isaacs girl and the girl who was supposed to have fallen from the Tree House?”
“Well, that makes sense. He’s always up earlier than everybody else, and his work takes him all over the campus.” Joy Ellen thought for a minute, then shrugged. “Nah! Londus is scared of his shadow. Besides, I can’t see him getting that riled at anybody.”
I told her what had happened to his father. “I’ve always heard it’s the calm ones you have to watch out for,” I said. “The ones who hold it in.”
“Could be, but if the police thought Londus was guilty, they would’ve arrested him by now—unless he’s a lot slyer than I think.”
I resisted the impulse to look behind me. Were we dealing with two different murderers? “What about the professor?”
“I can’t believe Clay Hornsby would let himself get mixed up in a thing like this—especially since his novel was accepted last summer. They’ve been playing it up big in the English Department.” Joy Ellen’s eyebrows went up. “But…a waitress in Columbia says she served Clay and a young woman that Friday before D.C. disappeared and that the girl looked like she’d been crying. Said she recognized them when she saw their pictures on the television news. Sounds like the two of them were together all that day.” She marked another book. “And then there’s that box of breath mints with his prints on it, and of course they were all over that shed, too, I hear.”
“What does he say about that?” I asked.
“What can he say? They were his, all right. That old shed was their secret meeting place, but he swears he didn’t see her after that night. Says they had a long talk, then D.C. drove back to the campus, or at least that’s what he assumed she did. Clay drove over to Table Rock Mountain and rented a cabin for a couple of nights.” Joy Ellen made a face and shook her head. “Needed time to think! Anyway, he got home late Sunday and didn’t find out D.C. was missing until the next day…or so he says.”
“That would explain why somebody heard her crying,” I said. “And her roommate swears her car wasn’t there when she got in that Friday night, so D.C. must’ve come in later. But wouldn’t the people who rented the cabin to Clay Hornsby remember if he was there?”
“It seems so, but of course I don’t know the details. The last I heard, the police were letting him go,” Joy Ellen said. “Frankly, I think the only thing Claymore Hornsby is guilty of is poor judgment and a bad tailor.”
The weather was almost summerlike as I walked across campus after class that day. Students in shirtsleeves strolled past and several gathered by the fountain in the sunny commons area. Sarah Bedford seemed a different place from the cold bleak campus where we had found D. C. Hunter’s body the week before.
The professor’s story of a cabin at Table Rock Mountain must have checked out or he wouldn’t have been released, I thought. But Table Rock State Park was only a couple of hours away. Clay Hornsby could have come back to the campus, killed his young lover, and been snug in his mountain cabin before dawn, and nobody would be the wiser. Unless they saw him here.
The students’ light voices blended with the trickle of the fountain as I walked past the commons, and for a minute I almost forgot a girl recently had been murdered here. Two of the girls in my class called to me and I waved back. They walked in pairs now, or clusters. The students at Sarah Bedford were afraid to walk alone. Several, I heard, had already left the college.
In a far corner of the campus I saw the empty Tree House in the dark shade of the huge oak whose limbs almost touched the ground. Its leaves were beginning to turn the same color as the red earth that nourished it, and it looked like a picture you might find in a coffee-table book. I started to hurry past when I noticed a movement near the top of the twisting steps and glimpsed the swirl of a lavender gossamer skirt that shimmered as if it had been sprinkled with stardust. Augusta.
She hurried to meet me at the base of the tree and paused briefly to glance back at the platform above us. “There’s only one way someone could fall from that Tree House,” she said, “and that’s if they either stood on the railing or crawled under it.”
“Or if they were pushed,” I said.
Chapter Seven
Augusta looked up from her latest Agatha Christie novel and lifted a brow. She had already finished most of the stack I’d brought from the library and was especially fond of what she called the English village mysteries. “You wouldn’t be going over to the college, would you?” she asked.
“I don’t have a class there today, but I thought I’d see how Blythe is doing. Want me to stop by the library?”
She marked her place in The Body in the Library and laid it aside. “Later, perhaps, but I’d like to go along if you don’t mind, maybe stroll about the campus a bit.” Augusta looked at me with a perfectly straight face and said, “Sometimes, you know, it’s diffic
ult to see the thicket for all the oaks.”
“I see,” I said, and nodded, planning to decipher that later.
Augusta seemed lost in thought as we drove to the campus. Blythe Cornelius had been so helpful during our recent chaotic invasion, I stopped by the store for a pot of African violets which Augusta held on her lap, and maybe I imagined it, but the soft lavender of the flowers’ petals seemed more vivid after the angel’s touch. We had waited until mid-afternoon to go so that Blythe would have a chance to unwind after what must be a tiring day with the dean, and she seemed pleased when she greeted me at the door.
“Why, Lucy! You didn’t have to bring me anything, but it’s good to see you again.” Blythe took the foil-wrapped pot from my hands and held it to the window light. “See how it matches my curtains…and isn’t it odd?” she added, sniffing. “It smells a little like strawberries.” She bent to stroke a yellow cat I hadn’t seen before that rubbed against her legs. “It will be lovely right here in the window if my babies will just leave it alone. You be a good girl now, Miranda.”
I glanced quickly at Augusta, but her back was turned as she stooped to examine titles in a bookcase across the room, looking for mysteries, no doubt.
Willene Benson sat on the edge of a dainty Victorian chair with her ankles primly crossed and dabbed her nose with a handkerchief. “Allergy,” she explained without looking up.
The woman seemed to have a perpetual smile, as if her teeth were too large for her mouth and she didn’t know what to do with them, but in spite of her ever-present grin it was obvious she had been crying.
“I was just about to offer Willene some banana bread,” Blythe said. “Not homemade, I’m afraid—the bakery has me beat. The water’s about to boil. Won’t you join us?”
She sounded as if she meant it, so I accepted, leaving Augusta to her own diversions. Also, I wanted to find out what Blythe Cornelius knew about the girl who had fallen from the Tree House.
The Angel and the Jabberwocky Murders Page 6