“Looks like one of them wanted you blamed for D. C. Hunter’s murder,” I said.
“But why?” Blythe slipped the picture into her worn brown handbag. “Sally, do you mind if I borrow this? Maybe it will convince that redheaded policeman I don’t go around killing my girls.”
But somebody did kill them, and it seemed apparent that it was someone who was familiar with the campus.
That afternoon in class I found myself wondering if one of my own students had lured D. C. Hunter into that old shed for what she thought would be one last meeting with her lover.
Tomorrow the girls would meet at Bellawood to prepare a meal over an open fireplace, so we spent today’s class period in planning. With our combined lack of knowledge about early American cooking, I had an idea tomorrow was going to be a very long day.
“You’ve got to help!” I had pleaded with Augusta the day before. “You’ve actually done all this, and all I’ve ever cooked over a fire were hot dogs and s’mores—and even then the marshmallows usually fell into the fire. What did people eat back then?”
“We’ll plan a menu,” Augusta said, putting aside her current whodunit. “Something simple.” Later I was to wonder what it would have been like if she had suggested a complicated meal.
Nettie had asked me to look in on her niece after class that afternoon, so I dropped by Leslie’s room before leaving for home.
I found her sitting in a lotus position at the foot of her bed with an open book in front of her, but her eyes were on something outside. She obviously hadn’t heard me knock, so I opened the door and spoke her name. When she looked at me, I could see she had been crying.
“What’s wrong, Leslie? Are you sick?” She looked as if she didn’t want me to touch her, so I didn’t.
“Yes, I’m sick. Sick of being me. I wish I were somebody else—anybody else!” She snatched a pillow into her lap and socked it like a punching bag.
I sat on the empty bed across from her. “Why is that?”
“I’m a terrible person, that’s why.”
“What makes you think that? Your family worries about you, Leslie. I’m sure they must love you very much. I know how special you are to your aunt Nettie.”
A tear slid down her cheek and the girl wiped it away with the back of her hand. “She wouldn’t feel that way if she knew.”
“Knew what?”
“Nobody would like me if they knew what I did.”
I waited. If she wanted to tell me, she would, but I was almost afraid to ask.
“It’s my fault D. C. Hunter was killed. I might as well have done it myself.” And the crying started all over again.
“Oh, Leslie! Why in the world would you think that?” I reached out to her but she ignored my hand.
“Because…I was probably the last person to see her alive.”
I passed her a box of tissues and she grabbed a few. “I don’t have a roommate, you know, and there was like hardly anybody on our floor that Friday night,” Leslie said. “I stayed up pretty late studying and had a hard time going to sleep. Then I heard D.C. come in and decided to go over there and get a book. Her roommate—you know Sally—has this novel I’ve been wanting to read and she told me to just come over and get it anytime.”
Leslie tossed the pillow aside and shoved lank hair from her face. “Well, I knocked but she didn’t answer, so I just opened the door. D.C. was lying across her bed crying and she looked so like—you know—miserable, I felt totally sorry for her…for a minute. But when I asked her what was wrong, she screamed at me and told me to go away.”
“And did you?”
“Yes, but not until I told her what I thought of her. I’d just held it in for so long I couldn’t stand it anymore and it all came pouring out.” Leslie swung long skinny legs to the floor and threw a wad of tissues at the wastebasket.
“I told her she was hateful and selfish and nobody liked her, and that she could cry her silly head off for all I cared, and then I left. She called to me to come back—called twice, but I was too furious to bother with her. If I had, well, maybe she’d still be alive.” Leslie stared at the floor, avoiding my gaze. “Later, after I calmed down a little, I went down to ask Aunt Shug what to do, but she wasn’t there so I put a note on her door asking her to like check on her, you know.”
“So you had a temper fit! Most of us do at one time or another. But you cared enough to leave a note. Sounds to me like you were just reacting like a normal human being—one who might be dealing with some stress of her own—but if you like blaming yourself, there’s nothing I can say that will make you feel any better.
“Is that why you’re not eating?” I asked softly.
She looked up at me. “I eat.”
“What do you eat? Tell me what you’ve had to eat today.”
“Well, toast. I had raisin toast and juice for breakfast.” Leslie examined her clasped hands in her lap. “And a salad for lunch.”
She was watching her weight, she said. But if Leslie Monroe didn’t get help soon, I thought, there wouldn’t be any weight to watch.
“Try not to dwell on what happened to D. C. Hunter,” I said. “She went to that shed because she was summoned there. Somebody either phoned her or left a message. Think about it, Leslie. Did you hear anything later that night?”
“Like what?” She smoothed her pink flowered bedspread and propped the pillow at the head.
“Like a telephone ringing, or voices. Footsteps. Her room is close enough to yours so you would probably hear if somebody visited or phoned, and she would have to pass by your door to get outside. Do you remember hearing her leave later that night?”
But Leslie was tired of talking about D. C. Hunter. She stood in front of the mirror and slowly brushed her hair. “I really can’t remember,” she said.
I wasn’t so sure she was telling the truth.
My neighbor was in her backyard picking up limbs from the recent rain when I pulled into the driveway, and she came over as soon as she saw me and began to speak in unknown tongues. Fortunately, I had been around Nettie McGinnis long enough to be able to translate when she wasn’t wearing her teeth.
“Yes, I had a long conversation with Leslie,” I said, and told her about my visit with her niece. “And you’re right to be concerned, Nettie. I don’t know what’s the matter with Leslie, but she needs help. I think you should speak with her father. She should be under a doctor’s care.”
She nodded solemnly. “I’ll call him tonight,” she told me. At least, that’s what I thought she said.
Augusta greeted me at the back door with two glasses of wine and a tray of my favorite cheese-olive pastries hot from the oven.
“What’s the occasion?” I wanted to know, snatching a glass without waiting for an answer.
She smiled and clinked her glass with mine. “There’s a message on that machine that answers the telephone for you,” she said.
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 quantit
ies 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.
Chapter Eleven
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 mc2. 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 l
ike 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 Angel and the Jabberwocky Murders Page 10