The Angel and the Jabberwocky Murders

by Mignon F. Ballard

  From where I stood, Sarah Bedford by moonlight looked like a print from an old woodcut, all black and white and still. There was no wind, but my ears were freezing, and my bare ankles tingled with cold. I slipped from shadow to shadow, keeping her in my sight until she reached the commons area. And that was when she looked back and saw me.

  “Wait!” I called, and realized how ridiculous it sounded. Of course she wasn’t going to wait. And she didn’t. Immediately Monica Hornsby began to run, and searching for breath, I ran after her. My side felt like it was being stitched by a giant needle and gathered into a knot. Would the woman ever slow down? Clearly she was in better shape than I was, and a whole lot younger.

  A dog barked somewhere not too far away and I heard the cold trickle of the fountain. I thought about yelling for help, but it might seem kind of strange since I was the one doing the chasing. Surely Blythe had called campus security by now, but where the hell were they?

  And where was Monica Hornsby? Probably far away by now. The silhouette of the Tree House loomed in front of me, and in the darkness I saw the glow of Augusta’s hair. I drew closer just in time to see Monica trip and go down; her short cry sounded out over the soft thud of her falling. By the time I reached her she was crawling on her hands and knees, probably searching for the package. When she saw me, Monica swore under her breath and hurried away, favoring her right foot in a limping gait. Near the loose flagstone that had tripped her, Augusta stood smiling, then wiped the soil from her hands before pressing the stone back into place.

  A few feet away in the black shadow of the Tree House lay the package Monica had dropped and I scrambled to pick it up. What could be important enough to make the professor’s wife go to such lengths to find it?

  A gust of wind sent what was left of the leaves on the big oak rustling, and a limb swayed over my head. I grabbed the box to my chest and stumbled backward when a man’s shoes swung past my face. The shoes had feet in them.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The scream was about halfway between thought and deed when I remembered the Halloween dummy we had encountered in the haunted garden. Whoever had been responsible for cleaning up after the festival had forgotten the stuffed creature hanging there. Thank heavens I hadn’t screamed and awakened the whole campus over a fake monster. Poor Frankie. He looked cold and uncomfortable hanging there with his head turned that funny way.

  Again the wind parted the foliage above me just long enough to reveal the white socks, the green denim pants…Frankenstein’s monster wasn’t wearing green denim pants!

  Then the pale light found his face. Londus Clack’s face. And he was never going to sing again.

  It was a good scream and I didn’t waste it.

  For some reason, throughout the ordeal that followed, I held on to the package Monica Hornsby had dropped. A couple of people looked at it curiously, and somebody—Blythe, I guess it was—asked me if I didn’t want to put it down somewhere. I didn’t. Whatever was in that box must have been important for Monica to do what she did and I wanted to find out what it was. But Monica’s nocturnal visit was almost forgotten after I discovered Londus Clack hanging around like that.

  Later, back at the dormitory, Captain Hardy looked at me with a resigned expression, as though he wasn’t too surprised to find me there mixed up in murder again. Good grief! Was I some kind of homicidal Typhoid Mary? I hadn’t even known D. C. Hunter, and I had only spoken with Londus Clack that one afternoon in Main Hall. Yet the idea made me feel a little strange.

  Leslie was still sleeping soundly when I reluctantly returned to the room to wake her with the grim news of Londus’s death, but the captain felt it necessary to speak with all the girls who had spent the night in Emma P. Harris Hall. Huddled in pajamas and robe, Leslie clung to me quietly during the questioning by police. Students were offered counseling of sorts by a yawning school psychologist who then advised them to try and get some sleep, and I felt her body tense beside me.

  “I don’t want to go back to that room alone,” she whispered.

  “Why not bunk in with Debra and me?” Celeste offered. “We can push our beds together and sleep three across.”

  Debra agreed. “Sounds okay to me. Mom always said there was safety in numbers.”

  “I’ll look in on you later,” I promised, trying to sound more confident than I was. And as the girls returned to their rooms, I was relieved to see Augusta trailing after.

  It was after four and still dark. Ordinarily, I could sleep at that hour on a bed of gravel, but that morning my adrenaline pump was in high gear. Of course I was working on my second cup of Blythe’s strong coffee.

  Blythe had a bad bruise on her chin where she had collided with Monica earlier in the lounge, and I noticed a raw-looking patch where she’d run into the doorjamb, she said, on the heel of her right hand.

  Now the captain pushed aside his half-filled coffee mug, looked at me, and sighed before removing his glasses to rub red-rimmed eyes.

  Blythe half-sat, half-lay in the faded green armchair across from him with her eyes closed and her head resting on the back of the chair. The laces of one gray oxford had come undone, and she cradled her bifocals in one hand, gently resting them on her chest. She looked tired and old.

  The young sergeant, Duff Acree, stood with his hands on his hips facing the window as though he dared anything else to happen.

  “Well,” Captain Hardy said to me, readjusting his eyeglasses, “how ’bout telling us what you were doing out in the commons area at two—or whatever—in the morning?”

  I glanced at Blythe, who smiled weakly, her gaze falling on the bulky package in my lap. I knew I was going to have to hand it over to the police—but not before I got a look at it first.

  “Believe it or not, I was chasing a prowler,” I said, “and I’ll be glad to give you a play-by-play account…” I shifted uncomfortably…“but first you’ll have to excuse me for a minute.” I managed to look a trifle embarrassed. “All that coffee, you know.”

  Secure in a stall in the first-floor bathroom, I slid the box from its padded envelope. It had obviously been around awhile as it was frayed at the corners, one side was split, and it was held together with string. It had once held typing paper and said so. It still did, only now the paper was filled with text, double-spaced. It was a manuscript typed on a manual machine that was in desperate need of a new ribbon by somebody who had never taken a typing course.

  I read for as long as I dared and found it to be a pretty good story. It appeared to be a novel about a botanist named Giles Crenshaw who discovered a lost tribe in the wilderness of the Blue Ridge Mountains. There he fell in love, and into bed, with a spritelike beauty named Ariel who spoke Elizabethan English.

  The language was beautiful and melodic, and from the little I read it seemed the writer not only had a sense of adventure but a sharp wit as well. The name “Crockett” had been typed in the top right-hand corner of every page, and on the inside lid of the box I found the title, High Devongreen, with the author’s name and address written below it:

  Amos Crockett

  516 Gray Woods Court

  Stone’s Throw, S.C.

  Amos Crockett. Wasn’t he the English professor who died midterm, the man Clay had Hornsby replaced? What was his manuscript doing behind the trophy case in Emma P. Harris Hall? I was beginning to get a crazy idea.

  I presented the box and its contents to Captain Hardy. “Here. This is what the chase was all about. Careful, it’s falling apart.”

  He frowned, accepting it reluctantly. “What is it?”

  “A book manuscript. A novel, by a professor who once taught here. Amos Crockett.”

  “So it was true!” Blythe came over to look at it. “Everybody suspected he was working on something, but he never talked about it. I thought it was probably some dull scholastic work, he was such a timid little man. A novel, you say?”

  I nodded. “And a pretty good one, I think.”

  Captain Hardy grunted. “You
wanna let me in on this?”

  I told him how I had heard somebody searching the room across the hall, then followed the prowler downstairs. “She was looking for something—this manuscript—and she found it behind the trophy case over there.”

  “She?” The captain popped a couple of Rolaids.

  “Monica Hornsby.” Blythe and I spoke together and I let her take up the tale.

  “I heard somebody in here,” she said. “And when I turned on the light and confronted her, she knocked me sprawling and ran…”

  “With the manuscript,” I said. “And I ran after her. She tripped on something out by the Tree House—a loose flagstone, I think—and hurt her ankle, probably sprained it.” No use telling about Augusta’s part in this, I thought. “Anyway, she dropped the box, and that was when I found him: Londus Clack. The package had landed under the Tree House, and when I went to pick it up I saw the dummy. Only it wasn’t a dummy.”

  I yawned. Even the cracked leather sofa with the cold chrome arms looked tempting. I was ready to go to sleep now.

  “And what about the Hornsby woman?” the detective asked.

  “I don’t know. She didn’t stick around, but she was limping, so she can’t have gone too far.”

  “Sergeant,” Captain Hardy said, “you and Tillman take the patrol car and pick up Monica Hornsby—No, never mind. We’re about finished here. I’d better go with you.”

  “Thank you, God,” I said, letting my eyelids droop.

  “Poor Londus,” Blythe said. “I know he’s been acting strangely lately, but do you think he…I just can’t believe he would…” She clucked softly to herself. “What an awful way to die!”

  “Oh, he didn’t hang himself, ma’am,” the young sergeant said. “At least the coroner didn’t seem to think so. He said it looked like somebody’d whacked him over the head real good first.”

  Captain Hardy groaned as he stood. “Well, fine, Sergeant. Do you have any other announcements you’d like to make, or can we get on with it?”

  Blythe Cornelius shook her head numbly. “Another murder. When will it end?” Suddenly she leaned forward and nudged my arm. “Dear God! You don’t suppose Riley Herman had anything to do with this?”

  The weary captain sighed and sat back down. “Just for the record,” he said, “who’s Riley Herman when he’s at home?”

  I told him how Willene’s ex had confronted Jo Nell and me and how I had crowned him with a chocolate-chip cone. I thought for a minute he was going to smile, but he didn’t.

  “He’s that man they brought in earlier, sir,” Sergeant Acree reminded him.

  “As far as either of you know, is there any connection between Londus Clack and this Herman guy?” the captain asked.

  Blythe said she didn’t know of any unless Londus happened to get in the other man’s way. I just shook my head. The two could have been engaged to be married for all I knew—or cared right then.

  The captain looked at his watch. “If you ladies don’t mind, let us know where you can be reached for the next day or so in case we need to get back to you.”

  I muttered something in reply as I knelt on the gritty tile floor to retrieve my jacket that had fallen behind the sofa. Ben and I were supposed to go somewhere today. Someplace that required physical exercise and strenuous activity. Kings Mountain. We were supposed to hike to the top of Kings Mountain.

  By the clock on the wall it was just after five and I didn’t think I could stay awake to drive back home. With my jacket under my arm I groped my way upstairs to the bed I’d vacated in Leslie’s room, pausing only to glance in at the sleeping girls down the hall.

  Just before sleep came, a troublesome little doubt flitted like a gray moth through my semiconscious thoughts and into some deep dark void where I couldn’t follow.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “I’m getting hungry,” I said, leaning against a sweet gum tree to rest. “How long before we eat?” I had slept late that morning, then hurried home to change and throw a picnic lunch together. I hadn’t had time for breakfast.

  Ben turned on the trail to look at me. “We’ve only been walking half an hour, Lucy Nan. And you ate all those doughnuts on the way.”

  “Two. I ate two, and they were small ones, at that.” I yawned. “Does this seem steeper than usual to you?”

  Ben and I stepped aside to make room for a troop of Brownie Scouts chasing one another up the mountain path, and it exhausted me to look at them. The walk up Kings Mountain wasn’t a challenge for even an inexperienced hiker and I had climbed to the top more times than I could count, but today the incline seemed straight up and down.

  “Look, you’re tired. We can go back down,” Ben said. “We don’t have to do this, you know.”

  “I know, but I want to—if only it would level off a little.” I shoved him ahead of me. “Press on and don’t pay any attention to me.”

  He gave me one of those looks that made me want to run up the mountainside with a big smile on my face. “I think you know better than that,” he said. I took a deep breath and chugged along behind him.

  As tired as I was after the horrible experience of the night before, being in the woods—even on a well-traveled path like this one—was calming. As a child, when I was upset or worried I would roam the hills above Stone’s Throw and let the peace seep in, and I needed that experience today. But Kings Mountain, the scene of a bloody battle during the American Revolution, had not always been a peaceful place.

  It was after two by the time we reached the top, where we found a patch of sun-warmed grass and sat on our jackets to eat. Ben unwrapped one of the pimento cheese sandwiches I had made that morning. “Why would anybody want to kill—what did you say his name was?”

  “Londus Clack.” I swigged tepid water. “I can’t imagine unless they thought he knew something. And it would have to have been a man, or else a woman with a lot of strength, to hoist him up there like that. I’m just glad it was dark so I couldn’t see any more than I did.

  “Wonder how long he’d been there?”

  “Couldn’t have been too long. He was alive when Celeste and I came out of that Haunted Garden thing, and then we cleared out like everybody else. Must’ve been about ten.” I bit into a pickle and edged away from an inquisitive yellow jacket. “I think he wanted to tell me something. Wish I knew what it was.”

  He frowned. “What makes you think that?”

  I told him what Londus had said and how he had been following the girls. “I don’t blame them for being nervous, but I really don’t think the poor man meant any harm.”

  Ben twirled a crimson sweet gum leaf that had drifted into his beard. “Maybe he was trying to protect them,” he said.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Blythe started to tell us something about Londus last night—something she suspected, I think, but I guess she realized she’d said too much already.”

  I watched him polish an apple on his sleeve. “Could’ve been Monica Hornsby,” I said. “She’s tall enough, and she was prowling about the campus last night.” I realized I wanted the woman to be Londus Clack’s killer because I didn’t like what I’d heard about her, but it was hard to imagine her bashing him over the head and stringing him up in the Tree House. Monica would be the type to use poison, maybe, or a ladder with the rungs sawed through.

  I crumbled the rest of my bread for the birds and held out a hand to Ben. “Come on, let’s walk around some. I don’t want to share my chocolate chip cookies with these wasps.”

  “Thought you were too tired.” He took my hand as we walked. “You just wanted to get me off to yourself, didn’t you, so you could have your way with me?” He aimed a kiss at my neck.

  “Cramp in my leg,” I said, laughing, although actually it wasn’t a bad idea. We stopped to look at the view. Although it was the last of October, the mountain was still a bright smear of color and the sky an incredible blue that rivaled the brilliance of Ben Maxwell’s eyes.

  For the last several weeks I had been aro
und college students so much it was a relaxing experience to have a conversation with someone near my own age. Was I mistaking my pleasure in intelligent adult company for something more? Whatever it was, I was enjoying it.

  A chill had crept into the air, a gust of wind sent a scurry of leaves around us, and Ben hurried me along. “Guess we’d better be starting back if I’m going to cook you dinner,” he said. “It has to simmer awhile.”

  I had never heard of simmering steaks, which is all I thought he knew how to cook, but I kept my mouth shut.

  I was happy to be wrong, and tried not to look astonished on our return when he dumped his collective ingredients on my kitchen table and went about assembling them into a stew almost as good as my mother used to make. Augusta had left a Bundt cake saturated with rum for our dessert and even the smell of it made me dizzy.

  Clementine was clamoring to be let out and I noticed the kitchen trash can needed emptying as well, so while Ben was chopping onions I decided to take care of both. The dog usually runs around the yard three times before retiring to do her business behind the summerhouse. I followed her, plastic bag in hand, to add her contribution to the garbage when I noticed an empty cake-mix box in the kitchen trash. First a slow cooker and now cake mix! Augusta was beginning to adapt to modern ways and I couldn’t wait to see if she would mention it. The note she had left on my dresser said she had gone to help Ellis with a sewing project but I couldn’t imagine what it was. Ellis had shown me the nursery-rhyme cross-stitch she’d completed for the expected new grandson, which was a miracle in itself. I couldn’t imagine her starting another project and wondered why she hadn’t mentioned it to me. Was Ellis giving Augusta lessons in shortcut cooking? I laughed just thinking about it.