The Angel and the Jabberwocky Murders

by Mignon F. Ballard

  He nodded as I spoke. “Saddest thing,” he said with an appropriately morose expression. “Music student. Everyone was shocked, but we just assumed that was an accident.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be any account of a note left behind or a verse like the other girls got,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean she didn’t receive one. It might have been thrown away.”

  The dean tapped the arm of his chair with a gnarly finger. “You phoned today? I’m afraid Mrs. Cornelius neglected to tell me.” He smiled. “But I always have time to visit with friends.”

  Lucy Nan, you must not under any circumstances look at Ellis Saxon! I glanced instead at Augusta, who gave me a “Don’t you dare laugh!” look. Leaning forward so the dean might hear me better, I spoke a little louder. “Dean Holland, do you remember if there were any other student deaths that may or may not have taken place before Carla Martinez was killed?”

  He cupped a hand over his ear and gave me an apologetic smile.

  Ellis nudged me with her elbow. “What about the Jabberwocky verses?” she bellowed in what I call her “green witch” voice. Her early experience as a Girl Scout leader has honed her hollering skills to perfection. “Dean Holland, do you have any idea why anybody would use those particular verses? There must be a reason.”

  He leaned back and closed his eyes and I prayed he wouldn’t doze off again. “Jabberwocky. From Through the Looking-Glass, of course. This last girl who died, and the one before…” He straightened abruptly and opened his eyes. “There was a group once, if I remember correctly. Yes. Kind of a club—called themselves the Jabberwocks, I think. Something like that.” Dean Holland rubbed a white-whiskered chin. “Funny, I’d forgotten that. Wish I could remember…I’m trying to picture some of the girls who were in it…peculiar little bunch…”

  “When?” I said, trying not to shout. “The year—do you remember the year?”

  The chair squeaked as he rose and walked to the window, where Augusta stepped deftly aside. “Hazel Godfrey was housemother at Emma Harris at the time. That was back when we still had housemothers. Girls had rules and regulations, had to be in at a certain time. Anyway, I remember Hazel being somewhat vexed by this little group. Dressed in black a lot.”

  “And when would that be?” Ellis asked.

  The dean stepped easily around an obstacle course of stacked books, boxes of papers, and a bronze bust of somebody I didn’t recognize. The worn green carpet was spotted with what appeared to be coffee stains and cigarette burns. Blythe had said he wouldn’t let her touch a thing in there.

  “Had to be sometime in the early or mid-seventies,” he said, wheeling about briskly, I thought, for somebody his age. “Hazel retired not long after that. Bought a little place in Chester to be near her daughter.”

  “Do you know if she’s still there?” Ellis asked, and the dean laughed. “Well, if she is,” he said, “she’s darn near as old as I am!”

  But Hazel Godfrey, we learned when we called the city hall in Chester, had died several years before. “Her heart,” I was told by the woman who answered the phone in the Records Department. “Her daughter Glenda was secretary at the middle school here for years. I think Glenda bought herself a condo in Charlotte after she retired.”

  “Too bad we’re not looking for information on Hazel’s daughter,” I told Ellis and Augusta after relating the conversation.

  “What about the college annual?” Augusta suggested. “Wouldn’t they have some from that period in the library here?”

  “Of course! And if that doesn’t work, we can try the Alumnae Society,” Ellis said. “If only we had a name—just one name! It’s a little awkward to call a perfect stranger and ask her if she wore black clothing and acted peculiar in college.”

  We found a quiet alcove in the library to go through the stack of Lanterns, which is what Sarah Bedford calls its yearbooks, starting with the late 1960s, just to be on the safe side. After Ellis and I amused ourselves over the love beads, ironed hair, and ragbag clothing, we moved on to some serious scanning. The first book I examined was dedicated to Miss Henrietta Westfield, the retiring dean of women, beneath whose photograph it read: “Unto the pure all things are pure.” And when I looked at her formidable face I didn’t doubt it.

  “I’m sure she was a fine, upstanding person of great value to the college,” Augusta said in regard to our not-so-silent snickering. I noticed, however, that her mouth twitched as she said it.

  “Augusta’s right,” Ellis said. “Will you get on with it, Lucy Nan? We don’t have time for this. Besides, the old bat’s ghost is probably hanging around somewhere waiting to shove a bookcase on top of us.”

  I set the heavy book aside. “Nothing here, anyway.”

  “I think we should look for groups or clubs. They might have been organized.” Augusta looked closely at a photograph and turned the page.

  We had worked up to 1974 before we found it, and then it was only a snapshot set at an angle on a page of similar informal photographs. The picture showed a black-clad group of seven girls in comical poses by the fountain in the commons. Each had a book balanced on her head; one was blowing a bubble; a cigarette dangled from one girl’s lips, and another clenched what looked like a lily in her teeth. The caption gave no names, only the identifying line: “The Mad Jabberwocks.”

  Augusta sighed. “There they are—at last!”

  Ellis shook her head and smiled. “Silly things. Thought they owned the world. Remember that feeling?”

  “Vaguely.” I examined the black-and-white photograph until my vision blurred. “Does anybody have a magnifying glass? I can’t tell a thing about their faces.”

  Ellis fumbled in her purse. “I’ve got one somewhere. Have you noticed the print in telephone books keeps getting smaller and smaller—not to mention menus and medicine bottles?”

  But even with Ellis’s magnifying glass the faces in the snapshot were too small to make out. “Do you think we’d recognize them in a class picture?” I asked.

  Ellis flipped through the pages of the yearbook. “For all their trying to be different, they looked pretty much like everybody else—except for the girls with teased hair and preppy clothing. All we can do is copy a few names—like the class president and some of the more involved students who would be more likely to keep in touch.” She shrugged. “Guess our next move is the Alumnae Society.”

  We began with ten names, which Ellis and I divided equally between us. The harried woman who runs the alumnae office was just getting ready to leave for the day when the two of us invaded her domain, leaving Augusta to browse through a few more yearbooks at the library. It took a few minutes of wheedling, but she reluctantly gave us the addresses we wanted.

  It was dark by the time we started home, and Ellis stopped by for a glass of wine before going home to start supper. Augusta hadn’t had any luck finding more pictures of the Mad Jabberwocks, she said, but a tray of fruit and cheese waited for us by the sitting room fire.

  “Here’s to the Jabberwocks!” Ellis said, lifting her glass. “We’re getting closer now.”

  “Which means you must be extremely careful, assuming the man the police arrested turns out to be innocent,” Augusta reminded us. “Londus Clack’s death should prove that the killer isn’t going to stop with college students if you get too close to the truth. He would have absolutely no compunction about getting rid of you as well.”

  “I thought that was your job,” I teased. “Aren’t you supposed to be looking after us?”

  Augusta selected an apple slice and a piece of cheese from the tray. “You know very well I can’t intrude in things like that,” she said with a slight edge to her voice. “I can only do my best to guide you, as I am doing now.”

  “I know, I know. Don’t get in an angelic flap about it, Augusta,” I said. “We’ll be careful—I promise.”

  Augusta considered that as she sipped her wine. “I wish you had promised that sooner. I would be remiss in my duties if I didn’t remind you
that this killer—whoever that might be—is probably someone you know, and it’s likely they’re aware of what you’re doing.”

  Ellis stood as she drained her glass. “On that comforting note I’ll take my leave,” she announced. “And I’m going to start calling the people on my list tonight. The sooner we get to the bottom of this, the better!”

  For supper Augusta served roast chicken, fresh asparagus with lemon-herb sauce, and a rice casserole, and I bragged on it so often she told me to stop. She was still miffed, I could tell, over my flippant remarks earlier in the evening.

  “Augusta, I’m sorry if I upset you,” I told her. “Frankly, I’m frightened every time I set foot on that campus. I suppose that’s just my way of putting on a brave front.”

  “I’m not upset, Lucy Nan, I’m concerned about you—and Ellis as well.” She patted my hand. “Sometimes being frightened is not a bad thing.”

  I put away the supper dishes, and while Augusta mended, phoned the first three people on my list. A man answered at the first number I reached and told me his wife was on a business trip and wouldn’t be back until Friday. No one was at home at the second address, and the third woman said she didn’t remember any Jabberwocks—mad or otherwise—and did well to remember her own name. I could hear what sounded like about five dogs barking in the background. I had a cup of orange-spice tea and a hot shower, and put the other two on the back burner.

  Ellis phoned me at Bellawood the next morning as I was going over the December schedule with Genevieve Ellison, who heads the plantation’s volunteers. “I’ve got one!” she yelled in her megaphone voice.

  “One what?”

  “One of the class of ’74, you batter brain, and she actually remembers the Jabberwocks. I’ve got a couple of names right here. Want me to give them a call?”

  “Without me? Are you kidding? Why don’t you come by after I get home tonight? We’ll call them together.”

  “Better still, you come here—and bring Augusta. Bennett’s investment club meets tonight—frankly, though, I think they just get together to eat and play poker. Come for dinner. I’ll add water to the gruel.”

  “I can hardly wait,” I said.

  The chicken stew was better than good, and so were the homemade biscuits and spiced apples Ellis served with it. Oh, sure, she takes shortcuts now and then just like the rest of us, but sometimes I find myself looking at my old friend as she shoves a loaf of bread into the oven with one hand and whips up her elegant apricot pound cake with the other, and I wonder where this domestic person came from. She wasn’t in the skinny, flat-chested sixth grader who gave Elroy Rippey, the boy next door, a bloody lip for making fun of her braces. And I don’t remember seeing her in the lanky high school freshman who refused to take home economics and planned a career in archaeology. She must’ve sneaked out when nobody was looking.

  And Bennett Saxon couldn’t be happier. I watched as he brushed a stray lock of hair from her face and kissed her cheek on his way out the door.

  “Hmm…you smell like strawberries,” he said as he gave me a good-bye hug.

  Witnessing the husbandly affection, I’ll admit I had an awkward “Charlie moment,” when sadness settles like a huge rock in my midriff and I long for my husband of twenty-nine years. But I can’t allow it to linger. “Looks like you’ve outdone yourself on the gruel,” I said to my hostess as she poured water in our glasses.

  We didn’t linger over dessert, as all of us were eager to find out more about the Mad Jabberwocks. “You go first,” Ellis said, shoving a notepad in my hand. “I’m too nervous.”

  My hand shook as I dialed the Greenville number.

  Sylvia (Bates) Prater laughed when I reminded her about the snapshot in the Lantern. “We were going to change the world! Well, maybe it’s not too late.” She and another “Jabberwock” had graduated that year, she told me, but they promised to stay in touch with the five who remained at Sarah Bedford. “We did pretty well for a while,” she said. “But you know how it is. I married a minister and we’ve moved from pillar to post. Vera went with a newspaper in Charleston, and the last I heard, she was still there.”

  “What about the other five?” I asked. “Did they all return to Sarah Bedford the next fall?”

  “Oh, yes, and I kept up with them for several years. Eva Jean Eaton married a Philbeck and lives in some little town in North Carolina—Elkin, I think, unless she’s moved…and I still exchange Christmas cards with Audrey Wallace—Tate her name is now. I’m ashamed to say I haven’t seen either of them in almost twenty years.”

  Eva Philbeck, I remembered, was the other name Ellis had been given to call. “I think I still have Vera Leonard’s home phone number if you want it, or you might try her at the newspaper.” Sylvia Prater paused. “Are you with the alumnae bulletin? Is this for a feature story or something? I’m surprised anybody even remembers the Mad Jabberwocks.”

  She sounded so cheerful I hated to give her the bad news, but I thought she should know. I told her about the verses. “Two girls have been murdered in the last few years—maybe more.”

  “Dear God, I read something about that in the paper but I didn’t realize it was anything like that. What can that possibly have to do with us? Seven girls who happened to live in the same dorm! We might’ve been a bit irreverent, and if we’d come along a few years earlier we might have been hippies, but we were too chicken to rebel.”

  There was silence on the line, during which time I think Sylvia Prater tried to convince herself the murders had nothing to do with seven girls who, over thirty years ago, longed to defy convention.

  “Because of the verses, we believe there’s a connection with the group you belonged to,” I said, “and it’s essential that I get in touch with the rest of them.”

  “Oh, everybody knows that silly old poem,” she told me. But she gave me the names of the members.

  Augusta, Ellis, and I sat at the Saxons’ kitchen table with the list in front of us. Sylvia and her friend Vera Leonard still lived in South Carolina; unless Eva Philbeck had moved, she was probably in North Carolina, and Audrey Wallace Tate owned a dance studio in upstate New York. That left Irene Friedman, Dorothy Cobb, and Maggie Talbot unaccounted for. Augusta found their class pictures in the yearbook: the two solemn seniors in black drape and pearls; a couple of straight-haired juniors with confident faces, and three sophomores who didn’t look old enough to be out of high school.

  As students at Sarah Bedford they had thumbed their noses as much as they dared. Now, was one or more of them demanding attention in a shocking and horrifying way?

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Eva Jean Philbeck was on her way out the door when we reached her at her home in Elkin. She still coached drama at the high school there, she explained, and they were rehearsing for their holiday production. I told her I was interested in the Mad Jabberwocks, but I didn’t tell her why.

  “Oh my goodness…you’re talking about another time altogether. It’s been so long since I’ve heard from any of those girls: Dorothy, Irene…Audrey lives somewhere up north, I think, and Maggie died several years ago.”

  For a few seconds she didn’t speak, and the silence weighed a ton. “Is anything wrong? Why are you asking about the Jabberwocks?”

  I suspected that if I told her the truth, that would be the end of it. There was something in her voice that warned me. If only I could see her, talk with her face-to-face. “I’m working with a history class at Sarah Bedford,” I told her, “and in looking through some old annuals we came across a photograph of the Jabberwocks. My friend thought it would make an interesting feature for the alumnae bulletin.” There, that wasn’t lying. Not really. “I’ve spoken with Sylvia Prater,” I said.

  “Sylvia who? Oh, Sylvia Bates. She was a year ahead of me, you know.”

  And what did that matter? I wondered. But it seemed important to Eva Jean Philbeck.

  Joy Ellen and I had planned a field trip to visit Miss Corrie Walraven, the soap-making lady who l
ived in the mountains above Elkin. Would it be convenient, I asked, to meet somewhere? I promised not to take more than a few minutes of her time.

  “Well…this is a busy time of year for me. I can’t guarantee you I’ll be free.”

  “Why don’t I just call when I’m in the area?” I suggested. “And if you have a few minutes to spare, maybe we can get together.”

  Ellis stood at my elbow. “Well, what’d she say?” she asked when I hung up the phone. “Is she going to meet with you?”

  “She doesn’t want to. That’s obvious, but I don’t think she knew how to avoid it. Seems I shook her up. She wasn’t expecting this.”

  Ellis shrugged. “That’s not surprising. After all, it’s been over thirty years.”

  “But don’t you think it’s strange that as close as these girls seemed to be, they didn’t care enough to keep in touch?”

  “Maybe there’s something they want to forget,” Augusta said.

  Paula Shoemaker sat demurely at the quilting frame making dainty stitches. “Looks like they’ll have to rule out the manuscript motive if they want to get a conviction on Horny Hornsby,” she said.

  Joy Ellen shook her head and laughed. “Why, Paula! Whatever would your great-great grandma say if she could hear the way you talk? Do you think your ancestors carried on like that at their quilting bees?”

  “Isn’t that why they had them?” Debra Hodges spoke up. “I mean, that is where they shared all their gossip, isn’t it?”

  “What gossip?” Celeste edged nearer. “Did I miss something?”

  Paula smoothed a pucker. “Well, you know Ernestine, the cleaning woman who comes to Emma Harris?”

  Celeste nodded. “The one who ‘threw out’ almost half those chocolate chip cookies Weigelia made for me. I know very well she ate ’em. What happened? Hope she got a stomachache!”

  “She said the manuscript Monica found behind the trophy case wasn’t there when she cleaned in the lounge a couple of days earlier. Told Aunt Shug a pen rolled under there when she was mopping, and it looked like a good one, so she got down on her hands and knees to poke it out and there was nothing back there except dust. That policeman came and questioned her yesterday—that one with the red hair—and Ernestine told him she would’ve noticed something as big as a box back there.”