Murder at Monticello

by Jane Langton

  She put down her pen and stood up, and then they both gazed at the six-foot piece of paper. Half a continent lay between Fern’s entry and Tom’s, but there was no separation in time. Godlike, they looked down at the small active figures poling their keelboat up the Missouri River while the founder of the expedition—far to the east, in another world—walked into the President’s House in the city of Washington. The pure rain of heaven had fallen on all their heads alike.

  When Augustus Upchurch appeared in the doorway, Tom and Fern were standing side by side, pinning the first piece of the time line back up on the wall.

  They turned as one, and saw him.

  Augustus had been about to invite Fern to a concert in Cabell Hall. After all, what could be more harmless? How could she refuse? They would sit together absorbed in the music. Afterward they would talk about it in high cultural tones, and then he would ask her where she lived and drive her home and kiss her lightly on the cheek.

  But now his smile faded.

  Rattled, Fern moved away from the time line and waved a feeble hand at Tom. “Mr. Upchurch, I’d like you to meet Tom Dean. He’s helping with my research.”

  Augustus was still gasping from the steep ascent up the high risers of the stairs. His face was purplish red. His tie was Day-glo green. He frowned at Tom, breathing hard. “You’re a volunteer?”

  Tom nodded vigorously. Fern said, “Oh, yes, that’s right, he’s just a volunteer.”

  The interloper was young, no older than Fern herself. Suddenly Augustus felt superannuated and ready for the grave. He tried not to show his crushed feelings. “What’s all this?” he said, walking to the time line, tilting his head to read the long slanting inscriptions.

  They both spoke at once, explaining.

  Augustus listened. Glancing around the room, he saw the prodigious length of the cooperative project, and his heart sank. He wanted to ask how this sort of thing would help with the writing of Fern’s all-important book, but he didn’t.

  He also wanted to know whether or not they had permission to jam all those thumbtacks into the wall, but again he refrained.

  Fern saw him glance at the crumbs of plaster along the baseboard. She hesitated on the brink of apologizing, then held her tongue.

  Augustus could think of nothing else to say. He did not invite Fern to the concert. He did not even say goodbye. In a paroxysm of hurt feelings, he marched out of the room.

  Almost at once there was a strangled shout and a heavy thumping, followed by a crash.

  He had fallen downstairs. They clattered down the steps to the landing and helped him to his feet.

  “Oh, Mr. Upchurch,” cried Fern, “are you all right?”

  He was not all right. By some miracle none of his bones had been broken, but a lump was rising on the back of his head, his dignity was shattered, and he was utterly miserable.

  Chapter 23

  … I was taken with such violent pain in the intestens that I was unable to partake of the feast.… My pain … towards evening was attended with a high fever.… Having brought no medecine with me I resolved to try an experiment … and the Choke cherry … first struck my attention.… A strong black decoction … was produced.… By 10 in the evening I was entirely releived from pain.…

  Captain Meriwether Lewis, June 11, 1805

  Lying flat on his back, Tom stared up at the top of the tent. It was invisible, a blotch of darkness. He could be anywhere. Maybe in a vast cave with a thousand bats hanging upside down over his head. Or in a wilderness camp on the South Fork, and Captain Lewis and the other men of the exploring party were right there beside him, sleeping on the ground.

  But even in the pitch-darkness Tom could feel the closeness of the walls of the tent. And the freshness of the woodland air was tainted with the scent of asafetida from one of the jars on the card table beside his cot.

  The jar was part of his precious Meriwether Lewis pharmacopeia. For weeks Tom had been collecting samples of all the medicines that had been packed in canisters and chests and carried on the keelboat, portaged past the Great Falls of the Missouri, and humped over the Rockies, all of those tinctures and powders and pills that had kept the men healthy, or at least had not killed them—mercury for the venereal diseases caught from the native women, salves for the eye problems that afflicted so many of the people in the tribal villages, and powerful purges for the cure of almost everything else.

  But lately he had been neglecting his bottles and jars. He had forgotten the name of the next item on the list. What was the healing plant he had been looking for? He couldn’t remember.

  It was too bad. One of the reasons he had set up his tent in the woods around Monticello was to look for some of the wild herbs on Lewis’s list—after all, this part of Virginia had been home to Meriwether Lewis as well as to Thomas Jefferson.

  But there were other reasons. The second was that Jefferson’s mountain was philosophically appropriate. The whole thing had been Jefferson’s idea. The President had chosen and trained Meriwether Lewis as its captain, he had set him great goals. He had imagined the possibilities, the necessities and dangers, and then he had persuaded Congress to provide the money.

  But there was a third reason why Tom was camping in the Monticello woods. It was an escape from his family. The big perfect house in Keswick Estates was only a few miles away, but here in the woods it felt like a thousand. He had fled from an overpowering mother, a demanding father, a domineering grandmother, and a younger sister in the most repulsive stage of sullen puberty.

  The fact was, Tom had been a battered child. The punches and blows had been to the psyche, not the body. They had beaten him through the various stages of lower and higher education and thwacked him in the direction of medical school.

  An ever-present scar was the cost of his education, never allowed to heal, always open and bleeding. Do you know how much it’s costing us to send you to medical school?

  They expected him to work the hardest, get the best grades, and be assigned to the best hospital. In other words, to become as successful as their friend Ronald Spark, whose medical practice was worth—“What would you say, Janine? Seven figures?” “Oh, of course, seven figures.”

  Dr. Spark was an eminent urologist, a specialist in diseases of the intestinal tract.

  Tom wanted nothing to do with the intestinal tract. The only successful physician he cared about was Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, who had provided Captain Lewis with his list of medicines, including his own famous thunderbolts for the complete evacuation of the bowels.

  Tom had been working his way down the list. He had collected calomel and epsom salts and nitre and ipecacuanha, he was trying to figure out how to powder rhubarb and jalap. He wanted to know what clyster pipes and penis syringes looked like.

  Laudanum had been more difficult to come by, because it was opium, and opium meant heroin. As a medical student with an earnest project, he had persuaded one of his professors to give him a prescription. But there were still a few things he had hoped to find growing naturally, plants he might find in the woods at Monticello. Exploring, he had come up with rhubarb and basilicum. He had collected bark from fallen branches.

  But then the time line had occurred to him, and swept him away. The bottles and jars still sat on the card table in his tent, sweating on hot days, solidifying on cold nights, the labels darkening in the humidity, but now they were neglected.

  The tent was nothing more than a place to sleep. Everything important had been carried up the hill.

  Tom smiled in the dark, pleased with the way he had half conned, half persuaded the woman named Fern to let him use her wall. She didn’t need it. She could write her dumb book in a closet. Let her scribble her sentimental garbage about Thomas Jefferson all over the lower half of the time line—the rest belonged to him.

  It was too bad he couldn’t accompany the words of the journals with a long continuous map of the terrain, but the river wouldn’t cooperate. It would soon wander right off the paper, h
eading northwest.

  The sloping walls of the tent were still invisible. But now the dark spaces around him were becoming the Dome Room, and over his head Tom could almost touch the wide concavity of the dome itself.

  He reared up from the pillow, gripped by an idea. The dome! Why shouldn’t he copy the maps made by William Clark—those wonderful maps drawn from measurements taken so faithfully every day with sextant, compass, quadrant, horizon glass, pole chain, and log line—why shouldn’t he paint the windings of the river and the entire course of the journey right up there on the dome?

  First, of course, he would need a ladder.…

  Chapter 24

  … the buffaloe have troden up the praire very much.… The sharp points of earth as hard as frozen ground stand up in such abundance that there is no avoiding them. this is particulary severe on the feet of the men who have not only their own weight to bear … but have also the addition of the burthen which they draw.… They are obliged to halt and rest frequently.…

  Captain Meriwether Lewis, June 23, 1805,

  portaging around the Great Falls

  Augustus Upchurch could not see himself clearly. He was not aware of the intensity of his feeling for the young woman at Monticello. He knew only that the presence of the interloper in the Dome Room made him feel like an old fool. His hurt feelings simmered and boiled. Nursing his wounded pride, he decided to complain to Henry Spender. Surely the curator would be shocked by the strange things that were happening right over his head.

  When the telephone rang in the curator’s office, Henry was deeply engaged in planning the Fourth of July bicentennial extravaganza.

  He had abandoned his keyboard. He was grasping a pencil tightly, checking and querying the items on a list.

  1. President’s helicopter, east lawn (Make sign visible from above?)

  2. Phone-bank (Check AT&T)

  3. Parking (Hire more shuttle buses?)

  4. Security (What if duties overlap? Possible disaster? State Police, Secret Service, Ch’ville Police Department? Speak to Richard>)

  5. Food (Gail says caterers at loggerheads, possible catastrophe)

  6. Chair rental, tents (Marcus Constable, no prob)

  7. Fireworks (Richard going hog-wild)

  8. Porta Potties (Out of sight! Howie swears, stack of Bibles.)

  9. Music (String quartet, A-okay)

  10. Setting up chairs (Howie again)

  11. Name tags on chairs (Fern Fisher)

  12. Invited guests (Jefferson descendants at each other’s throats! God almighty!)

  Scribble, scribble, scribble. In Henry’s frenzied grip, the point of his pencil snapped. He jumped up, loped across the room, ground the point sharp as a needle, plunged back to his desk, and scribbled on without a pause. Publicity, television, radio—

  He was just adding Donors, when the phone rang.

  “Oh, Augustus,” said Henry, “I’m so glad you called.” (Surely the Society for Jefferson Studies would contribute a large sum.)

  He didn’t have a chance to say why he was glad, because Upchurch was in a tizzy. He was spluttering and shouting. Something must be terribly wrong. “What, the Dome Room?” said Henry. “Did you say something’s wrong with the Dome Room?”

  “It’s my Jefferson scholar, Miss Fisher. She’s supposed to be working up there, writing a book.”

  “Yes, of course. I see her every day.” The curator had the insane impression that young Fern was doing something unspeakable. “Is something the matter?”

  Augustus choked. “Go and see,” he said in a strangled whisper, and hung up.

  Henry put down the phone and stared at his list. Then he slid back his chair and walked upstairs.

  He found Fern sitting quietly in front of her keyboard eating a sandwich. No orgies were going on.

  But there was something different about the Dome Room. A long strip of paper had been stretched all the way around it.

  Fern waved her sandwich at the paper and explained. “It’s a time line, Mr. Spender. For the Lewis and Clark expedition and the events of Jefferson’s presidency at the same time. You know, from 1804 to 1806.”

  “I see. What a good idea.” The curator smiled at Fern. “Please call me Henry,” he said, and went back to his ever-lengthening list.

  He was so absorbed that he paid no attention to the noises from the staircase, a succession of small rattles and bangs.

  Tom Dean’s aluminum ladder was an awkward thing to carry up the narrow stairs. He did his best to avoid knocking it against anything, but it was ten feet long. It kept bumping the wall on one side and crashing against the railing on the other.

  Acquiring it had been a hell of a job. Since he couldn’t carry a ladder on his motorbike, he had ridden the bike home, hoping to borrow his mother’s second car, a flashy new sport-utility vehicle, if only she hadn’t driven it away somewhere.

  Fortunately, the car was sitting right there in the driveway. Unfortunately, his little sister Myrna was right there too, with her asinine girlfriend Nadine. They were lying flat on their backs on lawn chairs with their faces raised to the sun.

  Nadine sat up and giggled at Tom. Myrna sat up and glowered. “Oh,” she said, “you’re back.”

  Tom yanked off his helmet, rolled his bike into the garage, came out again, and tried the door of the van. It was locked. He turned to his sister. “I just want to borrow it, bring it right back. Where’s the key?”

  Myrna said grumpily, “Mummy won’t like it.” Nadine giggled again.

  “But it’s only for an hour or two,” protested Tom.

  Myrna flopped back on the lawn chair and closed her eyes. Grudgingly she said, “Hall table.” Nadine flopped back too.

  The Bargain Mart on Hydraulic Road supplied everything required for living on the planet, except of course the finer things of life—poetry, music, and philosophical inquiry. But who wanted stuff like that when everything else was right here inside these cavernous walls? Certainly there were plenty of ladders.

  Tom forked over two twenty-dollar bills, carried his purchase outside, and manhandled it into the van. One end of the ladder stuck out the back window. He tied his bandanna on the last rung. It was the first time the big SUV had transported anything but his mother and Myrna and the twits who were Myrna’s little friends.

  On the way to Monticello, he wondered where in the hell he could possibly park. Of course there was the visitors’ parking lot, but he couldn’t very well carry a ladder past all the tourists and the ticket office and the arriving and departing shuttle buses.

  In the end Tom had no choice but to leave the big shiny car on the shoulder beside Route 53. It was illegal, of course, but he’d only be gone twenty minutes, just long enough to get the ladder up the hill to his tent and run back down.

  Even so, he was away too long. When he got back he was disgusted to see a parking ticket under his windshield wiper. He thrust it in his pocket and drove the van back home.

  Naturally, he’d pay the fine himself, but, God, he’d have to leave his mother a note, because the car was in her name and the Sheriff’s office might call and complain. Tom’s creepy sister had said, Mummy won’t like it. Well, goddamnit, Mummy certainly would not like it.

  The ladder was not easy to maneuver among the trees, but at least there was no one in the woods to ask what he was doing. When he carried it out into the open he was more conspicuous. Tom whistled carelessly as he marched across the lawn and around the South Terrace Walk and into the long passage under the house. There were staff members down there, and tourists looking at exhibits in glass cases, but nobody paid much attention to a working stiff with a ladder.

  It was tricky, banging and bumping it up the three flights of stairs, but Fern was expecting him. She leaned over the railing, grasped the top, and backed into the Dome Room. The ladder came neatly through the door. Tom set it up and unfolded it.

  “Oh, my God,” said Fern. “It’s so big.”

  Chapter 25

  … the h
unters at the upper Camp killed 3 White bear one large the fore feel of which measured 9 Inches across.… A bear [came] nearly catching Joseph Fields chased him in to the water. bear about the Camp everry night …

  Sergeant John Ordway, July 1, 1805

  Ed Bailey had been right about the house on University Circle. It was not a handsome Jeffersonian edifice with white columns and classical detail, it was a homely pile of clapboards with a wraparound front porch. For Ed it was conveniently near the University of Virginia.

  Homer and Mary settled in quickly. They had two floors to themselves. The guest bedroom was a shapeless space with ugly dressers and a deceased fern of immense size in a wicker stand. They hung their clothes in a cavernlike closet. Over their heads they could hear the soft thuds of Ed’s footsteps in the attic apartment.

  At first the telephone didn’t work, but before long Mary noticed that it wasn’t plugged in. At once she called Fern Fisher and made an appointment to visit her at Monticello.

  There was a problem with the bathroom sink. “Ouch!” shouted Homer, the first time he tried to brush his teeth, because the faucet marked “H” was cold and the one marked “C” boiling hot. Downstairs, the kitchen worked pretty well after they mastered its eccentricities—the exploding coffeepot and the hiding places for pots and pans. In the parlor, the piano was useless, because half its keys were dead, but it sometimes struck a tringling note in the middle of the night.

  The best part of the house was the front porch with its rockers and porch swing, as long as they didn’t try to sit down in the collapsing lawn chair.

  The house was under control, but for Homer the rest of the city was an enigma. Whenever he set out in the car, he lost his way.