Murder at Monticello

by Jane Langton

  “I kept going around in circles,” he complained to his wife, coming back defeated yet one more time. “I just wanted to find the supermarket on Hydraulic Road, but you can’t get there from here.”

  Mary took the crumpled map from his trembling hand. “Look, Homer, you just keep straight ahead on Preston Avenue. See? It turns into Hydraulic. Nothing to it.”

  “Preston Avenue! No, no, you forgot Grady! You gotta take Grady first, which turns into Preston, which turns into East Market, which turns into something else, and after a while you’re on your way to Richmond.”

  “Homer, look. You take Grady to Preston and then turn sharp left. You see, right here you go left.”

  “Left? Left?” Homer was too excited to distinguish the blobs of color on the map, which was ripped and crumpled from being batted open in moments of crisis. “Where, where? Oh, God, I don’t see it. Show me!”

  Mary folded the map along its torn creases and said soothingly, “It’s all right, Homer dear, we’ll soon learn our way around.” She whistled for the dog. It came bouncing to her on its tiny legs.

  It was the teacup poodle. Its name was Doodles. “Your turn, Homer,” said Mary, holding out the leash.

  “Oh, God, not again.” Homer looked down at the quivering little creature, which was looking up at him worshipfully with black button eyes. “I always feel like such a fool.”

  The tiny dog threw its whole being into a paroxysm of yipping. Mary thrust the leash into Homer’s hand and controlled her laughter until they were out the door. Then she watched from the window, rejoicing in the sight of her six-foot-six-inch husband demurely following a fluffy little powderpuff of a dog.

  Then she stopped laughing, as the memory of their melodramatic sojourn in Venice welled up in her mind, as it did so often without warning. Last year in Venice she had been infatuated with someone else, a married man, a charming stranger. She had abandoned all her New England inherited principles, she had told herself they were prim and puritanical and didn’t matter any more. Now she winced, remembering, because she hadn’t consulted her inherited principles at all, she had simply been swept away. Big mistake.

  Afterward she had tried to make it up to Homer. She had kissed him and caressed him and lavished tenderness upon him. Of course it was still necessary from time to time to control his dangerous tendency to giddy euphoria and flights of fancy.

  Now she watched until Homer and Doodles turned a corner and were lost to view. Therefore, she was unaware that another wild flight was about to happen. She did not see Homer take a copy of the Charlottesville Daily Progress out of the pocket of his jacket while Doodles squatted sweetly on the grass next to the sidewalk.

  On the front page was a photograph of the Governor of Virginia, his mouth open, his fist raised high. He was hot under the collar about something or other. Oh, of course, it was the serial killer. Why doesn’t the Charlottesville Police Department DO something, the Governor wanted to know. Don’t they have a budget of six million dollars a year, paid by the hardworking taxpayers of the city of Charlottesville? If they can find illegal stills in the countryside and retrieve stolen cars, why don’t they turn their attention to the monster who is threatening the innocent young women of Albemarle County?

  Homer stuffed the Daily Progress back inside his jacket and looked around vaguely. Where was he? Doodles had led him astray. What was this crazy bridge? Why was that lumpy wall painted pink and blue? Why did it say DAN ♥ MIGGY?

  Homer shook his head, bewildered. The city of Charlottesville was a labyrinth of vanishing streets and mysterious apparitions. He walked home with Doodles and turned her over to his wife.

  At once Mary picked up the little dog and cooed, “Cunning little sweetie,” and kissed her nose, which was the color of violets.

  “I think I’ll try again,” said Homer craftily. “I refuse to give up. This time I’ll find that supermarket if it takes all day. Where’s the stupid map?”

  “Oh, good for you, Homer,” said Mary. “This time be sure to turn sharp left on Preston Avenue.”

  But Homer was in the grip of transport. His heart beat high, his eyes glittered with crazy lights, he consulted the map and drove in the opposite direction.

  He would just drop in on the Chief of the Charlottesville Police. Just make him a friendly little visit, because the poor guy was in terrible trouble.

  Chapter 26

  The Indian woman recognizes the country and assures us that this is the river on which her relations live, and that the three forks are at no great distance. this peice of information has cheered the sperits of the party who now begin to console themselves with the anticipation of shortly seeing the head of the missouri yet unknown to the civilized world.

  Captain Meriwether Lewis, July 22, 1805

  Fern was soon accustomed to the slight scraping of Tom’s ladder on the floor as he followed the Missouri a few degrees of longitude farther west. Slowly the winding river advanced over the surface of the dome, climbing miraculously over the shallow ribs and continuing on its way.

  The time line too was growing longer and longer.

  Fern’s latest entry was Jefferson’s speech to the tribal chieftains, sent to him by Lewis and Clark:

  My children, White-hairs, Chiefs & Warriors of the Osage nation … It is so long since our forefathers came from beyond the great water, that we have lost the memory of it, and seem to have grown out of this land, as you have done.… I sent a beloved man, Capt. Lewis … to learn something of the people with whom we are now united, to let you know we were your friends.…

  Tom looked over her shoulder. “Oh, right,” he said. “The Osage chiefs. They all came to Washington.”

  Fern looked up. “Have you read it? Jefferson’s speech?”

  “No, I haven’t. Are you finished? My turn.”

  She stepped back and he began writing quickly, recording a journal entry by William Clark:

  Sent out Sjt. Pryor and Some men to get ash timber for ores, and Set some men to make a Toe Rope out of the Cords of a Cable.… Drewyer our hunter and one man came in with 2 Deer & a Bear, also a young Horse.

  Fern looked at his entry and smiled. “The spelling is certainly amusing.”

  Tom took offense. “Oh, I suppose you think Jane Austen was a better writer?”

  “Well, my God, of course I do.”

  “Well, how do you think Odysseus talked? Listen, think of those guys out there on an unknown frontier, living off the land, discovering places no white man had ever seen before, living with danger every day. They weren’t writing pretty for the teacher. Whereas Jane Austen—”

  “Oh, I guess she would have written better if she’d camped out in the wilderness?”

  “Whereas, while they were writing their journals beside the river, Jane Austen was sitting on a velvet sofa writing novels about lovesick young ladies.”

  “Oh, she was not. You don’t understand her at all.”

  Tom laughed. “Here, give me a hand. This piece is ready.”

  “Wait a sec,” said Fern. “Did you bring the pins?”

  Tom produced the paper of pins from his shirt pocket. Fern plucked out a few, remembering the way her mother had knelt on the floor to pin up a hem, with little Fern standing on a chair.

  Together they picked up the new piece of the time line and fastened it securely to the long blank strip of shelf paper that ran all the way around the wall. Then they stood back to admire the twelve running feet of recorded time, from May to September in the year 1804, with its notes from the letters of Thomas Jefferson and the journals of Lewis and Clark.

  “It looks great,” said Fern.

  Tom laughed. “What the hell are we doing this for?”

  Somehow they had forgiven themselves for the absurdities of the eighty feet of shelf paper, the 160 thumbtacks, the tall, ridiculous ladder, and the assault on the dome. And they had forgotten Mr. Upchurch.

  But Augustus had not forgotten them. One week after he had found the invader in Fern’
s lofty tower, they heard again the thump of his feet on the stairs.

  At once the racing engines of their obsessions ground to a halt. Tom backed away, Fern turned to face the imposing figure of Mr. Upchurch as he walked in the door. Surrounding him rose shafts of normalcy, dull and bleak, gray and accusing.

  Augustus was appalled. The boy was still here. Henry Spender had done nothing. Looking up, Augustus saw the vandalism to the dome, and gasped.

  “It’s the river, you see,” gabbled Fern. “From Captain Clark’s maps, the ones he made for Thomas Jefferson. We think he would have been pleased. The President, I mean President Jefferson would have been so pleased.”

  Augustus didn’t know what to say, or how to begin. “Well, my dear,” he faltered, but then he couldn’t go on. Once again he withdrew without saying goodbye. Stepping carefully down the staircase, gripping the steeply sloping banister, terrified of falling down, Augustus told himself that the poor child had been kidnapped. The threatening young stranger had led her astray.

  What the helpless young woman needed was the advice and counsel of an older and wiser man, a truly loving friend. In fact—by the time he descended to the bottom of the staircase Augustus had worked out a plan.

  He would send in a spy.

  Chapter 27

  We are now several hundred miles within the bosom of this wild and mountanous country.… My two principal consolations are that from our present position it is impossible that the S. W. fork can head with the waters of any other river but the Columbia, and that if any Indians can subsist in these mountains … we can also subsist.

  Captain Meriwether Lewis, July 27, 1805

  at the Three Forks of the Missouri

  On his way to pay his kindly call on the beleaguered Chief of the Charlottesville Police Department, Homer again lost his way. After finding himself heading out of town, he stopped to inquire the way at a gas station. The attendant pointed to the left and said, “Nothing to it. You can’t miss it.”

  Fifteen minutes later, at a convenience store, he bought a bag of peanuts and inquired again. The woman behind the counter pointed to the right and said he couldn’t possibly miss it.

  But Homer had an infinite capacity for error. Before long he was crossing the Rivanna River.

  At last, by some miracle, he blundered in the right direction and found the Charlottesville City Hall on East Market Street. By a stroke of luck, there was a parking place right out in front. Homer swooped into the space, hopped out of his car, and walked into the police station.

  It was milling with uniformed officers. Their faces were grim. Was one of them Chief Pratt?

  A reception officer sat behind a glass window. Homer edged in her direction and looked at her questioningly. “May I help you?” she said kindly, in the gentle accent he was already so fond of.

  “My name’s Kelly, Homer Kelly. I used to work for the District Attorney of Middlesex County in Massachusetts.” Homer was telling the truth as far as it went. He did not confess that his job with the District Attorney was a quarter of a century back. “I wonder if I might see Chief Pratt.”

  The woman must have been out of her mind, because after a pause she said, “Certainly,” and pointed down the hall.

  Homer was flabbergasted. “Don’t you need to ask him first?”

  “Oh, I’m sure he’ll be glad to see you.” The officer did not explain that her chief was so frustrated, so apoplectic, he would grasp at any straw.

  In fact, Chief Pratt hardly waited for Homer to introduce himself before he began to pour out his troubles. On his desk lay a newspaper with a couple of lurid headlines—

  ANOTHER FOUL KILLING

  MURDERED WOMAN WEARS

  EARRING TORN FROM LAST VICTIM

  Below was a color photograph of a body covered with a bloodstained sheet. The picture was overprinted with the words:

  DO SOMETHING!

  Homer listened humbly and watched in awe as the Chief ranted and raved and balled up the newspaper in his powerful fists. Hurling it across the room, he glowered at Homer and snarled, “He’s here, God’s whiskers, he’s right here in Charlottesville, I swear he is. Maybe we can’t find him because he’s in plain sight, like the purloined letter.”

  “The purloined letter?” Homer was charmed. “You mean like the one in Poe’s story? The police ransack the house for a stolen letter but they never look at the one on the mantelpiece because it’s in plain sight, so it can’t possibly be the right one, but of course it really is—you mean that purloined letter?”

  Pratt wasn’t listening. He leaned forward and let off steam like an overheated boiler. “You see, we think he has normal middle-class habits. His victims aren’t whores. The first two were Sunday-school teachers, and then there was the librarian and the chiropractor, women like that. Well, of course that hitchhiker was some kind of a New Age hippie, but that kid was just asking for it, right? This one was a respectable beautician.”

  Homer opened his mouth, but Pratt didn’t wait to hear his opinion, he just barreled right on. “Well, okay, we’ve got people in all the branch libraries and we’re trying to cover the churches, but, Judas priest, Mr. Kelly, do you have any idea how many there are in Charlottesville? Eighty-four—Lutheran, Episcopal, Methodist, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, Mennonites, Quakers, I mean we got all kindsa churches except maybe Holy Rollers, you name it, including twenty-three Baptist.”

  “A God-fearing town,” murmured Homer encouragingly.

  “So, okay, where does the bastard live? He’s gotta sleep somewhere, gotta room somewhere. Does he camp out in the woods? Eat in restaurants?” Pratt rolled his eyes at the ceiling, and swore by the bowels of Christ. “I mean, how does he get his food? In a supermarket? Well, sure, we can post people in all the big supermarkets and, like I said, in the churches and so on, but what the devil are they supposed to be looking for? Oh, there was some woman claimed she saw him, thinks he has red hair. And one of the county guys saw a redheaded kid on a motorbike”—Pratt scrabbled among the turmoil of papers on his desk and found a note—“little Honda, he said, only, goddamn him, he didn’t get the license number, but he swears he’s seen this guy coupla times, coupla different crime sites. But, jumping Jesus, maybe the description is phony anyway.” Pratt tore at his thick white hair. “The goddamn killer’s got some kind of vehicle, we know that because he picked up that poor hitchhiker. But, God’s teeth, what kind of car?”

  Homer didn’t know, and he shook his head humbly. He was delighted to observe that Chief Pratt’s exclamations were not anatomical but old-fashioned and theological, an exaggerated version of his own, because probably Pratt too had been brought up an earnest Christian, and what good were swear words if they didn’t shock you a little?

  Again the chief ran his fingers through his hair, front to back and side to side. “Oh, naturally, every single man, woman, and child in Albemarle County has called 911 because they saw a suspicious-looking car and scribbled the license number on their cuff, so we say thank you very much, and then of course we look it up, only it turns out the vehicle belongs to the rector of the Church of Our Saviour or an elderly orthopedic surgeon or a lady dentist. Christ Almighty.” Pratt’s face was a dark and passionate red.

  Homer cleared his throat and asked a modest question: “Is this the first serial killer you’ve come across around here?”

  Pratt looked at him scornfully. “Oh, God, no.” He turned to a map on the wall beside his desk and tapped it with his finger. “Spotsylvania, Culpeper. We got ’em all the time.”

  No flies on us, thought Homer. “What about stolen cars? People steal cars around here the way they do in Boston?”

  “Stolen cars? Mother of God, we got sixteen reports of stolen cars this week, tracked down eleven, mostly kids in the neighborhood, five outstanding, can’t find ’em, owners mad as hell.” With a savage motion of his arm, Pratt swept all his papers on the floor. “The guy’s a smoker, we know that. Drops ashes on th
e bodies. Stands around admiring his handiwork, having a comfy cigarette.”

  Pratt surged out of his chair and stamped up and down. “The Governor, bloody Christ, we’ve got him on our neck, running for re-election, other guy’s ahead in the polls, all the poor incumbent’s got to run on is public safety, righteous wrath about this dangerous maniac on the loose, laxity in the police department, he’s gonna reorganize public safety, turn it inside out, and guess who’s at the top of his firing list, yours truly, that’s who, God’s britches.”

  Homer opened his mouth to say something sympathetic, but Pratt whirled around and jabbed his finger in the air. “Okay, I know what you’re going to say, what about Forensics, right? Forensics, they always find something. Well, naturally they found something, this repeat pattern, he’s got an MO.”

  “MO, right,” said Homer. “Method of operation.”

  “It’s the same every time, so we know it’s just one guy, not different guys, because the pattern’s always the same. Throttles ’em, probably with a piece of chain, we get bruises like from a chain, rips off their clothes, mutilates ’em with a sharp knife, could be an ordinary carving knife, hunting knife, we don’t know what the hell, takes a memento, leaves it on the next victim. Like a rosary or the librarian’s name tag or this earring. You know, whatever. Cigarette ashes, he’s a smoker. And a note. Creep always leaves a note.”

  “A note!”

  “Right. Pins it on the body someplace, or on the clothing, common pins like in sewing”—Pratt made little darting motions with his hand, stitching a piece of air—“pinned-on notes, can’t miss ’em, stare you in the face.”

  “But doesn’t that give you something to go on? What do they say?”

  Pratt sat down again with a thump and closed his eyes. “Nutty, just nutty. We don’t know what the hell they mean, they don’t make any sense. Wait a minute.” The Chief opened his eyes, reached down, snatched a paper from the floor, and handed it to Homer. It was a typed list of the messages left by the serial killer on the bodies of his victims.