Murder at Monticello

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Murder at Monticello Page 10

by Jane Langton


  “Oh, it’s nothing. I ran into the ladder.”

  “You—ran—into—the—ladder. A likely story.

  “So the good times were gone. Well, of course, all the times up to now had been too edgy and argumentative to be called really good. But compared with the way things were now, they had been a golden age.

  Chapter 30

  … killing an enemy without scalping him is considered of no importance; in fact the whole honour seems to be founded in the act of scalping.… With them there can be no preferment without some warlike achievement.… It will in my opinion prove a serious obstruction to the restoration of a general peace among the nations of the Missouri.

  Captain Meriwether Lewis, August 24, 1805,

  with the Shoshone

  George Dryer’s childhood of neglect and abuse was no different from that of other bestial killers. Like many infant hoodlums, he had been thrown out of one school after another. Finally, expelled from the sixth grade, he had dropped out for good, heavily scarred by the contempt of women teachers, the ridicule of lady principals, and the taunting disdain of a hundred little girls. And then there was Jeanie.

  George had long been finished with school by the time he moved to Charlottesville with his mother. The property she bought was a modest ranch house built in the 1950s. It became George’s property when his mother vanished from sight.

  Nobody in the neighborhood missed her, since no one had met her. They hardly knew George either, because he kept very much to himself. Luckily, there was no need for him to work, because his mother’s savings were right there in the bureau drawer. In her checkered career, first as an exotic dancer and then as a chambermaid, she had been thrifty and tightfisted. The drawer held ninety-five thousand dollars.

  The neighbors knew only that George kept the place tidy. It was all they cared about. He mowed the lawn regularly and clipped the hedge and whitewashed the rocks along the driveway and polished the gazing globe in the front yard—George was especially fond of the gazing globe. He liked to bend over it and watch his small face fill the whole round world.

  He really cared about neatness. He liked to line things up—his shoes, his underwear, his razor and toothbrush, his set of knives. When not in use, his chain hung on a hook in the garage beside the garden rake and the shovel. The hose for washing out the back of the van was coiled in perfect order.

  Of course, his back yard wasn’t exactly neat, because it was the graveyard of all those bloody shirts. George had filled in the holes with dirt and seeded them with grass, but they were still visible. It was okay, next time he’d know where not to dig. There was plenty of room for more.

  So far, George Dryer was not an exceptional psychopath. But in two ways he was different from other quiet and inoffensive mass murderers.

  One was an episode with a girlfriend named Jeanie back in North Dakota. Jeanie had been an easygoing playmate until at last she grew tired of George’s weird attentions. She had told him to get lost.

  But he couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t let her alone. He had stalked her, grabbed her, kept her, showed her who was master, used her whenever he felt like it. And then Jeanie—

  No, no, forget it, don’t think about it. And somehow, by some sort of mental sleight of hand, George did not think about it. The evidence was with him all the time, but he chose not to look at it.

  The thing that Jeanie had done to him was absent from his conscious mind. It was missing, forgotten, and yet it surrounded him like a bleeding boil, a bloated translucent membrane pulsing with coarse blue veins. It was not neat and tidy, it was grotesque and horrible. George lived inside it, he saw the world through it, he was used to it, he wasn’t aware of it at all.

  The second thing that was different about George was even more unusual. He was a reader. The only public place he visited was the Jefferson-Madison Public Library.

  All his life he had loved stories of high adventure—true tales of the Barbary pirates, true stories about man-eating sharks and tiger hunts, true histories of the slaughter of Allied forces on the beaches of Normandy, true accounts of the bloody battles of the Civil War.

  And therefore, when he stumbled on Lewis and Clark, it had changed his life. George read their journals, skipping around, flipping the pages. He was thrilled by the sense of adventure, fascinated by the stories of the hunting and killing and butchering that kept them all alive. They were men, real men, heroes in the wilderness, fighting savages and rattlesnakes and grizzly bears and coming back alive.

  And there was another thing. George pounced on something in the journals that no one else had paid any attention to—the way those randy white men slept with Indian squaws, all the way from the Mandan villages on the Missouri to the Chinooks on the Columbia River.

  And one day he had been struck by an idea like a thunderbolt.

  What if he himself was connected with the great expedition? Hadn’t he been born in Bismarck, North Dakota? Wasn’t Bismarck very near the place where the expedition had spent a winter among the Mandans? What if a lot of little half-white, half-Indian bastards had been born to the squaws after the expedition took off up the river?

  What if he himself was the descendant of a Mandan squaw and one of the men? One of the best men in the whole expeditionary force, one man in particular?

  The day after Flora Foley began her job as a chaperone-spy in the Dome Room at Monticello, George was back in the Bargain Mart on Hydraulic Road, buying shirts. To his surprise and delight, he ran into the woman with long brown hair, the one he had seen here before. This time she looked even more like Jeanie, because she was wearing her hair in a pigtail.

  Last time she had been paying for an electric fan at the checkout counter. This time she stood in front of a shelf in the housewares department studying the automatic coffeemakers.

  At once George decided he needed a coffeemaker too. He moved up beside her and pointed to one and said, “Is that kind any good?”

  Fern glanced at him. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  George made a pretense of helping her choose. In two minutes he learned that she wanted a coffeemaker for her workplace at Monticello.

  “Monticello?” said George. “Oh, sure. I never been there. Thomas Jefferson’s place, right?”

  Fern glanced at him again and decided she didn’t want a coffeemaker after all. She walked away along the aisle of stoves and refrigerators, hurried past the racks of women’s bathing suits, and ran out of the Bargain Mart.

  Glancing back as she unlocked her car, she saw the too-friendly stranger racing toward her. Fern jumped in behind the wheel, slammed the door, started the engine, charged past him, and drove away.

  Standing alone in the parking lot, staring after the disappearing car, George remembered what she had told him, the bitch who looked so much like Jeanie. She said she worked at Monticello.

  Chapter 31

  Several horses Sliped and roled down Steep hills which hurt them verry much.… Nothing killed to day except 2 Phests.… From this mountain I could observe high ruged mountains in every direction as far as I could see.

  Captain William Clark, September 15, 1805

  The guide that morning, Gail Boltwood, was Henry Spender’s pride. She knew everything there was to know about the building and rebuilding of Monticello, every detail of Jefferson’s experimental farming, and a great deal about the lives of his slaves. She knew the background of every piece of furniture, every painting and Indian artifact, every useful Jeffersonian gadget.

  If asked, she could talk about his political problems, his disastrous embargo, the rebellion of Aaron Burr in Louisiana, the embarrassing XYZ Affair, and the disappointment of the Missouri Compromise.

  But this afternoon, as always, she was careful not to overwhelm her listeners. They were a typically miscellaneous lot. Most were the usual uninformed tourists, politely attentive. They were ignorant, they really wanted to know. “Did he live in this big house all alone?” “Did he die in this bed?” “Did he really d
esign the house all by himself?”

  As usual, a few were show-offs, eager to parade their little knowledge. “Where’s the lapdesk?” asked a broad-shouldered man, eager to separate himself from the hoi polloi. “He wrote the Declaration of Independence on it, so where is it?”

  “In the Smithsonian, I’m afraid,” said Gail gently.

  After that he kept erupting with identifications before she got to them, making a disjointed mess of the rest of the tour. He was bad enough, but one of the women was worse—another Sally Hemings enthusiast. She stared at Jefferson’s bed and asked eagerly, “Is this where they made love?”

  But there were a couple of other people in Gail’s first morning batch of tourists who intrigued her, a tall woman and a tall bewhiskered man. Their faces were alive with interest, they smiled at the right moment. At first they said nothing, until Gail gathered her charges in front of the engraving of the draft committee delivering the Declaration of Independence to John Hancock. There they were, the founding fathers—John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston—all in a row.

  “People forget,” said Gail, “that they were putting their lives on the line. If the British had won the war, every one of the signers would have been hanged. Signing the Declaration took courage.”

  The whiskery male burst out, “My God, it could have happened. We could have lost the war.”

  Gail smiled at him. “It was a close call. And yet, according to Mr. Jefferson, not a hand trembled.”

  Homer Kelly was carried away. “Just picture it, all those founding fathers up on the scaffold! George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin with his little specs smashed, all of them choking and strangling and hanging by the neck.”

  “Homer, for heaven’s sake.” The tall woman was laughing and pulling on his arm.

  But Gail was pleased. “Fortunately,” she said, “we didn’t lose the war, we won.”

  Not until the tour was over, and the rest of the group had been dispatched outdoors, did Homer and Mary Kelly introduce themselves to Gail Boltwood and inquire the way to the Dome Room, where they had an appointment with Fern Fisher.

  “Oh, of course, you’re the Professors Kelly I’ve heard so much about. She’s expecting you.” Gail led them to the foot of the stairs. “It’s up two flights. They’re awfully steep, I’m afraid. Look, there she is at the top. Fern!” called Gail. “Your visitors are here.”

  Naturally, they were stunned by the glory of the Dome Room. “Wow,” gasped Homer.

  There was too much to take in all at once—their old student Fern Fisher beaming at them, the redheaded guy on the ladder painting the ceiling, the long strip of paper running around the wall, and the homely old woman who was striding toward Homer, grasping his hand, shaking it vigorously.

  “Flora Foley here,” said the woman. “District Attorney Kelly? Well, well, I’ve heard of your exploits.”

  Homer protested that he was not and never had been a district attorney. “My wife Mary,” he mumbled, pulling her forward.

  Mary smiled politely, but Flora wasn’t interested in Homer’s wife. “I am the author of police procedurals,” she said importantly. From somewhere in the air she produced a manuscript and urged it on him. “With my compliments, my latest, ‘The Hacksaw Caper.’”

  Homer wasn’t prepared for its thickness and weight, and he almost dropped it.

  He was rescued by Fern, who was eager to show them the time line. She touched the latest entry on the long strip of paper and explained: “You see, my part is Jefferson, it’s what he was doing while Lewis and Clark were going up the Missouri. Look, here’s July 11, 1804, when Aaron Burr killed Jefferson’s political enemy in a duel—”

  “Alexander Hamilton,” murmured Mary.

  Then Tom, perceiving that Fern’s visitors were not complete fools, descended the ladder and explained his own part of the story, the daily adventures of Lewis and Clark.

  “You see here,” he said, pointing to his latest entry, “it’s August 13, 1805. They think they’ve reached the headwaters of the Missouri, and now they’re desperate to meet a local tribe with horses. I mean, they’ve got to have horses to get through the Rockies. They never expected the mountains to be such an enormous obstacle.”

  Mary listened politely. What an amusing face the boy had, what an eruption of orange hair. Earnestly she leaned forward and read Captain Lewis’s account of the meeting of the Indian woman with her brother, Chief Cameahwait.

  “It made all the difference, you see, that Sacagawea happened to be along,” said Tom. “It meant the Shoshones would sell them the horses.”

  Homer repeated it in a whisper—“Sell them the horses, great God Almighty.”

  Mary saw at once by the look on his face what was happening. It was another love affair. From years of experience as his wife, she knew how easily Homer could fall in love at first sight with some vast new field of knowledge. He was a gulper, a swallower of information, a greedy grasper at more and more.

  Once it had been Thoreau and Emerson, then Melville and Emily Dickinson, and still later on, with wild leaps across the Atlantic, the poetry of Dante, Darwin’s Origin of Species, and last year—what madness!—Homer had spent the entire autumn in the Library of St. Mark’s in Venice, gazing at manuscripts and early printed books. Since then, whenever his professorial duties permitted, he had been wallowing in the life of Thomas Jefferson.

  And now it was as though he had taken one drink too many. Homer clutched the skinny arm of young Tom Dean and whimpered, “More, tell me more.”

  Mary turned to Fern and rolled her eyes, meaning, My husband, you’ll have to forgive him, and Fern laughed.

  But then Flora bore down on them and said to Mary, “This homicidal maniac, I must talk to your husband.” Her eyes narrowed, and she whispered, “I have highly significant information about the identity of the perp. You know, the serial killer.”

  At once her eyes slid sideways to Tom Dean, who was talking and gesturing and snatching up maps and pointing at the ceiling and flipping the pages of a book, instructing his enraptured pupil, Homer Kelly.

  Chapter 32

  Began to Snow about 3 hours before Day.… I have been wet and as cold in every part as I ever was in my life, indeed I was at one time fearfull my feet would freeze in the thin Mockirsons.… Men all wet cold and hungary. Killed a Second Colt which we all Suped hartily on and thought it fine meat.

  Captain William Clark, September 16, 1805

  Flora left the Dome Room first. It was a clever move. Lurking on the South Terrace Walk, she watched the departure of Homer Kelly and Whatsername, his wife, and she saw the last group of tourists head for the shuttle bus. Where was that sly fox, Tom Dean? Was he still up there alone with poor gullible young Fern?

  Flora was patient, but she almost missed him, because Tom didn’t emerge from the East Portico along with everybody else. Luckily, she happened to glance down Mulberry Row in time to see him striding away down the hill into the woods.

  Galvanized, Flora loped after him, her big pocketbook slapping against her side. As she bounded clumsily along the path she wondered how she was ever going to get home again, because it was a long walk in the other direction to the visitors’ parking lot. Flora told herself pluckily that it didn’t matter. Her investigation was more important. She would pursue it to the end.

  She had to gallop along the path to keep him in sight. Then she almost missed the place where Tom left the path and dodged to one side. Slipping and sliding, Flora floundered after him. Oh, God, he was going so fast, she had to push her way recklessly through bush and briar, lashed at by whippy saplings. Where the hell was he going? Wasn’t he ever going to stop?

  She was soon exhausted. Her breath came in gasps, she wasn’t used to exercise. She should have done more jogging in front of the TV. But her work was so important, who cared about touching their toes ten times or vacuuming the dust kitties under the bed or washing the sticky dishes from l
ast night? Not Flora!

  Oh, God, her heart was pounding. Oh, Christ, she was falling down! Flora screamed and landed on her back.

  Tom stopped and turned around and helped her struggle to her feet. “It’s okay,” he said gently. “We’re almost there.”

  “I was just—” she began lamely.

  “Never mind,” said Tom. “Here we are.” He lifted the flap of his tent and said, “Come in. Be my guest.”

  Flora stared. She couldn’t speak. It was the murderer’s den. For a moment she panicked. Then her courage revived, and stoutly, valiantly, Flora Foley, the heroic private investigator in pursuit of Public Enemy Number One, the murdering monster of Albemarle County, the Perp, followed him inside.

  “Mind if I smoke?” she said, staring around the tent with bulging eyes, pulling out her cigarettes, fumbling in her bag for her lighter, extracting it, and then dropping it from nervous fingers.

  Tom picked it up. “Let me do it,” he said, and with a gallant gesture he held the flame under Flora’s trembling cigarette.

  She inhaled and coughed. Her mind raced, trying to think of a crafty question, the kind that would nail a suspect and force him to admit his crime.

  But Tom had had enough. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’ll be on my way. I’ve got an appointment with a hickory tree.”

  “What?”

  He was nodding and smiling, standing by the open flap of the tent, sweeping his hands sideways in a polite gesture, After you, dear lady.

  She had no choice. Flora ducked out of the tent ahead of Tom, who nodded again, smiled again, and set off down the hill.

  Bewildered, Flora stared after him, then dropped her cigarette, crushed it underfoot, and began stumbling in the opposite direction.

  It was hard work. Going downhill had been hard enough. Climbing against gravity was almost beyond her power. A small dead branch plucked at Flora’s wig and snatched it off. She screeched, stopped, jerked at the fuzzy mop, and jammed it back on her head, not troubling to get it straight, not bothering to tuck in the straggling wisps of gray hair. Gasping, she leaned against a tree.

 

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