by Jane Langton
Think, Flora, think.
Chapter 33
A clear morning. We eat the verry last morcil of our provision except a little portable Soup, and proceeded on to the top of Sd mountain.… We discovred a very large plain a long distance a head, which we expect is on the Columbia River.…
Sergeant John Ordway, September 19, 1805
George wasn’t equipped for business. He just wanted to check out the place. Therefore, he didn’t stow any of his usual apparatus in the back of the van. He put on one of his new shirts and rolled up the sleeves because it was a hot day, but he wore his driving gloves because the steering wheel of the van was nicked and cracked.
He drove past the gate of Monticello, turned the van around, drove past the gate again, and headed back along the road for a quarter of a mile, then pulled over on the shoulder. It was the same place where Tom Dean had parked his mother’s car and picked up a parking ticket.
George didn’t know that, but he didn’t want to leave the van where it could be seen, so he charged it up the slope, bashed through a barrier of low bushes, and crushed a thicket of maple saplings. Getting out to study the situation, he was satisfied that nothing could be seen from the road. He locked the van and began pushing his way up the mountain on foot.
It was heavy going. George heaved himself up and up, trampling the low canopy of maidenhair fern and sassafras on the forest floor. When he caught sight of a tent among the trees, he stopped and stared.
All was quiet. Through the undergrowth he could see a sparkle of reflected sunlight on something shiny. What was that?
Abandoning caution, he walked into the clearing. The shiny thing was a small motorcycle, propped against a tree. He saw at once that it was not chained to anything. What kind of careless shit would go off and leave a bike unlocked?
Cautiously George lifted the flap of the tent. Nobody home. Place a mess. Pair of pants on the floor, couple sneakers. Bed unmade, rumpled blanket, grubby pillow. Card table, lot of bottles, piece of chain—God, it was the lock for the motorbike. Jeez, what a jerk.
There was also a paper bag with apples and overripe bananas. George helped himself to an apple and took a bite. Then he reached under the bed, dragged out a backpack, and poked inside.
Heavy sweater, wrinkled pants, gray underwear, dirty socks, sealed envelope.
George picked up the envelope and looked at the address: Registrar, School of Medicine, University of Virginia.
At once he was filled with rage. Shit wanted to go to med school, be a fucking big important doctor.
In actual fact, the letter in Tom’s backpack was not an application for admission, it was his notice to the med school that he was not coming back in the fall.
George didn’t know that. His anger engorged his brain. He kicked the table. It collapsed. All the bottles fell off.
Then he paused, listening. Someone was coming. He picked up the fallen chain.
A face peered under the tent flap. To his surprise it was an old woman, a fucking fright in a black wig. She was opening her mouth, croaking. “What the hell are you doing here?”
George didn’t have to think. Swiftly he lunged at her with the uplifted chain.
In the ultimate moment of her life, Flora understood her mistake. She had been wrong about Tom Dean. Struggling for air, her fingers clutching at her throat, she whispered one last word, Perp.
Chapter 34
… we passed a broken country heavily timbered great quantities of which had fallen and so obstructed our road that it was almost impracticable to proceed.… I find myself growing weak for the want of food.…
Captain Meriwether Lewis, September 21, 1805
Now more than ever, in this bicentennial year of his election to the presidency, the citizens of Charlottesville felt connected to Thomas Jefferson. He was a neighbor, after all—a dead one, but still a neighbor. Many of the things he had said and done were fresh in the mind.
They kept popping up in conversation—his role in the writing of the Declaration of Independence, his scientific studies, his interest in horticulture, his founding of the university, his passionate hatred of any kind of tyranny over the mind of man—from the dictates of the British throne to the local established church of Virginia—and of course his notorious DNA. In the local garden centers there was a run on the supply of Jeffersonia diphylla, the modest plant named for him by his botanist friend Benjamin Smith Barton.
Among the admirers of Thomas Jefferson were the son and daughter-in-law of Augustus Upchurch. Roger and Debbie Upchurch lived not far from Monticello, and they took a proprietary interest in its distinguished former occupant.
Not so, their ten-year-old twin daughters. The two girls took Monticello for granted. They cared little for the Declaration of Independence or the Louisiana Purchase or the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom or any other celebrated achievement of the third President of the United States. Like Tom Dean with his paper time line in the Dome Room at Monticello, they cared for nothing about Thomas Jefferson but the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Ten years earlier the twins had been christened Bonni and Sherri, names they despised. Recently they had baptized each other in the water of the Rivanna River as Captain Meriwether Lewis and Captain William Clark.
This morning, sitting on the front steps of their comfortable house on Jefferson Lake Drive, they were engaging in target practice.
“Captain Clark,” whispered Captain Lewis, observing a bison trotting along the sidewalk, “I reckon I’ll git us some vittles fer supper.” She cocked her finger and fired. “BANG.”
The buffalo stopped and wagged its tail. “Reckon you missed,” said Captain Clark.
Luckily, just then a grizzly bear streaked across the tulip bed. Captain Clark raised her rifle and shouted, “BANG,” and the grizzly padded up to purr and have its ears scratched.
What they needed, they decided, was real wilderness experience. They had been forbidden to leave the house, but at this moment their parents were away at a neighborhood meeting in the school gym about the terrifying threat to the young women of Albemarle County.
“Let’s go,” said Captain Clark.
“Just for a little while,” said Captain Lewis. At once they set off on their trusty horses for the woods.
Leaving their mounts in a tangle of wheels and handlebars in the bushes, they walked up a secret path. Almost immediately, only a few hundred yards from the road, they stumbled on the body of an old woman. She was sitting in the hollow stump of a tree like a queen on a throne, her balding head drooping sideways, her eyes staring. At once their jolly playacting was abandoned, and they rushed away whimpering.
Their parents were still at the meeting, but their grandfather was just getting out of his car in the driveway. The two girls dumped their bicycles and ran to him and wrapped their arms around him and sobbed.
His first impulse was to call 911. His second was not to call 911. Grimly he said, “Where is she?”
Frantic with excitement, the two girls pointed their skinny arms and jabbered. “There’s a path. It’s by a big rock. We go there all the time.”
“Now, children,” said their grandfather, “you go right inside and lock the door. I’ll go home and call the police.”
But he didn’t. Not yet. Instead, Augustus drove to the place where the big rock marked the path, parked his car off the road, walked up the hill, and found the body.
At first he didn’t recognize Flora, because her black wig was gone. There was only a skim of gray hair on her scalp. Only slowly did he begin to recognize his old friend, the spying chaperone he had hired to keep an eye on Fern Fisher and Tom Dean.
A triangular scrap of paper was pinned to Flora’s shirt, neatly inscribed. Augustus bent to look, but the words meant nothing to him. Shocked and confused, he turned away from Flora’s body and moved clumsily down the hill. He was soon lost.
When he stumbled on Tom’s camp, he was interested at once. Like Flora Foley before him, he poked his head in
side the tent and walked in.
It was unoccupied. Augustus was not confronted with a killer, a murderer, a perpetrator. Grubbing around in the tent he found Tom Dean’s name on the flyleaf of a book. At once he understood that the tent belonged to the dangerous young man in the Dome Room. Dean was camping illegally in Thomas Jefferson’s sacred grove.
And there must have been some kind of violent scuffle. The table was tipped over, the place was a mess.
And Flora’s body was only a few hundred feet away.
Augustus was filled with triumph. He had been right all along. Tom Dean was the murderer, the real serial killer, the threat to all the young women of Albemarle County, and most especially to dear, dear young Fern. Tom Dean had murdered poor Flora, right here in this tent, and then he had carried her body up the hill to that hollow stump and arranged her arms and legs as though she were sitting upright. What a cruel joke!
When the emergency line rang, the sergeant on duty at the desk picked it up and murmured, “Charlottesville Police, this message is being recorded, what is your emergency?”
There was a jabberer on the line. “Hey listen, there’s been a murder, a woman, in the woods at Monticello, right off Highway 53, you can’t miss it. Path beside a big rock. Horrible, it’s number nine, right? I mean, what’s the matter with law enforcement? Why don’t you apprehend this guy?”
“Sir, would you give me your name?”
“Bullshit, what is this crap?”
The caller hung up. Using another phone, the sergeant called the patrol officer assigned to Route 20. The patrol car’s intercom burst into noisy life. “Big rock?” said the driver. “Yeah, right, I know the big rock.” He swerved the car around and raced away in the other direction, his siren screaming.
At the desk in the Charlottesville Police station in City Hall on East Market Street, the sergeant rewound the 911 tape and listened to the message a second time.
In the weeks to come it would be replayed again and again.
A hundred feet below Tom Dean’s tent a cautious hand struck a match and lowered it carefully into the dry leaves. At once a little flame shot up and spread merrily in a ring, igniting the ferny undergrowth and rising into the lower branches of the trees.
Back in his house on Park Street, Augustus Upchurch was at last ready to call 911 and tell his horrifying news. He was surprised and a little disappointed when the officer answering his call said, “Right, we know. They’re on their way. Who’s this?”
“You mean the girls called you?”
“Girls? What girls? May I ask who this is?”
“My name is Augustus Upchurch. Perhaps you’ve heard of me?”
“Can’t say I have.”
Of course he hadn’t, thought Augustus indignantly. He was too young. The whole world was run by ignorant children. “But it must have been one of the little girls?”
There was a pause, and then the sergeant said, “Sorry, sir, I can’t give information over the phone. Now, Mr. Upchurch, please give me your address and phone number, and tell me all about it.”
Chapter 35
The pleasure I now felt in having tryumphed over the rockey Mountains and decending once more to a level and fertle country … can be more readily conceived than expressed.…
Captain Meriwether Lewis, September 22, 1805
When the patrol car braked to a stop beside the big rock, the fire in the woods was already sending flames high over the treetops. “Christ,” said the sector officer at the wheel, and at once he called for help.
So the firefighters went in first. The fire turned out to be only a small local conflagration, easily controlled. By the time the smoke and flames died away, sirens were whining on the road. Soon the rest of the team was roaring up, jamming on brakes, and piling out. The five of them raced up the hill—the sector officer, the sergeant supervisor, a couple of detectives, and Marjorie Nightingale, the sergeant in charge of forensics.
They found the firefighters walking over the blackened ground under the dripping trees, checking for smoldering embers. “Where’s the body?” said the sector officer.
One of the firefighters mopped his face and pointed up the hill. Then he gestured the other way. “Tent’s down there.”
Soon they were gathered around Flora, moving around her carefully, stepping back to make room for the police photographer with his battery-powered floodlights. When Howie Plover came plunging down the hill gasping, the supervisor held up his hand and warned him to move back.
Howie had seen the smoke and flame from the house. Behind him stumbled Curator Henry Spender. Henry was flabbergasted. He had expected nothing more than a smoldering fire in the woods and a few firefighters. Now he was appalled to come upon a murder victim and a team of investigating police. His knees buckled, and he nearly fainted.
Howie caught him and led him to higher ground, where Henry soon recovered. “Who was it?” he whined to Howie. “I mean who was the dead person? What in the hell is going on?”
Howie shrugged his shoulders, and said damned if he knew, and Henry thought darkly that, whatever it was, it was just another example of the growing absurdity and incoherence of life on the planet. Where would it all end?
Oliver Pratt was the last official to flounder up the hill to the place where Flora Foley sat in pitiful majesty in her sylvan throne. Gasping, Oliver leaned against a tree, trying to recover his breath.
He was accompanied by an unofficial observer, the meddling outsider from Massachusetts. By a piece of blind luck, Homer Kelly had been talking to Oliver on the phone when someone barged into the Chief’s office with the news about Flora Foley. Shamelessly eavesdropping, Homer heard the whole story. Without waiting for an invitation, he abandoned his astonished wife, leaped into the car, and raced unerringly, without a single wrong turn, to the very place on Route 53 where the fire truck and the police cruisers and the Chief’s car were all gathered, their blue lights flashing.
Now Forensics Sergeant Nightingale moved around the body and explained. “Method of operation not quite the same. Oh, sure, she’s been strangled, but she hasn’t been disrobed or carved up.”
Oliver stared wretchedly at Flora and said, “Mother of God, it’s number nine.”
Sadly Homer recognized the silly woman he had met that afternoon in the Dome Room in the company of Mary, Fern Fisher, and Tom Dean, the Lewis and Clark enthusiast who had swept him off his feet.
Silly or not, the poor creature did not deserve this ignominious end. “Look, Chief,” he said quietly, “another note.”
“Oh, of course, naturally,” said Oliver bitterly, “another goddamned note.”
One of the detective sergeants murmured, “Over here, Chief,” and crooked his finger. “We found the killer’s tent.”
“His tent?” said Pratt. “What do you mean, the killer’s tent?”
“Forgive me, Chief,” said the sergeant. “I shouldn’t have said the killer’s tent. I should have said the suspect’s tent. But one of the 911 callers said this kid was a dangerous maniac.”
Fiercely Homer said, “What kid? Who called 911?”
But the detective sergeant was moving ahead of them, dropping slowly down the hill, making a wide detour around a faint beaten track among the trees.
Henry Spender joined the parade. “Come on, Howie,” he said. “After all, we’ve got a perfect right. It’s Jefferson’s own grove, it’s the private personal property of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation.”
When the detective sergeant stopped, the others stopped too, and stood in a row—Pratt, Homer, Henry Spender, and Howie Plover—and stared at the big tent that had been roped to three trees and pegged securely into the forest floor. There were voices in the tent, a flash of light. The photographer was again at work.
Pratt repeated Homer’s question. “Come on, Sergeant, who was it called 911?”
The sergeant explained. “The 911 call was from the man who found the body, guy name of Upchurch. Well, no, Upchurch wasn’t the first. S
omebody else called first, some kook, told us where to go. Crazy guy, pretty significant in the circumstances, we’ll try to track him down. Then Upchurch called, said he knew the victim and he also knew this kid Tom Dean, and he said Dean was really dangerous.” The sergeant nodded at the tent. “And he told us about the tent. Said it was Dean’s tent, illegal trespass, shouldn’t be here. And he was right. There’s stuff inside with his name on it, Tom Dean.”
Once again Henry Spender’s knees were wobbling. With horror he recalled the warning call from Augustus Upchurch and his own failure to expel the interloper.
With trembling fingers he plucked at Chief Pratt’s sleeve. “He’s up there in the house right now,” he said. “Tom Dean, I mean. I heard him go out. I can always hear them going and coming, because the stairs are right outside my office. And then just now”—Henry’s face was deathly pale—”just now I heard him come back in. He works up there every day with a graduate student, her name’s Fern Fisher, right up there in the Dome Room.”
“Holy bleeding Christ,” said Pratt. He shouted at the others, and soon they were all galloping up the hill in the direction of the house. It was an improvised SWAT team, a police assault on the house at the top of the hill, an attack on the architectural masterpiece that was Henry Spender’s precious charge. In the company of Howie Plover, Henry trailed wretchedly after Oliver Pratt, two detective sergeants, a supervisor, a sector officer, a couple of firefighters, Sergeant Nightingale, and a thoroughly wretched unaccredited inquisitive observer.
Homer had taken a liking to young Tom Dean.
Chapter 36
About 9 oClock we Set out and proceeded on.… One of the canoes Struck a rock in the middle of the rapid and Swang round and Struck another rock and cracked hir So that it filled with water.… Some of the men could not Swim, their they Stayed in this doleful Situation untill we unloaded one of the other canoes and went and released them.