Murder at Monticello

by Jane Langton

  Then George told him all. It was one long brag.

  “My name’s not Dryer, it’s Drewyer. George Drewyer. That name mean anything to you?”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Homer.

  George grinned, lording it over the Harvard man. “I’ll give you a hint. Lewis and Clark. Ever heard of Lewis and Clark?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “George Drewyer. The best hunter. Brought home the bacon. You know, deer, bear, buffalo. All those guys, they couldn’t have survived without George Drewyer.”

  Homer put two and two together. “You mean you’re descended from that George Drewyer, a member of the Corps of Discovery?”

  “Indian women. You know. The men fucked the squaws.” Again George asserted his superiority over this know-it-all. “See, I’m from Bismarck, North Dakota.”

  Homer shook his head. “I don’t follow you.”

  “Bismarck? You don’t know Bismarck, North Dakota? Right there on the Missouri River? Jesus! You don’t know shit.”

  “Well, of course you’re right about that,” agreed Homer, nodding his head, a glimmer of light beginning to dawn.

  “Mandan villages, that’s where they were. You know, this Indian tribe, the Mandans? Lewis and Clark, they spent the winter at Fort Mandan, George and all the rest. And the Mandan braves, you know what they said? They said, Hey, boys, help yourself. So the squaws—well, you know.”

  “I see,” said Homer. “You mean—?”

  “My name, right, Dryer? Just like Drewyen? So my great-great-great-grandmother, she must have been a Mandan squaw, slept with George Drewyer, got pregnant.”

  “Of course, of course.” Homer slapped his knee, asking himself whether any upstanding Mandan squaw would have given a child the name of some passing white man when she didn’t speak English, never saw the name written down, and probably couldn’t read anyway. He pretended to be impressed. “So I’m talking to a direct descendant of a member of the Corps of Discovery? How fascinating.”

  George grinned with pride, but then his expression changed. His mouth gaped open but no sound came out, his face was suffused with blood, he reared up and fell back. One of the nurses ran to his side.

  Homer got in his question quickly. “But why, George? Tell me, why did you do that to all those women?”

  It was too late. The nurse pushed him out of the way and shouted at the others. They came running. A doctor appeared from nowhere.

  Homer waited in the corridor, watching through the window, hoping to get another chance. But the crowd of experts around George’s bed hovered over him for an interminable half-hour.

  They thrust a tube down his throat, they worked over him with CPR, they leaned convulsively on his chest. At last they looked at each other and stepped back. The doctor shrugged her shoulders and departed. A sheet was pulled up. The head nurse made a face at Homer. They all dispersed.

  Homer gave a last regretful look at the body of the murdering, mutilating serial killer, George Dryer or possibly Drewyer. In the silent compartment George lay still while a nurse swiftly disconnected his life-support systems and detached from his fractured leg the complicated arrangement of pulleys and cables.

  A hospital aide appeared within minutes, rolling up a gurney. The body was transferred and whisked off to the hospital morgue, while another aide snatched the sheets off the bed, scrubbed the mattress with disinfectant, and ballooned over it a clean sheet, slapping it down and tucking it in.

  George was dead. The red boil of anger that had enclosed him for so long had burst at last.

  Leaving the hospital, Homer pondered the dying man’s insistence that he was descended from a Mandan squaw. The crudity of his claim was like the squalid insinuations about Jefferson’s “blackamoor wife.”

  Of course any comparison between the exalted refinement of Thomas Jefferson on the one hand and the filthy coarseness of George Dryer on the other was unthinkable. Homer tried heroically not to think it.

  Chapter 59

  You have been a long time with me.… Your woman … accompanied you that long dangerous and fatigueing rout to the Pacific Ocean and back.… As to your little Son (my boy Pomp) you well know my fondness for him and my anxiety to take and raise him as my own child.…

  Letter to Toussaint Charbonneau

  from Captain William Clark,

  August 20, 1806

  It was lunchtime at City Hall. The officer at the police reception desk was out sick, and the sergeant who normally handled emergency calls at this time of day had been summoned to the divorce court across the street, hoping to salvage a few scraps from the vengeance of his ex-wife.

  Therefore, Chief Pratt, left alone, was not free to accept Homer’s offer of lunch under the trees in the Downtown Mall.

  So Homer brought a bag of hamburgers and set it down on Pratt’s desk.

  The Chief was not to be outdone. “Hey, looky here. I just happen to have a pint of booze.” He reached behind the last volume of the OED and brought out a bottle. It was full of dark liquid. It had no label. “Liberated, so to speak, from a couple of moonshiners.”

  “Moonshiners? Don’t tell me you’ve still got old geezers in the hills making sourmash whiskey?”

  “We sure do. And it’s still a federal offense.” Pratt produced a couple of glasses from a desk drawer, dabbed at them with a paper napkin, removed the cork from the bottle, and poured an inch into each glass. “Watch it,” he said, “it’s pure rotgut.”

  Homer took a fiery sip and grinned. “Strong stuff.” He wiped his mouth and said, “Well, let’s see, now, where are we?”

  “Hospital,” said Pratt. He took a large bite of his hamburger and chewed it slowly. “The head nurse, did she tell you what she told me?”

  “The head nurse? No, she didn’t tell me anything. I was just in her way.”

  “Well, she told me why none of those poor murdered women was raped. He didn’t have anything to rape them with.”

  “What?” Homer was dumbfounded. “You mean he’d been castrated? For Christ’s sake, we should have thought of that.”

  “Okay, then.” Pratt wiped ketchup off his chin. “You said Dryer maybe came from North Dakota, someplace around Bismarck. So Quantico, they talked to the hospital out there, found the record. Guy by the name of George Dryer came into the emergency room three years ago, bleeding like a stuck pig, yelling and hollering. They fixed him up and discharged him, but one of the medicos wrote something in the margin of his medical record. You know, all they have to do is fill in the blanks, cardiac arrest or something. But this guy wrote a comment in the margin. It was the name Dryer kept yelling, the name of the woman who did it to him. Jeanie, the note said. Woman by the name of Jeanie.”

  “Jeanie!” Homer slapped his forehead. “Oh, my god, Oliver, I forgot to tell you. That’s what Fern said. It slipped my mind. She said he called her Jeanie.”

  “God’s teeth, no kidding?” Chief Pratt took another swig of moonshine. “Well, they found her.”

  “Already? They found Jeanie?”

  “Jean Lighthorse, that’s her name. She had a friend in Bismarck who kept in touch with her after she ran away.”

  “Jeanie ran away? You mean, after she did that to George?”

  “This friend’s a local prostitute, Beatrice Winn, sensible woman who sometimes works with local law enforcement. She saw it in the paper, all about this former resident of Bismarck who turned out to be a killer, only now he was dead. Well, it was great good news, because now Jeanie wouldn’t have to be afraid any more. So Beatrice got in touch with her again and persuaded her to come back and tell exactly what happened.” Pratt looked at his empty glass, leaned his chair back, and said, “Hooee.” He picked up the bottle of moonshine and waggled it at Homer.

  “Oh, no thanks.” Homer wiped his red face and collected himself. “So what did she say?”

  “What did who say? Oh, you mean Jeanie.” Pratt opened his eyes wide and shook his head to clear his brain. “Grisly story. Dryer kept he
r locked up in an abandoned shed somewhere out of town, padlocks inside, outside, used her whenever he felt like it. Brought her food when he remembered to do it, as though she were some kind of farm animal. Jeanie bit and kicked and yelled and screamed, but nobody heard her. Then, one day, she found some kind of tool in the shed, maybe a sickle or, you know, some kind of pruning instrument.” Pratt jerked his elbows in and out as though clipping an overgrown bush.

  Homer winced. “She used it on Dryer?”

  “Right. One night he made the mistake of falling asleep. It was what she’d been waiting for. His pants were right there on the floor, so she stole his keys. Then she—uh—did what she did. And naturally he woke up and howled, but Jeanie got away. Dryer had to crawl to the nearest road, yelling bloody murder, and somebody picked him up, took him to the hospital.”

  “Bloody murder,” said Homer dryly. “That’s exactly what he did from then on, avenging himself over and over again on Jean Lighthorse.”

  Pratt opened a folder and handed a piece of paper across the desk. “Here she is. Picture came through the computer, I don’t know how the hell they do it, we’ve got a whiz kid in the office. So what do you think?”

  “Handsome woman.” Homer studied the picture. “Looks Native American.”

  “Right. She’s Chippewa. Wears her hair in a pigtail.”

  “Ah, I see.” Homer nodded wisely. “You mean like that poor librarian. And the girl at the fast-food place.”

  “And your young friend Fern.” Pratt picked up the whiskey bottle, looked at it regretfully, put it down again, and sighed. “It sort of goes along with what Dryer told you.”

  “About his so-called ancestor, George Drewyer?” Homer brightened. “And all the Indian squaws the men slept with—the Chinook women at the mouth of the Columbia River and the Mandan women on the Missouri, right there where the city of Bismarck was going to be, the place where George was born.” Homer reached for the greasy paper bag and looked inside. “Hey, there’s another burger in here, Oliver. How about it?”

  Oliver groaned and shook his head.

  “Me neither.” Homer put the bag on the floor. “My God, Oliver, those notes he left on the women’s bodies, he was teasing us with Lewis and Clark. Poor Jeanie! He must have thought he was recapitulating the men’s lusty freedom with the willing squaws along the way.”

  Pratt glowered. “You couldn’t exactly call Jean Lighthorse a willing squaw.”

  “Of course not. But after what she did to him, he had to keep finding new Jeanies and punishing them in her honor.”

  “Punishing them? God’s whiskers, he butchered those poor young women.”

  Homer made a sick joke. “Well, at least he didn’t eat them. I mean, he wasn’t a cannibal like Jeffrey Dahmer.”

  Pratt wasn’t listening. He rocked back in his chair and stared dreamily at the ceiling. “Remember, Homer, I’ve been looking up the original meanings of words in the Declaration of Independence? Remember that?”

  Completely befuddled, Homer tried to switch his attention from the depths of depravity to the heights of glory. “Sure, I remember. You wanted to find out what the words meant way back then, when Jefferson wrote them down.”

  “Exactly. Well, guess what?”

  “My God, Oliver, I don’t know, what?”

  Pratt’s face shone. “Well, I’ve been working on my talk. You know, for the Philological Society of Philadelphia. Wait till you hear this.” In a fever of excitement he swiveled around in his chair and snatched out six volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary and piled them on his desk. For the next half-hour he lectured Homer on his philological discoveries.

  Homer listened with tipsy attention. At last he thumped Oliver’s desk and cried, “They were gods, Oliver, our founding fathers were gods walking the earth among mortal men.”

  Pratt stared at him, a little taken aback. “Well, jeez, I don’t know if I’d go that far.”

  Homer drove back to University Circle in a daze of awe and wonder. Recognizing a whiskey stupor when she saw one, Mary wisely put him to bed.

  Afterward, fully awake and sober, Homer remembered his ecstasy in Pratt’s office. He hated to set it aside. “Well, they were demigods anyway,” he said to Mary ruefully.

  “Who were?”

  “Washington and Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, all those people. It’s just dawned on me how lucky we were in our founding fathers. I mean, everybody always says that, but now it’s not just a truism, it’s a huge, enormous, overwhelming—”

  “Vast and gigantic?” suggested Mary helpfully.

  “Colossal, stupendous—”

  “Immense and titanic?”

  “Right. It’s an immense and titanic fact. I now appreciate it for the first time. What are all those boxes for?”

  “Homer, the landlord’s coming back on Monday. Ed told us in the beginning we could only stay for a month, remember?”

  “Oh, that’s right. Too bad. I’ll really miss this lovely town and the hills all around and the whole state of Virginia. But I won’t miss you, you ratty little dog.” Doodles was looking up at Homer, her violet nose quivering.

  Chapter 60

  To Captain Meriwether Lewis—

  I recieved, my dear Sir, with unspeakable joy your letter of Sep. 23 announcing the return of yourself, Capt Clarke & your party in good health to St. Louis. The unknown scenes in which you were engaged & the length of time without hearing of you had begun to be fell awfully.…

  I salute you with sincere affection.

  TH. JEFFERSON

  Washington, October 20, 1806

  At Monticello things had long since returned to normal. The captains and the kings had departed, the four hundred folding chairs had been whisked away, the men and women of the Secret Service had vanished, the caterers had swooped up their leftovers and garbage and mobile refrigeration equipment, their tent had come down, and a cleanup crew had walked slowly over the trampled lawn collecting plastic glasses, cigarette butts, toothpicks, dropped asparagus rolls, and paper napkins.

  They missed some of the napkins, because a few had fluttered up into the trees, where they perched like doves for days. The remaining crumbs among the blades of grass were carried away by ants.

  During the cleanup Howie Plover put a new set of saw-horse barriers in front of the ice house. But first he looked down into the pit and saw something strange and disgusting at the bottom. It wasn’t a dead rat, it was a tangled mop, hairy and black.

  He fished it out. Howie did not recognize it as the wig that had once belonged to Flora Foley. Instead of turning it over to the police, he tossed it into the trash.

  Indoors, the blood of Augustus Upchurch had been washed away from the parlor floor. The wet mop was followed by a waxing machine, and now the parquet gleamed with its usual geometric perfection. The parlor was once again a room in a museum, a place where nothing happened.

  When Fern came back to work she looked around downstairs, half expecting to see the key of the Great Clock turning, the pens of the polygraph moving, the concave mirror still holding in its shallow bowl an image of Thomas Jefferson, the lapdesk lying open on the marble table, and a storm of paper floating down from the ceiling. But of course everything was perfectly still and motionless, and all the things belonging elsewhere were back in elsewhere.

  She climbed the stairs, looked in on Henry Spender, and wished him good morning.

  Henry glanced up absently and smiled, then looked down again and frowned at his accounts. The bill for the fireworks was ten times more than he had expected. The itemized list was four pages long. The last page was the worst:

  60 Spiral Screamers @ $60 $3600

  45 Golden Starbursts @ $75 3375

  4 Blue Blockbusters @ $550 2200

  15 Vesuvius Rockets @ $300 4500

  1 Forty-Second Final Bombardment @ $1000 1000

  1 American Flag, Red, White, and Blue, @$1500 1500

  1 Portrait Display, Thomas Jefferson @ $2000 20
00

  Total $18, 175

  GRAND TOTAL 45, 112

  Opening the official checkbook for the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, Henry thought sourly that John Adams would never have called for Bonfires and Illuminations if he’d known what they would cost the future citizens of the nation.

  He scribbled the check anyway, rammed it in an envelope, and slammed his fist down on the stamp.

  In the Dome Room, Fern found Tom standing on the ladder with paintbrush in hand. “I didn’t get it exactly right,” he said apologetically, looking down at Fern. “I had to add another fifty miles of the Columbia River, here at the end, or it would never have reached the Pacific. This blue here, that’s the Pacific.”

  “Well, I think it looks great,” said Fern. “The time line’s finished too. We should celebrate.”

  “Right you are,” said Tom, descending the ladder with the can of blue paint. “After all, we deserve it. We’ve been all the way to the Pacific and back.” He gazed up proudly at the completed map on the ceiling, the meanderings of the rivers, the Great Falls, the jagged mountains, the Continental Divide, the Lolo Pass. “I mean, we really have, you and me. Snags tearing up the canoes, grizzly bears, cold and starvation, hostile Indians, generous Indians, dead horses, falling off cliffs, serial killers, ghastly parents, murderous attacks, wrongful arrests, solitary confinement.” Tom put down the paint can and gathered Fern in his arms. “Right? We got through it all. We made it all the way.”

  “Oh, yes,” agreed Fern, laughing. “We made it all the way.”

  “And, hey, I’ve got just the thing.” Tom picked up his knapsack, reached in, and pulled out a bottle.

  “Where did you get that?” But Fern knew perfectly well where it came from.

  “Dining room downstairs. The door of the dumbwaiter was standing open, so I looked inside, and there it was.”

  “Château Lafite,” murmured Fern. “Seventeen eighty-seven.”

  Tom looked at the label. “That’s right. How did you know?”