Louisa and the Country Bachelor : A Louisa May Alcott Mystery (9781101547564)

by Maclean, Anna

  “My son,” said Mr. Tupper, following my eyes. “He married against my wishes. Haven’t seen hide nor hair of him in half a year. Ida says he’s traveling.”

  I peered more closely. Ida’s husband had to be a full decade younger than she was, if not more.

  “Ayeah. She changed him, all right. Doesn’t write anymore, just sends picture cards once in a while,” the shopkeeper said. “Not like him at all, to waste money on picture cards when a penny letter would do. I just pray he hasn’t come to harm.”

  “What harm—” I started to ask, but was interrupted by the loud tinkling of the bell as the door swung open. Mr. Tupper gave me my basket, took my quarter, and directed his attention to the new customers.

  “Well,” said Sylvia, when we were back outside. “He is not friendly.”

  “No,” I agreed. “I am curious to know the cause of his dislike of Uncle Benjamin, as well as the extent of it. It is not wise to have open enemies in a small town.”

  “Any town,” said Sylvia. “Let’s go back home, Louy. I’m sure I can find a passage in Confucius pertinent to this situation.”

  She was only half jesting, and her eyes were merry, but before I could answer, I saw her face change from laughter to grimness; she looked at something over my shoulder.

  I turned around, knowing already that whatever had so changed her expression was something to dread.

  Coming down the Walpole sidewalk was a group of men carrying a litter, and on that litter was a body covered with a sheet. Rusty, coagulated blood blotted the sheet.

  “What has happened?” A man with rolled-up sleeves ran out of his cobbler’s shop, a huge needle in one hand and the unstitched leather sole still in his other. He waited next to us on the sidewalk, peering nervously at the approaching men with their litter.

  “Ernst Nooteboom,” called one of the men. “Found him dead in the ravine.”

  All movement stopped. Gossiping housewives, skipping children, apprentices with brooms, shopgirls carrying trays of tea, even the leaves on the elms seemed to cease their trembling—the entire square froze in disbelief. The two separate rows of tobacco-chewing unemployed laborers grew still. Unexpected death has that effect.

  A woman stepped away from her group of friends. She had fair skin and two long blond braids trailing down her back. A shopping basket hung over her arm. She moved slowly, not wishing to arrive at the side of that broken body but knowing she must. When she pulled the covering off the dead man’s face, six eggs spilled from her basket and broke on the cobbles. No one paid any attention to them.

  “Ernst?” said the woman gently, as if trying to wake a child from a deep sleep. When he did not respond, she screamed. She shook him so hard the litter carriers had trouble maintaining their awful burden. Finally she collapsed to the ground, wailing, and her friends circled around her once again, not to exchange gossip or recipes, but to comfort, as women do, making a cordon of their arms as though they could fend off further disaster.

  I looked back at the cobbler. “She be Lilli Nooteboom, his sister,” he said. He still held the shoe he had been stitching, and the huge needle with its cord was suspended in air, frozen in time by the coldness of death.

  Lilli Nooteboom would not be comforted by the women. She raged against the men carrying her dead brother, weeping and gasping, tearing at her hair, shaking her fists at the sky. “Where did you find him?” she sobbed.

  “Bottom of the cliffs, Miss Nooteboom. Seems he fell,” said the man closest to her. He avoided her gaze.

  “No,” she said, now somehow calming herself. “He did not fall. My brother climbed in the Alps; he was a summer guide. He had sure footing, my brother. Never does he fall.” Her voice was accented with deep Dutch “R”s and the upending inflection.

  “Don’t know nothing about that, miss,” he replied, still afraid to look into her eyes.

  “I do know about that,” insisted Miss Nooteboom. “He does not fall. Something else has happened to him. Oh, I told him we should not come.” And she began to weep anew, then once again controlled herself.

  Her blue eyes were like ice, sharp and cold. “Something else has happened,” she insisted. She looked at the row of laborers in their tweed caps and white tunics.

  “Well, will we carry him home?” asked one litter bearer, shifting his weight a little in discomfort. The body under the sheet was not small; it must have been a strain even for four men to carry him all the way from the ravine.

  “Eh. Home, to the dining room,” said the dead man’s sister in a strangled voice. “I will put a clean sheet on the table and prepare him. And then I will be speaking to the sheriff.” She led the way, looking straight ahead with those piercing blue eyes.

  The processional passed Sylvia and me, where we stood on the edge of the sidewalk in front of Tupper’s General Store. The sheet wasn’t quite long enough to cover the dead man’s feet. I had a good look at them.

  The leather soles of his shoes were worn smooth and had not been crisscrossed with the incised Xs with which walkers and climbers increase boot traction. No sensible person would walk on a cliff in shoes like those on the feet of Ernst Nooteboom; certainly no hiking guide would take such a risk.

  “It were an accident,” said a man behind me. I looked back and saw Mr. Tupper standing there.

  “Beg pardon?” I asked.

  “Mr. Nooteboom. He fell.”

  “So they said,” I answered. Mr. Tupper seemed plainly distressed by something; I could see it in the trembling of his hand. “An accident,” he repeated.

  The procession disappeared around a corner and the day slowly returned to its previous condition: Birds sang in the ancient oaks and elms, children played at stick and hoop, the idling laborers grumped and talked among themselves. Groups of women stood in closed circles, whispering. Now, instead of recipes, they talked of Ernst and Lilli Nooteboom, I was certain.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Knitting Lessons and a Wake

  SYLVIA AND I returned home to find Ida Tupper sitting in the kitchen with Abba.

  “Look,” she said with great glee. “Abba is teaching me to knit!” She held up a tangled skein of wool and a needle with two lopsided, uneven rows of knit one, purl two. Ida wore pink-striped linen that day and skirts with enough yardage for two or three of my workday gowns. She looked youngish in a strange way, as middle-aged women who deny their maturity often do when adorned in insistently youthful style. “I thought I would come keep your mother company. We musn’t let her get bored here in the country.”

  Abba, looking patient but tired, was too kind to point out to her new neighbor that there was dinner to prepare and rows of vegetable seeds to be planted and so had let herself be coerced into yet another task. Judging from the unevenness of Mrs. Tupper’s knitting stitches, it was an impossible task.

  “I’ve never attempted a sock before,” said that woman gaily. “Mother insisted I learn crewel embroidery and china painting instead, you know—what ladies do. I learned a bit of hat trimming as well, what Parisian ladies occupy themselves with. Trimmed that one.” Ida pointed to a confectionery of white starched lace and peacock feathers now resting on the table near her elbow. “Jonah bought it for me before he left,” she said. “Oh, it is ever so expensive, I’m sure. You’ll not find another like it in Walpole. I asked Lilli Nooteboom if she could make a dress to match and she was just speechless, poor thing. She has no talent for dressmaking, really she hasn’t.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Louisa, you look pale,” said Abba, putting down her needles. “And Sylvia, you are trembling. What is the matter?”

  I pumped water into the sink from the kettle, and stuck more wood into the stove to blaze up the fire.

  “Lilli Nooteboom is the matter,” I said. “Her brother has fallen from a cliff, it seems.”

  “Ernst?” Ida Tupper looked up from her lopsided knitting. It seemed she was on a first-name basis with a great many people.

  “Ernst,” she said again, wo
nder in her voice, and a touch of fear. “I do hope he will recover without a limp; it is so awful when a man limps. Such a nice young man. So very tall, and that funny accent. His sister, of course, is another story. So cold, so formal. She purposely shut a door once in my face; I would swear she did it on purpose.”

  “Ernst Nooteboom is dead,” said Sylvia.

  I had wished to announce the mortality a little more gently, but Sylvia was in her straightforward phase.

  Ida Tupper dropped her knitting. “Dead? I never thought . . . What a catastrophe.” Her voice trailed off, and I feared she would swoon. She did not. Instead she rose from the wobbly kitchen chair and went to the window. It was the side of the house that faced her own; she stared into her own front parlor.

  “Oh, dear.” Ida turned back to us. Tears seeped from her eyes. “And I was just saying horrid things about that poor girl. I sympathize with her, I really do. It is awful to lose a loved one. I know, I know.”

  We all sat for a moment in silence and brooded, as people do when a death has been announced. Mrs. Tupper dabbed at her eyes.

  “Don’t cry,” said Abba, going over to her and patting her hand. “I’m sure the town will do what it can for Lilli Nooteboom. There will be a raffle and a dinner to raise money for her, once the viewing and funeral are over.”

  “Yes,” said Ida Tupper. “Tonight I will go through my trunks and find what I can give her myself. You are right, Abba. We must all be very brave.”

  It seemed to me that Lilli Nooteboom was the one who must be brave, and the thought of short, buxom Ida Tupper’s castoff dresses on tall, thin Lilli Nooteboom was almost enough to make me smile.

  Father came in just then for his cup of tea, and to discover what delayed the arrival of his seed packets. He found the four of us sitting at the kitchen table.

  “You look like someone has died,” he said.

  “Someone has.” I took off my plain straw bonnet and placed it on the table next to Ida’s confection. “Ernst Nooteboom, one of the Dutch workers. He fell into the ravine.”

  Father folded his arms over his white work shirt and squinted. He had been so delighted to have a vegetable patch again that he had taken to dressing in farm clothes and coming to tea with his suspenders drooping. If anything, such informal attire made his thin, aesthetic face look even nobler.

  “I hope it was not worse than an accident,” he said. “I mean, this has nothing to do with the ill will between the Irish and the Dutch laborers, I’m sure.”

  I was not. I thought of Ernst Nooteboom’s smooth-soled shoes, his sister’s conviction that he could not have fallen because he was too practiced at climbing, and this young man’s death acquired a sinister quality. Well, climbers do sometimes fall, I thought. But the thought nagged rather than reassured.

  “Tomorrow we shall call on Lilli Nooteboom and pay our respects,” said Abba.

  LILLI NOOTEBOOM, WE learned from Eliza, lived in rooms in Mrs. Roder’s boardinghouse, the big gray house at the east end of Westminster Street. The following afternoon the entire Alcott family, including Sylvia, donned their formal calling clothes, left the little cottage, and turned in the direction of that street. Anna and Abba talked quietly about household matters; Father and Lizzie murmured occasionally about family friends—dear Mr. Henry Thoreau had sent a letter from Concord, where he was working as a gardener and continuing his study of Greek. But the conversations were muffled and we walked largely in silence, a reminder of the serious purpose of our visit.

  Soon the more densely placed houses and stores of Walpole thinned into irregular lots, affording a view of the Connecticut River and, just before that, the huge scar in the earth where the ground had been dug and leveled for the railroad tracks. When in employment, Ernst Nooteboom must have been able to make it from his door to his work site in less than two minutes. A practical man, I thought, willing to give up the amenities of living close to the village square in order to save time. Practical men do not hike in town shoes.

  Mrs. Roder opened the door to my knocking and greeted us with a stormy expression and a broom in her arms.

  “Thought you were those ruffians,” she explained, placing the broom back in the corner and smoothing her apron. Her explanation did not flatter what we had considered to be our best attire. The landlady was an elderly woman, tall and strong and formidable-looking. New England stock.

  “Ruffians?” asked Father, interested.

  “The Irish railroad workers. They make trouble here some nights, because some of the Dutch live with me,” she said somewhat apologetically, deducing now from Father’s voice that he was more in the order of a gentleman. “Threw eggs at the house last week. Sad waste of good food, don’t you think? They will be sorry when the law has to deal with them. Mr. Nooteboom bloodied one of their noses, after the eggs. Oh, that poor young man!”

  I wiped my feet carefully before stepping off the rag rug before the door. Mrs. Roder’s hall was sparkling clean. “May we pay our respects to Miss Nooteboom? I understand she lives here.”

  “She does. You may. Front room. It was the only room had a table long enough for that poor young man.” Mrs. Roder shook her head, pointed out the exact doorway, and went back to her chores in the pantry. The Alcott tribe moved in the assigned direction.

  The sun had not yet set, but that room was almost as dark as night. Three layers of curtains had been tightly closed and only a single candle burned. Lilli Nooteboom knelt at the side of the table, a black shadow of a woman in a dark room. When my eyes adjusted I saw the spray of wildflowers lovingly spread over her brother’s chest, and the crucifix holding them in place. The room was cold; pails of ice had been placed under the table to preserve the body until the burial.

  Lilli started at our steps and looked over her shoulder at us.

  Father, Sylvia, and my sisters took chairs that lined a wall, and sat with bowed heads. Abba and I knelt on either side of Lilli Nooteboom and offered prayers. Lilli began to sob. When Abba put her arm about her shoulders, the young woman, feeling the warmth and strength emanating from Abba, leaned her head there and wept freely. Abba had that effect on people: Here, you thought, was a personage you could trust completely.

  I turned my attention to her brother, on the table. I hadn’t seen Ernst Nooteboom’s face before. Now I saw the strength of his jaw, his wide-set eyes and long, straight nose, and how his pale hair fell straight back from the broad forehead. He had been a fine-looking young man. Such a man should not die so young, I thought, not before he has lived his share of years.

  Also evident on that fine face was a deep gash on the side of his head, and his right leg had an unnatural angle to it; bruises showed on the hands and torn fingertips; he had tried to gain a purchase to break that mortal fall. Had his fingers left marks on an attacker? He was a stranger, but like his sister I could not believe that his fall had been an accident.

  We prayed together, silently, and I stayed on my knees until Lilli herself stood.

  “We have not been introduced,” I said then, “but we wanted to offer our sympathy.”

  “Thank you. So few people have come.” Lilli extended her hand and swayed unsteadily from grief and the lack of sleep that often accompanies it.

  “She needs air. Take her outside, Louy,” Abba said. “We will stay with Mr. Nooteboom.”

  I took Lilli’s arm and led her to the side porch, where a pretty flower bed of crimson poppies glowed defiantly against the brown earth. Lilli gulped big drafts of air, and color returned to her drained face.

  “Have you been in Walpole long?” I asked, after she had wiped her eyes and blown her nose.

  “Three years,” said Lilli, leaning against a column for support. “Our mother and father sends us here, to make our way. I have six brothers and sisters at home.” A tear splashed down her cheek, and Lilli dabbed her eyes again with her crumpled handkerchief.

  “Will you go home now?” I asked gently.

  “Home? No. I cannot. I am sent. I stay. Ernst wo
uld wish me to stay. We had plans. He is gone. I make plans now.” She stood straight again, defiant.

  I didn’t think I had ever heard a braver speech. Lilli pointed past the flowers, past Mrs. Roder’s lawn and picket fence, to the gash of the empty railroad bed.

  “See?” she said. “That part where the trees have not been felled. That part where the railroad must pass by. That is Ernst’s and mine. We buy as soon as we come and Ernst guesses the direction the track will take. We eat bread and milk, wear only one dress and one suit, save everything. Now, is mine.” She gazed at the patch of mud with pride. “No, I don’t leave,” she said. “I stay and earn money so I can send home. And I will get an American husband, become American lady.”

  There was a moment of silence as we both stared into the distance, trying to see the unseeable future.

  “May I ask a question, Miss Nooteboom?”

  “Yes?” She looked at me with a little frown creasing the pale skin between the white-blond eyebrows.

  “Did your brother often go climbing in his town shoes?”

  “Never! Never would he do such a thing. I told you, we save every penny, are very careful of our wardrobe. Town shoes are not for such wearing.” In her anger, she pounded a little fist against the porch railing

  “How do you explain what happened, his falling from the cliff?”

  “It is as I told the sheriff, when I go to his office this morning,” Lilli said. “Ernst came to where I was working in Mrs. Simon’s nursery—I sew the clothes for her children—and he told me he had a meeting with a man who wanted to talk about his lot. Our lot.” Her gaze wandered again to the distant patch of mud that was all she owned in this world. “Ernst told me he would not sell. Ever. My children would grow up in the house we built there. The town would grow in that direction, to follow the train, and we would build a big house, big enough for an inn, and behind it a pen to fatten cattle before shipping to Boston markets. Ernst was a clever man.” Her eyes glowed.