by Ann Waldron
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Recipes
“Don’t miss [any in the series] . . . a satisfying puzzle.”
—Mysterylovers.com
Praise for the mysteries of
ANN WALDRON
Death of a Princeton President
“Succeeds in every facet of good storytelling it seeks to conquer . . . A solid read, satisfying and well-written, and highly recommendable to any who seek the pages of an intriguing yarn.”
—Roundtable Reviews
“McLeod is a very interesting character . . . entertaining.”
—The Romance Reader’s Connection
“Waldron creates suspense, both romantic and mysterious . . . Meticulously plotted.”
—Romantic Times BOOKclub
The Princeton Murders
“Believable characters. Deftly positioned clues . . . in the very best tradition of the whodunit.”
—The Trenton (NJ) Times
“McLeod and her students are very likable and interesting characters . . . the mystery itself is well-designed and the perpetrator will come as a shock.”
—Midwest Book Review
“A must-read. The premise and voice are fresh and entertaining. Waldron combines a superb mystery, divine characters, and suspenseful storytelling.”
—Romantic Times BOOKclub
Berkley Prime Crime Titles by Ann Waldron
A RARE MURDER IN PRINCETON
UNHOLY DEATH IN PRINCETON
DEATH OF A PRINCETON PRESIDENT
THE PRINCETON MURDERS
THE PRINCETON IMPOSTOR
Biographies
EUDORA: A WRITER’SLIFE
CLOSE CONNECTIONS: CAROLINE
GORDON AND THE SOUTHERN RENAISSANCE
HODDING CARTER: THE RECONSTRUCTION OF A RACIST
Children’s Books
GOYA
MONET
TRUE OR FALSE? THE DETECTION OF ART FORGERIES
THE BLUEBERRY COLLECTION
THE FRENCH DETECTION
SCAREDY CAT
THE LUCKIE STAR
THE INTEGRATION OF MARY-LARKIN THORNHILL
THE HOUSE ON PENDLETON BLOCK
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
A RARE MURDER IN PRINCETON
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / April 2006
Copyright © 2006 by Ann Waldron.
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Acknowledgments
I should like to thank the people who work in the real-life Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University. They are much nicer and more interesting than the characters I made up for my wholly fictional, geographically inaccurate Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Most helpful were Alfred Bush, Steve Ferguson, Charles Greene, Gretchen Oberfranc, Linda Olivera, Ben Primer, Meg Sherry, and Jane Snedeker.
Kim Otis, Ted Cashel, and Mary Cason answered questions about other matters.
Heartfelt thanks for manuscript reading to Lolly O’Brien and Amanda Matetsky.
One
“SO GOOD OF you to have me for dinner, but, dear boy, you didn’t tell me you had bought the murder house . . .”
Coming down the stairs, McLeod Dulaney heard the old-fashioned phrasing of the man talking to George Bridges at the front door. The voice obviously belonged to the dinner guest George had told her to expect, Nathaniel Ledbetter. She stopped and looked down at the pair of them.
George was her old friend from an earlier stay in Princeton—tall, about her own age, with a head of thick curly black hair turning gray. Ledbetter was a portly man who looked rather like a glossy gray tomcat with his thick mane of gray hair and bristling gray eyebrows. He took off his galoshes and his gray overcoat, and pulled down the gray cardigan he wore as a vest beneath the jacket of his gray tweed suit.
Ledbetter followed George through the door at the bottom of the stairs, and McLeod continued down the stairs and joined them in the small front parlor of George’s house.
“The murder house?” she asked Nathaniel Ledbetter, who was just sitting down on George’s new sofa.
He stood up when McLeod came in. “Oh, yes, this is the murder house,” he said with an air of authority.
“What do you mean, ‘murder house,’ Nat
ty?” George asked.
“Surely you remember when Jill Murray was murdered ?” said Ledbetter.
“Vaguely,” said George.
“I don’t,” said McLeod, who could not abide not knowing what people were talking about. “Who was Jill Murray and where was she murdered?”
“She was murdered right here in this house,” said Ledbetter, staring, puzzled, at McLeod. He held out his hand. “I’m Nathaniel Ledbetter,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” said George. “You shocked me, Natty, and I forgot my manners—”
“I have often said you didn’t have any, dear boy,” interrupted Natty.
George went on as though Ledbetter had not spoken. “McLeod, this is a former professor of mine, Nathaniel Ledbetter. He always was a terrible know-it-all. Nat, this is my good friend, McLeod Dulaney, who’s going to stay here while she’s teaching a writing seminar at Princeton this semester. She’s my first houseguest.”
“I’m glad to know you, Ms. Dulaney. I’ve heard about you. You’re from Florida, aren’t you? What do you think about our winter weather?”
“It’s cold,” said McLeod. “The camellias were in bloom when I left Tallahassee three days ago.” It had been beautiful, in fact, the pink and red and white camellias amid glossy green leaves all over town under live oaks festooned with Spanish moss, and McLeod felt a moment’s pang for the camellias and azaleas she would miss, but only a moment’s. She concentrated on Natty Ledbetter. “Tell me about the murder,” she said.
“You two sit down and I’ll get drinks,” said George. “You’ll have a martini, I assume, Nat, and what about you, McLeod?”
“I’ll have a martini, too,” said McLeod.
“Good girl,” said George and left for the kitchen.
McLeod sat down on the sofa in front of the tiny fireplace and looked at the fire while Ledbetter sat down in a small wing chair. She turned to him. “Now, this murder,” she said. “Who was Jill Murray?”
“She was a lovely woman. A widow, who lived here alone. It was in the autumn—beautiful weather, I remember —and Jill disappeared. Nobody knew what happened to her; she just vanished. Finally, her son came over and searched the house thoroughly and found her body down in the basement. She had been beaten severely. And the police never found out who did it.”
“Good heavens!” said McLeod. “How long ago did this happen?”
“Oh, let’s see. Ten, fifteen, maybe twenty years ago, I would say.”
“And it was never solved?”
“No, I think the police finally decided that she had been working in her garden—her hands were still crusted with dirt—and a tramp, somebody from Trenton, had come up here and tried to rob her and then killed her.”
“And the house? Has it been vacant since then?”
“It was for a long time. Her son kept it for years because nobody wanted to buy it, and then came this man from Texas who bought it, but he didn’t stay long. I guess George bought it from him.”
“And people still call it the murder house?”
“Always will,” said Ledbetter. “Things don’t change all that much in Princeton.”
George arrived with a tray that held three martinis and a plate of baguette slices with smoked salmon. He handed out the drinks, and Ledbetter, brown eyes gleaming, proposed a toast: “To your new house, dear boy.”
The murder house, thought McLeod uneasily.
George added another stick of wood to the fire.
“Ms. Dulaney, I’m delighted to make your acquaintance,” Ledbetter said. “As I said, I’ve heard so much about you. And I understand you’ve written a most interesting book about Elijah P. Lovejoy.”
“Elijah P. Lovejoy is my hero,” said McLeod.
“Admirable man,” said Ledbetter. “He was lynched, was he not, out West somewhere?”
“In Alton, Illinois, near Saint Louis,” said McLeod. “He was a Presbyterian minister and the editor of an abolitionist newspaper. A pro-slavery mob came to destroy his press, and he was killed.”
“I see,” said Ledbetter. “And what are you working on now?”
“I’m not working on another book,” said McLeod. “I do have a newspaper job, you know—on the Star of Florida in Tallahassee—and they’re good about giving me a leave of absence. This is the third time I’ve come to Princeton to teach for a semester. I’m lucky.”
“I would imagine it makes for a full life,” said Ledbetter.
“McLeod has the energy of three dynamos,” said George.
“Hardly,” said McLeod. “Mr. Ledbetter, you’re not teaching anymore? You’re at the library, George said.”
“Natty, McLeod will interrogate you,” said George, “while I go to the kitchen for a few minutes.”
“What do you do at the library?” asked McLeod, thinking that George knew her pretty well. Curiosity about people —and everything else—ruled her life. And she had found that her white hair—it had been white since she was in her thirties—permitted her to ask even more questions.
“I’m director of Rare Books and Special Collections,” said Ledbetter. “Do you know what that is?”
“Manuscripts? Rare books?”
“You’re right. The term ‘special collections’ includes not just manuscripts, but graphic arts—a wonderful collection of prints—and the theater collection and Western Americana, a coin collection, and a few other odds and ends. It’s a big tent.”
“What’s your special treasure?”
“We have many. We have cuneiform inscriptions on clay cylinders from Nebuchadnezzar’s time. We have papyrus manuscripts, illuminated manuscripts, incunabula—that is to say, books printed before 1501—one of them, incidentally, is The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili from 1499, and we have . . .”
McLeod had met her match, someone who knew more than even her curiosity demanded. Natty described photographs taken by Lewis Carroll, mentioned an autograph (meaning handwritten) manuscript of a poem by Emily Dickinson, talked about a book of Oscar Wilde’s poems inscribed by Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas. “And of course, we have all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s papers,” he said, “but that’s enough.”
“How did Princeton get all these things?”
“Gifts. Generous alumni over the years have given us their libraries and book collections. And benefactors give us money to make our own purchases. A loyal group called Friends of the Princeton University Library gives money for purchases and lectures and exhibitions.”
GEORGE CAME IN to say that dinner was ready.
“I am afraid I’ve bored your guest,” Nat said to George as they went to the dining room. “I do go on. I get carried away.”
“Not at all,” McLeod said. “It’s fascinating.”
“It’s hard to bore McLeod,” said George. “Her curiosity is insatiable.” He smiled at her sympathetically and patted her shoulder. But then he opened the gate for more. “Nat, McLeod is a real Trollope fan,” he said. “You did tell her about your Trollope holdings, didn’t you?”
“No, but I shall,” said Natty. “We have the manuscripts of ten Trollope novels—The Eustace Diamonds and Orley Farm are the best known of the ten. We also have The American Senator, The Claverings, Lady Anna, The Landleaguers, Lord Palmerston, Marion Fay, Mr. Scarborough’s Family, and An Old Man’s Love.”
“I never even heard of some of those titles,” McLeod said.
“Natty, I’m impressed that you can remember all ten titles and recite them at the dinner table,” said George.
“Alzheimer’s has not set in for me yet,” said Natty. “Dear lady, come over to Rare Books and I’ll show you our Trollopes.”
McLeod, who really was extremely fond of Trollope, happily agreed to pay him a visit, thinking that being called “dear lady” was not as bad as “dear girl.”
Dinner was outstanding—a creamy cauliflower tomato soup and duck à l’orange, with fruit tarts for dessert.
“George, you’re an even better cook than you were before,” said McLeod.
> “Very fine, my boy,” said Nat.
“I spent two years in Brussels—I learned a lot about food,” said George. “But I bought the tarts at Chez Alice.”
It was while they were having coffee in the living room—George had rebuilt the fire—that Natty spoke to McLeod again. “I’ d like to interest you in a man whose papers we have. You might want to write about him—Henry van Dyke.”
“Is that the man who wrote ‘The Other Wise Man’?” she asked.
“Yes, but he wrote many other things, too,” Nat Ledbetter was saying when George interrupted him to ask what “The Other Wise Man” was.
McLeod and Natty spoke at once and then told him together.
“It’s a Christmas short story,” said McLeod. “My mother loved it.”
“I heard it read out loud at church when I was a boy,” Nat said. “It was quite popular. But van Dyke did many other things. He was a famous Presbyterian minister and he was later for twenty years a distinguished English professor here at Princeton. He wrote many books. He is the only member of the English Department faculty whose collected works have been published—in twelve volumes, no less. He was a great fly-fisherman and was ambassador to the Netherlands. He was a most fabulous man. And I do wish somebody would write about him. Do come over to see the Trollopes, and while you’re there, take a look at the van Dyke papers—there are boxes and boxes of them, including letters from, I believe, six presidents of the United States.”
McLeod promised she would indeed be over to see him and his treasures as soon as she could. And soon after that, she yawned, apologized, and said she really had to go to bed.