The Angel and the Jabberwocky Murders (6 page)

“Wait just a minute,” I said. “We don't know that he
did
kill her.”

Celeste fanned away walnut fumes and made a face. “He's gone, isn't he?”

“Maybe he's just scared,” I said.

She shrugged. “That makes two of us.”

It occurred to me as I drove home that afternoon that not one person had mentioned the suspicious letter D. C. Hunter was supposed to have received in the mail, which must mean that only the police knew about it. “Just like that other girl got,” the sergeant had said. But what other girl? The girl who was killed four years ago? If only I knew what had been inside that envelope!

“What envelope?” Augusta asked when I told her about it that night.

“Then they must be keeping it quiet for a reason,” she said when I told her what I had heard at Blythe Cornelius's apartment. “And by the way, your cousin called and left a message just before you got home. Seems the professor turned himself in this afternoon.”

“Where was he? Has he admitted anything?”

“Jo Nell said he showed up at the police station around four—been staying with a relative. Says he didn't do it.” Augusta had laid a fire in the sitting room and now she gazed at the embers, absently stroking Clementine's black-and-white head. “I wonder how long he's been at the college. Could he have had anything to do with the other girl's death?”

“I'm sure Captain Hardy's looking into that,” I said. “He seems to know what he's doing. Do you think there might be a connection?”

Augusta's amber necklace reflected the flickering blaze on the hearth. “It might be a good idea,” she said, “to look into some of the old newspaper files. You never can tell what might turn up.”

“But don't you think the police have already done that?”

The angel turned her gray-green gaze on me. “That's just the point, Lucy Nan. You'll be looking at this with an open mind. You just might catch something that went right past them. Something so ordinary they wouldn't think it was important.”

I frowned. “You mean like mysterious letters?”

“I mean, you'll know it when you see it,” she said.

I wasn't so sure about that, so I convinced Augusta to come along with me. It didn't take a lot of persuading.

Stone's Throw's weekly newspaper,
The Messenger
(Ellis calls it
The Mess
because she claims there's a typo on every other line), shares a yellow brick building facing the town park with Petal Pushers, the new florist (“We sell every blooming thing!”) and McBride's Pharmacy.

The receptionist put her telephone conversation on hold long enough to point out the small room where back issues were kept on microfilm, and Augusta, fascinated by the whole procedure, hovered over my shoulder as I scanned several weeks of news. “Imagine getting all that information on that little piece of film!” she said as the pages rolled past. I didn't bother to explain that technology had developed an even more advanced technique used by most contemporary publishers.

Rachel Isaacs's murder took up most of the front page of the October 5 issue that year. Londus Clack had discovered the girl's submerged body caught on debris just beneath the surface of the water as he trimmed the tall grass around the lake. She had been stunned or knocked unconscious by a blow to the head, then apparently was shoved into the water to drown.

“‘The victim could have stood if she had been able, as the water was only about four feet deep in the spot where she was found,'” Augusta read aloud. “That poor girl! What a cruel thing to do!” She sank onto the chair next to mine, her gray-green eyes filled with the horror of it.

“They just left her there—left her to drown,” I said. Even though the girl had been killed several years before, reading the article made the tragedy seem fresh and new. “Who would do such a thing?”

“That's what we want to find out.” Augusta nodded toward the screen in front of us. “Let's see what else it says.”

Like D. C. Hunter, Rachel was fully dressed in shorts, T-shirt, and sneakers, and her roommate said she had gone to the Old Lake to jog. The weapon used to strike the girl was never found, I read, but a coroner's report didn't rule out the possibility it might have been a stout stick later camouflaged by others of its kind in the lake's murky waters.

Rachel Isaacs's smiling photograph looked out at us from the front page of
The Messenger
. It was made the week before her death, the article said, for a college annual she would never see. She was a freshman and looked it: pretty, heart-shaped face, bright smile, short dark hair that appeared to be naturally curly. And the expression in her eyes gave the impression she had just heard a really good joke and couldn't wait to tell it.

Friends planned to dedicate a sundial in her memory in the campus garden, I read, and the girl's roommate was so distraught she was under a doctor's care.

Augusta shook her head. “It seems as if she had absolutely nothing in common with D. C. Hunter, yet the two were killed near the same place at approximately the same time of year.”

“There has to be some kind of mad reasoning behind all this,” I said, “but I can't imagine what it might be.”

“The article doesn't mention the Isaacs girl receiving any kind of note or letter,” Augusta said, scanning the story again. She glanced at the office across the hall. “Do you suppose the editor might remember anything about it, or has she not been with the paper that long?”

Josie Kiker had been editor of the tiny weekly for over twenty years, and it didn't look as if her desk had been cleared since she'd started. When I poked my head in the doorway she looked up from her computer and stretched, shoving a mop of gray-streaked red hair from her forehead. “Did you bring me a scoop or you just out slumming?” With a sudden kick, she sent a straight chair sliding in my direction. “Have a seat. I need a break anyway—back's rebelling.” Josie pushed up her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “What can I do for you?”

I told her what I had overheard the policeman say about D. C. Hunter supposedly receiving some kind of mysterious letter. “Just like that other girl got.”

She reached for a pot of what looked like liquid coal that simmered on top of the filing cabinet. “Coffee?”

I thanked her but declined. I try not to drink anything you might have to scoop out with a shovel. I told her how the girls in my class had discovered D.C.'s body and how the police had examined her mail. “We—I—thought you might remember something like that happening when Rachel Isaacs was killed,” I said.

Josie tossed down her brew like it was a shot of bourbon. “Seems like I did hear there was a message of some kind, but the police were real closemouthed about it. Never gave out so much as a hint. When nothing ever came out about it, I just assumed it was one of those rumors that circulate through the gossip mill.” Shoving her coffee mug aside, the editor leaned across her desk. “Did you actually
see
these letters? How do you know they were meant for the Hunter girl?”

“That's what Sally, her roommate, told police. She'd been collecting the mail and leaving it on D.C.'s desk. I was there when they asked her for permission to enter the room and take them.”

She frowned. “How many letters were there?”

“Oh, I don't know. Four or five, maybe, but the attention seemed focused on one,” I told her.

“I don't suppose you know what it said?” She tilted her head to look at me. I didn't even have to answer.

Josie Kiker had the look of a bloodhound in her eyes and I wouldn't have been too surprised if she had dropped to the floor and begun to sniff. Instead she leaned back in her chair. “Wonder if it held some kind of threat?”

I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine, but it sounds as if it might be something that would tie the two murders together.”

The smell of scorched coffee filled the small room, and Augusta, standing behind the editor, wrinkled her nose at the sight of the stained pot, which looked as if it hadn't been scrubbed in this decade.

I turned away to hide my smile, but thankfully Josie didn't notice. “They'll say Claymore Hornsby did it,” she said, studying a spot on the ceiling, “but I just can't see it.”

“Was he here when the other girl was killed?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, Clay's been at the college for seven or eight years now and had a roving eye for as many, but I never thought he'd actually
do
anything about it. You've seen his wife, I suppose?”

I shook my head. “Not that I can remember.”

“Well, as the old fellow says, ‘She ain't got nary turn for inticin'.' Plain as a rag mop, Monica is—but then he knew that when he married her, didn't he?”

I said I reckon he did and tried to signal Augusta it was time to go. I wouldn't put it past her to go into a cleaning frenzy right then and there. “I just hope they'll soon find out who did it,” I told her. “Two unsolved murders in less than five years isn't going to look good for Sarah Bedford.”

Josie Kiker made a noise that was somewhere between a shish and a grunt. “Two is all they admit to, but I've wondered since about that other girl.” She nudged her glasses into place and frowned at the computer screen.

“What other girl? You mean there was a murder before Rachel Isaacs's?”

“Accident, they
said
. Fell from the Tree House. You know, that circular platform around the big oak on the front campus. They use it mostly on Class Day.”

I sat back down. “I don't remember that. When did it happen?”

“'Bout nine years ago, I think. I can look it up. Seems it was a girl from somewhere in upstate New York.”

Josie bustled out of the room, bypassed the microfilm, and went to a narrow alcove where I heard her shifting through bulky bound copies. Her glasses had slid midway down her nose when she returned dusting off her hands a few minutes later. “Martinez,” she announced. “Carla Martinez.” She looked at me across her rat's nest of a desk. “Happened in early October—just like the other two.”

Nine years ago in October. That was about the time our daughter Julie, still in high school, had been hospitalized with a severe bout of flu that developed into pneumonia. I had been so preoccupied with worry I hadn't kept up with what was going on at the college—or anywhere else in town. If there was a connection with the three girls' deaths, that would mean a gap of five years between the first two, yet it was hard to believe it was coincidence. I also considered the fact that Stone's Throw was usually a slow news town and that Josie Kiker rarely had a chance to unearth a good story. Her hands paused now over the keyboard, aching back apparently forgotten in her eagerness to dig up old bones. “And guess who discovered the body?” she said.

I frowned. “Not Londus Clack?” I darted a look at Augusta, who was making her way to the door with a look of purposeful intent, and I knew she was headed for the bound copies.

“The very same. Found her early in the morning as he was setting out mums—always plants that pretty purple kind along the flagstone walk there. Everybody seemed to think she'd fallen the night before. Died of a broken neck. Doc Worley—he was coroner then—said she'd been dead about six or seven hours.”

“What was she doing in the Tree House that late at night?” I asked.

“Who knows. Some of the girls in her dorm said she'd gone over to the practice rooms like she always did after supper—she was a piano student, you know—and she was wearing the skirt and sweater she'd worn to class the day before.” The editor nodded toward the door behind me. “I left that issue out if you want to see it, but I doubt you'll learn much there.”

Carla Martinez had large dark eyes and long straight hair that could have been light brown. She wasn't smiling in the picture and looked as if she might be the studious type. In fact, the article revealed she had come to Sarah Bedford on a partial scholarship and planned to major in music. She was a freshman.

I looked up at Augusta, who stood waiting. “What now?” I asked. She didn't answer, but as she fingered her glowing necklace the stones turned from brilliant sapphire to the mesmerizing cobalt of deep, deep water.

“Brendon Worthington—he was dean of the School of Music then—said Carla was one of the most promising pianists he'd ever taught,” Joy Ellen Harper told me a few days later. “It just tore him up when that happened. She was only seventeen, you know.”

“What do you think happened?” I asked. “She doesn't sound like the type to be hanging out in a tree house in the middle of the night.”

“Could've been a prank, I guess. Underclassmen aren't supposed to go up there. The Tree House is off limits to everybody but seniors, although I doubt if any of them give a hoot about it. The college makes a big deal out of it on Class Day.” Joy Ellen shook her head and frowned at the blue book she was grading. “What in the world's gotten into that girl? Didn't even try to answer half these questions.” She slashed a red F on the inside cover and tossed the book aside.

“I really didn't know the Martinez girl,” she continued. “She wasn't in any of my classes, but you're right, she didn't seem the type for midnight stunts. Kind of a shy little thing. We all just assumed she fell.”

I glanced at the name on the failed exam.
Leslie Monroe
. I knew she had studied. I'd seen her cramming with a stack of books the day I'd brought the cookies from her aunt. She had seemed worried even then. Poor Leslie! She wasn't going to take this well at all.

“Where can I find Dean Worthington?” I asked. “Is he still around?”

“No, Brendon retired soon after that. He died a couple of years ago.”

I sat on one of the desktops. “What about Dr. Hornsby?”

Joy Ellen let the blue book drop. “Claymore Hornsby? Uh-uh. Clay came here after old Amos Crockett died. Good English teacher, Professor Crockett, but a bit on the eccentric side. Died during midterms and they had to find a replacement fast. No, Clay couldn't have had anything to do with that girl's death.”

She turned the red pencil in her fingers. “You know, I'd almost forgotten that incident. That's awful, isn't it? But it happened soon after classes started that year. The girl hadn't been on campus long.”

Joy Ellen tossed aside her pencil and leaned back in her chair. “Hornsby's admitted he had a fling with D. C. Hunter, but he swears he broke it off that Friday night and didn't see her again.”

“That was the night before she died…how do you
know
this?”

I must have had a strange expression because Joy Ellen laughed. “Campus grapevine. And it was in this morning's paper. I'm surprised you didn't see it.”

“Haven't had a chance,” I said. “But I did stop by
The Messenger
over the weekend to look through some old issues. Did you know that Londus Clack was the one who discovered the Isaacs girl
and
the girl who was supposed to have fallen from the Tree House?”