The Angel and the Jabberwocky Murders Read online

  Zee groaned. “Well, for heaven’s sake, who is this girl? Doesn’t anybody know her name?”

  Willene Benson spoke up. “D. C. Hunter. And I think you’re all hard up for something to worry about.”

  The college nutritionist had come as a guest of the hostess, and she now screwed up her pale thin lips as if she struggled to stanch her opinions. It didn’t work. “I know this girl,” she said, “and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if she weren’t just staying out of sight to create a sensation.”

  “Why would she do that?” Jo Nell asked.

  Willene rolled her eyes. “Drama major—went to school in England a couple of years and used to doing pretty much as she pleases. Reckon she must have a first name, but everybody just calls her D.C.”

  I passed around what was left of the olive-cheese balls. “How did she end up at Sarah Bedford?” I asked.

  “I wondered about that, too,” Willene said, taking two. “Somebody told me her grandparents wanted her closer to home and thought a small school might be good for her. A relative went here once, I believe.”

  “Sarah Bedford always had a good drama department,” Zee said, “and from what I hear, everyone seems to like the new head.”

  “We try to see all their productions,” Jo Nell said, “as long as they don’t run around naked onstage!”

  “Really?” Zee cocked her head and laughed. “I try not to miss it when they do.”

  “I think they’re doing Dracula this month,” Willene said. “Fully clothed, I assume. Opens the week before Halloween. The Hunter girl’s supposed to play one of the leads, but I hear she’s missed two rehearsals already.”

  “Now that doesn’t sound right to me. And it hasn’t been long since that Isaacs girl drowned in the Old Lake.” Jo Nell leaned down to feed a crumb of pastry to her obnoxious terrier, Bojo, and I cringed as the moth-eaten little animal wormed underneath my chair and slobbered on my shoe. He had nipped me twice and I held my fork like a bayonet, waiting for revenge.

  “It’s been four years this month,” Zee reminded her. “And she didn’t just drown, she was murdered.”

  “Never came close to finding out who did it, either,” Nettie said. “Or why.” She looked down at the small dog with distaste and prodded him ever so slightly with the toe of her shoe. “Just think of that poor girl’s parents—not ever knowing…”

  “I wonder if it’s the same person this time.” Idonia folded her napkin and gave her mouth another swipe. “No telling who could be next!”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Idonia!” Ellis said. “We don’t even know if the girl’s dead. She’s probably off partying somewhere.”

  “If anything has happened to her, it’s going to hurt the college,” Jo Nell said as she stacked dishes on a tray.

  “Can’t help the town, either,” Zee said. “That college is about all there is to Stone’s Throw. If Sarah Bedford goes, there won’t be anything left.”

  It grew cool in the shade of the wisteria vine that crisscrossed my cousin’s wide porch, and spoons rattled against fragile china cups as the group came to terms with that last comment.

  “Claudia was supposed to lead the discussion today,” Zee announced, flipping through the pages of her book, “but she had a job interview in Columbia, so I guess you’re stuck with me.”

  “Columbia? Isn’t that a little far?” Ellis asked.

  “She’d prefer something closer—especially with her younger son still in middle school,” Zee said, “but Claudia thought it worth looking into. I do wish she could find something at the college.”

  Willene nodded. “Told me she applied there. If you ask me, it’s past time some of those people retired!”

  Although it’s usually warm in the piedmont of South Carolina in early October, I was glad I wore a lightweight blazer as shadows crept across the lawn. A brief gust of wind rustled burgundy leaves that clung to the oak by the front walk, and a few houses away a dog yapped as if the whole world depended on its frantic warning. Bojo, hearing the summons, joined in.

  “Do you think there’s anything to all that talk about a missing girl?” I asked Ellis as we walked home together.

  She frowned. “I hope not. Sounds to me like this D.C. person just likes to do her own thing.”

  “What about the girl who drowned in the Old Lake—the Isaacs girl—how do they know that wasn’t an accident?” I asked.

  Ellis frowned. “Don’t you remember? It was in all the papers. They said she’d been hit over the head, but they never found the weapon, and she was fully dressed. She certainly wouldn’t have been going for a swim.”

  “I hope this girl turns up soon,” I said. “Did you notice that Nettie was unusually quiet this afternoon? Her niece’s daughter, Leslie, started as a freshman at Sarah Bedford this year.”

  “That little girl who used to visit here in the summers? The one with the freckles and bangs? You’ve gotta be kidding. She can’t be more than ten!”

  “She spoke to me in the quad today. Had to tell me who she was. Must’ve grown a foot since I last saw her. And you remember Weigelia Jones? Her sister Celeste is a sophomore there, and she’ll be taking my class. Both girls live on campus.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t worry too much about what Idonia said,” Ellis assured me as we parted at the corner. “You know how she carries on.”

  I hoped she was right.

  Across the broad oak-lined street a neighbor waved as he raked leaves into crisp brown hills, and a bright orange pumpkin sat on the steps of the house next door. I inhaled the tingling smell of dry leaves; somewhere nearby somebody was baking a ham for supper.

  In spite of the chill in the air a warm, snug feeling crept over me, beginning somewhere in my middle. It was a familiar sensation I often experienced while walking the streets of Stone’s Throw. I was born here, belonged here. The town had nurtured me through good times and bad, and until recently it had been a quiet town. I wanted to keep it that way. Idonia’s grim announcement, I thought, was nothing but idle beauty-parlor chatter, and wouldn’t her face be as red as her hair when the missing girl turned up safe and sound tomorrow?

  Yet something…something small and pesky nagged and nipped at the back of my mind. Something Augusta had said when she decided to stay in Stone’s Throw after helping The Thursdays clear up a nasty chain of murders the year before. There were other secrets here, she had confided, that could use her attention as well.

  But what other secrets? I hurried up our worn brick walkway, shaded now by a large magnolia on one side of the yard and a towering spruce on the other, loving the way the gentle yellow light from the fan-shaped window above the door made a pattern on the porch. Inside I could hear an authoritative voice barking, “Stretch! Right! Left! Reach higher! Higher! Step…step…step!” Augusta Goodnight, my resident guardian angel, was working out with her aerobics video, and I knew better than to interrupt.

  The savory aroma of vegetable soup greeted me in the hallway, along with Clementine, our lovable dog with the world’s largest feet. Whatever I had to ask Augusta, I decided, could wait until after supper.

  Chapter Two

  I had hoped Augusta would dismiss all the hoopla over the missing girl with a flutter of her elegant fingers, but she did just the opposite. “Exactly how long has she been gone?” she asked with the tiniest hint of a line between her brows that in her case passes for a frown. “Who was the last person to see her? Did she have her cell phone with her?”

  I shook my head. I hadn’t thought to ask, I admitted. After supper I stacked soup bowls in the dishwasher and scrubbed the pot while Augusta painted at the kitchen table. She had recently taken up painting and was presently working on a pastoral scene of a man and woman picnicking on strawberries beside a shallow stream. Augusta manages to include strawberries in most of her pieces, I’ve noticed. A reminder, I expect, of her time in the strawberry fields of heaven. “Can you imagine heaven without them?” she explains.

  Tonight her honey-gold hair was
caught up with a green ribbon at the top of her head and her face was still flushed from exercising. Augusta’s hair always looks good with very little help from her, no matter what she does, and she never, never perspires. Angels don’t sweat, she tells me. When she first came to my door a year ago, claiming to be my guardian angel, I had my doubts, of course. Well, after all, who wouldn’t? In fact, I came close to asking my friend Ed Tillman, who happens to be a policeman, to send for the men in the white coats. But there was an essence of calmness about her, something so right, so good, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Smelling of honeysuckle, she had produced a basket of warm strawberry muffins and soon had me sitting at my own kitchen table heaping my myriad of problems onto her angelic shoulders.

  Now Augusta was quiet as I sat at the table across from her going over my plans for the next day, making notes as I thumbed through material on natural dyes. “You think something’s really happened to that student, don’t you?” I asked, glancing at her pensive expression.

  She added a swirl of green to her painting and leaned back to study the result. Her lustrous necklace, which hung to her waist, winked at me in colors of a stormy sea. “I’d rather not go off the steep side,” she said, which, in Augusta terminology, I took to mean the deep end. “I don’t know the girl or the circumstances, of course, but I would certainly be concerned if they don’t hear something from her soon.” She swished her brush in water and dabbed on a blob of brown. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to take a look around the campus.”

  “Fine,” I said, trying to discourage Clementine from climbing into my lap. “Just don’t suddenly appear in my classroom tomorrow. I’m jittery enough getting used to the job without being distracted by somebody no one else can see.”

  “We’ll see,” Augusta said. Which meant, I knew, that wild horses couldn’t keep her away. “Meanwhile, let’s hope the missing girl turns up.”

  But when I walked into my classroom at Sarah Bedford the next day, I didn’t have to be told that D.C. Hunter was still missing. In spite of the students’ eagerness to begin a new project, I sensed a restless, uneasy atmosphere in the room. I expected Augusta might suddenly decide to “pop in” on my class at any minute, but she must have remembered my request because she didn’t show up. I was almost sure, however, that she was somewhere not too far away.

  “Sally thinks the worst has happened,” Celeste Mungo said as I walked with her and her roommate to their dorm after class. She wanted to send home some of her lighter clothing now that the weather had turned cooler, and since she didn’t have a car, I had offered to deliver them for her.

  “Sally who?” I asked.

  “Sally Wooten, D. C. Hunter’s roommate.” Celeste tossed her notebook onto a low stone wall and stretched into a light denim jacket. Wind ruffled the hickory above us and sent golden leaves sashaying to the ground. “Says she just knows she’s not coming back,” she added.

  “Sounds too good to be true,” Celeste’s roommate Debra said. “Why, D.C. could be over in England with some of her ritzy school friends. It probably wouldn’t occur to her that somebody might worry.”

  “Not one of your favorite people?” I glanced at her as we walked.

  She shrugged. “If you lined up all the people at Sarah Bedford D. C. Hunter has insulted, they would circle the campus. Deep Chill—that’s what everybody calls her.”

  “And she’s only been here a little over a month.” Celeste nudged her roommate and grinned. “Of course the fact that D.C. got the lead in the play doesn’t make you like her any better.”

  “Well…I might’ve locked her in a closet if I thought it would help me get that role, but I draw the line at kidnapping.” Debra tugged open the massive oak door to Emma P. Harris Hall and a wave of stale heat engulfed us. “Go pick on Katy Jacobs,” she said as the door slammed behind us. “She’s her understudy.”

  I sat on Celeste’s bed as she stood on a chair and searched her closet for the box of clothing. Since the dormitory was built in the 1920s, the rooms were larger than most, and the girls had used bright rugs, spreads, and curtains to make it theirs. A microwave and small refrigerator sat in one corner and a television and stereo took up one large shelf. All the comforts of home, I thought, remembering my own college days, when we had to hide the hot plate from the hall monitor.

  Both dressers were cluttered with framed photographs and I noticed a smiling picture of Celeste’s older sister on hers. I had tutored Weigelia Jones through the literacy program a few years before and was pleased that she was currently studying for her GED. Celeste planned to major in political science and hoped eventually to get into law school, and I knew her sister was cleaning other people’s houses to help pay for her education.

  “What about boyfriends?” I asked Celeste as she stuffed another pair of shorts into the box. “Is D.C. seeing anybody?”

  “Not that I know of. She went out a couple of times with one of the locals, I think, but there was nobody special. Let’s face it, Sarah Bedford has only six male students and there’s not a whole lot to pick from here in Stone’s Throw. We have to import them.”

  “Like from Clemson!” Debra giggled. Weigelia had told me her sister was dating Stone’s Throw’s all-star quarterback, Delray Lyons, who now played for the nearby university.

  “I think she’s been seeing somebody on the sly,” Debra said. “Haven’t you noticed her dragging in here late—or maybe I should say, early—with that smug look on her face? You don’t get a smile like that from going out with the girls.”

  “Surely there must be somebody who likes her,” I said.

  “I’ve never heard her roommate say anything bad about her,” Celeste said, “but I wouldn’t say she and Sally were friends exactly.”

  I jumped at the pounding of what sounded like enormous feet on the stairs, followed by a curiously sweet male tenor belting out “In the Sweet By and By.”

  Footsteps clomped past our closed door and turned a corner in the hallway, but the singing continued…“We shall meet on that bee-yoo-tee-ful shore…”

  “Londus,” Debra explained, smiling at my puzzled expression. “From maintenance. That’s how he lets us know there’s a man on the hall.”

  Celeste laughed as she added another pair of shoes to her stack. “Seriously, though, if anybody would know about D.C.’s love life, it would be Londus Clack. He sees everything that goes on around here.”

  Lugging a sack of soiled laundry she’d decided to send home, I followed Celeste into the hall. I could guess how her sister would be spending her spare time. It hadn’t been too long, I remembered, since my own daughter, Julie, had done the same to me.

  About midway down a dim passageway I saw a handyman in blue coveralls on a stepladder replacing a lightbulb. He had started another verse.

  Celeste nodded in his direction. “D.C.’s room’s down there. End of the hall on the right.”

  As we reached the main floor, a tall dark-haired girl who obviously had just come in from outside shrugged out of her heavy sweater in the hallway.

  “Sally…” Celeste paused at the door. “Have you…have they heard anything yet?”

  Sally Wooten nodded slightly as Celeste introduced us. “If they have, nobody’s told me, but it doesn’t look good. Her grandparents are flying in tomorrow, and the police were here earlier asking questions. You must’ve just missed them.”

  Celeste’s dark eyes were somber as she shifted the heavy box of clothing in her arms. “You don’t really think anything’s happened to her, do you? Don’t you have any idea where she might be?”

  “D.C. doesn’t confide in me,” Sally said, “but it’s definitely time to worry. She couldn’t have gone very far. They found her car way back in that parking lot behind the gym, and the keys were right here in her desk.”

  “Then she must’ve been here all the time,” I said.

  But D.C.’s roommate shook her head. “That car wasn’t there Friday night. I know it wasn’t because I went out with a group f
rom the dorm that night and when we got back at a little after midnight, that parking lot was empty. It was dark there, too, and kind of secluded, so we found a place to park on main campus closer to the dorm.”

  “But if it was dark, couldn’t you have missed it?” I asked.

  Sally turned to go upstairs. “Not that car. D.C.’s car is yellow—canary-yellow. You’d have to be blind not to see it.”

  I remembered what Augusta had mentioned earlier. “What about her cell phone?” I asked.

  Sally shrugged. “The police asked me that, too. She must’ve taken it with her. We haven’t been able to find it.”

  Celeste and I didn’t speak as we crossed the campus to my car and I kept a watchful eye out for Augusta, as I had a feeling she must be “casing the joint,” as she says. Lately, Augusta has taken to reading old detective novels, and I’m finding it difficult to keep her supplied.

  Sarah Bedford College had been built in the 1880s and it had its share of ivy. The buildings of aged brick, some so dark they resembled brownstone, reflected the period with towers, turrets, and marble trim. Present-day students in short skirts and jeans seemed out of place on this broad shady campus where girls in long dresses once played croquet. Now, gentled by the late-afternoon sun, it looked like a place where nothing bad could ever happen.

  A shedding sycamore had littered my windshield with curled yellow leaves, and I stopped to brush them away, giving Celeste the key to my trunk.

  “Miss Lucy, if you don’t mind I wish you wouldn’t mention this to Weigelia—about D.C.’s being missing, I mean.” She slammed the lid shut on her belongings and walked with me to the driver’s side. “You know how my sister is. She’ll drive us both crazy, and for all we know, that girl could show up in class tomorrow.”

  “Celeste, I can’t promise you that. Besides, Weigelia probably knows about it already. It’s all over town by now, and Sally said the police had been here earlier. Don’t you-all have a cousin on the force?”