The Angel and the Jabberwocky Murders

by Mignon F. Ballard

  “But you had to think about it,” Jo Nell reminded me. “Seems like you stood there for at least five minutes before you came to parting terms with it.”

  “I didn’t see you parting with that pound cake,” I told her.

  Blythe was serious again. “You did report this, didn’t you, Lucy?”

  I nodded. “As soon as I had the breath to speak. If he’s still on campus, the police shouldn’t have any trouble finding him.”

  “Now you see what Willene had to put up with,” she said.

  “Can you blame her for trying to hide?”

  “But aren’t they divorced?” I asked. “Isn’t there a law against that sort of thing?”

  “Can’t make it stick. I don’t know how many times Willene has taken out a restraining order against that man.” Blythe rattled her bean jar at a passerby. “But this time she thought maybe she’d lost him for good.”

  “Well, he gives me the creeps,” I said. “He’s not right, not normal. No wonder she’s afraid of him.”

  Blythe zipped up her jacket and tucked soft gray curls under a blue knitted cap. “Let’s hope campus security will turn that one over to the police…if they can find him.”

  I heard the jangle of bracelets behind me and turned to see Sally Wooten. “Find who?” she said.

  “Never you mind, sugar,” Blythe told her. “Just be sure you don’t wander off alone. A drunk frightened Miss Lucy near the parking lot a while ago, so keep your eyes open.”

  Sally made a face. “It wasn’t that Londus, was it?”

  “Londus Clack? Drunk? Surely you must be joking, Sally,” Blythe said, “Why, he’d as soon drink drain cleaner than touch a drop of liquor. What makes you say a thing like that?”

  Sally looked at me and shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s been acting kind of funny lately. Follows us sometimes, and sort of hangs around like he wants to say something.” She rolled her eyes. “Weird!”

  Blythe frowned. “Follows who? Where?”

  “I guess he’s trailed after just about everybody at one time or another. Celeste and Debra said he walked a few paces behind them when they went to the library the other night, only when they turned around he pretended to tie his shoe; and Paula said he was watching while she swam laps in the pool yesterday. He’s always prowling around our hall.”

  “How long has this been going on?” Blythe asked.

  “I don’t know. Couple of weeks, maybe longer.” Sally dug two quarters from her pocket and wrote down five guesses for the bean jar.

  “I’ll speak to him about it,” Blythe told her. “A month ago, I would’ve bet good money Londus Clack is as harmless as they come, but now I don’t know. They even think he might’ve—”

  “Might’ve what?” I asked.

  But Blythe had a set look on her face, and I knew she wasn’t going to say any more. “Don’t forget one of our girls has been killed on this campus. Just be careful,” she said.

  The crowd was thinning now and some of the booths were closing. Blythe turned away to wade through her basket of names and numbers to determine who would win the big panda. Jo Nell had wandered off earlier to find Idonia, as she was giving her a ride home, and I would bet my next paycheck—all $1.98 of it—the two of them were sitting at her kitchen table this minute putting a big dent in that sour-cream pound cake.

  I turned up my collar, stuck my hands in my pockets, and told the girls in our booth to go home. They had sold all the taffy and only a few popcorn balls were left.

  “I want to see the Haunted Garden before it’s too late,” Celeste said, taking down our sign. “Anybody want to go with me?”

  Debra, who was helping her, counted their earnings and wrote down the sum. “Not me. It’s getting cold out here. Besides, I’m expecting a call.”

  “Come on, Miss Lucy, it’ll be fun, and the proceeds go to the Drama Club.” Celeste waited with her head to one side, looking about twelve years old. I shuddered to think of facing Weigelia Jones if I let anything happen to her little sister.

  Leslie, I noticed, was helping out with a few stragglers in line for the ring toss game and I waved to let her know I hadn’t deserted her. “I’ve already had one scare tonight. It can’t be much worse than that,” I said. “Okay, let’s go.”

  I hadn’t been on the “haunted” trail since our children were small, and it was fun letting myself be a child again. The college had talked about canceling the Drama Club’s project after what happened to D.C., but the students had put so much work into it, they decided to go ahead.

  Shrieks and moans against a background of eerie music were being broadcast throughout a thriller obstacle course beginning with the cavelike circle beneath the Tree House. Celeste and I were met by Igor—or was it Quasimodo?—who escorted us past a life-size dummy wearing a Frankenstein monster mask. The gruesome thing hung by its neck with a knife in its chest, but it looked so fake it wasn’t even scary.

  Dracula swooped out of shadows, ghosts appeared from behind gravestones, and a growling student in a shaggy costume, who I think was supposed to be Wolfman, stalked us along the way. “Look out!” I yelled and Celeste grabbed me around the neck as a witch on a broomstick swooped from behind a tree with a hoarse, rasping cackle that ended in a howling crescendo.

  Laughing, we untangled ourselves and had started to walk on when Celeste grabbed my arm and whispered something so low I could barely hear her.

  “What?” I found myself whispering too.

  “Oh, Lord, there he is again.” She nodded slightly to the right.

  It was so dark, I could only make out a low wall. “Who?” I said.

  “Shh! Not so loud. It’s Londus. Watching us. He’s been acting real strange lately. Wait and see, he’ll be there waiting when we come out.”

  “Does he do anything? Say anything?” I asked.

  “No, he’s just there—like a bad taste in your mouth that won’t go away. And it’s always when there’s just one or two of us around. I’m afraid of him. If he followed D.C. like this, she would’ve said something nasty, something that might set him off—and then…”

  I clawed at a fake spiderweb. (I hope it was a fake spiderweb!) “Sally told me pretty much the same thing.”

  “Sally Wooten?”

  “Right. She was telling Blythe about him just a little while ago.”

  “Oh. Well, she would,” Celeste said.

  A tall figure with a jack-o’-lantern for a head stepped up and asked if we had seen her head. I recognized Joy Ellen Harper’s voice. Celeste had moved a few steps in front of me, and now she turned and waited.

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked.

  Celeste managed to look confused, but she knew very well what I meant. “By what?”

  “What you said about Sally. She would what?”

  Celeste looked down as she walked, ignoring Jack the Ripper with a bloody knife. “I shouldn’t have said that. There’s probably nothing to it, but…well, Sally would probably be relieved if somebody else got blamed for D.C.’s murder.”

  “But everybody says they got along fine. I don’t understand.”

  “They did, or at least they seemed to.” We stepped carefully over a couple of rubber snakes slithering in our path. “Look,” Celeste said, “Sally never mentions this, but D.C. was bad news for her from the first day she set foot on campus.”

  “How? What did she do?”

  “Stole her boyfriend, for starters. Sally had been going with Tommy Jack Evans for almost a year, but we hadn’t been back to school two weeks before he gave her the old heave-ho. Next thing we knew, he was dating guess who? I saw them together myself,” Celeste said. “Of course it didn’t last long—couple of weeks, maybe—but long enough to make a mess of things.”

  “How did Sally take that?” I asked.

  Celeste shrugged. “Pretended she didn’t know what was going on, and maybe she didn’t. Tommy Jack never came to the college when he was seeing D.C. He’s already finished school. Coaches football at
the high school and has his own place here in town, so she must’ve met him there. Sally was devastated, though. I think she was in love with the jerk—or thought she was. Then, when D.C. started gettin’ it on with Professor Hornsby, Tommy Jack Evans was history. Served him right!”

  “Do the police know about this?” I asked.

  “They should. They questioned everybody in Emma Harris. Wanted to know who D.C. dated—everything about her—which wasn’t much. I’m sure somebody must have told them about Tommy Jack.”

  Our breath came in frosty puffs, and Celeste shoved her hands deep into her pockets and shivered. “She saw him for such a short time, it didn’t occur to me to mention it, but now that I think about it I realize I should’ve said something. It’s just that…well, this is murder we’re talking about, and he’d only known the girl a short time.”

  I could see why Sally Wooten might want to slap her roommate upside the head a couple of times for what she did, but I didn’t think she’d have a go at her with a rusty sickle. “So had Sally. So had everybody,” I reasoned.

  “Maybe so, but she didn’t seem all that upset at the service,” Celeste said. “Not many of us did.”

  “Service? What service?”

  “They held a memorial service for D.C. here at the college a couple of nights ago. Just about everybody came—felt guilty, I guess. I know I did. It was sad, real sad. I felt just awful, but I couldn’t even shed a tear. I wanted to, but the only two people I saw crying were Leslie Monroe and that hypocrite Londus Clack.

  “See, there he is! What’d I tell you?” Celeste elbowed me in the side as we left the garden through a gap in the hedge.

  Londus stood alone beside a weeping willow, which was appropriate, I thought, considering his forlorn expression. He wore a dark jacket over his work pants and his ears stuck out beneath a visored cap.

  The commons area was empty except for a few people packing away their wares. Ed Tillman and his partner Sheila had left, but Kemper Mungo, I noticed, had stayed to help the cleanup committee gather empty cans for recycling. Celeste’s co-worker had taken the table and proceeds with her, and Blythe Cornelius was folding her card table. The panda, I noticed, was gone.

  Celeste began to walk faster and I glanced over my shoulder to see if Londus was still there. I know I must have appeared surprised to see him approaching us with a determined and slightly disapproving look on his homely face. I paused. This man came and went about the campus freely, and a policeman was in screaming distance. What could he possibly do? I turned to face him, folded my arms, and waited.

  He slowed, but kept coming. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Celeste poised for flight, and after what we had discovered in that old shed, I didn’t blame her.

  Removing his cap, Londus held out a hand. “Miss, I wonder, could I—”

  “Aunt Shug!” Celeste yelled louder than all the beasties in the Haunted Garden put together, and Blythe looked up to see who was calling to her.

  “Who won the panda?” Celeste ran toward her into the light.

  Blythe smiled when she saw her. “One of the cooks from the cafeteria won it for her daughter. Took two people to carry it. I remember my little sister had a bear like that—only not as big, of course. Carried it everywhere she went.”

  Blythe stood and looked at us as if she were waiting for something to happen. “You know, I sure could use a hand with this table,” she said finally.

  I glanced back to tell Londus to wait, but the janitor wasn’t there.

  Usually I don’t have trouble sleeping in a strange bed, but that night I kept stumbling over all the clutter in my mind. Augusta had insisted on staying overnight as well—“to get the feel of things,” she said, and I knew she was somewhere nearby. Leslie had read for a while after going to bed, but now slept soundly across the room in a cocoon of purple sheets. Her dad was to come for her in the morning and I hoped she would get some much-needed help from her doctor during her stay at home over the next few days. Something was causing her anxieties, and maybe her father did expect too much of her, as Nettie claimed, but I didn’t think he was to blame for all of it.

  And in spite of the girls’ suspicion of Londus Clack, I didn’t believe he meant to harm them. After all, can a man who owns a singing teddy bear be all that bad? His very shyness was probably what frightened them, I thought, his reluctance to come out and approach the girls with whatever he wanted to say. Besides, Londus didn’t seem the type to read Alice in Wonderland or appreciate the Jabberwocky nonsense. I was almost certain he had wanted to tell me something tonight before Celeste frightened him away by shouting to Blythe.

  I lay on my back and stared at the window. The curtains were open and a light just outside threw a square of pale silver across Leslie’s neat desk and a chair with a sweater draped over it. Sally Wooten across the hall had gone home after the festival and our end of the wing was quiet. I wondered where Augusta had taken up watch. She rests but I’ve never seen her sleep, so she might be anywhere in the dormitory or even outside. Down the hall a toilet flushed and somebody in the room below was watching a late-night talk show. A car door slammed.

  I had forgotten to ask what happened to Riley Herman after his anointment with a chocolate-chip cone. The creep was lucky I had bought ice cream instead of one of those painted pumpkins or a big pot of chrysanthemums from the faculty Garden Club.

  I closed my eyes. Tomorrow Ben and I would be hiking up Kings Mountain for a picnic at the top and I tried to think of something good to take along. I flipped over on my stomach and played the alphabet game Charlie and I used to play with Roger and Julie on long car trips. Apples, of course; bread, thick and crusty. Bananas? No, too smushy. Bottle of wine. Cheese. Cake or cookies? I couldn’t decide…

  The door closed so softly I don’t know how I heard it, but I woke knowing somebody had stood there silently and then moved on. I sat up in bed. “Augusta?” I whispered, but no one answered.

  Outside in the hallway a board creaked. Probably one of the girls had gone to the bathroom, and being half-asleep, opened our door by mistake. Footsteps, slow and cautious, moved away from the door. I sat on the side of the bed and listened. It was almost two in the morning and somebody was opening the door of the room across the hall. Sally’s room. Why would she come back to the college at this hour?

  The floor was cold to my bare feet as I tiptoed to the door and quietly, carefully turned the knob so the hinges wouldn’t squeak. I was just in time to see the door across from me slowly close.

  I had slept in an oversized T-shirt. Now, leaving the door slightly ajar, I grabbed the jeans and sweatshirt I had thrown on the foot of the bed and slipped into loafers. Leslie had not moved from her original position and her breathing was deep and even. There was no use waking her and frightening her even more.

  Whoever was in Sally’s room was making a poor effort to be quiet. A drawer squeaked open, then closed; a closet door banged softly. I stood with my back to the wall as close to the door as possible until I heard someone come out, then listened until footsteps reached about midway down the hall before I risked looking. Somebody in a raincoat—somebody tall—a woman, I thought, with a heavy knitted cap pulled low over her ears crept slowly down the stairs. I snatched my jacket and followed.

  I stood listening at the top of the stairs as the prowler moved past Blythe’s closed door and down the hall to the lounge, and was working up the courage to follow when someone touched my shoulder from behind.

  “Wait for me!” Augusta whispered, falling into step beside me.

  “Do you have to do that? You almost gave me a heart attack,” I said, although I was relieved to have her there beside me.

  It seemed to take forever to reach the bottom of the steps and I looked around for a place to hide. Augusta, of course, didn’t have to worry about that. The double doors at the end of the hall stood open and I slinked toward them as quietly as I could. What would anybody want in a room filled with ugly secondhand furniture, old magazines, and
sports trophies? And what was I doing at my age snooping after God-knows-who when I could be warm and asleep—maybe even comparatively safe—upstairs, or better still, at home in my own bed?

  The intruder rummaged through drawers in the trophy case, looked under sofa cushions, and slowly ran a finger over the titles on the bookshelf. The room had several windows and the security light from outside enabled me to see her plainly at last. For a few seconds she stood with one hand on her hip, apparently stymied in her search. Monica Hornsby.

  She looked in my direction but didn’t see me as I watched from behind the door, then she turned away to circle the lounge, checking possible hiding places once more. Finally, in a kind of last-ditch effort, she got down on her knees and looked behind the trophy case on the other side of the room. Something must have been shoved in back of it because Monica Hornsby sat on the floor with her back to the wall and slid an arm behind it as far as she could reach. She was drawing out what appeared to be a square boxlike package when a light came on in the hall and Blythe Cornelius charged out of her apartment, banging the door behind her. “Who’s in there?” she yelled, clumping down the corridor past the door where I was hiding.

  I heard a muffled thump and somebody muttered, “Damn!” Then a runner I guessed to be Monica dashed past me and out the heavy front door, letting it slam behind her.

  I stepped out to find Blythe in a pink quilted bathrobe holding on to the back of the sofa and looking thoroughly confused.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, and she looked up and nodded.

  “I think you’d better call security…and would you please keep an eye on Leslie upstairs? I hate to leave her alone,” I said before taking off after Monica, who, as far as I knew, still had the package she’d found.

  I was just in time to see her disappear around the corner of the building that housed the cafeteria, with Augusta not far behind her. I circled the building from the other side and with my back against the cold brick wall waited until she emerged from the other side. From there I watched her blend with the shadow of a ginkgo tree that sprinkles the ground with leaves like tiny golden fans. She walked quickly but didn’t run, and carried the parcel under her arm as if she were on an ordinary errand.