The Angel and the Jabberwocky Murders

by Mignon F. Ballard

  “So where did Monica find it?” Debra asked.

  “Brought it herself, I’ll bet,” Miriam said.

  “Why would she pretend to find the manuscript, then let herself get caught taking it?” Debra looked at her classmates’ faces and flushed. “Oh. You mean she meant to—She planned it that way so it would look like D.C. had hidden it there and that she, Monica, was looking for it to save her sorry husband’s hide. What a rotten thing to do!”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Paula said. “I call it sweet revenge. Or it would’ve been if it had worked. The case against the creep would have been stronger if the police thought D.C. was using that manuscript for blackmail.”

  “Now they’ll probably let him go. Too bad Ernestine had to pick that week to mop under there,” Troll said. “But what was Monica doing upstairs in D.C.’s room that night?”

  “I suppose she thought if she made enough noise someone would follow her,” I said. “And we did.”

  “He still had a motive,” Celeste said, pulling her stitches tight. “And I’ll feel a lot safer if that man stays in jail where he belongs.”

  I thought about the afternoon Ellis and I saw Monica Hornsby in the old shed on back campus. She must have been looking for a place to leave the manuscript then, but since the shed had already been carefully searched, decided on the dormitory.

  “Hey! Guess who’s back on campus?” Miriam said. “That little mousy nutritionist. The one whose ex-husband was arrested for stalking. I saw her bringing some things into her apartment yesterday, so he must be gone for good.”

  Debra tugged at her thread. “I heard they warned him not to get within fifty miles of her—but what if he does? She’ll always have that hanging over her, won’t she? Some night when she least expects it, he might just step out and—”

  “Will somebody please pass the thread?” I said. “Is anybody going someplace exciting for Thanksgiving?” I had seen the look on Celeste Mungo’s face and it sickened me to know that one person, just by copying a verse from a poem, could be responsible for practically scaring somebody to death.

  Jo Nell had asked me to deliver an old end table she’d had in her attic for Willene to refinish for her living room, so I took it by there after class and found her hemming curtains for her kitchen. The curtains were yellow ruffled and not at all like Willene. In fact, Willene didn’t even seem like Willene. Maybe it was her chic new hairstyle or soft, flattering blouse. Or maybe it was the gun she kept handy.

  “Lucy! I’m so glad you could come by, and thank you for bringing the table. I know just where I’ll put it.” The radiance from her toothy smile almost made my eyes water, but I was happy to see her more relaxed and less rabbitlike than before. “I thought I’d try a different kind of painting technique,” she said. “Sort of a marbled effect—maybe in a muted turquoise. And I’ve found just the rug for this room.

  “I’ve never been able to do much in the way of decorating,” she confided, “since I wasn’t sure how long it would be before…” Willene Benson smiled as she took me by the arm. “Well, let’s hope those days are over. Now let me show you the wallpaper I’ve picked for the kitchen, and I’ll need to get some pictures framed, too. These walls look so bare, don’t they?” She laughed. “Maybe Blythe will lend me some of her relatives.”

  I was in a hurry to get to the grocery store before the late-afternoon rush, but Willene seemed so happy to have company, I stayed for a glass of iced tea.

  “Tell me about your history class,” she said as we sat in her tiny kitchen. “I hear you’ve been working on a quilt.”

  I nodded. “Another few sessions should do it, and tomorrow we’ll be going to Alleghany County in North Carolina way up in the Blue Ridge Mountains to learn how to make soap. Miss Corrie says it takes a while, so we’re prepared to make a day of it.” I didn’t tell her about the little side trip I had planned.

  The unpaved road to Corrie Walraven’s house near the little town of Sparta twisted through the Blue Ridge Mountains like a russet apple peeling. We had left in a caravan from Sarah Bedford at a little after nine, stopping in North Wilkesboro for an early lunch.

  I had convinced Roger and Jessica that Teddy would benefit as much from our visit with Miss Corrie as he would from a day in the first grade, and fortunately his teacher agreed. Now he sat with Troll and Paula in the backseat, calling out inane jokes until the two students finally gave up on being polite and stopped laughing altogether.

  Ellis, who had come along for our hoped-for meeting with Eva Jean Philbeck, sat in front with Augusta and me. I knew Augusta was there, although neither Ellis nor I could see her and I was glad. When you’re in close quarters with other people, her presence becomes a bit distracting.

  “Watch closely now, Teddy, and maybe you’ll see a deer,” Ellis suggested.

  “Or maybe even a bear,” I said, but Teddy was bored with looking out the window and the scenery didn’t interest him. I remembered when, at his age, I’d felt the same, but now I saw the landscape in a state of basic beauty, unadorned and waiting for winter.

  Most of the hardwoods were bare now, but a few faded amber and burgundy leaves mingled with the brown. Pine, spruce, and cedar greened the surrounding mountains in swirls and patches like a design on a giant quilt.

  Teddy kicked the back of my seat. “Are we almost there yet?”

  “Just about,” I said, “and quit kicking the back of my seat.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Again? We just ate. Ask Aunt Ellis if she’ll give you a cookie.” I had come prepared with his favorite peanut butter kisses. I was beginning to wonder, however, if I had made a mistake by bringing along a six-year-old.

  “There’s a pretty waterfall near here, Teddy,” Ellis said, handing him a cookie. “Linville Falls—not too far away. Maybe we can see it on the way home if we have time.”

  “Where did he fall?” Teddy giggled and repeated his joke. His seatmates ignored him.

  “He fell into a dark cave with bears in it because he asked too many silly questions, and nobody’s seen him since,” I told him. “Now, everybody needs to help me look for the wooden sign where we turn. Miss Corrie says it’s red and says ‘Honey, Apples, and Cider.’ Should be coming up soon.”

  Just ahead of us in a cloud of orange dust I saw Kemper Mungo and his carload turn into a narrow lane, bumping over ruts and stones. The sign was on our right. Since Sue Starnes, Celeste’s customary police escort, was off duty that day, Kemper had stepped in with a purpose.

  Some people might call Corrie Walraven’s house a shack, but it looked snug enough to me, and it was home to Miss Corrie and her brother Henry. The unpainted house with its rust-streaked tin roof had weathered to a rain-washed gray, and it stood in a bare-swept yard between a great gnarled oak and the prettiest blue spruce I’ve ever seen.

  Somebody hollered “Welcome!” as we pulled into the yard, and two barking hounds, three flapping chickens, and Miss Corrie hurried to greet us.

  I recognized Corrie Walraven from my childhood storybooks. She was the little old woman who went to market to buy a fat pig. Or maybe she was the one who chased the runaway johnnycake. She wore a knitted shawl over her crisp blue cotton dress, and an apron, made from bleached sacking, I learned later, covered the front of it.

  “Lord, it’s good of you’uns to come! I don’t get much company way up hyare—and lookit you!” She held out her arms to Teddy, who went right into them. “Don’t know when I’ve had a young’un like you to come visit old Corrie.”

  Corrie Walraven was old. Just how old it was hard to tell because her skin had a crinkled manila-paper look, although her blue eyes were lively and bright. She wore her white hair, streaked with yellow, in a little apple-size knot on top of her head, and when she smiled—which was often—it looked as though about every other tooth was missing.

  Augusta took to her at once, as did Teddy, and practically fastened herself to the woman’s side, taking in every word. As soon as Joy Ellen and the ot
hers arrived, Miss Corrie took us around to the back of the house where she had a fire laid under a black iron pot. The ground had been covered with frost when we started out that morning, but the sun had mellowed the earth so that by the time we got the fire going I felt comfortable in a sweater. Cold-natured Augusta, however, hovered as close to the blaze as she could get.

  Kemper, I noticed, seldom let his cousin out of his sight, and Celeste bore it with as much good humor as possible, but I could tell it was wearing on her. When he followed her to the woodpile that afternoon, Celeste stopped in mid-stride. “Will you give me a break, Kemper! The woodpile’s only a few feet away, and there’s nobody up here but us. I feel like we’re stuck together with super-glue!”

  “At least you can still feel,” her cousin said. “That’s more than those other girls can do.”

  The wheels of justice had better grind a lot faster, I thought, if those two were going to remain on speaking terms.

  Miss Corrie showed us how to make lye by pouring water over hickory ashes in a crude wooden trough, then collecting the liquid that ran through. She added this to an assortment of fat scraps and boiled the mixture until it thickened. Teddy and the girls took turns stirring it with a wooden paddle, coughing and rubbing their eyes as the smoke searched them out.

  With her apron, Miss Corrie fanned the smoke from her face. “It’s just me and Henry now, so I don’t make lye soap much anymore unless some of them ladies in Elkin or Wilkesboro take a notion to sell some at a church fair or something,” she said. Henry, she explained, was her “baby” brother, who worked at the sawmill down the road a piece.

  “Now, if it was spring,” she told us, “we could make this soap smell real good with some of them wild ginger leaves—that’s what Mama Doc used to put in it. That woman knows a purpose for just about everything that grows, but I reckon store-bought spices will do near ’bout as well.” Miss Corrie showed Teddy how to tie whole cloves and cinnamon sticks into a piece of cheese cloth, then added it to the pot. When the soap was thick enough she poured some into a square enamel pan to harden overnight. “You-all take this along with you now and you oughtta be able to get a few bars out of it by tomorry.” When Joy Ellen and I protested, she laughed and flapped her sooty apron at us. “Lord, I don’t need that ol’ pan no more! Just keep it. Now you-all come in and have some apple pie afore you go.”

  We sat at a long table covered in blue-checkered oilcloth in our hostess’s simple kitchen with its white plank walls and worn linoleum. Augusta took delight in inspecting the row of African violets in pink, blue, and lavender that thrived on the windowsill, and a white cat named Aunt Mamie that was as big as Blythe’s two put together entertained everyone just by twitching her long tail.

  Celeste scraped her plate clean and stared longingly at mine. “Think again,” I told her, and she looked at me and laughed. “You know,” she said, “I’ve felt safer here today than I have since this awful Jabberwocky mess began.”

  Later I would remember what she said.

  When we got ready to leave, Miss Corrie insisted on seeing us to our cars, then stood waving as we made our way down the long twisting drive. “You-all come back now!” she called to me. “And bring that pretty lady with you.”

  “What lady?” I hollered, waving good-bye.

  “Why, the one with the long sparkly necklace and candlelight hair!” Her keen blue eyes didn’t blink.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I phoned Eva Jean Philbeck from a gas station just outside the little town of Elkin and asked her if we could meet somewhere for dinner. “I realize it’s late, but we’ve been making lye soap up near Sparta and it took longer than I thought. We’d like for you to be our guest, of course.”

  “My goodness, that does sound tempting, but we’re babysitting tonight. In fact, my son and his wife are due to drop him off in a few minutes.”

  “Really? How old is he?”

  “Matthew’s four months. He’s our first, and his parents don’t like to leave him often, but some friends are having a dinner party, so we get to have Matthew all to ourselves for a while.”

  Matthew. She’d said his name twice. Loved saying it, just as I did Teddy’s. Sometimes I suffer through entire conversations waiting for somebody to ask me about my grandson, and when they don’t, I tell them about him anyway. “Four months!” I said. “Oh, you’re in for a treat.” And babbled on about crawling and toddling and adorable first words.

  “And how old is your grandchild?” There was polite interest in her voice.

  “Teddy’s six, and he came along with us today. I hoped he would learn something from the experience, but it’s been a long drive and I’m afraid we wore him out.”

  The woman laughed. “Well, he’ll grow up fast enough.” She paused, waiting for me to go on with it or hang up. It was obvious she wasn’t going to invite us over.

  “Mrs. Philbeck, I know this is a terribly inconvenient time for you, but this Mad Jabberwock issue is more serious than I led you to believe. My friend Ellis is with me, as well as my grandson, and I give you my word we won’t stay long, but if it’s at all possible I’d like to see you this afternoon.”

  She sighed, and I was afraid she was going to say no or hang up on me. “I knew all along something would come of this. All right, come on.” The joy in her voice was gone as she gave me directions to a two-story brick on a cul-de-sac called Graylag Drive, which sounded sort of like the way I felt.

  Earlier, Paula and Troll, the two girls who had ridden with us, had met their dates at a local McDonald’s and would go from there to a fraternity function at nearby Appalachian State, and Teddy, having been treated to a chocolate shake, was currently engrossed in a puzzle book.

  “What if she’s the one?” Ellis whispered when we pulled up in front of the house. I knew what she meant because I’d thought of the same thing. The possibility that one of the Mad Jabberwocks could be responsible for the killings was becoming more and more likely, and Eva Jean Philbeck was the one who lived the closest. How could this loving grandmother be guilty of something so totally evil? But of course she hadn’t always been a loving grandmother.

  A blue car was parked in the driveway, and as we started up the walk a young couple came out of the front door, then turned and waved to someone who stood behind them. They both smiled and spoke when they saw us, but didn’t stop as they cut across the lawn to their car. They looked to be in their mid-twenties, and the man walked with a pronounced limp.

  “Our son Ken and his wife, Anne,” Eva Jean explained as she ushered us into her living room. “I’d show off my grandson, but he just got to sleep.” She introduced me to her husband, Bill, who invited Teddy to watch football with him in the small paneled den. He didn’t seem alarmed at our being there, so she must not have told him of her concern. And the woman was definitely nervous. She smiled and said all the proper, polite things, but there was a tense look in her eyes and her hands were never still.

  Mrs. Philbeck seated Ellis and me on the sofa and took the wing chair opposite, then thought better of it and stood, offering coffee. Augusta, standing in the doorway, brightened considerably at the prospect but seemed resigned to waiting for her favorite beverage until we got home.

  “Thank you, but I know we must be delaying your dinner,” I said. “And I really don’t want to take any more of your time than necessary.” I glanced at Augusta, who gave me a “Get on with it!” look. “I suppose you’ve been hearing about the murders at Sarah Bedford,” I said.

  “Yes, the girl they found in the old stone shed. Why, we bought candy and soft drinks there! And if I remember right a few years ago there was a drowning in the lake where we used to swim.”

  Ellis looked at her face-on. She’s good at that. “You know about the verses then?”

  The woman picked at a thread in her skirt and nodded. “Of course I do. I just can’t understand what it has to do with us. I—I tried, but I can’t get in touch with anyone. Irene’s in some kind of hospital—nerve
s, her husband says. I left a message on Audrey’s answering machine, but she never returned my call, and I don’t even know where Dorothy is.” Mrs. Philbeck stood and walked to the window and back. I had never seen anybody actually wring their hands before, but she did.

  When she sat again it was as if she had suddenly run out of energy. “Well, I don’t care if they like it or not. I can’t keep it to myself any longer. This has to be about what happened to Carolyn Steele.”

  Ellis looked at me and mouthed the words I was thinking: Who’s Carolyn Steele?

  “Carolyn was a freshman in the fall of my junior year,” she explained. “A sweet girl—I liked her, but kind of…well, I guess you’d call her naive.

  “The Mad Jabberwocks, as you may have guessed by the name, were not a serious group. We just liked to have fun—and poke fun, too—probably more than we should’ve. There were only the five of us left that year and we all lived in the east wing of Emma Harris Hall.” Eva Jean smiled briefly. “Carolyn wanted to join. Heck, there wasn’t any joining to it. You either belonged or you didn’t, but how do you tell somebody that? She was lonely, I think. Didn’t have much family.”

  She pressed her hands together and looked away. “Dorothy and Irene—oh, what the hell, we were all in on it—we promised her she could join if she’d steal a pair of the housemother’s underpants and hang it from the Tree House.”

  Ellis and I exchanged glances. It sounded like something we might have done ourselves.

  “Mother Godfrey—Hazel, her name was…” Eva Jean shook her head. “Big as a Mack truck with sort of a bovine face. And strict! We were all scared to death of her. Made fun of her to her back, but never to her face.” She shuddered. “No, Lord!”