Murder at Monticello

by Jane Langton

  “Henry,” said Gail, “there’s a problem. A lot of people are complaining about a bad smell.”

  “A smell?”

  “I went to see for myself, and it’s true. It comes from the ice house. You know, that deep pit under the North Terrace Walk.”

  Henry sucked his pencil. “Do you know what kind of smell it is?”

  “No, the iron railing makes it impossible to look down. I think you’ll have to get somebody with an acetylene torch to remove the railing.”

  “Right.” Henry made one of his usual sensible decisions. “I’ll call Howie Plover. He’ll take care of it.”

  Tom followed Fern through the woods up the steep side of the mountain, and then through the field of daisies to the border of small trees at the end of the west lawn. Beside the Roundabout Walk, the foxgloves and Canterbury bells had given way to scarlet poppies and Texas bluebonnets. Tom stopped to admire the bluebonnets, because people said they were Lewis’s pea.

  He was falling behind. “Hold it a sec,” he called to Fern. She looked back and waited for him to catch up, and then they moved quickly along the dependencies under the North Terrace Walk. Passing the ice house, Tom wrinkled his nose. There was something rotten down there. He wanted to look, but Fern was disappearing into a long stony corridor. He followed her in.

  In the middle, the corridor opened out into exhibition spaces and offices. Fern stopped at the foot of a stairway, turned to smile at him, and then began running up the narrow steps.

  Obediently Tom followed. As they climbed past the first floor, they could hear one of the guides lecturing to a flock of visitors—“The portrait over the mantel is Jefferson’s daughter Martha at the age of fifty-one. She was the mother of eleven children.”

  Up and up. When Fern kept climbing past the landing on the second floor, Tom guessed where they were going. “You don’t mean—it isn’t the Dome Room?” She kept doggedly ascending, but at the last turn of the stairs, in a flood of sunlight, she looked back at him and grinned.

  He stood in the doorway gazing around the lofty room. Then he said softly. “What a waste.”

  Fern was insulted. “A waste? What do you mean, a waste”

  “This room, these walls.” He raised his arms in a gesture of wonder, and gave her a wild look. “Wait, I’ll be back.”

  Astonished, Fern watched him stride to the door, then turn and begin plunging down the stairs. His footsteps were soft rapid thuds, going down and down. What did he mean, he’d be back? What made him think he could get in again by himself? She’d be damned if she’d wait for him downstairs.

  Fern plumped herself down at her keyboard and brought up on the screen the chapter she had abandoned an hour ago, hoping it would look better than she remembered.

  It was still pretty limp:

  Thomas Jefferson was regarded as a kind master by the slave population at Monticello.

  Tom was gone a long time. Fern could dimly hear the comfortable voices of the guides. Visitors from Boston, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles murmured their questions, the guides softly answered.

  Probably he wasn’t coming back at all. Well, good riddance.

  At last there were footsteps on the stairs. Too many footsteps. When Tom appeared, he was accompanied by the curator, Henry Spender.

  “This gentleman says he is a friend of yours,” said Henry mildly.

  “Oh, right,” said Fern. Hastily she introduced Tom Dean, mentioning his interest in Lewis and Clark. Tom stood stiffly upright, looking sheepish.

  Henry nodded and smiled politely at Fern. “Next time just let someone know you’re expecting a guest.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Fern, and Henry withdrew.

  Tom had his time line under his arm. He strode across the floor and began to unroll it. “Look,” he said eagerly, “there’s room enough. There’s room enough for the whole expedition.” He swept his arm around the Dome Room.

  Fern was speechless.

  He unrolled the time line a little farther. Somewhere downstairs a door opened, sending a draft of air up the stairs to fling out the flimsy paper in Tom’s hand. It rattled like a flag in the wind.

  “Listen”—he was pleading with Fern—“it was Thomas Jefferson’s expedition. Lewis and Clark, they were doing it for him. It’s part of your story. It’s the best part, the very best part.” He brought the roll of paper to the table and spread out the first six feet. “It’s the journey to the western ocean. It will fit on the wall. All of it, the whole thing, from beginning to end. Don’t you see”

  Fern stared at it. “Well,” she said doubtfully. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  But Tom’s sense of manifest destiny was very strong, and she gave in.

  Chapter 19

  This morning early we … formed a camp on the point formed by the junction of the two large rivers.… An interesting question was now to be determined; which of these rivers was the Missouri.… To mistake the stream … might defeat the expedition altogether.…

  Captain Meriwether Lewis, June 3, 1805

  There had been another killing. “The young woman was a hitchhiker,” said the dapper reporter on Channel 10. “Several passing drivers saw her standing alone beside the road. Apparently, in spite of the warnings that have been broadcast throughout the entire commonwealth of Virginia, she accepted a ride from a stranger.”

  “Security measures are being instituted at the university,” said the cute woman reporter, and she went on to talk solemnly about curfews and a buddy system. “Women students are urged not to walk alone after dark.”

  George was one of the first on the scene after his CB radio burst into noisy squawks, summoning a pack of cruisers to the place where he had dumped the girl.

  A suspicious state cop asked him point-black what he was doing there.

  “Heard the sirens,” said George. “Just wanted to see what was up.”

  “Well, keep the hell out of the way. Get over there on the other side of the highway.”

  But it was too late. George had already seen the police photographer aim her camera at the new message pinned to this Jeanie’s bra, and now she was focusing on one of George’s artistic touches—the name tag he had taken from the Jeanie in the library.

  He doubted they’d notice the mutilated ear or the careful pattern of the slashes. Too dumb, they were all too dumb. But it was what they always did first, the men with Lewis and Clark, they did the disemboweling so the meat wouldn’t spoil. These ignoramuses, they didn’t know stuff like that.

  A lot of other drivers slowed down when they saw the cruisers with their flashing blue lights and the ring of uniformed men and women bending over something at the side of the road. A traffic cop from the Albemarle County Police Department stood in the middle of the highway making huge motions with his arm, urging the traffic forward.

  The cop paid no attention to the inquisitive faces in the cars, but he couldn’t help noticing a young guy on a motorcycle, because the kid pulled up near the taped barrier and pretended to fiddle with his engine.

  When he took off his helmet, the officer thought he recognized him. Wasn’t he a lot like the redhead who had been there at the public library when the body came out the door? Had the other kid been as funny-looking as this one?

  The officer yelled at one of his colleagues, but nobody heard him. Frustrated, he watched the biker fasten his helmet and zoom out on the highway. He didn’t even get the kid’s license, because a couple of cars full of rubberneckers got in the way.

  On the other side of the road, George Dryer was still watching, feeling more and more condescending. Oh, sure, those jerks had been to college, they thought they knew everything, only they didn’t know shit. They didn’t read great books like he did. They weren’t worthy of somebody like him.

  What George wanted was somebody with a high IQ, some genius out there somewhere, some great mind to catch on at last. Somebody to give him credit.

  Chapter 20

  We therefore continued our rout
the river sometimes in the mud the water of the bottom lands, at others in the river to our breasts and when we water became so deep that we could not wade we cut foot-steps in the face of the steep bluffs with our knives and proceded.…

  Captain Meriwether Lewis, June 7, 1805

  If Homer and Mary Kelly had great minds, their giant intellects were absorbed at the moment in the task of driving down to Charlottesville.

  Mary was a steadier driver than Homer, who was apt to fall asleep at the wheel. But by jolting himself awake with strong coffee he was able to take his turn, while Mary read aloud the letters that had passed between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

  Mile after highway mile streamed by, as the two old men, long separated by political hostility, took up again their youthful friendship by correspondence.

  “Laboring always at the same oar—” read Mary, and then she glanced up in alarm as Homer careened headlong into a traffic circle. “Watch it, Homer, watch it!”

  Homer edged into the right lane, whirled the wheel, and dodged in front of a truck. Somehow they came out alive, and he said stuffily, “I am perfectly capable of driving this vehicle without supervision.”

  Mary took a deep breath, then went on calmly with Jefferson’s letter—“with some wave ever ahead threatening to overwhelm us and yet passing harmless under our bark, we knew not how, we rode through the storm with heart and hand, and made a happy port.”

  When they pulled into a truck stop for lunch, they bought a copy of the Washington Post. “Good grief,” said Homer, pouring ketchup on his French fries, “that weird homicidal maniac is still on the loose in Virginia.”

  Mary looked at him warily. “Now, Homer, it’s none of your business.”

  “Of course not,” said Homer stoutly. “But a person can take an objective interest in what’s happening in the world, can’t he? After all, it’s one’s duty as an informed citizen.”

  “Oh, Homer—”

  He protested loudly. “After all, Thomas Jefferson himself wanted free public education. He said you couldn’t have an enlightened citizenry unless they could read and write. You can’t disagree with such a noble purpose, can you? All those little tots lisping their ABC’s? Colleges full of scholars reading Shakespeare, et cetera?”

  “Shakespeare has nothing to do with it,” said Mary indignantly. “This killer is a crummy, disgusting, abominable human being, and the entire police force of Virginia is working on the case, and they’re certainly going to nab him sooner or later, without your lifting a finger, Homer Kelly.”

  “No, no, of course not,” exclaimed Homer, lifting his hands in innocent horror. “My interest is purely that of a spectator, nothing more.”

  “Glad to hear it,” said Mary, looking at him darkly.

  But as they paid for their meals, the man behind the counter said jovially, “That last poor girl, did you read how he carved her up?”

  Mary hurried Homer back to the car and snatched up the book. She had lost her place. As he turned the car back on the highway, she began reading another random letter from Jefferson to Adams in the middle of a page—“It seems that the Cannibals of Europe are going to eat one another again.… This pugnacious humor of mankind seems to be the law of his nature.”

  Chapter 21

  The Indian information also argued strongly in favour of the South fork. they informed us that the water of the Missouri was nearly transparent at the great falls … that the falls lay a little to the South of sunset from them.… In the evening Cruzatte gave us some music on the violin and the men passed the evening in dancing singing &c and were extreemly cheerfull.

  Captain Meriwether Lewis, June 9, 1805,

  at the junction of two rivers

  Tom got to work next day, unrolling his shelf paper all the way around the room, jamming his thumbtacks into the plaster wall and the wooden moldings, skipping only the two doors. Stretched over the round windows the paper was translucent, reducing the light only slightly.

  Fern looked on with alarm. “Tom, hold it a minute. I don’t know about all those thumbtacks. I mean, this place is a museum. It’s all so perfect.”

  But it was too late. Tom carried on feverishly, thrusting the tacks into the wall with his thumb. In the powerful grip of the magnificent story, he was eager to record the emergencies that had come up every day and the beauty of the landscape and the roar of the Great Falls and the nearly impassable mountains and the urgent forward momentum of the two gallant captains in their drive to the western sea. “Hold this end a sec,” he said. “Got any more thumbtacks?”

  Fern shook her head. Oh, God, she should have put her foot down. How could she let this Tom person take over like this? Now he’d be here all the time, scribbling away on his sleazy piece of paper.

  She tried to renege. “Listen, I don’t know about all this. I mean, here I am with this big grant, and I’m supposed to be writing a book about Thomas Jefferson. Lewis and Clark were just a minor episode in his life. But here you are, taking up all this space.”

  “A minor episode!” Tom looked at her in horror.

  Fern thrust out her lower lip. After all, it was her project, her office. She had a perfect right to tell him to piss off.

  But to her surprise his face changed. He smiled and began talking like a rational human being. “Look, why don’t you join me?” Leaving his roll of paper dangling from the last thumbtack, he walked back to the beginning, where he had pinned up the six-foot stretch recording the start of the journey. “See this horizontal line? My stuff about Lewis and Clark is just the top part. You can have all the rest.”

  Fern stared. She didn’t understand. “What do you mean?”

  He read his first entry. “May 14, 1804, Capt. Clark sets off up the Missouri from the camp at River Dubois—‘I Set out at 4 oClock P.M., in the presence of many of the neighbouring inhabitents, and proceeded on under a jentle brease up the Missouri.… A heavy rain this after-noon.’”

  “Well, all right,” said Fern, “bully for Captain Clark.”

  “But what was Thomas Jefferson doing on May 14, in 1804?” Tom had the kind of complexion that flushed upward from the neck. Now it was patchy with excitement. “I mean, he was president of the United States, wasn’t he? He must have been doing something important.”

  “That’s right,” muttered Fern. “He was in his first term as president in 1804.”

  Tom slapped the paper. “I’ll write up here on top whatever the Corps of Discovery was doing on any particular day, and you can match it with whatever Jefferson was up to at the same time.” Again he swept his arm around the room. “See? There’s miles and miles, and half of it’s yours. How about it?”

  Fern stared at the long stretch reserved for Thomas Jefferson. It was not just miles and miles, it was a continent of blank white paper.

  “Can’t you find out what he was doing from day to day?” urged Tom. “My God, you’ve got all those books. Is one of them a journal? I mean, after all, he told Meriwether Lewis to keep a journal. What about Jefferson himself?”

  “Letters,” mumbled Fern. “He wrote a lot of letters.”

  “Well, letters, then. Is there a letter dated May 14, 1804?”

  It was a delicious question. Fern turned slowly and looked at her heaps of library books. For the first time she was captured by a strange kind of hunger, a passionate desire to fling open their pages, run her finger down their lovely indexes, ransack their beautiful chapters, looking for the answer to the question. What was Thomas Jefferson doing on the day Lewis and Clark set off up the Missouri River?

  She had always thought of scholarship as meditative and serene. Could this really be scholarship, this greed to wrench the books open and tear out the pages, to gobble them alive, the dismembered facts red and dripping? She laughed, remembering that she was after all, a carnivore.

  Outside, under the corner of the North Terrace Walk, Howie Plover set up a flimsy barrier of stakes and string around the ice house. Passing tourists walked around it, holding
their noses. Then Howie put on his welder’s mask and got to work with a torch. Blue flame attacked the iron gate at both ends, where it had been thrust deep into the stone.

  When he could pull the gate free, he took a flashlight out of his toolbelt and pointed it into the pit.

  Howie had suspected drowned rats, and his suspicion was right. Five bloated bodies floated in the shallow water at the bottom. The stench was overpowering.

  Breathing through his mouth, Howie lowered a bucket on a rope and scooped them up. Nothing to it. Then he carried the bucket to his truck, hurtled down the mountain road, charged along Route 52 to 20, whirled onto Interstate 64 at Exit 121, found the Shadwell exit to Route 250, and at last turned off on a woods road and hurled the contents of the bucket into the Rivanna River.

  Chapter 22

  … we burry 1 keg in the cach & 2 canisters of Powder in 2 seperate places all with Lead; & in the cach 2 axes, auger … 1 keg flour, 2 kegs Pork, 2 Kegs Parched meal 1 keg salt, files, chisel, 2 Musquits … 3 bear skins … Beaver Traps and blacksmith’s tools.

  Captain William Clark, June 11, 1805

  “Jefferson was traveling too,” said Fern, glancing up from the book. “May 14, the very same day. He was just back in Washington from Monticello. The carriage got stuck in the mud, it was raining, it was a mess, he was disgusted.” She was flooded with excitement. She looked at the limp stretch of shelf paper. “I can’t write on that.”

  “Of course not,” said Tom. He detached his original six-foot stretch and slapped it on the table. “Here you are. Just fill in the bottom half.”

  Fern looked at Tom’s sentences, rising straight up from the horizontal line. She pulled up a chair, picked up her pen, and whispered, “I’ll be really careful.”

  He watched as she stared at the first piece of the time line, then turned it sideways and bowed over it, writing small, the words running neatly up from the bottom of the paper to the spot on the line that was the beginning of the voyage of discovery—After a hard journey from Monticello, where he was present at the death of his daughter Maria, President Jefferson was back in Washington.