Louisa and the Country Bachelor : A Louisa May Alcott Mystery (9781101547564)

by Maclean, Anna

  Mr. Tupper tugged at his waistcoat. I looked at his huge, dirty hands, the right one with its gold signet ring. Above the ring I saw a rusty stain on his shirt cuff. His eyes followed mine, and he jammed his hand, all the way up to the forearm, into his outer coat pocket.

  “A bloodstain, Mr. Tupper?” I asked.

  “I was slicing up beef this morning,” he said.

  I looked him straight in the eye. “Mr. Tupper, have you had any word from your son? Do you know where he is?”

  A group of women doing their morning marketing approached us on the sidewalk. When they saw Sylvia and me, they crossed the street, whispering behind their fans, their long skirts trailing in the dust of the street and leaving patterns like waves. Waves. Water. The river was so close by, yet Clarence had been murdered and left in the cellar. The murderer had wanted him to be found, had wanted us, the Alcotts, to be implicated.

  “No.” Mr. Tupper, his face red with emotion, turned back to Crabtree’s before I could ask any more questions. “Stay out,” he called over his shoulder.

  Sylvia picked nervously at the lace trim on her gloves. “It appears even his son dislikes Mr. Tupper, to be gone so long from home without sending a letter.”

  “Is he gone?” I asked Sylvia.

  I looked over my friend’s head to the mountains beyond, to the forests and ravines and riverbanks and all those other places I had so admired upon my arrival. They could be hiding a murderer. Jonah Tupper would inherit the Tupper estate. Were father and son both trying to expand their holdings by violent methods? With Ernst Nooteboom dead, they had thought it easy to buy Lilli’s holdings cheaply, through intimidation. And with Clarence dead, there would be no rival for the inheritance. I had suspected Clarence of hating his young stepfather enough to do violence to him. Perhaps it had been the other way around.

  Or perhaps I had been right the first time: Clarence had murdered his stepfather, and Jonah’s father, suspecting this, had now murdered Clarence. Oh, it was getting too Shakespearean, all this revenge, greed, deceit, passion.

  Another unrelated—or was it?—matter was bothering me. The stench from Father’s vegetable patch grew stronger each day. It increasingly stank as if something were rotting there. There, where the earth had been disturbed but not planted, where Clarence had been spied poking about with his walking stick. I thought of Dr. Burroughs’s stories of the finding of bits and pieces of Dr. Parkman in Boston, and my stomach turned.

  Jonah, where are you? I thought for the hundredth time.

  Was Jonah the strange, tall man occasionally seen in Walpole in early morning or at dusk, walking alone, the one O’Rourke had described? That man had a limp. But any actress knows how easy it is to fake a limp.

  FANNY KEMBLE ARRIVED to share our noon dinner, trailing her own retinue and a large group of townspeople as well.

  “Such a lovely day for a walk!” she cried out as I opened the door to her. “Will you offer a meal to a hungry wayfarer?”

  “The biscuits are heavy and the soup too thin,” I said. “Abba was busy and I cooked today, but we will gladly share the meal with you.”

  “Because of the body in the cellar,” said Fanny with astounding complacency, once the door was closed on the curiosity seekers now standing outside our door. “Such a thing will throw a household routine all out of order.”

  Llew, who had been sitting alone in the little parlor and heard this, came out to us with a look of disbelief on his ashen face.

  “You jest?” he said.

  “My dear boy, I have come to ease you through this difficult situation with some light comedy,” Fanny exclaimed. “I have read enough scripts to know that you will not be tried and hanged; it just is not good plotting. No audience would allow a youth as charming and obviously innocent as yourself to be the villain. They would not stand for it.”

  Father, just in from his vegetable patch and still in his boots and overalls, scratched his chin.

  “Fanny, you have been wrong on other matters,” he said.

  “Bronson, you will never allow me to forget that disastrous marriage, will you?” She pouted prettily over her white silk fan.

  “I pray you are correct, Fanny, for we know Llew to be completely innocent in this,” I said. Llew gave me a glance of gratitude, and I thought there was even more in his expression.

  Despite Fanny’s attempts at humor, the meal was a somber one, and grew yet more somber when, after the plates were cleared, the doorbell sounded and Abba opened it to Ida’s little maid.

  “Mrs. Tupper says I am to give you this,” said the child, handing me a note. Once it was delivered, she scampered back to the path that connected our house with her own.

  “What does she say?” Abba asked, after giving me a moment to decipher Ida’s uncertain handwriting, made even more quixotic by the laudanum with which she was dosing herself.

  “She asks me to go to her son’s campsite and bring back his personal items,” I said. “She cannot do it herself, nor obviously can Mr. Wattles.”

  “I do not like this,” said Abba. “It is unfair of her to ask this of someone who is not family.”

  “But obviously her brother, Mr. Wattles, cannot go up the mountain in his wheeled chair, and she has no one else to ask,” I said.

  “Well, I wish Llew could go with you,” Abba said.

  “He cannot, else Sheriff Bowman may lock him up completely, if he breaks house arrest. No, I will do this, Abba. I have a presentiment that the danger is over.”

  I was lying to Abba—a rare sin, indeed. I donned my running clothes. If I were to look through and gather up a dead man’s belongings, I wished to be unencumbered of the skirts and hoops and high heels and tight waists that keep the female population moving at such a slow pace.

  It had stormed during the night, and the stream that bubbled through the ravine now roared and was brown and frothy. I stayed close to the side of the path on the cliff rather than streamside; a fall into that raging water would be deadly. The steep hill to Clarence’s campsite was slippery with mud and broken ferns, and my progress was slow.

  The campsite, when I arrived, was despoiled by rain and abandonment, the tent sagging and the ashes of the circled campfire cold and black. The rain had made of the previously inviting camping area a devastated area of storm-flattened weeds, broken tree branches, and impromptu muddy paths and puddles slanting to the cliff’s edge. It was evident that Clarence Hampton had not been there for several days. I gathered together his possessions: fish-boning knives, a fishing rod, tin plates and cups, hammers and chisels of all sizes, a volume of poetry, and two penny-dreadful novels.

  He had kept no journal, indeed nothing that could be said to be of a personal nature, and I wondered that his mother would place sentimental value on such impersonal objects. But when I lifted the volume of poetry, a piece of paper fluttered from it. My dearest Clarence, I read, but before I could read more a stray gust of wind took it from my fingers and blew it toward the cliff.

  The paper landed on the cliff’s edge and balanced there, half over the edge already.

  Cautiously, on my hands and knees, I crept close to the cliff, to the very spot from which I had estimated Ernst Nooteboom had fallen. Just as I reached for the paper, another gust of wind carried it away, over the edge. I reached, but it escaped my grasp. I looked down. The height, combined with my fatigue from the climb up the path, created a dangerous vertigo.

  A twig cracked underfoot. The birds, which had been calling from the tall pines, grew silent. Someone was behind me. Another twig cracked, closer.

  Still perilously close to the cliff edge and prostrate on the ground, I felt my body tense. I rolled up and on my hands and knees quickly backed away from the cliff’s edge, thankful for Father’s cast-off trousers, which saved me from the bondage of a woman’s cumbersome skirts.

  The birds began to sing again, and I knew that whoever had been there was gone. Who? The answer was so obvious I frowned at my own simplicity. The murderer. Clarence
’s murderer. Or had I imagined that sinister presence?

  My lungs hurt from holding my breath. Perhaps I had simply imagined the encounter? I decided the best course was to think about it later, in Abba’s kitchen. I felt a sudden urgency to be away from there.

  The tent and bedding would be too heavy for me to carry, but I began placing his fishing knives, the tin plate and cup, and the volumes of penny thrillers into my rucksack.

  Dark clouds hovered overhead. It would rain again soon. I sniffed the air, searching for that hint of green miasma that fills the air before a storm, and trying to gauge whether I could make it back down the mountain before the downpour began. But the wind was coming from the southeast, turning the leaves inside out, showing their fish-pale undersides. Branches overhead groaned.

  I caught an unexpected scent, and my stomach turned. Decay. The wind blew it in my path and I followed, trying to find the source.

  Just a hundred yards beyond the tent, I saw the mound that had, on previous visits, been camouflaged by thickly growing ferns. The storm had bent them and revealed the unmistakable long, mounded shape of a burial.

  I approached slowly. An animal had been digging there, and the heavy rain had eroded a portion of the hasty burial. I saw bones. Human bones. And on those bones a signet ring, just like the one worn by his father, Mr. Tupper.

  Here, at last, was Jonah.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Young Love Revealed and Destroyed

  “LOUY, YOU LOOK a sight! What has happened? Quickly, out of those wet clothes.You’ll catch your death.”

  Abba met me at the kitchen door, where I was gasping and bedraggled, for the storm had begun again during my descent from the mountainside, and I had fallen several times.

  Llew was in the kitchen as well, and Anna and Sylvia, for it was the warmest, driest room in the house. They gazed upon me openmouthed, Llew with horror for my muddied, gasping condition, Anna with dawning realization that there was trouble, and Sylvia, who knew me well, already reaching for her coat.

  “I can tell from your face that you wish me to fetch Sheriff Bowman,” said that young woman with great complacency.

  “Yes. Oh, how I wish Llew could go with you!” I exclaimed, giving vent to a little anger.

  “Is it dangerous, Louy? Should I go as well?” Anna offered.

  “No. The danger is not to your own being, but to your credibility. Sheriff Bowman is just as likely to dismiss the story out of hand if it is brought to him by a woman.”

  “Then I will go with her.” Father stood in the doorway. Father, who had spent the summer with his cucumbers and radishes and Cicero and Plutarch, oblivious to much that was happening outside of his own deep thoughts, now put his gentle hands on my shoulders and held them so tightly my shivering stopped.

  “Tell me what I am to say to him,” Father said. “And if he takes my words lightly because they originated from my daughter’s mouth, then I will lecture him on the steadfastness of the female intelligence until he does pay attention.”

  “Father, tell him he must also bring Dr. Burroughs,” I said. “This requires a medical examiner as well as the law. Jonah Tupper has been buried just beyond Clarence Hampton’s campsite. From the tent, look east, to where the ferns grow under the stand of pines, and you’ll see the place.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Abba, sitting down at the table. On the stove, her unstirred pot began to smoke and then burn.

  ABBA INSISTED I spend the rest of the day in bed under thick blankets, for as soon as Father had released me I had begun to shiver again, so hard that my teeth chattered. My hair, released from my boy’s cap, hung to my waist in dark rivulets, and my clothes were soaked through to the skin. There were several cuts and scrapes on my legs.

  “You can do no more today,” Mother insisted. “If you try, you will take ill, and what good will that do?”

  She was right. I felt exhausted—more than just physically exhausted, but morally and imaginatively as well. I had suspected Clarence Hampton of doing evil, and he had been murdered because my imagination had found a path and ignored all other possibilities in this maze of deception and violence. I had suspected Jonah Tupper of evil, and now he, too, was dead. Three young men were dead. I fell into a troubled sleep muttering their names—Ernst, Clarence, Jonah. Had one person murdered all three? Or had there been a sinister geometry of revenge and payback?

  IN THE LATE afternoon, after several hours of drifting in and out of sleep, I rose again and went downstairs. Fanny was in the parlor, murmuring quietly with Abba, and they both looked up with great concern when I entered.

  “My poor darling,” said Fanny, coming to me with open arms. “And this was to be a vacation! A quiet time in the countryside!”

  “I admit to a certain disappointment in this turn of affairs,” I said. “It would be pleasant to wonder about someone’s whereabouts and not have them turn up dead.”

  Abba and Fanny exchanged glances; Abba always grew worried when I resorted to gallows humor. She knew it meant I had fallen into the Slough of Despond, a depression from which it was difficult to climb back out.

  “Where is Sylvia?” I asked, and then quickly wished I hadn’t; at that moment it seemed bad luck to ask about a friend’s location.

  “Still with your father and Sheriff Bowman. They went and saw . . . what you said they would see . . . and then had to come back down the mountain to gather up more men, shovels, and a litter to carry the remains back down.” Abba picked up her knitting. She was making a new winter shawl for me, with a pattern of blue and green waves, and for years after when I wore that shawl I thought of graves.

  The knitting reminded me: “Has anyone spoken with Ida Tupper?” I asked. “How will she deal with this new tragedy? First her son, and now her husband.”

  “She seems a woman of singular ill luck,” agreed Fanny. “I hear she has lost other husbands as well.”

  “Anna is with her,” Abba said. “I went over with her and checked the laudanum bottle to make sure Ida did not accidentally kill herself with that poison. A small dose was administered, and then Anna took the bottle. Now Ida is sleeping, and Anna is watching over her.”

  I sighed heavily and sank deep into the blue settee, letting dark thoughts swirl about me as I drank Abba’s strong tea and let the gentle murmur of her conversation with Fanny sweep over me. Jonah, it would seem, had died first, many months before. Then Ernst Nooteboom. Then Clarence Hampton.

  Why was Jonah Tupper killed? He was young and wealthy—at least, he stood to inherit his father’s wealth. And his stepson, Clarence, would have been the next to inherit, if the marriage between Ida and Jonah produced no children. I had suspected Clarence, for there had been an angry violence about him. But then why would Ernst have been murdered? There was no ability to profit from that murder, except for his sister, Lilli, who now owned the lands they had purchased together. Could sister murder brother? And Clarence. Who profited from his death?

  My head began to pound.

  At six o’clock, Father returned with Sheriff Bowman.

  “Well,” said that man of the law, giving me a cryptic glance. “Well.”

  “This time,” I said, “you cannot accuse Llew. He was not even in Walpole until some weeks ago, and that poor young man was killed—”

  “Six months ago, at least,” said another voice. Dr. Burroughs, who had been taking off his muddy galoshes in the hall, now also entered the parlor. “Miss Louisa, this really will not do. No man of good repute will want to marry a female scribe who keeps finding bodies. It will put you beyond the pale.”

  Abba cleared her throat, one of the only predictions of anger that gentle woman made. “I am sure it is absolutely unfair to reprimand my daughter,” said she. “You had better spend your energies discovering who put those bodies in her path.”

  “Well said,” agreed Sheriff Bowman, with a smile at me that was almost—not quite—approving.

  “How did he die, Dr. Burroughs?” I asked.

  �
�There wasn’t much left to work with, but I did discover a crack in the skull and signs of a knife cutting across the windpipe,” he said.

  “Then he died as Clarence Hampton died,” I said. “Beaten over the head, and then his throat slit.”

  “Ayup,” said Dr. Burroughs. “That’s the essence of it.”

  “Was there a suitcase anywhere near him?” I asked. “Had he been traveling, or about to go traveling?”

  Sheriff Bowman looked at me with a glimmer of new respect. “No suitcase that we found,” he said. “But there was a train ticket in his pocket. He never got to use it.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s right. There would be no point of bringing his suitcase up the mountain. But he was lured up there, for it would have been too difficult to carry him if he were already dead. He was lured up the mountain somehow, and murdered there, near Clarence Hampton’s campsite. He went up to perhaps say good-bye to his stepson.”

  “And never came back down,” added Sylvia.

  “I admit to being at a loss,” said Sheriff Bowman. “Who is left to question?”

  “It’s very much like a Shakespearean play,” said Fanny. “The stage is left littered with corpses.”

  “I will take my leave. ‘Sufficient unto the day is the labor thereof,’ ” said the sheriff, rising stiffly from his chair. That walk up and down the slippery mountain path would make even young bones ache, I knew. He made a courtly little bow to the ladies in the room and then stopped short, facing in Fanny’s direction. She had sat quietly, paying close attention but not interrupting. I knew that later, back in her rooms, she would note in her journal how the sheriff had moved, how voices had sounded when certain statements had been made. There was a reason why she was acclaimed for verisimilitude in her technique.

  “You are . . . ?” the sheriff asked, already knowing. Who in Walpole did not know?