Louisa and the Country Bachelor : A Louisa May Alcott Mystery (9781101547564) (28 page)

Mr. Tupper rose and walked to the window, and looked down at the busy square.

“He laughed at me,” he said. “Said he didn't want a mountain. That he was a lowlander; he wanted his lowland for the railroad.”

“And then?” I asked.

“And then I . . . well . . . I said some things, called some names best not repeated, and then I left.”

“You left Ernst Nooteboom alive on the mountain.”

“I did. But . . .”

“But what, Mr. Tupper?”

“Before I got far down the path, I heard him talking again to someone else. I thought I heard a shout and a scream.”

“But you never said anything to Sheriff Bowman about this?” I asked.

“What was there to say? Someone up the mountain quarreled? No, I didn't say anything. I was busy.” He looked at his raveling shirt cuff and mumbled, “Busy time in the store, in the spring, and my business with Nooteboom was confidential. I aimed to keep it that way.”

“Do you know who the other man was?”

“No. I only heard Nooteboom's voice, not the other.”

 

 

ABBA WAS IN the kitchen when I returned home. She comforted me as I had comforted Mr. Tupper, with a shoulder to lean against and gentle reassurances that all would be sorted out, that the worst was over.

“But how can it be over?” I said, hanging up my coat and hat. “There is a murderer walking freely in this pleasant village, and no one is safe till that murderer is caught.”

“Write, Louy,” Abba said. “Empty your mind of all this, and work on your story. Sometimes things come to you that way.”

“O wise woman,” I said. “Keen-eyed enough to see her own and others' faults, and wise enough to find a cure for them. Abba, what would I do without you?”

So I took a pot of tea and tray of biscuits and locked myself in my writing shed, feeling safe there, feeling separate from the horrors of the past few days, from all the deaths, and concentrated on my story about Mr. Windsor, who must make a choice between the shallow beauty of Miss Amelia and the independent nobility of Kate. My emotions were in a turmoil; my thoughts roiled and stormed around the events of the past few weeks in Walpole, and the storm appeared in my story.

I put down my pen and reread the words, and they seemed to have more than one meaning to me that afternoon. I had believed I was coming to spend a pleasant, quiet time in the country; instead I was in the midst of a dark flood of violence, and if I could not discover the truth I would always be a prisoner to the deceit, the violence, that was being wrought here.

I wrote for several hours, making what I thought was good progress with my story, when I was interrupted by a timid knock at the shed door.

“It's suppertime, Louy,” said Sylvia when I opened the door. “Abba says you are to come and eat something, for you haven't eaten all day.”

“How was your own day with Mrs. Tupper?”

“She slept, as you said she would, but in the afternoon she woke and ate bread and butter and drank a pot of tea. Her mind is all unraveled, I think. She kept looking at the door as if Clarence were about to walk in. She asked where he was.”

“ ‘One woe doth tread upon another's heel, so fast they follow,'” I quoted.

“Is that from your story, Louy?”

“No, it is Queen Gertrude's complaint, close to the end of
Hamlet
. Let us go and pretend to eat Abba's supper to ease her mind, for I have no appetite.”

We gathered about the table, Llew and Sylvia, Abba, Father, Anna, May, Lizzie, and myself, and the prayer before that meal was a long one, for we all felt the need for grace, for meditation upon powers stronger than our own. Supper was fish chowder again, and if I hadn't already lost my appetite I would have then, but I played with my spoon and dipped my bread and ate enough to convince Abba that body and soul would not be separated by starvation that night.

For dessert we had a bowl of peaches and cream, sent over by Cousin Eliza.

“Louy, I almost forgot,” said Abba, spooning the peaches into our bowls. “Benjamin also sent a message. I have no idea what it means, but he asks if you have seen Anubis.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

“ANUBIS!” I DROPPED the cream ladle with such careless surprise that I chipped it, I'm afraid to report, and sent a spray of cream down the table, so that a spot of white ended on Father's nose and another on Sylvia's frock.

“Louy, what have you to do with pagan gods?” asked Father, somewhat shocked. “What does this mean?”

“He means his walking stick,” I said, rising and beginning to pace in our little dining room. “Remember the set of four from Egypt? Anubis! He would never let us play with Anubis, because it was sharp and dangerous, he said. ‘You'll put out someone's eye,' he said. He was right. It was a walking stick that killed Clarence, and now one of Uncle's is missing. Oh, why didn't I take a closer look at it before Sheriff Bowman took it away?”

“Because it was covered with blood and gore,” said Llew, who had grown pale at the renewed references to the murder of Clarence Hampton.

Abba put the bowl of peaches on the table with more care than I had shown the ladle. She looked confused and very worried. “But doesn't that then implicate Benjamin?” Father reached over and patted her hand for reassurance.

“It can't,” he said thoughtfully. “Benjamin cannot be in two places at once. He was with us all that night.”

“Besides,” added May, “Uncle Benjamin would never ruin his cape with a bloody murder. If he intended to kill Clarence, he would have made him take the Turkish hat and cape off first.”

“May!” said Mother, shocked.

“I was just trying to be logical, like Louy!” May protested.

“Oh, let me think!” I said, pacing furiously back and forth before the window that looked directly into the dining room window of Ida Tupper's house. The lace curtains were closed, but I could see the table was bare; Ida and her brother would be dining in their rooms, off trays, if at all. And then I remembered.

“Weeks ago,” I said, “at tea with Eliza and Benjamin, it began to rain and Mrs. Tupper borrowed one of Uncle Benjamin's walking sticks. She must have borrowed Anubis.”

I sat back down, overwhelmed. I stared at my hands, at the ink stains that never completely washed away. I looked at Abba, that good and gentle mother, and at Llew, whom she loved like a son. The room was absolutely still.

Sylvia broke the silence. “Are you saying, Louy, that Mrs. Tupper is the murderer?”

“How could it be?” I said. “How could it be? His own mother! I could almost understand marrying for wealth and dispatching the husband. . . .”

Father cleared his throat.

“Understand,” I clarified. “Not condone or recommend as practice. But to murder one's own child . . . ! Abba, what should I do?” I looked to my mother for advice.

“There have been three deaths, not just the one,” she said. “If you accuse her, you accuse her of more evil than I fear a woman could be capable of. Yet you cannot ignore what you know. Perhaps tonight it would be enough to send a message to Sheriff Bowman. Tell him you know the owner of the walking stick that was used to destroy Clarence Hampton, and let him know that the stick was in Mrs. Tupper's possession. Let the sheriff make of it what he will. Then think some more.”

As always, her advice was perfect. The note was dispatched to the sheriff, written by Father himself, and then we all went to our beds.

There was no rest for me. I assessed anew Mrs. Tupper's nature, her coquettishness, her obvious delight in the company of men, her nature to take offense easily, to be mortally wounded by a slight; there was passion in her, and vanity and greed, as well.

“Are you thinking of her?” Sylvia whispered when the moon shone full in the room and I had tossed and turned for the hundredth time. Anna was fast asleep, her breath sounding like a gentle, soothing tide, but Sylvia was as awake as myself.

I watched as a cloud passed over the moon and the room grew dark; the cloud moved on and dim outlines returned, the curtains flapped, and Sylvia sat up.

“I am,” I admitted.

“And to think that Mrs. Tupper wished her son to court me. For the inheritance, of course.”

“He was already in love with Lilli. Does that wound you?”

“Not really. We would never have achieved harmony together. I suspect Lilli was the better choice for him. Oh, Louy, would she have killed him over that? Because he wanted to marry a poor girl? How awful!”

“To begin with, Lilli is not really poor. She still has the land she and Ernst purchased. No, I don't think that was the problem between those two. There is still something missing, Sylvia. We have an odd assortment of facts and motives, but I don't think we have the solution yet.”

Anna made a little noise in the back of her throat and turned onto her other side. Dear Anna. I thought again about her hearing loss and wondered how severe it was, if it was a small matter, as she said. My family seemed changed this summer, with Lizzie growing up yet ever shyer, May becoming even more outspoken, Anna seeming distant though still loving. Abba and Father looked healthier, even younger, than they had looked the year before in Boston. The country air and sunshine agreed with them. Yet I had a sense of their changing as well, of Abba struggling with the need to let her Golden Brood fly free of her, and Father reconciling himself to his lack of great success by forcing himself to delight in small achievements, like his vegetable patch.

The vegetable patch. Now there was a relief. In the back of my mind had grown the possibility that the stench of that soil came from a buried body: Jonah Tupper. That had not been the case. The relief was short-lived. That nagging sense of failing my family returned. When I had the solution, I would devote myself completely to my family, I promised myself in bed that night. I would write stories for May to illustrate with her paints, and listen more carefully to Lizzie's piano exercises and compositions, and take long walks with Anna, as we used to do. When this was over. When this was over. I fell asleep, finally, to that refrain.

 

 

SINCE SHERIFF BOWMAN seemed to be a late sleeper, and I had no reason to expect a message from him till later in the day, if at all, I went for my morning run in the ravine the next day; a good run cleared my head so that my thinking was more productive, less rambling. Maybe I hoped that the stones themselves would speak of what they had seen.

As I ran, I listened in my head to Kate and Mr. Windsor debate the qualities of womanhood and wondered at what moment the handsome but somewhat fickle Mr. Windsor would finally realize Kate's worth. I had left them in the midst of a raging flood; now I sent Kate off to find help, while Mr. Windsor attended to the others of the group, being the protection and mainstay during the dangerous storm. Yes, Kate would be the heroine, bringing help when help was most required.

But what was I to do with Mrs. Tupper?

The run did not clear my thoughts but only jumbled them more. Disheartened, I climbed back down the slippery path of the ravine, almost oblivious to the prettily bubbling brook, to the birdsong and wildflowers and stands of pines that had so enchanted me weeks before. At the top of that ravine, one young man had been killed and buried; a second had fallen to his death; a third had been discovered in our cellar. How could I admire a stalk of Queen Anne's lace when somewhere in Walpole a murderer was walking free and perhaps preparing to strike again? Or had Clarence, the country bachelor, been his last victim? Or her last victim?

I returned home and wrote for several hours, stopping only when Sylvia knocked to give me a cup of tea for refreshment and a letter that had arrived from the post office.

I did not recognize the handwriting, but I knew the address. It was from the Unitarian minister of Manchester, Mrs. Tupper's birthplace and childhood home. I tore the envelope open and read. I had written to him out of curiosity; as I read I realized that my intuition had not been superficial, as I had first assumed.