Louisa and the Country Bachelor : A Louisa May Alcott Mystery (9781101547564) (29 page)

Sylvia was sitting on the stoop, staring up at me.

“Louy,” she said, “you should see your face. You have lit up like a lantern.”

“I have it,” I said. “I have the answer. Come with me, Sylvia.” I ran back to the house in search of Father. He was in his study, and looked up with benign concern when he saw me standing in his doorway.

“Louy, my dear. What is it?”

“Time to send another message to Sheriff Bowman,” I said. “About Mrs. Tupper again.”

Abba was behind me, looking worried.

“Louy, I thought you had gone up to the ravine,” she said.

“Why would you think that?”

“Because of this.” She handed me a note, not post delivered, but one that had been slipped under the front door. It was written on familiar plain brown parcel paper, and the words were not scripted but scribbled in block format, like a child's—or like an adult with little education.

˙“I was going to give this to you, but something started to burn in the kitchen and I got all distracted. I gave the note to Anna to put on your desk.” Abba wrung her hands in her apron.

Suddenly our crowded little cottage felt very empty.

“Where is Anna?” I asked, fear rising in me.

Lizzie came out of the parlor, where she had been practicing her exercises. “She put on her hat and coat and went out,” Lizzie said. “She said she would be back soon, and that probably Lilli Nooteboom would have supper with us.”

“Oh, no,” I said.

“Louy, what can be wrong with that?” Abba wrung her hands even more fiercely.

“That note is not from Lilli,” I said. “It is not from Lilli, and it was meant for me. Llew, come; we have no time to waste!”

“I cannot leave the house!” he protested.

“That does not matter now. Llew, trust me; come with me. I need Sylvia to get Sheriff Bowman, and Father should stay here to protect Abba and Lizzie and May.”

Llew looked at me. “I will,” he said. “Lead the way.”

We ran up the path to the ravine trail, moving quickly, without speaking, intent only on arriving at that place where I knew Anna waited. She expected to meet Lilli. Instead she would be at the mercy of the murderer. The murderer had thought to trap me in this way, knowing that I was getting close to the truth. But instead Anna had decided to relieve me of a chore, and in so doing was risking her life and did not even know it.

Anna would stand looking out at the breathtaking sight, at the babbling brook running through the ravine and the gray, green-ferned, steep walls of the cliffs. She would look, and wait for Lilli, not hearing the steps approaching behind her.

“Hurry!” I yelled to Llew. He was just behind me, his hands already bruised and bleeding from the rush of our ascent up that steep cliffside.

We were halfway up. Then we were only a third of the way from the top. We were just steps from the rise of the hill, beyond which all would be visible—the sad, emptied place of Clarence's campsite; beyond that the hill of broken ferns, now even more disrupted by the disinterring of Jonah; beyond that, Anna, standing at the cliffside, the wind blowing back her cape. Her blond hair was tucked tightly under her straw hat. From the back—where the murderer would approach, probably from that thick, shadowy stand of pines—there would be no way to know that Anna Alcott stood there, not Louisa.

“Look!” I pointed, panting, as a shape emerged from the forest. It was just yards away from Anna.

A black, hooded shape approached her. I yelled, but the wind carried my voice in the other direction and Anna did not hear. Two hands appeared from under the cloak, two hands reaching for Anna.

Llew uttered a cry such as I have never heard; he leaned forward, balancing his arms across his chest, and charged.

The two figures wrestled close, perilously close, to the edge of the precipice, but Llew was young and strong and furious at this threat of harm to his beloved adopted family. In minutes the caped figure was lying in the gravel and dirt, face pressed down, arms twisted behind him.

Anna was weeping with fright. I put my arm about her, steadied her, then went to the figure on the ground.

“Llew, turn him over,” I said.

Mr. Wattles glared up at me, one eye already blackened from the brawl, the other glittering with menace.

“He has a formidable strength, for an invalid,” Llew panted.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE SHERIFF ARRIVED just minutes after Llew had managed to tie up Mr. Wattles with the ribbon from my straw bonnet. It was an old ribbon; it would not have held long, so the sheriff's promptness was much appreciated. Sylvia and Sheriff Bowman gaped for some time at the figure on the ground.

“Why, that's Ida Tupper's brother, without his chair. It would appear his rheumatism has significantly improved,” Sylvia finally exclaimed. “Come to think of it, he is without his beard as well,” she added.

“His identity has been a pretense,” I said. “As was the relationship. Ladies and gentlemen, please meet Mr. Johnnie Dodge, Ida's first and only legal husband.”

“Well, I'll be,” said Sheriff Bowman.

“Oh, my,” said Anna, and she fainted.

THE WIND RUFFLED the long dried grasses of August, and a streamer tied to the top of Clarence Hampton's collapsing tent blew bravely. There was a hint of autumn in the air, I thought. I had both my arms about Anna, who was still only half-conscious. She and Sylvia and I leaned against an ancient oak, catching our breath. Llew and the sheriff had not so gently led Mr. Dodge-Wattles back down the steep path to town, to jail.

“It is over,” Sylvia said.

“It is,” I said. “Anna, can you walk yet? Should we send for a litter?”

“Don't be ninnies,” she said, rising carefully to her feet and smoothing her muddied and crumpled dress. “I am more embarrassed about fainting than I can say. You are so very brave, Louy, and I—”

“You are the bravest of all,” I said. “You came up here by yourself to help a friend without any thought of your own danger.”

“But I fainted!”

“From excitement,” I assured her. “Facing a fall of some forty feet down a cliff face can be overstimulating. Moreover, that faint of yours has just helped me out of a difficulty in my story. Oh, thank you, Anna!”

“You're welcome, I'm sure, though I've never before received enthusiastic gratitude for a faint,” said Anna. “Come, girls, we must get home before Abba begins to worry.”

 

 

ONE WEEK LATER, the parlor of the Alcott cottage was again filled to overflowing with family and guests, and the scent of fish chowder for supper wafted through the air. My lack of appetite for yet another fishy meal was shared by others present, as could be seen by the hostile glances that they gave their soup spoons. And to think that at one time I had actually feared that Jonah Tupper had been buried in Father's vegetable patch. Now there was a mystery still unsolved: that stench.

“More sherry?” asked Benjamin, passing a decanter and pouring when someone nodded yes. Uncle Benjamin had been up to his own attic and found an old trunk with souvenirs, and was adorned, once again, in exotic style with a Turkish robe and cape. Cousin Eliza looked tired but happy. One of her children back home was sniffling, and she knew that soon they would all be ill and she would be sleepless for days, but on that night she was out with her husband and friends and was enthusiastically conversing on subjects other than skinned knees and nursery rhymes and colic.

“Oh, what a summer it has been,” she said. “When I met Mrs. Tupper—well, I guess we are to call her Mrs. Dodge—when we first met I knew she would be trouble, but I didn't suspect how much. Only Louisa could discover that.”

“I do find her an interesting study,” I admitted.

Abba beamed at me. “And Louy wasn't so much as scratched in the process, though her hands are a mess from climbing up and down that ravine trail,” she said.

“I will give you a manicure, my dear,” said Fanny Kemble. “I have all sorts of lotions and potions.”

“No, thank you,” I said. “Ink will soon cover all the bruises.”

Lizzie, in a fit of joy, bounced up from her place on the old blue settee and dashed into the second parlor to her rented piano, and pounded out a rendition of “Darlin' Corey.” Llew took my hands as Sylvia pulled Anna from her chair. May and Lizzie paired off, and we tried to dance but only tripped over each other in the congested space, and fell back into our places, laughing.

“Play ‘Pretty Saro,' ” Abba called to Lizzie through the thin walls.

“Will you sing?” Lizzie called back.

Abba, her gray hair tucked into her lace cap and an apron covering her much-mended dress, looked at Father with eyes soft and gentle and sang the old love song. He gazed back with a rare clarity of emotion; he adored Abba. I remembered something he had written to her once, in a letter, years before, when he was traveling and alone:
I was first attracted by your faithfulness to your brother and the intelligent vivacity of your conversation. But I soon felt the real nobility of your character, and loved you
.

My story “The Lady and the Woman” was finished and ready to be sent to William Warland Clapp at the
Saturday Evening Gazette
. I hoped readers, someday, might recognize that Abba, my own dearest mother, was the inspiration for feminine womanhood depicted in the story, for she was kind, patient, courageous, and wise. But it was thanks to Anna that my story was completed, for after Kate faints, she is wooed and won by Mr. Windsor, who recognizes her gentleness as well as her strength.

“Enough entertainment,” said Fanny Kemble. “Though, Abba, I wish I had your voice. But I wish to hear how Louisa arrived at the solution to this puzzle. Who would have guessed that poor old Mr. Wattles was the scoundrel Johnnie Dodge?”

“You might have,” I said with a smile, “if you had met him. Mr. Wattles's beard was always beautifully combed. Not the beard of an old man who has trouble eating his soup. I suspect it was the same beard Ida wore in her school play, when she was King Lear. But that's hindsight. I should have suspected he was not what he claimed when he interrupted our game of croquet in the yard.”

“How was that suspicious?” asked Llew.

“Dear Llew, it is a new game, yet he knew the rules. How could he, unless he had played himself, and how could he have played croquet from his wheeled chair? Ida must have taught him. I suspect it was part of her efforts to make him more genteel.”

“So the husband pretended to be the brother,” said Anna. “But why?”

“Because Johnnie Dodge is still wanted for robbery in several places and did not wish to be recognized,” I said. “And there was an even darker purpose. He saw that his pretty wife might earn more by marrying money than he could by stealing it. So the husband became the brother, and Ida married—several times, each time acquiring more wealth.”

“I did perceive her as a woman of weak intelligence,” said Father. “Weak morals often accompany that condition.”

“She met Johnnie Dodge when she was quite young and easily impressed,” I said. “I suspect she never broke the habit of attempting to fulfill all his requirements of her, even when they involved crime.”

“But did she herself help dispatch those poor men who married her?” asked Sylvia.

“One fell from a ladder and the other drowned,” I said. “Perhaps we will never know the truth of their deaths, except that Johnnie Dodge wished them. Abba, do you think Ida Tupper-Dodge was capable of murder, or assisting in murder?”

“That is what most disturbs me,” said Abba, frowning and sitting again. “I thought her silly. A grown woman who couldn't even knit. Was she guilty of deep evil? Did she help, or simply stand by and allow it to happen? I don't know.”

“I think she helped,” said Sylvia in a dark voice.

“I don't,” said gentle Anna. “I think her sin was failure to act, to stop Johnnie Dodge.”

“I think I must agree with Anna,” I said. “She was in Johnnie Dodge's power, and there did not seem to be an excess of communication between them. Certainly, had she known that her husband was to kill her son, it would have roused her to action to stop him. Even as faulty a parent as she proved, I think she had an element of affection for Clarence. Once she realized Clarence had been murdered, she took her own revenge against Dodge.”

“She did?” asked Sylvia, startled.

“Yes. By sending me to Jonah's grave, under a pretense of fetching her son's camping items. She wanted me to discover the murder of her husband, to avenge the death of her son. She helped hide the murder of Jonah by pretending those penny cards were posted by her husband who was supposed to be traveling for business. But when Clarence was murdered, she turned on Johnnie Dodge.”