Louisa and the Country Bachelor : A Louisa May Alcott Mystery (9781101547564) (9 page)

We all sat up straighter, somewhat startled, thinking that he was speaking symbolically, as he was sometimes inclined to do.

“Thunder,” he repeated. “Excellent. I put in the spinach today, and another row of potatoes. Rain is just what they need.”

“Did Dr. Burroughs indicate the purpose of his visit?” I asked, feeling livelier. A breeze had started rippling the curtains and sliding papers back and forth on Uncle Benjamin's corner desk. He rose and weighted them down with books and letter openers and a little statue of a sphinx.

“He said he wished to see the corpse,” Eliza said. “I would have felt more comfortable if he had said, ‘view the deceased,' but he did not; he said, ‘see the corpse,' and it sounded a little gruesome.”

“He was a medical examiner,” I explained. “He has an interest in . . .” I paused. I had almost said, “corpses.” “An interest in mortal wounds,” I finished.

“Well, little Lilli Nooteboom did not seem pleased to receive him,” said Uncle Benjamin.

“No?” asked Abba somewhat distractedly; she had left linens hanging on the line to dry, and now it certainly looked like a storm.

“They were having words,” said Eliza. “More lemonade?”

“That was thunder,” Abba said. “We must try to make it home before the rain starts.”

I agreed wholeheartedly, since a wet costume would mean a whole day of washing, drying, and ironing those twenty pounds of muslin that constituted accepted female attire. (Wearing Amelia Bloomer's new short skirts and trousers was still liable to get a woman arrested for indecency.) However, a thought had formed in that part of my brain in which I was keeping mental notes and jottings about the death of Ernst Nooteboom.

“What words?” I asked urgently, as the Alcott tribe rose as one and moved to the hallway.

“Why, last summer when Dr. Burroughs was visiting he exchanged angry letters with Ernst Nooteboom, and the two never made it up,” Eliza said, rooting around in the cluttered hall table for Abba's straw hat. “Ernst had been ill with a high fever. Dr. Burroughs wished to inspect him to make sure it was not yellow fever. He is an old busybody, isn't he? At any rate, Ernst refused to see him. The old man was sorely wounded, thought it an affront to his reputation.”

Uncle Benjamin clucked his tongue and straightened his Turkish cap, which had tilted somewhat. “You don't know what an epidemic of fever is like. Dr. Burroughs remembers the last one. He thought Ernst owed it to this community to prove he carried no mortally communicable illness.”

Big drops of rain splattered heavily on the slate walk; the sky had turned a sickly green.

“Oh, dear,” said Ida, frowning up at the glowering clouds. “I have my parasol, but neglected to bring my walking stick, and the paths will be slippery.”

Without so much as a by-your-leave she helped herself to a cane from Uncle's elephant-foot stand.

“Good day, all,” she called over her shoulder, her pink-striped skirts flashing.

 

 

THE NEXT DAY the Alcotts attended the funeral of Ernst Nooteboom. There were few mourners there, since many of the Dutch workers had already moved on to other places, while the railroad company finished its negotiations for the final line. Mrs. Roder had taken time from her chores to attend, and a few of the town's older citizens were there, as funerals sometimes pass as a form of entertainment, or perhaps preparation.

Uncle Benjamin and Cousin Eliza attended, and Ida Tupper had also arrived, dressed in black silk and lace and with a black silk corsage on her shoulder that flounced all the way up to her little pointed chin. She wept copiously and murmured, “Poor Ernst,” several times.

To my surprise, Dr. Peterson Burroughs attended, dressed in his black suit and looking sterner than usual, as if he did not approve of the young dying.

“Foolish boy, foolish boy,” he kept muttering. Lilli studied him from behind her handkerchief with barely concealed fear.

“I understand you tried to administer to Mr. Nooteboom last summer, during a fever,” I whispered to the doctor, who had chosen a place at my side, as we circled the final resting place of that poor young man.

“He would not permit me to see him,” Dr. Burroughs whispered back with some agitation. “He had never seen an epidemic of yellow fever. He endangered us all.” Was the good doctor capable of carrying a grudge all the way to the grave-side?

The minister looked in our direction and we ceased whispering.

The Walpole churchyard was an ancient ground filled with stone memorials of leaning angels and stone tablets of funeral poems. I made notes in my head about one particular stone angel that drooped and wept in exaggerated Gothic fashion, suitable for description in a “blood and thunder” story.

Lilli, dressed in her black mourning, looked almost like a spirit, so pale was she. She wept quietly as the minister intoned the brief service, and Abba and I held her hands throughout it for comfort.

“He did not fall,” were her last words to me, when the brief service was over and black dirt was shoveled over the wooden coffin.

But who would wish to murder the young Dutchman? Who would push him over a cliff to his death?

Someone he knew
was the immediate answer, for he went to that spot willingly; he hadn't been dragged or carried. Someone he knew who had power over him of some sort, for he went to that dangerous, wild place in his town shoes. Or someone he trusted, and did not fear, until it was too late.

I wished I had spent more time with that inebriated camper, although my own sense of self-preservation had discouraged lingering at the time. It was such a small walk from that campsite to the cliff's edge.

CHAPTER SIX

WHEN, THE NEXT day, Father found an old row of raggedy rhubarb at the edge of his weedy vegetable patch, Abba decided she would preserve the stems with sugar for next winter.

“Excellent tonic,” Father said with approval. “Cleans the body. Nature does provide, doesn't it, Abba?” he asked happily.

“It should provide the jars as well as the rhubarb,” said Abba. “Louy, will you walk into the town square and buy a dozen jars?”

I had finished my morning run and not yet begun my afternoon writing, so I agreed readily enough. I had woken up with a strange thought that morning. In small towns, and even in the individual neighborhoods of larger cities, shopkeepers often attend funerals when the deceased was a customer. The Nootebooms shopped at Tupper's, yet he hadn't been there. Perhaps he feared Lilli's accusations, feared that others would believe her.

“Madam, I am here to do your bidding,” I said to Abba with a bow. “A dozen jars, purchased from Tupper's. And half a pound of wax for sealing, I assume.”

Sylvia accompanied me, and Lizzie came along as well. She seemed to be growing even shyer, and the family had decided we should try to “bring her along” a little more.

“I don't see why you need me to come shopping with you,” said Lizzie, who had been reading a sheet of music and practicing the fingering of it on the scrubbed kitchen table. While May, the youngest, was our spoiled child, Lizzie was our angel, quiet, gentle, never complaining—until one required her to don a party frock and go to some home where gavottes would be played and young men would ask for a dance, or to some afternoon party where other young women would wish to talk of hair fashions and skirt trimmings. Lizzie was more like Abba than any other of the “Golden Brood,” believing that “society” was purposeful only when the stronger were helping the weaker, and that all else was frivolous and often just plain silly.

“It's silly to comb your hair up and put on a better frock just to do the marketing,” she complained.

“I know, my dearest,” I said. “But come just the same. Keep us company. We may need you to help carry things.”

That settled it, of course. If she might be of use, all dissent from Lizzie ceased.

Walpole was enjoying a golden summer day, with red and purple flowers glowing in tidy brown beds and green trees overhead all aflutter. With each passing summer day the village seemed to grow even more beautiful. Yet a crime had occurred, I was certain, and I felt an undercurrent of menace. I believed Lilli Nooteboom: Her brother had not fallen, but had been pushed.

Our first stop was at the post office, to send off Anna's correspondence—a dozen envelopes thick with pages of her elegant handwriting, going off to friends in Boston, Concord, Syracuse—and Father's own thick correspondence to Ralph Emerson. Our second stop was at Tupper's General Store.

It was not crowded that morning. Indeed, except for one other, we were the only customers. That other was Lilli Nooteboom.

She stood there, her face stormy, her ungloved hands clenched. She wore dusty black mourning. The two of them, Lilli and Tupper, were staring each other down in the center of the store, leaning forward but not touching, as if some macabre dance were about to begin. The bell chimed as we entered, but they seemed not to hear it.

“I know,” she said, glaring at him, her white face, surrounded by all that black mourning, looking like the full moon in a midnight sky. “I know what you have done, and you will pay for it.”

He stared back, his hands opening and closing into fists.

“I know,” she accused, then ran out, brushing past us.

Mr. Tupper rearranged his features into their more habitual expression, something between a smile and a sneer, and took my list and basket. His glowering posture, those severely forced-back shoulders, the chin jutting into the air, even the way his ginger whiskers seemed to bristle, discouraged me from making inquiries about that confrontation between himself and Miss Nooteboom. People in the state of mind that seemed to engulf the shopkeeper usually do not talk at all, or when they do talk, express half-truths and obfuscations. Or he might just tell me it was none of my business.

Our purchases were quickly made and even more quickly paid for—ten more cents out of the thirty-two dollars I had to my name—and we left without a word other than “Good day.” Tupper gave us a withering glance, which reminded me of another errand.

“We also need some greens for supper,” I said to Sylvia and Lizzie when we were back in the sunlight. “Abba is making a fish chowder with river trout.”

Next door, at the greengrocer's—which was frequented by Whigs and Democrats alike, since Walpole had just the one greengrocer on the square—the store was busy with shoppers and animated conversation, much of which seemed to be about Ernst Nooteboom and his sister. “Looking to buy that acreage near the river,” I heard one man say. “Add to the lot he already had.”

“Tupper wanted it for his son,” another whispered.

I hovered over a bin of strawberries and selected a basket for our dessert. Eliza had a strawberry patch, but her brood had dispatched the fruits almost before they were ripe. Another dime gone from my steadily lightening purse. How soon, I wondered, before I sold another story? Would the
Saturday Evening Gazette
purchase “The Lady and the Woman”? And could I finish my tale of woodland elves in time for Christmas? That was a lovely thought—another book in the Boston Corner Book Shop, perhaps right next to Father's and a shelf or two above Emerson's, a case over from Hawthorne's; poor Henry Thoreau, down there alone on the right in the Ts. If I finished
Christmas Elves
in time for that holiday, think of the celebration the Alcotts could have!

“Louy?” asked Sylvia. “You seemed to disappear there for a moment.”

“Ah. A lovely daydream struck me,” I said.

Just as we were leaving the store, Dr. Peterson Burroughs entered, towing two unhappy-looking grandchildren who just about reached his knees. “A penny each,” the doctor said sternly.

“Mama let us have two pennies each on Tuesday, after our castor oil,” the older of the two spoke up, looking up at her grandfather with huge, round black eyes.

“She is a spendthrift,” said the gentleman. He spied me and tipped his old-fashioned derby hat. The other men of Walpole wore the new light straw boaters to keep the sun off their heads, and much fun they were, too, those wispy hats that tended to fly off and leap about the streets; it was a pleasure to see men chase their hats like children chasing their hoops. But Dr. Burroughs wore his beaver hat in winter and his derby in summer, and that was that, I assumed.

“Ah, Miss Alcott. You have recovered from the sad occupation of yesterday? Not feeling liverish? Funerals are not good for young women, not good.” His smile was vulpine.

“I would rather they were unnecessary, especially when the deceased dies before his reasonably expected length of years, but one goes to these rituals to support friends in mourning,” I said.

He looked at me from under his knitted brows. “I, too, felt it my duty. Yes, my duty. A man must do his duty, even when it is unpleasant.”

His emphasis on
duty
left me somewhat queasy; it was a word used often by politicians to justify the unjustifiable, as in, “It is our duty to return fugitive slaves to their owners.” What had Dr. Burroughs meant by it?

 

 

BACK AT THE Alcott cottage, I unpacked my shopping basket at the kitchen table. Abba looked unhappy.

“Eliza and Benjamin are here examining Father's vegetable patch,” she said. “And Mrs. Tupper and her son are in the parlor. He seems to have returned from wherever he has been. It's not quite clear. Well. Best to get tea over with. Prepare yourselves.” Abba handed me the teapot to carry in, while she and Sylvia cut and buttered more bread for the tray.