Louisa and the Country Bachelor : A Louisa May Alcott Mystery (9781101547564) (26 page)

“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?

“Fanny Kemble,” said she with a little smile and a nod of her lovely head.

“May I have your autograph? Er, for the missus, of course.”

 

 

THE NEXT DAY, after an hour of contemplation, I went to visit Lilli. I knew there would be no lies, no more half-truths, this time.

Mrs. Roder showed me up to her attic room; Lilli no longer came downstairs to the parlor. “She hasn't eaten in days,” Mrs. Roder anguished. “I fear she'll waste away to nothing. And she's behind on her orders. Soon she'll lose her customers and then . . . Well, I can't give charity. I've got my own family to think of.”

I had such a sense of doom then, of time passing and me caught up helpless in it. It was late summer, and the zinnias in Mrs. Roder's garden were tall and straggly and looked faded.

“Give me half an hour with her, and then bring up a bowl of broth and a piece of bread,” I said. Mrs. Roder shook her head but promised she would.

“Lilli! Open the door!” I banged loudly.

Silence. But I knew she was in there. I could sense her behind that door, frightened and alert.

“Open, or I shall have the sheriff force it open!” I said.

A key turned. The rusty hinges groaned. Lilli's small, white face peered out at me.

“What do you want, Louisa?”

I hadn't seen her since before Clarence Hampton's death, and the change in her shocked me. She had grieved for her brother; now she was like a woman harrowed and broken. Her tangled hair hung loose upon her back, and dark shadows under her eyes gave her a sepulchral appearance.

“We must talk about Clarence,” I told her.

She hung her head and studied the floor. She looked back up at me with tears rimming her eyes. “Come in, then,” she said.

Lilli sat on her bed. The faded red-and-blue star quilt was rumpled and the pillows bunched up against the headboard. I suspected she had lain down to rest and jumped back up again, over and over, unable to sleep. I sat on the only chair in the room, a stiff ladder-back. No wonder Lilli had preferred to do her sewing in the garden. Her room was dark and damp, and even during the day mice scurried in the rafters overhead. Strange to be wealthy, and yet live in such poverty, for that land had made her wealthy.

“What will you do now?” I asked.

“Now?” She looked up, pretending not to understand.

“Now that Clarence Hampton, your fiancé, is dead.”

She looked at me with wonder.

“My dear,” I said, “I guessed, but your eyes give it away. The signs were there. It just took me too long to put them together. Clarence had been known as a rake, but this summer he had shown little interest in the young women of Walpole and even refused to court a wealthy heiress, my friend Sylvia. He had been aloof, preoccupied, and in a strained emotional state. He was in love with you, wasn't he? Did you meet at Tupper's General Store?”

The tears now overflowed. She sobbed so hard her shoulders worked up and down. She gasped for breath and turned pink from the effort. I put my arm around her and gave her a handkerchief.

“It is time to tell someone,” I said. “Tell me, Lilli. Do not carry this weight all by yourself; it will break you.”

“Not at the store,” she said, blowing her nose and smiling as she remembered. “At the mountain. I had gone to the little clearing where the water pools—you know the place, Louisa? Where red columbines grow? I was sewing and he came, looking so funny with his new feathered mountain hat and shiny boots and that silly polka-dot tie. I laughed at him.

“Have you seen him smile, Louisa? He smiled at me the day that I laughed at him. I think first he likes me for my yellow hair and because I am a working girl that he can play with. But then I saw there was more that he buried deep inside, that he wanted to be with me because there was a kind of peace between us, an understanding. Do you see that?”

“I think I do,” I said. “Many people think that in love, like attracts like. But Abba says that opposites are more likely to attract. I think Clarence could have loved you just for being so very different from his own mother.”

“Yes,” Lilli said. “He is not in good relations with his mother. For me, he says he will learn to farm, to like simple. He was to make a vegetable garden. But he never did.”

I thought of the turned-over patch where Father had planted his own garden, the same place where Sylvia had once seen Clarence poking at the ground . . . the garden Clarence had not finished. That part of the riddle was solved.

“Your brother did not approve, did he?” I asked Lilli.

Lilli twisted the damp handkerchief. “He had a friend in Holland who was to come over and marry me. I had agreed before we left home, but I was just a little girl, you see. And then I met Clarence.”

“My dear, I am so sorry.” It was all I could think of to say, and Abba had taught me that sometimes it was enough.

Lilli rested her head and sobbed for a long while. When she grew calm again, I gently pushed her away so that we were eye-to-eye.

“Lilli, think carefully before you answer. You have already met with so much tragedy that a lie could make life unendurable. You will survive this, but only with truth. Tell me: Do you think Clarence could have wished to harm Ernst? So that you might wed?”

Lilli's blue eyes darkened. “No,” she said. “Clarence would not do that. He would not hurt me so much, to kill my brother.”

“Even if you could wed afterward?”

“No. Because there was Clarence's family, too. His mother wanted him to marry a rich girl. We kept it a secret from them. Clarence said we must wait for the right time or . . .” She hesitated. “Or something terrible would happen.”

A knock sounded at Lilli's door. Mrs. Roder, with the broth.

“Go away!” Lilli said.

I opened the door and took the tray from the landlady's hands. I set the tray on a small table, and opened the curtains over Lilli's one window, letting in a little light. “Both Ernst and Clarence loved you,” I told her. “You must live—for them.” I broke the bread into the broth, and after a few attempts Lilli let me spoon-feed her.

After she had eaten she grew sleepy, so I pulled the quilt over her and left. The truth does more than set you free. It allows you to rejoin the living, to eat and sleep and pick up the threads of a life come unraveled, so that it may be made whole again.

 

 

I HAD PROMISED to sit with Ida Tupper that afternoon, to relieve Anna. My sister greeted me at the door when I arrived, and she looked thankful to see me.

“This is a strange house, Louy,” she said. “Mrs. Tupper sleeps mostly from all the drops she is taking, and Mr. Wattles refuses to speak to me, or even see me.”

“He has returned to his misanthropic ways,” I said. “And . . . Clarence?”

“In the dining room. Abba helped me with the laying out.”

“Mrs. Tupper did not assist?”

“In honesty, we did not wish her to. She either sleeps or raves.”

“Go home and get some rest.” I kissed Anna on the forehead and gave her a little push in the direction of the Alcott cottage. She looked at me thankfully over her shoulder and disappeared through the hedge.

Mrs. Tupper's house smelled musty and unused, the way large houses do when too few people inhabit them. The little maid seemed to have disappeared, so I hung my linen coat and straw hat on the hall rack. I moved quietly down the hall, over the expensive Turkish rug, noticing the new wallpaper, the new pictures hung over the wallpaper, the new little figurines on the bric-a-brac shelf. Mrs. Tupper and her brother seemed disinclined to favor old and sentimental memorial objects over the new and stylish.

The door to the library was closed. I knocked. “Mr. Wattles?” I called.

A long silence, then a gruff voice: “I do not wish to be disturbed” came from deep within that room, from behind the locked door.

“I thought you might want some tea and toast,” I suggested.

Another long silence. I heard papers being rearranged, the squeak of his wheeled chair.

“Come back in half an hour. If you don't mind,” he added.

I found Ida upstairs in her bedroom. On the dresser was the same tintype picture of Jonah Tupper that hung in the general store; it was the only masculine element in a room that was a frenzy of pink chintz and lace.

Ida herself was sleeping on her back, her mouth open and moving as if she talked in her sleep, though no sound came out. I looked down at her, and for the first time felt the compassion that is the essence of human friendship. Without the horsehair rolls to fill it out, her hair was limp and thin; without the rouge, one could see all too clearly the papery complexion of a woman past her youthful beauty.

The water glass with its dregs of laudanum was on her night table. I washed it and filled it with clear, health-bringing water.

Then I went into the parlor, to where Clarence Hampton had been laid out.

No candles had been lighted here; no sister or mother or uncle knelt in prayer. Clarence was alone.