The Angel and the Jabberwocky Murders by Mignon F. Ballard

almost every week, and it seems like there was a bill from a credit-card company. I don’t remember the other stuff, but it’s all up there on her desk. That’s where I always put it.”
    â€œWould you mind going along while Sergeant Acree takes a look at those?” the captain said with a nod to the younger policeman. “We’ll need your permission, of course, to enter your room, and we’ll want to see her other things as well.”
    Joy Ellen had left a few minutes earlier, and I was squishing my wet clothes into a grocery sack before starting for home when Sergeant Acree put in a breathless appearance at Blythe’s door with what appeared to be four or five envelopes in a plastic bag. “Looks like another one,” he said in what I’m sure was meant to be a low voice. “Just like that other girl got.”
    Another what? What other girl? I knew they wouldn’t tell me if I asked, but if I could manage to sort of blend in with the background, maybe the captain and his sidekick would forget I was there—at least long enough for me to eavesdrop a little.
    But that was not to be.
    â€œWhere is she? Where’s our granddaughter?” From outside in the hallway, the woman’s words caught at my heart. There was still hope in her voice. She hadn’t been officially informed of D.C.’s death, and for a few flimsy seconds she could cling to the possibility that everything would be all right. But she knew. The ugly, stark knowledge of it overrode her words, and it hurt, hurt, hurt.
    The captain stepped outside at the commotion and I heard him speak softly. “Please, ma’am, let’s go in here where you can sit down. I wish there were some kinder way to tell you…”
    I stood aside to make room for them: the trim, matronly woman in what looked to be a designer dress, and beside her, a tall graying man who cried silently. “Now, we don’t know, honey. We don’t know,” he said. His hand shook on her arm. He knew. I had seen those same expressions on the television news, on the front page of the newspaper wherever tragedy and disaster pointed a grim finger.
    What if it had been Julie? My Julie? My own daughter wasn’t much older than the young girl we had found that day. How could I bear it? How could they?
    Nobody noticed when I slipped outside and hurried to my car and home. I wanted Ben to hold me, and I wanted Augusta to tell me everything was going to be all right.

Chapter Five
    â€œI’ll have to admit, I’m not a bit surprised. I just had a feeling something awful had happened to that girl,” my neighbor Nettie McGinnis said the next day when I dropped by to reassure her about her niece.
    â€œYou had a feeling the first time you flew on a plane, too,” I reminded her. “Remember when you went to your cousin’s wedding in Richmond? Made out your will and everything.” I laughed, hoping my teasing would prod her out of her doldrums.
    It didn’t work. “And what’s all this I hear about that English teacher? The one who’s written that book. I always did think that man was peculiar. Leslie doesn’t have him for any of her classes, does she?”
    â€œYou mean Dr. Hornsby? I doubt it. I think he only teaches upperclassmen.”
    â€œThat’s the one, all right—the one with the dowdy wife. Sour-faced as a dish of clabber, and about as appealing.” Nettie flapped across the kitchen in her pink fuzzy bedroom slippers and removed a pile of needlework from a cane-bottom chair, gesturing for me to sit. “Know what that woman told Willene?”
    Sitting obediently, I shook my head.
    â€œSaid she’d just as soon live in the backwoods as to be stuck here in Stone’s Throw!” She lowered her voice. “It’s all over town her husband and that poor little Hunter girl were carrying on .”
    I said I’d heard. “I’m sure the