Read Online The Angel and the Jabberwocky Murders by Mignon F. Ballard - Free Book Online Page A

Miriam had reported seeing the dark-stained sickle beside the girl’s body.
    â€œI heard they’d been screwin’ around—oops, sorry!” One of the girls flushed and grinned. “I mean getting it on out there for weeks. ‘Horny’ Hornsby, they call him. And all this time I’ve been sitting right there in his class. Gives me the creeps! I wonder what she saw in him.”
    â€œOr he in her,” Celeste said. “But he didn’t have to kill her.”
    â€œShe was gone all day Friday, you know, and so was he. They must’ve met somewhere,” Troll suggested. “Maybe he wanted to break it off and she threatened to tell his wife. That’s probably why she was crying the next morning.” Troll was one of a group tending simmering pokeberries at the next stove and she carelessly shoved hair from her face, leaving a dark red smear. Though the girls were swathed in huge aprons and wore rubber gloves almost to their elbows, it was impossible to protect every inch. My old once-white sneakers were spattered in yellowish-brown, and I knew I had painted my nose when I gave in to an itch.
    â€œWait just a minute,” I said. “We don’t know that he did kill her.”
    Celeste fanned away walnut fumes and made a face. “He’s gone, isn’t he?”
    â€œMaybe he’s just scared,” I said.
    She shrugged. “That makes two of us.”

    It occurred to me as I drove home that afternoon that not one person had mentioned the suspicious letter D. C. Hunter was supposed to have received in the mail, which must mean that only the police knew about it. “Just like that other girl got,” the sergeant had said. But what other girl? The girl who was killed four years ago? If only I knew what had been inside that envelope!
    â€œWhat envelope?” Augusta asked when I told her about it that night.
    â€œThen they must be keeping it quiet for a reason,” she said when I told her what I had heard at Blythe Cornelius’s apartment. “And by the way, your cousin called and left a message just before you got home. Seems the professor turned himself in this afternoon.”
    â€œWhere was he? Has he admitted anything?”
    â€œJo Nell said he showed up at the police station around four—been staying with a relative. Says he didn’t do it.” Augusta had laid a fire in the sitting room and now she gazed at the embers, absently stroking Clementine’s black-and-white head. “I wonder how long he’s been at the college. Could he have had anything to do with the other girl’s death?”
    â€œI’m sure Captain Hardy’s looking into that,” I said. “He seems to know what he’s doing. Do you think there might be a connection?”
    Augusta’s amber necklace reflected the flickering blaze on the hearth. “It might be a good idea,” she said, “to look into some of the old newspaper files. You never can tell what might turn up.”
    â€œBut don’t you think the police have already done that?”
    The angel turned her gray-green gaze on me. “That’s just the point, Lucy Nan. You’ll be looking at this with an open mind. You just might catch something that went right past them. Something so ordinary they wouldn’t think it was important.”
    I frowned. “You mean like mysterious letters?”
    â€œI mean, you’ll know it when you see it,” she said.

Chapter Six
    I wasn’t so sure about that, so I convinced Augusta to come along with me. It didn’t take a lot of persuading.
    Stone’s Throw’s weekly newspaper, The Messenger (Ellis calls it The Mess because she claims there’s a typo on every other line), shares a yellow brick building facing the town park with Petal Pushers, the new florist (“We sell every blooming thing!”) and McBride’s Pharmacy.
    The receptionist put her telephone conversation