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

is to tend to the living. First a warm shower, then you’ll want something hot to drink. I’ll put on the kettle.”
    â€œLet me, please,” I said, tired of feeling useless, and was glad when she agreed. In the tiny kitchen, I arranged the dripping coats on the first chair I saw and started to fill the kettle. That’s when I heard someone gasp.
    For the first time I noticed Willene Benson seated at the small maple table in the breakfast nook with a Scrabble board in front of her, along with two china cups and a plate of Oreos. She looked up with a frown. “Lucy Nan! What’s going on? I thought I heard a commotion in the living room.”
    â€œWe found the missing student,” I said, trying to play down the grizzly details. “She’s been dead for some time and I’m afraid it’s taken an emotional toll on all of us, especially the girls who found her. Joy Ellen has phoned the police.”
    Willene’s hand went to her mouth. “Oh dear! In that case, I’d better go,” she said, rising.
    â€œNo, please! We really could use your help. Blankets—as many as you can find, and something hot to drink: canned soup—anything.” In spite of the warm kitchen, my teeth were beginning to chatter and I knew I had to get into dry clothing soon.
    In the hallway off the kitchen I found Blythe Cornelius herding the two girls into her bathroom, and soon heard a shower running. Ellis, who was relatively dry, offered to run home for dry clothes, but Joy Ellen had already phoned her teenaged daughter to bring us something to wear, and Blythe sent a message to Miriam’s roommate to hurry with warm clothing for the girls.
    Joy Ellen and I eagerly snatched the towels and robes Blythe offered and headed for the girls’ shower at the end of the hall. When we returned a few minutes later, we found Willene ladling hot tomato soup into Paula and Miriam, who huddled beneath blankets on the sofa. Two policemen stood outside the door and I recognized the younger one as Duff Acree, the sergeant who had searched my yard for missing jewelry the year before—but that’s another story. Joy Ellen and I had to explain to the two why we needed to go inside before they’d let us into Blythe’s apartment.
    â€œThose policemen aren’t setting a foot inside this door,” Blythe told us, “until these two girls have warmed up and calmed down. If the Hunter girl is dead like you say, she isn’t going anywhere, and neither are we.”
    But apparently that rule didn’t apply to her employer, Dean Holland, who sat in an armchair by the window with a grim look on his face and a coffee mug in his hand. Willene had obviously taken her assignment seriously, as everyone seemed to have been supplied with something hot to drink, and almost as soon as I stepped into the room a cup of something that smelled like lemon tea was thrust in front of me. I gulped it gratefully.
    The dean looked frail and ill, and when I went over to speak to him he merely shook his head from side to side and mumbled a groan. Partly, I knew, because he couldn’t hear a word I’d said. Deaf as a roastin’ ear, as my granddaddy used to say, but I could see the poor man was genuinely distressed at the turn of events on his campus. And he had good reason to be. If D. C. Hunter had been murdered, as it certainly seemed she had, it wasn’t going to bode well for Sarah Bedford, especially after the drowning death of that other student several years before.
    â€œOne of the policemen told me they’re waiting for Captain Hardy,” Ellis whispered aside to me. “He said two men have already been sent out to the shed where you found the Hunter girl.”
    Having completed her duties, Willene Benson slipped into her raincoat, wrapped a shawl around her neck, and started out the door for home, only to be told by one of the uniformed men to wait until the officer in