Free Louisa and the Country Bachelor : A Louisa May Alcott Mystery (9781101547564) by Anna Maclean Page A

rolled up the sleeves of my sweater and my trouser legs, and both arms and legs were now bare before this stranger. Worse, a bough had removed my cap, and my hair tumbled down my back. My hair was chestnut-colored, and there was a considerable quantity of it.
    â€œAre you a fairy?” he asked in slurred amazement.
    â€œThat I am not,” I said, pulling down my sweater sleeves and knotting up my hair. “I am Miss Louisa Alcott, a visitor here in Walpole.”
    â€œWhy are you dressed like that?” he asked suspiciously. “Are you in disguise? Are you here to cause more harm? Did she send for you?” He tilted his body to look at me, and I feared he would tilt himself right over into a fall. Yet I dared not approach to steady him.
    â€œI run,” I said, puzzled by his barrage of questions and determined to memorize them exactly as he had said them, since there seemed to be some purport in his phrases that needed sorting out. Instead of answering those strange questions, I stalled with one of my own: “Why are you camped in the woods?”
    He sat down now, and put his chin in his hands.
    â€œTo discover fossils. And to get away from them,” he said. I understood from his voice that he fled some group of people, not petrified remains. He looked up wildly. “I can say no more.” He began to weep! “Go away,” he sobbed, raising his fists.
    I fled. Gentle reader, be assured I did not flee so quickly that I did not first ascertain one fact: This camp spot was not far from the edge of the cliff from which Mr. Nooteboom pitched to his death. I had come by a longer path, but ended up very close to that same place.
    Â 
    Â 
    I DID NOT speak of this encounter to Abba or Father or Sylvia. Something stayed my tongue. I believe I wished to make sense of that strange encounter, to discover its meaning, and so I let it simmer in my imagination. I returned home to discover Abba singing happily in the kitchen, and enjoyed such a flush of creative energy that I went straight to my writing shed and began my elf stories, though strange worries about the death of Ernst Nooteboom fluttered through my thoughts. I spent most of the day writing, mindless of all else. Abba, my inspiration, left a tray outside my door and kept all others away.
    â€œMay I read it, once it is done?” she asked with maternal eagerness.
    â€œI ask no greater honor than to place it in your hands,” I said. In my younger days, Abba read everything I wrote. Well, almost everything. There was the issue of those lurid “blood and thunders” that I wrote for the money they brought. They were not Louisa May Alcott’s work but the sins of some personage known as Anonymous and sometimes Flora Fair-field.
    I emerged from my shed feeling slightly feverish, and when Abba announced we were to visit Eliza the next afternoon I almost decided to stay alone at home to rest.
    Something bade me go, some instinct for discovery. It had occurred to me that Walpole was missing several young men: Ernst, who had died; Jonah Tupper, who was traveling; and Ida’s son, Clarence, who likewise was said to be traveling. Such a strange coincidence!
    At Eliza’s the next day, I asked Ida—for of course Ida, in all her flounced glory, was in attendance—if she had heard from her traveling husband.
    She trembled and sighed.
    â€œIt is unfair,” she declared, gazing sadly out the window, “the things a wife must put up with. Don’t you find marriage to be frightfully unfair, Abba?”
    Abba, who had finished an entire sock in the length of time it took Ida to cast on one ragged row, shook her head.
    â€œNot at all,” said that staunch mother. “I can’t imagine life without my family about me.”
    â€œBut that’s exactly what I mean!” wailed Ida. “Jonah is gone ever so long. I do worry.”
    At that precise moment Eliza and Mrs. Fisher came in with a tray of