Angel And the Jabberwocky Murders An Augusta Goodnight Mystery With Heavenly Recipes

Chapter One Oh, I wish I were a little bar of soap! I wish I were a little bar of soap! I'd slippy and I'd slidy over everybody's hidey. Oh, I wish I were a little bar of soap . . ." Sighing, I flipped over in bed for the umpteenth time and buried my head under the pillow. Teddy, my six-year-old grandson, had plagued me with that ridiculous ditty all afternoon and now I couldn't get the silly song out of my head, so when thunder rattled the windows and lightning exploded like a flashbulb just outside my bedroom, I welcomed the diversion. Clementine, however, did not. My dog awoke from her favorite sleeping spot on the kitchen rug and began to bark frantically, toenails scratching as she dashed back and forth on the hardwood floors. I was reaching for my robe to go and calm her when I heard her enormous paws pounding up the stairs to Augusta, her guardian angel. And mine. It had been Augusta who had taken the puppy under her wing, so to speak, the year before, and now Clementine not only claimed what had been my grandmother's rag rug in the kitchen, but my favorite chair, the run of the houseand my heart. "Hush now, it's all right." Augusta spoke from the top of the stairs and the dog immediately stopped barking to huddle at the angel's feet. "I think this calls for some spiced cider," she said, gathering a voluminous cloudlike shawl about her trembling shoulders. Augusta has suffered from bouts of the shivers since that long-ago Christmas at Valley Forge, she tells me. She sat on the stairs and took the big dog's head into her lap, drawing the animal closer until they both stopped trembling, then followed me into the sitting room, where I poked futilely at the embers in the fireplace. With an inconspicuous wave of her hand, Augusta soon had amber flames licking what had once been a limb from a black-walnut tree that had come close to crashing into the house during a late-August storm. "Do-law! Another two inches and that thing would've slammed right into your roof," my next-door neighbor, Nettie McGinnis, had announced, observing the sodden debris. "I'll swear, Lucy Nan, you must have a guardian angel!" I smiled and agreed. She was right, of course, but except for me, no one was aware of Augusta's presence but my friend Ellis Saxon. A year ago, when she came to my door in response to my advertisement for a room to rent, Augusta had announced that during that particular period in her life Ellis needed a bit of divine intervention as well, and it wasn't long before her prediction proved to be true. Warmth from the fire had taken the chill from the room when I returned from the kitchen with two steaming mugs of cider and a doggie treat for Clementine, whom I rudely dislodged from my chair. Augusta curled up with a lap robe on a corner of the sofa and the two of us sipped in companionable silence, listening to rain pounding against the house and the rhythmic thump of Clementine's tail. Another peaceful evening in Stone's Throw, South Carolina, I thought. Of course it didn't last. "I'm kind of worried about Claudia," my neighbor Nettie said the next day as we attempted to clear a pathway through soggy leaves and twigs from the sidewalk out front. Acorns crunched underfoot as I sidestepped a puddle. "What's the matter with Claudia?" I asked. Claudia Pharr was the youngest and most recent member of Stone Throw's oldest book club, the Thursday Morning Literary Society (commonly referred to as The Thursdays), which now meets on MondayBallard, Mignon F. is the author of 'Angel And the Jabberwocky Murders An Augusta Goodnight Mystery With Heavenly Recipes' with ISBN 9780312354190 and ISBN 0312354193.