Murder at Marble House (6 page)

Alarm sent me to my own feet, but Aunt Alva was too quick for me. Before I could speak up or reach for her, she was across the room, lifting Clara by the front of her dress, swinging one hand high in the air....

I braced for the slap even as I scrambled after her. Jesse had better reflexes than I; a lengthy stride brought him to Aunt Alva, and he grasped her raised wrist at the same time he commanded, “Mrs. Vanderbilt, release Miss Parker this instant or I’ll be forced to restrain you in a more permanent way.”

The shock of being spoken to in such a manner proved more efficient than any physical force could have. Aunt Alva released her hold on Clara and swung about. “Restrain me? Restrain
me?
”

“Yes, Mrs. Vanderbilt, that is what I said,” he replied mildly, his reserves of patience endless. He released her wrist.

On the other side of the desk, Anthony Dobbs held his pencil aloft and forgotten as he took in the scene. His heavy features filled with pure glee.

“There’s your criminal.” Aunt Alva gestured to Clara. “That’s whom you need to restrain. Do you not know who I am? Do you not understand what I am capable of, young man? Do you wish to continue in your employment as a police officer, or would you prefer to sweep chimneys or muck stables?”

“Aunt Alva, please, Detective Whyte is simply doing his job. He can’t allow you to attack Clara, or anyone else for that matter. And besides, Clara wasn’t accusing you of anything. She was merely pointing out that . . .” Oh dear, how to put this delicately, especially with Aunt Alva’s fuming wrath now aimed at me.

I swallowed audibly. I’d never seen her quite like this before. Oh, I’d seen her angry. I’d seen her railing at Uncle William, Consuelo, her younger brothers, the servants.... But just then, with the fury emanating from her like summer heat off a cobbled road, she did indeed seem capable of anything. Anything at all. Even, perhaps, with the right provocation, wrapping her hands around my neck.

I stepped back. Her last words to Madame Devereaux echoed inside me, sapping my body of warmth.

 

Some twenty minutes later, two uniformed policemen stepped into the room to report that all of the servants had been questioned, their statements taken, and each seemed to have been where he or she ought to have been at the time of the murder. In other words, they all had proper alibis.

“As well they should,” Aunt Alva mumbled.

Again I reminded myself that each of her guests had attested to the same thing: They had been together in the gardens immediately before our sojourn to the pavilion. I’d heard Aunt Alva threatening, or seeming to threaten, Madame Devereaux through the open library windows, but could she have had time to follow the medium to the pavilion, strangle her, and take her place among her guests quickly enough that they hadn’t noticed her absence?

It didn’t seem likely, and the Vanderbilt part of me breathed a sigh of relief. Aunt Alva had her faults, but she was, after all, family.

The officers led a weeping Clara out of the house. No sooner had they left than another officer entered the room with Lady Amelia close behind him. “The coroner’s finished for now, sir, and the body’s being loaded into the wagon for transport into town,” he told Jesse. He only then seemed to notice Aunt Alva and me in the room, and he cast us a sheepish look. “Beg pardon, ladies.” He held out a hand from which dangled a red silk scarf. “Here’s the murder weapon. This lady here says it belongs to her.”

Lady Amelia stood with one hand pressing her bosom, the other dabbing a lace-edged handkerchief at her eyes. Yet when the delicate confection came away from her face, her cheeks were not mottled, nor were her eyes reddened. “This is most horrible.” Her accent had become subtly more English since I’d seen her last. “I didn’t recognize it when we first found the poor woman . . . well, I was distraught, of course. To think, that dreadful girl stole my scarf right out of my room and used it to . . . to . . .”

“We don’t know that for certain yet,” I told her. “Clara is innocent until proven guilty. Isn’t that right, Jesse?”

“Bah!” Aunt Alva exclaimed at the same time Detective Dobbs snorted.

Jesse crossed the room to take the scarf from the policeman. He held it up, allowing it to unfurl to its full length, a good four feet. “Do you know when it went missing, Lady Amelia?”

Lifting her hems, she moved elegantly into the room, almost slinking, with the way her body swayed within the trim, tailored lines of her emerald gown.

Why hadn’t I noticed it before? If Madame Devereaux had conducted herself with the practiced finesse of a stage performer, this woman did so to no less of an extent, though her mannerisms were of a different sort. Refined rather than theatrical, but no less affected.

I stored the impression away for later and concentrated on her reply.

“I couldn’t tell you when it was taken,” she said, reaching out to finger the end of the scarf trailing from Jesse’s hand. “I hadn’t had occasion to wear it since arriving at Marble House.”

“Where had you kept it?” Jesse asked.

“In the clothespress in my dressing room. Where else would I keep it?”

“Did you put it there, or did your maid when she unpacked your belongings?”

Beneath a layer of powder, Lady Amelia’s cheeks turned pink. She hesitated, her gaze flickering over my aunt and me in turn. Her chin came up. “I put it there myself.”

Why so defensive? Before I could wonder, Jesse turned to Aunt Alva. “Was Clara serving as Lady Amelia’s maid?”

Aunt Alva sounded almost surprised, as if something about those circumstances had only just struck her as strange. “She was, when I could spare her from her other duties.”

“Then Clara had access to Lady Amelia’s things.” Jesse blew out a breath, and I realized that, like me, he very much hoped to find Clara innocent. He turned back to Lady Amelia. “I take it your own maid has been delayed in coming?”

“She is ill,” the woman replied without missing a beat, then added, “poor dear.”

“People get ill,” Anthony Dobbs commented to no one in particular, as if summing up a conundrum. He shrugged his shoulders, closed his tablet, and got to his feet. “I think we’ve heard enough.”

“You go ahead back to the station and write up the report,” Jesse said to him. “I want to take another look at the pavilion.”

Dobbs frowned. “We been through it already. So have the bluecoats. What else you expect to find?”

“Whatever we might have missed.”

“Suit yourself.” Dobbs headed for the door.

Jesse handed the murder weapon back to the policeman who had brought it in. “Bring this back to the station. I’ll be along later.”

“How you gonna get back, sir?”

Jesse glanced at me, and I nodded. “I’ll get back,” he told the officer. Then he nodded at Lady Amelia, bid Aunt Alva good day, glanced at me and gestured toward the door. “Emma, would you mind?”

We walked back out to the pavilion together.

“What
do
you hope to find?” I asked once we’d cleared the terrace steps. I felt eyes on our backs. Aunt Alva’s, no doubt, but I judged that we had gone beyond her hearing.

“I’m not sure. Maybe nothing. But I want you there all the same.”

I couldn’t help smiling and uttering a quiet, “Thank you.”

“This doesn’t mean I want you getting involved. Not in any active way. But . . .” He sighed. “I can’t deny that you’ve got the instincts of a real detective, Emma.”

“Not to mention the brains?” I couldn’t resist adding.

He nodded. “Yes, the brains, too. Absolutely.”

The pavilion came into view through the hedges and my steps began to drag. Jesse stopped a few feet ahead of me and looked back. He studied me a moment before saying, “I’m sorry, Emma. What was I thinking? You shouldn’t be out here.”

“No . . . no, it’s all right.” I drew a deep breath and strode to where he waited for me. “I want to help. I have to, Jesse.”

He smiled grimly. “Aunt Sadie?”

“In a way. She taught me to care about them. About everyone who has no voice. Girls like Clara. Like Katie, who used to work for my uncle Cornelius and lives with me now.”

“You really think Clara’s innocent?” We’d resumed walking again, side by side. Jesse offered me his arm, and I slipped my hand into the crook of his elbow. We continued in companionable silence until we reached the pavilion steps.

At the top, I answered his question. “I don’t know for sure. It’s just a feeling I have. When I look at her, with that delicate frame and those huge eyes of hers, I just don’t see a murderer. Do you?”

“Oh, Emma, murderers look like all kinds of people. If recent events have taught you anything, it should be that.”

He referred to the case I’d helped solve, the murder my own brother had been accused of committing. In the end, the guilty party had been someone I’d never have suspected if I’d lived a thousand years. And yet, looking back, there
had
been signs....

I turned away from him to glance around the pavilion. The card table still occupied the space at the center of the floor, and the crystal ball caught the rays of sunlight slanting beneath the roof and sent them dancing on the ceiling, floor, and columns. The coins had been scooped up, the cards removed. A light scent of incense, though long extinguished, still permeated the air. Better that than the scent of death, I thought morbidly.

I walked farther in, then stopped and turned. “So, what are we looking for that we haven’t already noted?”

Jesse strode past me, circled the card table, and went to the far railing. He turned and stared at the pavilion entrance, then shifted his gaze closer, to the table. “Madame Devereaux sat there, waiting for Mrs. Vanderbilt and her guests. Tell me exactly what you saw, and what you think might have happened, Emma.”

“Well . . .” I studied the table for a moment, picturing the scene as it had been earlier. “Actually, Madame Devereaux might not have been sitting and waiting. It makes more sense that she was busy preparing. Lighting the candles, the incense, placing everything just so. The scene was set when we arrived.”

Jesse nodded. “Go on.”

“If she sat, my guess is it was because someone had come asking about their future.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because of the cards and the coins. It looked as if she’d been in the middle of reading a fortune. And because . . .” I fell silent, trying to put my finger on why Madame Devereaux hadn’t been surprised by her killer. Finally, it hit me. “The tablecloth. It wasn’t askew or rumpled. It was just as it is now, except that Madame Devereaux had fallen over facedown on it. As if someone had placed her gently down.”

“Someone who’d been standing behind her, perhaps?”

“Exactly.”

“As you found Clara.” This was not a question, but a statement of fact.

My shoulders slumped. “Yes, but . . .”

“Let’s think this through.” Jesse moved to stand behind the chair, just where Clara had. “Now, supposing you’ve just strangled the woman, and you hear someone coming. What would you do?”

His expression held knowledge of the answer, yet he waited for my hypothesis. I studied the artfully winding path leading from the gardens to the pavilion. I realized with a start that although the shadowy interior of the pavilion wouldn’t be visible from the upper gardens because of the foliage, it was possible from this raised vantage point to catch flashes of anyone on their way down the path. If Clara had come from the house, her white pinafore and cap would have stood out against the greenery, visible to the killer in a succession of glimpses at each break in the hedges.

“He saw her coming,” I murmured. Then, louder, I said, “He—or she—saw Clara coming down the path and made his escape.”

Jesse was nodding. “My guess is our culprit went over the railing directly behind Madame Devereaux’s chair, and then ran between the azalea hedges and through those trees.” He pointed to a stand of dogwoods and graceful willows. He beckoned me beside him. “My colleagues have already noted the broken branches in the hedge. See?”

I went to the railing and peered out over the shady vista. The growth Jesse indicated stood twisted to awkward angles among the perfectly trimmed hedge, as if forcefully shoved aside and then allowed to fall haphazardly and brokenly back into place. “Did they find any torn fabric, or even threads, in the branches?”

“Unfortunately not,” he replied. “Which in itself provides a clue. It tells us the person was wearing sturdy clothing.”

“Not delicate silk or muslin,” I said. “The footsteps Clara heard . . . By the time she reached the pavilion, he was well away, and Clara was too distraught over what she found to give those footsteps another thought.”

I turned back to Jesse, reaching back to clutch the railing behind me. “The question is why?”

“Why was Madame Devereaux murdered?” Jesse sent me a warning glance. “Mind you, Emma, this is all speculation. We could be dead wrong, and Clara is guilty as sin.”

“I doubt that very much. What reason could Clara Parker have to murder anyone? What would her motive be?”

“Fortune-tellers make enemies all the time. Clara might simply have managed to make it to the front of a long line of people waiting to wring Ellen Deere’s neck.”

“Ellen Deere! I heard that name spoken once before today. Mrs. Stanford said it when Madame Devereaux first arrived.” The earlier incident flashed in my mind. “For an instant she looked furious . . . and so did Madame Devereaux, for that matter. But it was quick, and at the time I thought maybe I’d imagined it. Now, however . . . well. It certainly makes one think.”

“Mrs. Stanford, you say?” When I nodded, Jesse raised his eyebrows. “Looks like I’ll have to question Hope Stanford again, won’t I?”