A Murder in Time (19 page)

“'Ere they come,” whispered one of the maids, who apparently had ears like a bat. Half a second later, Kendra heard the voices interspersed with feminine laugher and masculine chuckles.

They were an exotic parade, thirty men and women in total. The Duke of Aldridge led the way. On his arm was a small, plump woman in a vivid blue dress and bonnet decorated with an enormous peacock feather. Alec was right behind him. He looked more handsome than the last time she'd seen him, probably because he wasn't scowling. Instead, he seemed relaxed, smiling at the woman he was ushering into the clearing. Kendra couldn't see the woman's face, since it was angled toward Alec, and obscured by the bonnet and gauzy white veil she wore.
Wife or girlfriend?
Kendra wondered as she observed the intimacy between them.

She nearly jumped when Alec turned his head suddenly, looking straight at her. Even from that distance Kendra could see the green eyes narrow in suspicion. His companion turned, too, and looked at Kendra.

She wasn't beautiful, Kendra noted with some surprise. That, she supposed, was her own prejudice. Guys who looked like Alec usually had a beautiful woman on their arm. This woman—Kendra pegged her to be in her early twenties—had pleasant enough features, but her skin was severely pockmarked, destroying any hope of beauty.

When the woman turned back to say something to Alec, drawing his attention, Kendra deliberately shifted her gaze to the rest of the group. It was odd that there were more women than men. Societal mores, she'd have thought, would have paired up the sexes.

She spotted the brats, Sarah and Georgina, at the end of the procession, dangling off the arms of two young men who were dressed like the other men in the party—cravats, shirts, vests, coats, breeches, and boots—except the points of their collars were so starched and exaggerated, their cravats so elaborate, that their chins were swallowed up in yards of fabric.

“Lady Atwood, you've simply outdone yourself,” trilled an exquisitely lovely blonde in a sugary pink-and-white striped dress and matching coat and hat. She paused to admire the table settings. “'Tis absolutely delightful.”

“You are too kind, Lady Dover.” The woman on the Duke's arm gave a gracious nod. “Thankfully, the weather is cooperating. ‘Tis been a dreadfully chilly summer.”

As the nuncheon began, Kendra concentrated on her duties, but couldn't help but overhear snippets of conversation. In many ways, this was no different than social gatherings in her own time. Chatter centered around mutual acquaintances and the latest gossip from London. Yet she nearly dropped a plate when someone mentioned the health of King George and the political intrigue surrounding the Prince Regent.

Sweet Jesus.
Mad King George
. The guy America had revolted against. He was freaking
alive
!

“Careful with the dishware,” one of the maids whispered.

“Sorry.” She shook off her sense of amazement, and tried to pretend she was watching a period play. There was a lot of flirting going on, plenty of fluttering of ivory fans and eyelashes. It was weird to think that in another two hundred years people would flirt by pole dancing, twerking, and sexting.

The lunch seemed to stretch on interminably. But maybe that was because the maids were required to stand silently in the background. The footmen had the more active job, replenishing wineglasses under Mr. Harding's direction, and serving the food under Mrs. Danbury's eagle eye. When one of the young ladies dropped a spoon, Mrs. Danbury snapped her fingers, and a footman scooped it off the ground and replaced it with a clean spoon within seconds. If this had been a restaurant, it would've registered five stars.

The fruit and cheese were offered at the end of the meal, along with glasses of Madeira. Kendra finally understood the purpose of the extra ladies when several of the young men approached for permission to walk with the young ladies around the area.

Chaperones.
This was an era where ladies were practically kept under glass until they could be wed off.

Shaking her head—if she'd been dropped in the middle of Mars, she couldn't have felt more alienated—Kendra turned her attention to the mundane task of scraping off remnants of food from the china plates, and stacking them in the wicker baskets so they could be carted back to the castle for washing.

The scream that cut through the idyllic atmosphere was so shocking that, for the second time, Kendra nearly dropped the plate she held. Everyone froze. Then instinct and training kicked in. Kendra put the plate down and began running in the direction of the screams. She made an instinctive movement for her service weapon, her fingers brushing her skirt.

Goddamnit!

“Get back!” she shouted as she rounded the rocks and shrubbery. She saw a girl—Georgina, she recognized—shaking and crying in the arms of an ashen-faced man.

“What is it?” she demanded, scanning the area. What kind of wildlife did they have in these parts? “What's wrong?”

The man gave her a blank stare. Georgina continued wailing, hysterical. Kendra considered slapping her, but thought she'd enjoy it too much. Instead, she reached out and shook the arm of the man. “What happened?”

“T-there! Over there!” he gasped and pointed to the water.

Warily, she inched toward the edge of the lake, and caught the pale glimmer in the dark water. It could've been a dead fish, but she knew it wasn't. She knew what it was even before she saw the hair floating like flotsam on the surface of the water, the cameo blur below, the wide, dark eyes. Most likely, the girl had been pretty. Yet nature, as brutal as it was beautiful, had taken its toll. Now she was just dead.

12

Kendra studied the nude body that had been caught and anchored in the cattails and weeds along the shore.

“My God!”
The Duke of Aldridge's voice came from behind her, sounding shaken. “My God. Is that . . . ? We need to get her out of there. We need to help her!”

“She's beyond help,” Kendra stated matter-of-factly, and shifted her gaze to the surrounding area. It was as idyllic from this angle as it was from where they'd set up the nuncheon. Green trees, lush shrubbery, slate-gray rocks, and the waterfall created a private oasis of which Georgina and the young man no doubt had wished to take advantage. Instead, they'd found death—and, she could see, not an easy or a natural death. Her practiced eye scanned the body, noting the dark bruises circling her throat, the ligature marks at her wrists, and the lacerations running across the torso. Something tightened inside her as her gaze fell on what she considered the most damning of all—the injury on her left breast.

Alec crouched down beside her, his face grim as he stared at the figure under the water. “We still need to get her out of there.”

“No. We need to . . .”
Preserve the crime scene
. It hit her like a two-ton brick that those words had no meaning here. What the hell was she going to do? Call the coroner, the cops, the CSI team? She'd never studied this particular time period, but she sure as hell knew that the tools she was so familiar with in the twenty-first century were either rudimentary now, or nonexistent.

Alec eyed her curiously. “We need to . . . what?”

“Nothing,” she mumbled and rubbed her hands over her face, trying to organize her thoughts.

“What happened? Did she fall in?” A man stepped to the edge of the lake so he could get a better look.

“Most likely she was bathing, slipped, and drowned,” suggested another man.

Kendra shot him an incredulous look. Would they write this off as a
drowning
? She couldn't let that happen. “Not unless she walked naked through the forest to get here. You don't see any clothes, do you?”

Alec frowned as he did a narrow-eyed scan. “This area is a watershed, with a network of tributaries, one of which feeds this lake. The main river flows toward the ocean, but her body could've been swept downstream and carried here.”

“That may be how her body got here, but that's not how she died.” Kendra stood up abruptly. “She was murdered.”

For the space of about three seconds, there was a shocked silence.

Then someone denounced shrilly, “That's outrageous!”

Kendra glanced around. The rebuke had come from the woman in the vivid blue dress who the Duke had escorted to the nuncheon. She glared at Kendra like she was responsible for the dead woman. “Who is this creature, Bertie?”

That seemed to rouse Aldridge. He still looked deathly pale, and his hands shook visibly as he brought up a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his brow. But he made an effort to pull himself together. “Caro, you and the other ladies must return to the castle. Harding? Mrs. Danbury? Please be so good as to escort the ladies home.”

The butler moved forward. “Of course, Your Grace.”

“I'll be happy to lend my assistance to the ladies, sir.” The offer came from the young man who was still holding the whimpering, red-eyed Georgina. Sarah had raced to her friend's side, and was now casting curious glances at the lake. She didn't look eager to leave. In fact, Kendra thought several of the ladies looked undecided, wanting to display the proper horror even as they strained to get a glimpse of the body. As they were standing several yards away from the lip of the lake, Kendra doubted whether anyone could see anything. Georgina was probably the only woman who'd gotten a good view of the corpse.

Kendra caught the hard look Mrs. Danbury shot her. The housekeeper's expression would've been understood even in the twenty-first century:
Get your ass over here, now!

Her heart sank. This was outside her jurisdiction.
Way
outside her jurisdiction. Like, two hundred years outside her jurisdiction. But she couldn't force her feet to move.

They'd probably shrug the girl's death off as an accident. And why should she care? She didn't belong here. Her only concern was to get back to her own time line.

But what if the two incidents were connected? Like most people in law enforcement, Kendra wasn't a big fan of coincidences. She'd been thrown back in time, and now she was presented with a murder victim. And, God help her, the violence that had been done to this poor girl piqued every one of Kendra's instincts.

She'd probably pay for her insubordination, but she ignored the housekeeper. “The Duke's right. We need to clear the area, secure the scene,” she said in a low voice to Alec.

He gave her an odd look, but before he could respond, the woman with the pockmarked face separated herself from the group of ladies that Mr. Harding and Mrs. Danbury were trying to hustle out of the area.

“Bloody hell,” Alec muttered under his breath, and moved forward to intercept her. Kendra couldn't hear what was being said, but from the woman's body language she was making an appeal to stay while Alec was ordering her to go. The woman gestured to the lake, even stomped her foot, but Alec won the argument. The woman shot Kendra a disgruntled look, then whirled around, skirts belling out as she rejoined the departing procession.

“Now, Miss Donovan,” Alec said, returning to Kendra's side. There was a tic along the clean line of his jaw; impatience deepening the green of his eyes. “You need to explain yourself.”

Kendra had the oddest sense of déjà vu. A handful of men had stayed behind and were now staring at her. Once again, as in her life in the twenty-first century, she was the only woman . . . and a freak.

“No.” Aldridge stepped forward. “Alec, we need to get that poor girl out of the water. Now.”

Alec exchanged a look with the Duke, and nodded. “Yes, you are correct, Your Grace. I trust you have no objections, Miss Donovan?”

He was being snide, she knew, but she answered anyway. “She wasn't killed here, so you won't be destroying any trace evidence.” Not that it would matter if there was trace evidence, she thought bleakly. She wouldn't be able to examine it, anyway.

Again she felt a wave of helplessness. What could she do here? Christ, even something as simple as fingerprinting was beyond the scope of these people. Fingerprints
had
been used as a source of identification as early as the T'ang Dynasty in China, and there'd even been a murder case solved in ancient Rome by identifying a bloody handprint, but that was an anomaly. The distinctive ridges in fingerprints, she knew, wouldn't be accepted as a crime-solving tool for another fifty years.

She stepped back while Alec took charge, ordering two footmen to wade into the water to disentangle the body from the weeds. During the grim process, the younger footman began to look so green that Kendra feared he was going to throw up on the corpse at any moment. Thankfully, they managed to get her limbs free and carry her to the shore before anyone got sick. Alec was already stripping off his coat to cover her in a belated attempt at modesty.

Kendra saw the look in his eyes, knew that he understood. He'd seen what she had. That close to the body, it would've been impossible to miss.

“She's been strangled,” he said.

“Yes.” Kendra knelt, scanning the girl's white face. “God, she looks so young. Fourteen. Maybe fifteen,” she murmured softly, feeling a tug of pity. She cleared her throat. “She hasn't been in the water long. Less than twenty-four hours, I'd say.”

“What, are you a bloody body snatcher?” laughed one of the loitering young men, earning a few uneasy chuckles from his peers.

A man with ash blond hair and soulful brown eyes came forward, squatting down beside her and Alec. “I may be of some help. I was a surgeon. Simon Dalton,” he introduced himself, meeting Kendra's eyes. He shifted the jacket aside. It took Kendra a moment to realize he was being careful to preserve the girl's modesty before lifting her arm. “She's still in rigor mortis.”

“The water's cold, so rigor mortis could be slowed.”