Cinderella Six Feet Under (2 page)

“Duck!” Prue whispered.

There was a clatter above, voices coming closer; someone pushed a window open.

Ophelia and Prue stumbled off to the side until they were safely in shadow once more. They'd come to the second wing of the mansion. All of the windows were black except for two on the main floor.

“Let's look,” Ophelia whispered. “Could be your ma.”

They picked their way towards the windows, into what seemed to be a marshy vegetable patch.

Ophelia stepped around some sort of half-rotten squash, and wedged the toe of her boot between two building stones. She gripped the sill to pull herself up, and her waterlogged rump padding threatened to pull her backwards. She squinted through the glass. “Most peculiar,” she whispered. “Looks like some sort of workshop. Tables heaped with knickknacks.”

“A tinker's shop?” Prue clambered up. “Oh. Look at all them gears and cogs and things.”

“Why would there be a tinker's shop in this grand house? Your ma married a nobleman. Yet it's on the main floor of the house, not down where the servants' workplaces must be.” A fire burned in a carved fireplace and piles of metal things glimmered.

“Crackers,” Prue whispered. “Someone's in there.”

Sure enough, a round, bald man hunched over a table. One of his hands held a cube-shaped box. The other twisted a screwdriver. Ophelia couldn't see his face because he wore brass jeweler's goggles.

“What in tarnation is he doing?” Prue spoke too emphatically, and her bonnet brim hit the windowpane.

The man glanced up. The lenses of his goggles shone.

Holy Moses. He looked like something that had crawled out of a nightmare.

The man stood so abruptly that his chair collapsed behind him. He lurched towards them.

Ophelia hopped down into the vegetable patch.

Prue recoiled. For a few seconds she seemed suspended, twirling her arms in the air like a graceless hummingbird. Then she pitched backwards and thumped into the garden a few steps from Ophelia.

“Hurry!” Ophelia whispered. “Get up! He's opening the window!”

Prue didn't get up. She screamed. The kind of long, shrill scream you'd use when, say, falling off a cliff.

The man flung open the window. He yelled down at them in French.

“Get me off of it!” Prue yelled. “Oh golly, get me
off
of it!”

Ophelia crouched, hooked her hands under Prue's arms, and dragged her to her feet. They both stared, speechless, down into the dark vegetation. Raindrops smacked Ophelia's cheeks. Prue panted and whimpered at the same time

Then—the man must've turned on a lamp—light flared.

A gorgeous gown of ivory tulle and silk sprawled at Ophelia's and Prue's feet, embroidered with gold and silver thread.

A gown. That was all. That had to be all.

But there was a foot—mercy, a
foot
—protruding from the hem of the gown. Bare, white, slick with rainwater. Toes bruised and blood-raw, the big toenail purple.

Ophelia's tongue went sour.

Hair. Long, wet, curled hair, tangled with a leaf and clotted with blood. A face. Eyes stretched open. Dead as a doornail.

Ophelia stopped breathing.

The thing was, the dead girl was the spitting image of . . . Prue.

T
he goggled man's yelling stopped, and he vanished.

He'd be summoning the law. Or maybe unleashing a pack of drooling hounds.

Ophelia managed to stagger away with Prue from that horrible . . . thing. Prue's whimpers inched into a hysterical register.

Ophelia lowered them both to a seat on the edge of a fountain. The fountain's black water mirrored the lights of the party still going full-steam ahead inside. Those fancy folk hadn't heard Prue's screams through the piano music.

“Calm yourself. It will be all right.” Ophelia stroked Prue's hunched back. These were hypocritical words, since Ophelia was feeling about as calm as a nor'easter herself. But what else could you say to a girl who'd just laid eyes on her dead double? “We'll leave this place, Prue, just as soon as you're able to walk. How would that be?”

Prue panted through her teeth.

“And that girl,” Ophelia said, “well, there must be some horrible mistake, or maybe—”

“How could it be a mistake? Them
holes
in her. The blood. The—”

“I don't know. But we'll leave, even if it means sleeping on a park bench, but first you must steady your breath, and—”

“My sister.”

“Sister? Have you a sister?” In all the years Ophelia had known Prue, she'd never heard of a sister.

“Had. I
had
a sister. Now she's gone, and I never had a—had a—had a—” Prue crumpled into fresh sobs.

Her sobs were so noisy that Ophelia didn't hear the scrunching gravel behind them until it was too late.

“You two,” someone said just behind them. “
Mais
oui
. I might have guessed.”

Ophelia twisted around.

Baldewyn the steward minced around the fountain. Even in the dim light, it was easy to see his pistol, aimed straight at Ophelia's noggin.

“You hold that gun just as prettily as a feather duster,” Ophelia said, “but doesn't the hammer need to be cocked?”

“Forgive me,” Baldewyn said. “I had been inclined to think I was dealing with a lady. Not”—he cocked the hammer— “a sharpshooter. I had almost forgotten that you two are not only derelicts, but Americans. Does everyone in that wilderness of yours fancy themselves a—how do you say?—cowboy?
S'il vous plaît
, rise and walk.”

“Not on your nelly.”

“What a quaint expression. Does it mean no? Sadly,
no
is not, at this juncture, a possibility. The marquis has informed me that you have been trespassing, and that there appears to be a corpse on the premises. On occasions such as these, it is customary to take invading strangers into custody.”

“You aren't the police,” Ophelia said.

“Oh, the
Gendarmerie Royale
has been summoned and the
commissaire
will be notified. You cannot escape. Now, I really must insist”—Baldewyn leaned around, pressed the barrel of the pistol between Ophelia's shoulder blades, and gave it a corkscrew—“that you march.”

He prodded Ophelia with the gun across the garden to the house, Prue clinging to Ophelia's arm all the way. They reached a short flight of steps that led down to a door. Windows on either side of the door guttered with dull orange light.

“The cellar?” Prue said. “You ain't going to rabbit hutch us in the cellar are you, mister?”

Baldewyn's answer was a shove that sent Ophelia and Prue slipping and stumbling down the mossy steps. Baldewyn followed. He kicked open the door, and bundled Ophelia and Prue across the threshold.

The door slammed and a latch clacked.

They were locked in.

*   *   *

Prue had reckoned
she'd gotten ahold of herself. A
slippery
hold, leastways. But something about the sound of that latch hitting home made her go all fluff-headed again. Another scream bloomed up from her lungs, but it couldn't come out. Her throat was raw now, wounded.

Wounded. Her sister. Those creeping dark stains. Her poor, small, battered foot.

“Look,” Ophelia said in the Sunday School Teacher voice she always used on Prue. “Look. It's only a kitchen, see?”

Right. Only a kitchen. A mighty
dirty
kitchen.

“And,” Ophelia added, “it's spacious. No need to feel cooped up.”

Half of the kitchen glowed from orange cinders in a fireplace. The other half wavered in shadow. Iron kettles on chains bubbling up wafts of savor and herbs. Plank table cluttered with crockery. Copper pots dangling from thick ceiling beams.

And . . . little motions flickering along the walls. Prue rubbed her eyes. The motions didn't stop. Black, streaming, skittery—

“Mice!” she yelled.

In three bounds, Prue was on top of the table. Crockery crashed. A chair toppled sideways.

Mice.
Uck
. Prue's skin itched all over. She disliked most critters with feet smaller than nickels, and she
hated
mice. Blame it on her girlhood, on the lean times spent in Manhattan rookeries.

“My sainted aunt.” Ophelia righted the chair.

“Sorry.” Prue crouched on the tabletop, arms hugged around her damp, muddy knees.

Ophelia, silent, stooped to collect shards of crockery.

Probably marveling at how she'd been dragged into yet another fix by Prue. Prue was fond of Ophelia, but she knew—or, at least, she powerfully suspected—that Ophelia looked upon
her
as a dray horse looks upon a harness and cart. A deadweight. A chafing in the sides.

Ophelia piled the crockery shards on the table. “Tell me about your sister,” she said. “Did you never know her, then?”

“Only heard stories. Well, just one story. Ma only kept her long enough for the one story, see.”

“What was her name?”

“Don't know. She is—was—a year or two older than me. Her pa took her off when she was only a new baby. I never got to
meet
her, Ophelia, I—”

“What else did your ma say?”

“That's all. That her pa was some hoity-toity French feller, and he hired a wet nurse and took the baby off to give her a better life. Didn't want his child raised by an actress. Do you think . . . maybe Ma married him, all these years later? Maybe this here's his house? But then, why is my sister lying dead out there in the weeds with those fine folks inside laughing and listening to piano songs and—”

“Shush, now. Don't work yourself up.”

Prue patted her bodice. From beneath damp layers of wool and cotton came the comforting crackle of paper.

The letter. Her treasured secret. Proof that
somebody
in this wide world wanted her. Maybe.

*   *   *

Ophelia and Prue
hunkered on stools at the kitchen hearth. They kept their wet cloaks and bonnets on. Their soaked boots steamed. Mice nibbled food scraps under the table.

From the rooms above came muffled voices, foot thuds, door slams. Outside in the garden, men's voices rose and fell behind the spatter of rain on the windows. Lights shone and turned away like unsteady lighthouses.

More than an hour passed.

“Oh!” Prue's head bobbed up. “Someone's coming down the stairs.”

Ophelia straightened her wig and stood. “Let me do the talking.”

A person ought never show up to a murder wearing a disguise. Ophelia had realized
that
nugget of wisdom too late. The problem was that if one whipped off a wig and padded hips, say, shortly after a dead body was discovered, well, suspicions were sure to kindle.

Which meant there was no choice but to blunder forward in this absurd disguise.

Three men piled into the kitchen: the bald, egg-shaped fellow they'd seen tinkering with the screwdriver, and two young men in brass-buttoned blue uniforms. Police.

“Precisely
what
is the meaning of this?” Ophelia asked in her best Outraged Chaperone voice. “Locking us up like common criminals? I'll have you know this is the marquise's daughter, Miss Prudence Bright. Where is the marquise—where is Henrietta?”

The men gawked at Prue.

“I presume that your
extremely
rude staring,” Ophelia said, “is due to the simple fact that the dead girl in the garden is—was—
also
Henrietta's daughter, and thus Miss Bright's sister. The resemblance is indeed uncanny, but that is not an excuse to gape at this poor girl as though she were a circus sideshow.”

“Sister?” the egg-shaped man said. “Oh.
Sisters
. I see. I beg your pardon,
madame
. I have forgotten my manners. I am Renouart Malbert, the Marquis de la Roque-Fabliau. The master of this house.”

Malbert wore an elegant suit of evening clothes that was fifteen years out of mode and frayed about the cuffs and collar. He was so short he had to tip his custard-soft chins up to look into Ophelia's face. His jeweler's goggles had been replaced with round, gold spectacles. His eyes blinked like a clever piglet's.

“
Et oui
, oh yes,
mon Dieu
,” Malbert said, “Mademoiselle Bright does indeed resemble the girl—her sister, you say—in the garden, and also my dear, darling, precious Henrietta.”

Henrietta was lots of things, but
dear
,
darling
, and
precious
were not at the top of the list.

“The girl in the garden, you say?” Ophelia frowned. “Then you do not know her name?”

“Why, no,” Malbert said. “She is a stranger to me.”

“A stranger!”

“Yet now that I see this daughter—Prudence, you say?—of my darling wife, well, now I begin to discern a family resemblance. Oh dear me.” Malbert dabbed his clammy-looking pate with a hankie. “A most perplexing matter, troubling, macabre, even.”

“I should say so,” Ophelia said. “Perhaps the girl was searching, too, for her mother at this house.”

“Are you a relation of dear Henrietta's, as well?”

“No, I am . . .” Ophelia cleared her throat. “I am Mrs. Brand. Of Boston, Massachusetts. Miss Bright could not, of course, travel without a chaperone. She is young, and quite alone. I encountered her by chance, degraded to the role of maid by an appalling series of events, in the scullery of an American family residing in Germany. I agreed to escort her, out of a sense of national duty and womanly propriety, to her mother here in Paris.” Half-truths, and a couple of whoppers. But Ophelia couldn't very well say
she
was an actress, too, because that would mean revealing she was in disguise. Besides, she'd already had a mix-up with the police in Germany.

Speaking of which . . . Ophelia looked at the two officers. They had scarcely three chin hairs between them.

She could cow them. Easy as pie.

With Malbert translating, the two officers questioned Ophelia and Prue at the kitchen table. They had no identity papers, which caused a stir until Ophelia shamed the officers with a reminder that ladies needn't carry such vulgar documents, and that a lady's word was verification enough. She elaborated on the string of half-truths and whoppers, and summed up their discovery of the body in the garden.

“So,” she said, “if you mean to arrest us for murder, I do hope you will be quick about it, for I do not think Miss Bright and I shall abide another hour—no, not another
minute
—in this shockingly inhospitable house. I would rather spend the night in jail, thank you very much.”

Malbert translated.

Both officers' eyes grew round, and they muttered to each other in French.

“What rude men!” Ophelia said.

“They are surprised at your suggestion of arrest,” Malbert said to Ophelia, “since the murderer has already been identified.”

“Oh! And arrested?”

“Not yet. It seems the scoundrel eluded the police and he is still at large, but the
Gendarmerie
is out in full force and he is expected to be apprehended shortly.”

“Who is he?”

“A certain vagabond, a useless, half-witted wretch who dwells in the alleyways and courtyards of this
quartier
, and who has been known to prey upon . . . ah . . . ladies of . . . ill-repute.”

Prue gasped.

“You do not mean to suggest,” Ophelia said, “that that poor girl—”

“I am afraid so.”

It wasn't so scandalous, learning that Henrietta Bright's daughter was a fallen woman. The real wonder was that Prue had retained
her
virtue, given her upbringing and her beauty, a beauty that men wished to dig into like a beefsteak dinner.

“Why was the girl in the garden of this house?” Ophelia asked.

“The police tell me that her body and garments showed signs of having been dragged there,” Malbert said.

Right. Her foot. Her bare, small, battered foot. What had become of her shoes? Had someone chased her through the night before shooting her? Is that how her toes had gotten so black and blue? “Do you mean to say that she was killed elsewhere?”