Louisa and the Crystal Gazer (14 page)

“It looks mundane enough, doesn’t it?” Mr. Phips whispered. “The sofa, the curtains, the rug. Is it Aubusson, do you think?”

“Imitation Aubusson,” I answered. “The room does indeed appear quite ordinary, except for the broken windows where you acquired entrance that day.” The little points of glass were still on the floor under the window, and were now covered with a light layer of snow that had drifted in. “The floor will be ruined,” I said. There are moments, dear reader, when Marmee seems to speak through me.

I turned back to the door to examine the bolt from this side.

“Perhaps Mr. Barnum is right,” I said, as much to myself as to Mr. Phips. “I shall try. Mr. Phips, in a moment bolt the door behind me, will you?” I looped my thick wire around the bolt head, held it firmly in my grasp, and stepped back into the hall. After Mr. Phips shut the door, I tugged gently
on the wire. It moved, slowly and with difficulty, but it moved. Judging from the wire, the bolt was halfway home. Then it stopped, somehow stuck, at the same point at which the trick always seemed to fail. I tugged a little bit harder, trying to slide the bolt without undoing the loop. It began to move again, in minuscule jerks, and then would move no farther.

“It is bolted!” exclaimed Mr. Phips with great wonder. “My dear girl! You’ve done it! Will you allow me to give a tea some afternoon? You will, of course, bring the chaperon of your choice.”

He seemed so eager it pained me to disappoint him, but, “I am so very busy just now, Mr. Phips,” I told him.

His brow clouded with displeasure. He was, I saw then, a man used to getting his own way.

“Life requires boldness, Miss Alcott,” he said. “A young woman should not only think of duty, but once in a while of entertainment as well.” He strode off, his shoulders back and his chin high.

“Y
OU SHOULD NOT
have gone to see Mr. Nichols without me,” said Constable Cobban, plainly irritated. He sat in Auntie Bond’s best parlor with a teacup and saucer balanced on his knee, and a cake plate in his left hand. I had sent him a note explaining my visit to Mrs. Percy’s stepbrother.

“More poppy-seed biscuit?” asked Sylvia, holding the silver cake tongs poised over the cake stand. She sat close beside him on the settee, and he looked at her as if she were a
misbehaving puppy that had climbed onto the furniture without permission.

“I realize that now,” I said quietly. “I do ask your pardon, but I’m certain you have set all to rights. I have no doubt that any little disturbance we caused was quickly remedied by your competence.”

Faced with such feminine meekness he was at a loss, which had been my intention, of course. The best way to disarm a man’s wrath is to allow him to feel the false superiority underlying the temper tantrum, and then to flatter him.

“Not all of my day’s work was bungled,” I continued, and then described my visit to Mrs. Percy’s, and running into Mr. Phips there.

“The door was open? I’ll have to have a word with my men,” Cobban said. His red-and-black-checked suit contrasted very badly with Auntie Bond’s blue-and-gray floral carpet, and he had forgotten to remove his hat. “Very bad procedure,” he continued, frowning. “They should know better. Taints the entire robbery investigation, knowing the door was open. What was stolen before the murder, and what was stolen after?” How such a bright and freckled face could look stormy is a mystery in itself, but he looked stormy with fresh anger.

“The orange cake is delightful,” said Sylvia.

“Do stop going on about the cake,” said Cobban and I together.

“I have irritated you.” She put the tongs down and leaned back into the settee. “Thank heavens for stopping me. I don’t know what got into me there for a moment. Do you think it was Father, encouraging me to be a good hostess?”

Cobban looked at her in wonder, and his expression softened.

“The robbery investigation is secondary to the murder, isn’t it?” I asked, returning to the main subject. “Besides, if you depend on Mr. Nichols to provide the quality and quantity of the goods removed from his stepsister’s home, that investigation is already severely tainted.”

“You’ve got a point there,” Cobban agreed. “I wouldn’t trust him with a penny of mine.”

“And Mr. Barnum trusted him with many thousands of dollars,” I said. “But the point is that I tried the wire trick that Mr. Barnum taught me to bolt a door from the other side, and it worked. We know now how we came to find a murdered person inside a bolted room. Of course, we’ve only the stepbrother’s say that it was murder. Perhaps he lied about that as well. Perhaps Mrs. Percy did have a weak heart. Oh, my.” I put my teacup down so quickly and so hard on the table that it rattled.

A new thought had just occurred to me. What if Mrs. Percy had died of natural causes, and Mr. Nichols merely wished us to think she had been murdered? Why would he? Because Mr. Barnum would be a suspect; Mr. Barnum, to whom he owed an honest lifetime’s wages; Mr. Barnum, who was taking him to the courts in a lawsuit. Is there no end to perfidy? How much greed can a society allow, and still survive?

“But it
was
murder,” Cobban said. “I saw Dr. Roder this morning, and took him to see Mrs. Percy at the morgue.”

“Is he to do a postmortem?” Sylvia asked cautiously.
The last time she had sat at a postmortem she had almost fainted.

“No need.” Cobban put down his teacup and saucer as well, and looked greatly relieved when he had been freed of those fragile objects. “He could tell from her eyes. That bloodshot pinkness was cerebral hemorrhaging, he said. She’d been suffocated.”

“The pillow on the floor,” I said. “The souvenir pillow from Niagara Falls.”

“Well, I won’t be going there on my honeymoon,” decided Sylvia.

“Are you engaged, Miss Shattuck?” asked Constable Cobban, and both his voice and expression were those I would imagine sheep would use (if they could understand and speak in our language) on the day the farmer prodded them into the slaughterhouse. Sylvia did not answer, but once again passed the cake plate.

“So it is murder. Again.” I could not restrain a sigh. Marmee would not be pleased to hear this. She had reasonable objections to having her second-eldest daughter involved in squalid and dangerous affairs. I knew the neighbors would talk about us again, for one thing.

“That Alcott girl!” they would say. “Always tripping over dead bodies! Makes one wonder, don’t it?”

“Yes,” another would say. “I hear she even whistles in public!”

“Why are you smiling, Louy?” Sylvia broke my train of thought.

“I am sorry. That is highly inappropriate and disrespectful
to poor Mrs. Percy,” I said. “So, it is murder. That means, of course, there is a murderer, no doubt about it.”

“Yes. And we have her locked up,” said Cobban, mumbling through a mouthful of seed cake.

“You have been wrong before,” I reminded him. “First suspicions are not necessarily correct. I have an instinct about Suzie Dear….”

“And your instincts have often been incorrect,” Cobban retorted, reaching for another piece of cake.

“Dear Constable Cobban,” I said somewhat primly, “consider the evidence you have. Suzie was wearing some of the crystal gazer’s jewelry when she fled the house. She maintains that the jewelry was given to her as a gift, meaning a bribe, of course, to assist with the séances and to keep quiet about the tricks. As for fleeing the house, she fled because she knew the constabulary would jump to the exact conclusion to which you have jumped.”

“But how did she know the medium was dead,” Cobban said, “if she didn’t kill her?”

“Instinct,” I said. “Mrs. Percy was very late that morning, and not responding to knocks upon the door.”

“We searched her rooms. We found a diamond ring and a bag of money. About two hundred dollars, I’d say. Explain that, Miss Louisa. Do you really think Mrs. Percy was that generous?”

Oh, Suzie! So much greed leads to dire consequences!

“A thief,” I said. “Perhaps Suzie is a thief because too much temptation was put in her path. But not a murderess.”

“I don’t share your opinion.” He brushed crumbs from his boldly checkered trousers and rose to leave.

“I haven’t finished,” I said. “Please stay another ten minutes and hear about the rest of my afternoon.”

“You bolted the door from outside,” Cobban said patiently. “My congratulations on learning to emulate the behavior of the lower classes. What else happened?”

Sometimes I wanted to thwack Cobban on the head, he could get so smug. “After Mr. Phips left, I saw Miss Snodgrass again. She was standing in the side garden, looking at an upstairs window.”

I
NOW HAD
the young constable’s full attention. “All in brown again?”

“Yes. And when she saw me looking at her, she almost turned and fled, then decided to stand her ground.”

“I don’t like the look of this,” Cobban said.

“Nor do I. Her behavior is suggestive, but what it is suggesting I cannot yet identify.”

Cobban reached for a third piece of cake, changed his mind, and jammed his hands in his jacket pockets, which were stretched and rounded from this repeated gesture, making his suit look even shabbier. A good-looking young man, I thought, but with little regard for appearances. Maybe Lizzie is right: I shouldn’t put my hands in my pockets and whistle.

“Did you speak with her?”

“Yes. She came into the house when she saw the front door was open. We exchanged ‘good days’ and such and she
said she had been drawn to the house by a morbid curiosity about Mrs. Percy’s death.”

“Sounds innocent enough,” said Cobban. “The citizenry often show up to peer at crime scenes.”

“Miss Snodgrass never asked how Mr. Phips and I came to be at the house, and it seemed she had been standing and watching us for some time. It would appear her morbid curiosity is somewhat limited,” I said.

“She was preoccupied.” Sylvia spoke up. Cobban and I both turned to look at her. She was sweeping crumbs off the tray. “Women in love are forever preoccupied, and she has just become engaged, remember.”

“True,” admitted Cobban.

“The afternoon was not yet over,” I continued. “Mrs. Deeds also arrived. She was coming up the path just as we were going out the front door. She seemed most surprised and unhappy to see us there.”

“Did she explain her visit?” Cobban asked. “More morbid curiosity about the crime scene?”

“Quite the contrary. She was hoping that Mrs. Percy’s cook had returned to the house, so that she might employ her in her own kitchen. ‘She is out of work now,’ she had said. ‘Why should I not have her?’”

“Vultures.” Cobban snorted. “You don’t think Mrs. Deeds would resort to murder to obtain a cook, do you? I do wonder where the cook has gone, and why she fled. Makes her look guilty, don’t you think? But why would a cook murder her employer?”

“It has happened,” said Sylvia darkly. “When I was a child and old Mr. Paterson hadn’t given his cook her Christmas
envelope, he got terribly ill the next week, and the family all claimed he’d been fed rat poison from the larder.”

“Sylvia, there are weeks still before Christmas,” I pointed out. “And Mrs. Percy seems to have been a generous rather than a miserly employer. Cook had a large room with windows and a good mattress, as I recall. No, the Chinese woman would have no cause to murder her employer. She fled for some other reason.”

“Well, I must continue my rounds,” said Constable Cobban, rising. Sylvia rose also and went to get his hat and coat.

We had walked to Auntie Bond’s hall by then, and Sylvia stood there, smiling, holding the constable’s coat. “Do stay warm,” she told him. “It is snowing again. Here, wrap this.” She reached up and twisted a brightly colored muffler around his neck.

“What’s this?” he asked, frowning.

“I knitted it,” said Sylvia.

“Did you, then! Thank you, Miss Shattuck. Well, congratulations on your engagement, and I wouldn’t let my comment about Niagara Falls spoil your honeymoon plans.”

When the door was closed, I turned to my friend. “You purposely let him think you are affianced,” I accused.

“I did,” she admitted with a little smile. “There’s more tea cake in the parlor. Shall we finish it?”

T
HAT NIGHT
I stayed up late writing, sitting before smoky candle stubs in my attic room so that Lizzie could sleep undisturbed in our bedroom. Progress on “Agatha’s Confession” had slowed, because my thoughts more and more settled on
the mysterious fate of Mrs. Agatha Percy rather than her namesake. I realized that my story was tied to the investigation, that to know what was to happen to my Agatha meant knowing what happened to the real Agatha. Tomorrow, I decided, questions must be answered. And then, out of nowhere, came a paragraph for the story, about Agatha, deeply in love with Philip but seeing her lover conversing with her friend Clara:

Jealousy. That was why Sylvia had suggested to Cobban that she was engaged: to make him notice her, to awaken his own feelings, if there were any. And now my poor Agatha, plain and poor, must suffer this most terrible of feelings. I sat chewing the end of my pen for some moments; more than Sylvia’s little ploy had begun this train of thought, but I could not yet identify the source of my musings. That is one of the defects
of the universal mind, I thought. We may all step into the same stream, but that does not mean we see the source!