The Drowning

A Victorian horror novel.

Death settled on the house like a lady’s mantle. It covered and enveloped everyone inside, muffled them and their thoughts, until it wasn’t certain that the former gaiety of the house would ever return. The circular drive was covered in straw and only the black carriages and horses were used on the infrequent trips into Boston. The velvet curtains were switched out to the dark wine colored set, appropriate for the season as well as the state of mourning, but early so that the house lost the advantage of the last rays of light in the darkening season.

 

Those in the small hamlet surrounding the house felt the loss as acutely as those employed within its doors since nearly everyone was employed by the man of the house, Mr. Hart, who owned the steel mill the town was centered around and who‘s father had been the founder of Hartville. Besides obligation to the family and their employer, the woman who had died had been universally liked, and her death had been such a tragedy.

 

It’s always a tragedy when it’s a young woman who dies.

 

Alice Hart had only just turned nineteen. Her fresh face, bright with energy and excitement, and rosy with exercise that was benefiting a lady of quality, had been admired by those in the servant classes as well as those of her own class. She had not yet chosen a husband and many suitors had vied for the pleasure of her attentions at the merry balls at the house. All of the workers, especially the women, good-naturedly talked of her qualities and her beauty, playing matchmaker like the mothers they were. The men talked wistfully of being twenty or

thirty years younger until their wives slapped them.

 

Her qualities were many and varied and seemed endless to those that loved her. She was naturally beautiful and seemed to never wear the enhancements that so many women needed to make her eyes large and luminous, her cheeks rosy, her lips pink. Her light reddish brown hair shone in the sunlight and her lady’s maid, Anne, made sure that there was never a hair of those copper tresses out of place. She had a wonderful figure and it had only been enhanced under the fashionable, though not flashy, dresses she wore.

 

Despite her physical appearance, of course, her character and abilities were unmatched by any other lady. At least, according to the rather protective women of the town and the house. She could sing and play the piano and recite poetry and paint a little. She was always so kind to others, often going out of her way to help those in need. She was a saint.

 

This was all that Detective Alastair Cargill learned when the case was handed to him. He sat in the common room of the pub, Tinnie’s, with a pint of good beer and good stew made by Henrietta, Tinnie’s grand-daughter. The middle-aged woman with doughy arms and a face that, even on the verge of tears, looked as if it were about to break into a smile sat across from him, her eyes every once in a while cutting to the kitchen where she’d left her girl, Martha, to handle the few patrons.

 

“I really can’t say any more than that,” Henrietta said. Her thick Boston accent was heavy with grief as if it had been one of her own that had died. “I think it was a tragic accident. She were so lovely.”

 

She dabbed her eyes with her apron and cut back to her own daughter, a plain girl though not ugly, around the same age the young heiress had been. Though hard work made Martha less of a blossoming beauty she still had the solid earthy quality that was nice in a woman of her station.

 

Alastair nodded. He hadn’t expected much from the townspeople after all. It was still early in the investigation and so far the death of Miss Alice Hart had remained a tragic accident. It seemed, from the nature of the body, that she’d drowned in the lake behind the family’s house.

 

“You said that she had many suitors, Mrs. Klein, do you know if any of the gentlemen in question were jealous of her other lovers? Perhaps one wasn’t confident enough in his abilities to woo the lady?”

 

Henrietta’s eyes went wide and the good lady shook her head, shocked to the very core of the very idea.

 

“No, no, they were all perfect gentlemen. I can’t imagine. No. It don’t make sense, sir, why would they kill her if they loved her?”

 

Alastair shook his head. He’d been a detective now for twenty years and worked closely with others and yet the carnage he’d seen and heard of was always surprising. Lizzie Borden’s case was not yet old and though the young woman was acquitted because no one could imagine a woman being so brutal to her own family it was obvious to Alastair that she’d done it. He wished he’d been the man on that case. Delicate sensibilities aside, murderers should be hanged.

 

“It’s only a possibility, Mrs. Klein, officially we still believe this was a tragic accident.”

Alastair didn’t believe it but it was best not to give any potential murder or murderess a chance to concoct a story. They should be kept off their guard as much as possible. He smiled at the woman, who had been the last to talk to him, and pushed his finished bowl to the center of the table.

 

“If that’s all you can think of, Mrs. Klein?” he asked.

 

The woman nodded.

 

“Only that my condolences, of course, are with the family. Oh, they’re such a good lot, they really are, and it’s such a tragedy. I can’t imagine losing my Martha.”

 

There was real emotion in Henrietta’s eyes when she mentioned her daughter’s name and Alastair caught it. He nodded. It was delicate being a detective. One had to ask the questions that society and decorum forbade, to speak ill of the dead or the grieving, it just wasn’t done, but the truth must come out.

 

He stood and handed the woman the bill plus extra for talking to him. She thanked him.

 

“Thank you, Mrs. Klein,” he said, and he left into the street.

 

It was bitterly cold as if even the weather were in mourning for this poor girl. He’d only seen paintings of her and her body after the accident and he would have to be an automaton in order to not feel for her. He sniffed at the word accident. Twenty years and he knew this was no accident.

 

The story that had been designed so that there could be no one to blame was that Miss Alice Hart, a young woman of nineteen, had been walking around at night alone and she’d gone to the lake. Once there, she thought to walk to the far end where there was a gazebo to sit and look over the frozen water. Unfortunately, the water was not so frozen as she thought and she slipped and fell, cracking the ice and drowning.

 

Her body was found the next morning by a hunter who had seen the crack in the ice when he, too, thought to walk across the lake in order to get to the hunting grounds and saw something strange under the half-frozen over surface.

 

The hunter, a man in his forties named Sam Jenkins, had been blameless. No one could find a motive or even opportunity for him to have killed Miss Alice, and like the rest of the town he seemed to have loved her with paternal pride. He’d been as shaken by her death as Mr.

Gregory Hart, Alice’s father.

 

Though not nearly as much as her mother, Claire.

 

Claire Hart had taken ill as soon as the news arrived. Her normally pale face had turned ashen with pain and shock and she’d fainted in the hallway. The doctor had sent a capable nurse to stay with her but she’d hardly recovered. She could take a little soup now but she refused everything else and she was slowly wasting away. Never a strong woman to begin with, it was now feared that mother would follow daughter.

 

Alastair was met outside by his deputy, a youth named John Clemens, coming around a corner. They’d split up the town, both finishing about the same time as planned. The look on the young man’s face was enough to tell Alastair that he, too, had found nothing. The younger man fell into step with him.

 

“Did you find anything, John?” Alastair asked as a formality.

 

“Nothing that looks like motive, Mr. Cargill,” he said. He shook his head. “Everyone seemed to have loved her. No one was jealous, she seemed to have been a sweet young lady, kind to everyone. There was no hard feelings that I can ascertain. Do you think it might have been an accident, sir?”

 

Alastair turned up the collar on his jacket as they walked back to the police station. They were visiting from Boston, as a special request from the chief of police, Michael Sullivan, but they were to check in with the chief if they found anything, or not. Their quarters were in the building as well.

 

They had been in town for only three days and the investigation had only been underway for five. The entire town had been questioned first by Sullivan and now by Cargill. The family and household had only been delicately questioned by Sullivan and Cargill had only been able to question them on generalities so far. Even a number of the suitors had been questioned. So far, nothing stuck out, nothing seemed odd, except the death itself.

 

John had worked closely with Alastair long enough to know when to remain quiet and they walked the uneven streets of Hartville without a word, but sensitive to the man’s every expression.

 

“I don’t believe so,” Alastair said finally.

 

John nodded. He didn’t think so either and it was vindication that his mentor backed him up. He was young and many of the older members of the Boston Police Force didn’t believe that he was capable of such an honor of having Alastair Cargill as a mentor, he wanted desperately to prove them wrong not just for himself but to erase some of the stigma of his past. He wanted to prove that the child of a lunatic and a drunkard, a child who’d been a tramp and a thief on the darker streets of Boston, could grow up to be a good detective. The best.

 

Cargill, knowing the young man’s past, had specifically requested him thinking his background would give him an edge, an insight, that others who’d come from better backgrounds may not have. He was certainly more approachable to some of the people that a detective needed to speak with.

 

The police station was a house that had been built as a residence. The original Hart, Lindel Hart, had been the son of a minister and didn’t believe that a hard-working town would need such vulgarity as a prison. However, it came to be realized that the necessity was there and a house had been converted for the purpose. For that reason the police station and prison was one of the nicest that Cargill had ever been in.

 

Michael Sullivan met them in his office when they came in. He was reading some paperwork near a fire when they entered and he noticed their chilled cheeks and ordered one of his deputies to get a cup of coffee.

 

“Gentlemen, have you found anything?” he asked. Michael Sullivan was the child of Irish immigrants and he knew that his position as chief of police was not highly regarded by some of the older class of resident in Hartville. He had much to prove. However, that didn’t seem to bother him. He was well known for his fairness and even judgment, his sobriety and thoughtfulness. It would seem as if he were trying to erase all the stereotypes of his race

with himself as an example had Alastair not known that he was earnest.

 

They sat in the wingback chairs with their coffee and Alastair shook his head.

 

“I’m sorry, Michael,” he said.

 

Sullivan paused for a moment, then nodded.

 

“An accident, then?” he said. “I suppose that’s best all around.”

 

Alastair shook his head again.

 

“I don’t think it was an accident. It seems too strange for that,” he said. “She was a practical girl and spontaneous, but she wasn’t a fool. She was found in her bedclothes and no slippers, drowned in a frozen lake, at midnight, as near as we can figure. I’m sure we can assume she was wearing shoes and that in her struggle she kicked them off but that she left her house barely dressed in the middle of winter seems ludicrous. And alone?”

 

Michael looked miserable. He had not been able to withstand the woman’s charms either which made him call Cargill in as a third party.

 

“I just can’t imagine anyone wanting to harm her,” he said. “I thought it was strange, too, which is why I called you, but I can’t find anything and neither can you. Perhaps there’s nothing to find. Perhaps she just wanted a walk and it ended tragically?”

 

Alastair set his cup down and nodded. He felt for Michael, who was a friend as well as a colleague, and understood the delicate nature of the business.

 

“Perhaps,” he said. “It would make it more pleasant.”

 

Michael sighed.

 

“Pleasant is not something we can afford, unfortunately. If there’s anything strange about Miss Hart’s death we must investigate it, no matter the unpleasantness.”

“I agree,” said Alastair. “Tomorrow I’ll question the family and the household.”

 

“Yes, of course,” Michael said, distractedly. Then he remembered something and sat up.

 

“No, not tomorrow. Tonight. The funeral is tomorrow.”

 

“Tonight, then,” Alastair agreed.

 

 

The house was large and employed a large household of servants. Maybe too many for the five people that had lived there, now four. Mr. Gregory Hart and his wife Claire, their son Jonathan and his wife Georgia, had lived in the house along with Alice. Yet, the five had a cook, a cook’s assistant, a butler, two parlor maids, a lady’s maid for the ladies and a valet for the gentlemen each, two laundresses, a housekeeper, a coal boy, two stable boys, and a

chauffer.

 

Alastair had been accustomed to the extravagances of luxury because of Boston but this small country manor seemed ostentatious. Alastair found it unappealing but couldn’t allow his distaste to cloud his judgment of the house. It was a luxury that was reserved for the better classes and a police detective could ill afford.

 

They knocked on the side entrance, knowing better than to attempt entry through the front, and were shown in by a surprised looking parlor maid, Violet.

 

“Detective Cargill, Mr. Clemens, would you care to come in?” she asked. She was a pretty girl in her twenties, but parlor maids were chosen for their prettiness.

 

“Yes, please,” Alastair said. “I wish to speak with the master of the house, if he’s available.”

 

“Of course,” she said. She left him and John in the housekeeper’s niche where they waited for a quarter of an hour to be admitted into the library where Gregory stood facing a fire.

 

He turned to face the two men and they were moved to see the pain behind the man’s eyes.

 

“Gentlemen, please be seated,” he said.

 

They both nodded and sat though the man didn’t. He seemed beyond even the smaller comforts in life.

 

“I’m very sorry to have to barge in on you again, Mr. Hart,” Alastair said. “I’m afraid it’s unavoidable, however.”

 

The man turned to face them again, his face ashen but trying to remain dignified.

 

“Are you saying you’ve found something about my daughter’s death?” he asked.

 

Gregory Hart was beyond pleasantries and his bluntness was to be expected. Alastair felt deeply for the man and shook his head.

 

“I’m afraid not, sir,” he said. “Sir, I understand that this is a very hard time for you and it would, in some ways, be better if this were a tragic accident.”

 

The man blanched and Alastair regretted his choice of words.

 

“I’m sorry. Obviously the word better wasn’t what I meant.”

 

“No, no. It’s fine. I understood what you meant.”

 

Gregory looked as if he were about to fall from the weight of his grief and instinctively John rose to ease him into a chair. He collapsed into the chair that John had just recently occupied and smiled gratefully.

 

“I’m sorry. I was raised to not express emotion but you can understand, gentlemen, this was my daughter. My beloved daughter.” His voice cracked and he swallowed to regain his composure. “If someone has done this to her, of course I want to know. What can I do?”

 

“I would like to question the staff and the family if I may tonight,” Alastair said.

Gregory seemed to think for a moment.

 

“You may question the staff at any time, of course, though I can’t imagine that it’s any of them,” he said. “The family as well. With one exception. My wife, she’s taken this very hard.”

 

“I have no intention of questioning Mrs. Hart, sir,” Alastair assured the man.

 

“I suppose you’d better start with me, then,” Gregory said.

 

“If you’ll allow Mr. Clemens to start on the staff?”

 

“Of course. Everyone should be home,” Gregory said. And with a distracted wave of the hand John was dismissed.

 

He was fine with that. The posh interiors of the houses were too stuffy for him and constricting. For him the servant’s quarters, with the hustle and bustle of real people doing real things. He could talk to servants, to laymen, but the landowners were a different breed of people all together.

 

Alastair was more comfortable with the landowners. He had been on the force for long enough to simply see all people as people. Nothing surprised him anymore, especially how a person could deviate from their social constrictions to do things that were merely human. To him anyone could be a suspect.

 

Alastair remained seated next to Gregory Hart. He knew a little of the man even before he’d arrived. His name was known in certain circles in Boston as a gentleman of breeding and of taste. He was a good manager and a kind and pious man. His character was without reproach from the betters in that city. Alastair, too, knew that the man was not guilty of killing his daughter.

 

He’d seen fake tears enough and remorseless grief. The man seated next to him was beyond the limits of fakery. That didn’t mean that Alastair had no use for him, though. Perhaps there was something that the man did know that would be useful.

 

“I’m very sorry that you have to withstand my questioning, Mr. Hart, I’ll try to be brief. The character I’ve compiled of your daughter from the town was that she was universally loved and adored. She was seen as cheerful and generous and no one could tell me of a person who could wish her harm. You, however, are her father and so were more acquainted with her moods and tempers. Was she cheerful? Or was she depressed and hid it?”

 

Gregory shook his head. It took him long moments to answer.

 

“No, she wasn’t depressed or anxious or anything to that affect. She was always upbeat, always cheerful. I never knew anyone who could light up a room like she could.”

 

“Even in recent months? Did she frequent the outdoors more than usual, or stay in more than usual? Change her diet or her habits in anyway?”

 

“No.”

 

“And there were a fair number of suitors, is that correct?”

 

“Yes. Since she came out she had a fair number of men that were interested. It was always her choice, of course, but we met with them all and all of them were perfect gentlemen.”

 

“Was there any that may have been more interested? Perhaps a bit jealous?”

 

“No. All of them wanted her but they were gentlemen.”

 

“You can’t imagine any of them being violent?”

 

Gregory seemed affronted at the idea.

 

“Of course not. All of the men we allowed her to meet were recommended to us by socially correct avenues. We wouldn’t have exposed our daughter to someone violent.”

 

“I’m sorry to upset you, sir. You said men that you permitted her to meet, was there a man that she may have had a special interest outside this realm?”

 

“No.”

 

Alastair reviewed his notes. He had nothing else to ask.

 

“If I may speak with your son now, sir?”

 

 

In the kitchen, John’s less formal interrogation was met with more information. The cook, Ruth, was a matronly woman who lived in town with her husband, a steel worker at the factory, and she was up to her elbows in the bread dough for tomorrow morning. She couldn’t be bothered to stop to talk to him.

 

“Oh, she was a right looker, all right, but never let it get to her head. Not like that other one, Mrs. Hart,” she said with some disdain.

 

“The lady of the house?”

 

“No, Mrs. Jonathan Hart. Georgia. She’s from somewhere in the heathen south, you know, down there were morals are loose. She’s got a nice enough pretty face but she knows it too well if you ask me.”

 

John perched on a stool to be out of the way as he talked to Ruth and her assistant, Liz. The smells were driving him crazy and he realized that he hadn’t eaten.

 

“So, we’ve established that she had many suitors, any that come to mind as being somewhat less savory, less a gentleman?”

 

“No, they were right proper.”

 

“Well, there was that one,” Liz piped up. Ruth glowered at her.

 

“Who are you talking about, girl?”

 

“That one that she turned down just a few days ago, Mr. Harris,” she said. Ruth thought for a moment and then laughed. She shook her head.

 

“You foolish girl,” she said. John leaned forward.

 

“Mr. Harris?”

 

“Mr. Harris isn’t a suitor, not in the proper vein. He’s ninety years old and an old friend of Mr. Hart’s, he was just messing with the young mistress and she was messing with him back. They were always bickering, those two. Liz must have caught them wrong. He doesn’t come around often, you know, and she hasn’t been here that long.”

 

Liz was embarrassed and went back to her baking. John’s lead vanished as quickly as it came.

 

“So, no suitors with a serious bitterness towards her?”

 

“No, can’t say that I’ve seen any act towards her that way. I’ve been the cook here for twenty years now, seen her grow up, but if she had a problem with a suitor she never came to me about it.”

 

She seemed to be upset by this. She remembered times when young Alice would come into the kitchen looking for treats when Jonathan was being less than brotherly to her and she’d confide in the woman, closer to her than her mother in many ways, but those days were gone. Alice never distanced herself from the servants, always remained cordial, but she was a grown woman and didn’t confide her secrets like a five year old.

 

“She didn’t seem upset the last few nights?”

 

“No. Cheerful as ever. And she were as transparent as a waterfall, that girl, we’d all know if something were bothering her, I’m sure of that.”

 

Liz nodded her agreement.

 

“She got along with her parents, her brother, her sister in law?”

 

“Oh yes. It’s hard to get along with Georgia, on account as she’s so pig-headed, you know, but she got along with her, too. They weren’t close but they were friendly.”

 

“No jealousies or petty quarrels?”

 

“None,” said Ruth with conviction.

 

“All right. If she were going to confide in any member of the family or the staff, who would she be more willing to confide in?”

 

“Oh, that’d be her maid, Anne, of course. Those two were like sisters, they were,” Ruth said. She lifted the dough onto the table and started kneading it. John watched her cooking with admiration.

 

“Anne? The butler, Mr. Peacock, he didn’t mention an Anne.”

 

“No, I suppose not. She’s been let go anyway.”

 

“Let go?”

 

“On account as they don’t need her now,” Ruth said.

 

“Oh, right. You don’t know her surname or where she went?”

 

“No. You might ask Emma, though. They were very close, she might know,” Ruth said.

 

 

Jonathan was joined in the library by his wife, Georgia, who sat in the wingback chair watching Alastair with a touch of disdain. She carried herself stiffly erect like some lady or queen, a marked contrast to the more approachable gentlemen. Jonathan was an unremarkably handsome man. He was taller and more physically present than his father and his good looks were easy and approachable. She, however, was gorgeous.

 

“Father says you fear Alice’s death was not an accident,” Jonathan said. He said the statement with some incredulity, both of his eyebrows raised. He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I can’t believe it. Who would think to harm her?”

 

Alastair looked at the pair of them. Jonathan’s face clearly read grief and disbelief. Though the young man had more composure than his father had at the moment it was only a fragile hold that kept him together. He needed to be strong since his father and mother couldn’t be. The burden was terrible.

 

On the other hand, Georgia’s face read little emotion. Certainly there was sadness there but it was distant, removed, as if a distant and infrequently seen relative had died, not a woman she’d lived with for three years.

 

“Yes, I’m afraid so. It’s simply a formality. Any death of this sort we must investigate, you understand.”

 

That was a lie but both seemed to buy it.

 

“I don’t know what to tell you, Detective, I believe it was an accident. Terrible, yes, but an accident,” Jonathan said.

 

“Yes. It’s a few questions. Did either of you notice a change in her before the accident?”

Jonathan looked at his wife who shrugged minimally.

 

“No,” he said.

 

“Ma’am? A woman may be more inclined to talk to another woman than even her brother,” Alastair prompted.

 

She gave a brief shake of her head.

 

“We were, regrettably, not close,” she said with a heavy, and Alastair thought affected, Southern drawl.

 

“And you observed nothing in her behavior that seemed strange?”

 

“Nothing at all. She was at dinner, talking about going riding early in the morning and then went to bed early,” Jonathan said.

 

“Nothing strange about that?”

 

“She loved the horses and often went riding when it cold colder.”

 

“Do you find it all strange that she’d be out in the cold at midnight walking on the lake alone?” Alastair asked. Georgia didn’t react at all and Jonathan balked.

 

He lowered his head and closed to his eyes to compose himself. It seemed he needed the chair more than his wife and Alastair stood to offer him his. He took it gratefully.

 

“I’m sorry. No. It does seem strange. She was usually such a heavy sleeper. I mean, she never had trouble sleeping that I knew of. Only when she was very excited about something in the morning but there was nothing, nothing I can think of.”

 

The young man was miserable and his wife sat in her chair just staring at him, a mild look of disgust on her face, her lips pressed slightly together. She disliked weak men, it was obvious.

 

Alastair found himself disliking her immensely.

 

Alastair finished his questions, for the most part the same ones that he’d asked of Jonathan’s father, and with similar results. Neither of them knew any name that might be connected with Alice’s unfortunate end and she hadn’t seemed upset. Nor was she the type of woman to walk about the woods at night alone. So, how had she gotten there?

 

He wished he could talk to the girl’s mother but that was impossible. She was cloistered in her room with a nurse and there was no way she’d talk to him. He’d have to wait and hopefully find something without her help.

 

 

Emma was shown into the housekeeper’s niche with John. She was an extraordinarily pretty girl in her late teens with the blush of womanhood just ripening in her cheeks. She was a slightly plump girl with large dark eyes and her face was expressive for a servant girl. She looked amazed to see John and forgot her professional courtesy only for a second. She curtsied prettily and sat in the chair opposite him.

 

John was captivated by the young girl only a year or so younger than himself and knew it was unprofessional to be staring at her. There was an innocence about her that raised protective feelings in him. There was something else, too, something underneath the surface, a fear that was unmistakable.

 

“Miss Emma, you’re Mrs. Jonathan’s lady’s maid, is that correct?” he asked.

 

She nodded slightly.

 

“Yes, sir,” she said. Her voice was quiet and low.

 

“And you knew, of course, Miss Alice Hart?”

 

“Yes, sir, of course, we know all the ladies in the house.”

 

“We?”

 

“There are three of us lady’s maids, sir. Myself for Mrs. Hart, Esther for this mistress, and Anne.” She said the last name with a bit if emphasis that John caught.

 

“That was Miss Alice’s maid?”

 

Emma nodded, her eyes were wide and she seemed to wish to convey something of great importance. John was annoyed but he understood her hesitation. Even in the servant’s quarters the walls had eyes and ears. He’d lived in poor houses long enough to know that privacy was a luxury that very few, even the most wealthy, could afford.

 

“She is, sir,” the girl said.

 

“And you were friendly with her? So, you can tell me if Miss Alice said something to her lady’s maid that she wouldn’t feel comfortable talking about to others?” he asked.

 

Emma shook her head.

 

“Most things, Anne would say, of course, but they were close, like sisters, sir. Anne was hired to be Miss Alice’s maid when both were quite young and I only was just hired to the family when Mrs. Hart was married to Mr. Jonathan.”

 

“So, you’ve been here?”

 

“Three years, sir. Anne’s been here for five years,” she said.

 

Emma leaned forward into the statement, trying to lend it some weight on the young man in front of her. She couldn’t say her suspicions out loud. She’d already talked to the others and they thought she was going crazy. They were right, of course, it was logical that Mr. Hart, or some other member of the family, had dismissed Anne as soon as it was evident that she was no longer required, but to leave without saying good-bye?

 

She’d been hurt at first. She’d thought that Anne had left, with good character, and had left as soon as she could, like the others thought, but that was so unlike her. The more Emma thought about it the more she was certain that something had happened to her friend but she wasn’t sure what.

 

“Did you know of anything that might have been suspicious?” John asked. Emma shook her head.

 

“I didn’t know everything. She was a cheerful and sweet lady, the best mistress you could have. I envied Anne a lot,” she said. John understood the implication and unvoiced complaint. He hadn’t met Georgia yet but from the attitude of the household staff he’d already talked to it was clear that Alice had been favored over Georgia.

 

“What about Esther?”

 

Emma shook her head.

 

“She’s older than Anne and I are by a few years and she’s the mistresses maid. She oversees us, too, though Mrs. Greene oversees her, of course.”

 

John nodded. Even in the servant class people needed a social hierarchy. The housekeeper, Mrs. Greene, would be the overseer of the entire staff with the exception of her boss, the butler, Mr. Peacock.

 

“Did Miss Alice frequently go outside alone at night?”

 

Emma’s eyes flew open and became as big as pie plates.

 

“No, no, of course not!” she said.

 

“Is there any occasion that she might?”

 

Emma thought about it for a moment and a horrible thought occurred to her. She leaned very close to John, aware that it was very likely that someone was out in the hall listening to her. John, for his part, wasn’t at all upset that she was required, by the rules of decorum and privacy, to lean close to him.

 

“Only if it was a rendezvous, sir, and she would have brought Anne for sure,” she said.

 

John thanked her. He wished that he didn’t have to go back to Boston soon. As soon as the investigation was over he’d be leaving the countryside and the comely Emma a thing of the past.

 

 

For their investigation, they hadn’t found much. Alastair wasn’t disappointed, though. He sat with Michael and John in Michael’s office again, all three of them drinking port. Outside, the weather had taken a turn for the worst. Now it was no longer just cold but the wind was picking up and screaming under the eaves.

 

The shadow of the big house at the one end of the town and the steel mill at the other cast the town in darkness, they were like hulking sentries keeping a watchful eye over the citizens. He wasn’t sure why he thought of the buildings in that way now that night had fallen and the wind picked up.

 

“No motive, no suspect, no explanation,” Michael said. He was staring into the fire that, for all it’s cheer, seemed inadequate to reduce the chill in the room.

 

“All we know is the fact that the official story is no explanation,” Alastair said.

 

“Do we have any leads?”

 

The three men were silent for a moment.

 

“The lady’s maid, Anne, might be of use if we can find her,” John said.

 

“Tomorrow’s out, of course. Even the townspeople will be at the funeral,” Michael said. It was clear that he was going to be, at least.

 

 

The funeral was at dawn. The cold sun was unable to shed any heat or light on the town, it

was as if they were all cloaked in their misery. The roads were spread with straw to deaden the sound of the horse hooves and the black carriages were lead by coal black horses. The mill was shut down for the day in remembrance and because the town would have rioted had they not been permitted to express their grief.

 

Everyone walked to the cemetery clad in the best black mourning clothes they owned, flowers piled in their arms to cover the coffin. The family were standing around the coffin, friends and suitors behind them, the household, then the townsfolk. Alastair and John stood in the far back underneath a tree.

 

It was the first time that either man had seen the reclusive Mrs. Gregory Hart, Claire, for what good it did. She seemed to be a fragile, tiny thing hidden under layers and layers of dull black satin. Her large black hat had such a heavy veil that it was impossible to see her face. She sat in a chair near the grave with her husband beside her, his hand resting gently on

hers.

 

The pain was evident on each person’s face and there was no attempt to conceal the emotion. The preacher presiding over the ceremony choked up unprofessionally a few times.

It was difficult, but Alastair and John were there not just to bear witness but to also watch the faces. It was very often that the guilty party went to the funerals, a sort of horrible fascination, and it was usually written all over their faces. Also, as disgusting as it was, it would be necessary to interview the funeral party since they were all in one place. It would have to be done delicately and if he were able to find one person in the crowd that seemed to be acting strangely then it would save them a lot of embarrassment.

 

Each scanned the bereaved faces but there was nothing. Each face registered shock and infinite sadness. The preacher crossed the coffin and it was lowered into hole. One by one the bereaved threw flowers after her until it seemed that the hole would be filled with flowers.

 

The family left. Gregory held his wife and walked her, both of them slightly weaving, to the waiting carriages. Jonathan looked as weak as his father and held his wife’s arm but she seemed unaffected and it seemed to Alastair that she was holding him up. There would be small pockets of people huddled together all over town eating together and talking in low voices of how tragic it all was. Eventually, the world would go back to some semblance of normal but the death of Alice Hart would go down forever as a tragedy that affected the entire town.

 

Alastair and John stood and watched the grave diggers cover the coffin and hothouse flowers. The rain started after they were done. It started as a drizzle, slipping coldly through the leaves and splashing on Alastair and John’s faces. They both turned up their collars.

The vigil was not without it’s rewards.

 

When the grave diggers finished their unenviable task they stood to the side of the grave with their heads bowed in their own silent acknowledgement, giving a finality to the ceremony that few witnessed but Alastair had witnessed far too many times. They both wandered off toward Teenie’s pub.

 

The wind was getting colder and the wind ripped at the leaves causing more of the rain to splash on them. It was unpleasant and their boots were frozen. The grey skies were opening and the rain was coming down harder now. All around them, people were settled with others in brightly lit pubs and houses, trying to warm themselves from a chill that was deeper than the cold.

 

It was then that a figure in black walked from behind a tree and tentatively approached the gravesite. It was a man, dressed in the somber funereal colors, with a top hat on his head making him appear much taller than he really was. The coat turned up against the cold obscured his face and his expression. In his hands, he carried an elaborate array of calla lilies.

 

A wealthy man, then, and influential. Then, why hadn’t he been there at the ceremony with the others? The man knelt down on the frozen, rain soaked ground and set the calla lilies on the grave marker. He stayed there for long moments and the slight shaking of his shoulders made it certain that he was sure he was unobserved.

 

Alastair moved very quietly toward the man. He could walk silently if he needed to and he didn’t want to startle this man.

 

The man looked up shocked at the intrusion when Alastair approached him. He was a pale man with fair hair and pale blue eyes. He stood erect, his height, even without the hat, was overpowering and Alastair saw that he was also powerfully built as well. A large man, then, but not a gentleman. The clothes were extravagant but too shiny and too shabby to be cared for by a household of servants. Not fallen noblesse, either. There was something of smoke and shadows in the outfit.

 

“Sir, my name is Alastair Cargill. May I ask what your name is?” Alastair asked very gently. The man balked. He looked around but saw John standing where he’d come from and he stood his ground.

 

“I’ve never seen you before in my life,” the man said.

 

“No, sir, I don’t doubt that. I’m a detective investigating the death of a young woman,” Alastair said.

 

The man paled. He raised a handkerchief to his face in an affected manner. Alastair watched him carefully. The man straightened to his full height then and pierced Alastair with a steady gaze.

 

“My name is Oliver Morris,” he said, suddenly haughty.

 

“And what is your relationship to the deceased, sir?” asked Alastair unfazed.

 

“Miss Alice Hart and I were,” he hesitated. He seemed to be thinking of the proper term for their relationship. “We were friends.”

 

His mobile mouth curved downwards slightly at the term but whether it was because he was upset that it didn’t become more or for because it hurt to think of their lost friendship was unclear.

 

“I’m very sorry for your loss, sir,” Alastair said.

 

Oliver acknowledged the condolence with a brief nod of the head.

 

“May I ask you why you weren’t here for the official ceremony?”

 

A darkness passed over Oliver’s face briefly.

 

“It was regrettable,” he said. “There are members of her family who would not have approved of my being here.”

 

Alastair was too well trained and too experienced to register interest.

 

“Do you know the reason?”

 

“Of course,” Oliver said. He stiffened. “I’m a self-made, Mr. Cargill. I was born in humble beginnings and raised myself above my class. Alice believed in me and always encouraged me but her parents felt that our friendship was dangerous so they forbade her to see me.”

 

“Did you remain close to her?”

 

The darkness passed again. Oliver looked hurt and Alastair could feel for the man. Despite America claiming that class didn’t matter and that a man could raise to the upper echelons of society on hard work alone, it was clear that there was a disconnect between the reality and the myth. The neuvo riche were certainly looked down upon by the ones with old money and the Hart’s were definitely old money.

 

“No,” Oliver said. “I moved to New York and only heard about her untimely death through a mutual acquaintance.”

 

“Who, sir?”

 

“Mr. Robert Harris.”

 

That name had come up in John’s report, Alastair was certain of it, an old friend of the family, apparently. He was an eccentric old gentleman who seemed to have doted on Alice as a grandchild.

 

“Thank you, very much, sir. I’m sorry to have had to disturb you,” Alastair said. The man looked relieved and, with one last look at the grave, turned on his heel and left.

John came up to Alastair and watched after the man.

 

“Do you think he’s the man?”

 

Alastair thought for a moment. The grief had been real and it didn’t seem that he was lying when he said that he hadn’t been close to the girl lately. The excuse that her parents wouldn’t have liked him being there was strange and seemingly out of character since they didn’t seem to be snobs when he met them before but the young man might have felt that they disapproved due to his own prejudices and not from feelings based in reality.

 

“It’s too early to tell, John. We’ll have to keep an eye on him.”

 

 

Emma stood behind Georgia brushing the long brown curls into the fashionable ringlets of the day so that she could look presentable when she greeted the mourners in the parlor but she was distracted. The brush moved in her hand but she didn’t feel that she was controlling it.

 

She was thinking about Anne. It seemed as if the entire household had forgotten the girl, as if she were disposable, and now that she was out of the house she ceased to exist. That she’d already moved onto a different position was likely, she was pretty and efficient and came would have come highly recommended, but it still bothered her. She couldn’t ask the family, they wouldn’t stoop so low as to answer her, not with the greater tragedy. Yet, the more Emma thought about it, the more she was concerned that something equally as tragic had befallen her friend.

 

Georgia noticed her delinquency and jerked her head out from under the brush.

 

“Really, I do think you’ve brushed my hair enough, Emma,” she said. “If you’re going to do nothing but stare at your own reflection in a mirror, I suggest you at least leave my hair out of it.”

 

Emma blushed a deep crimson and bent over to pick up the brush that had dropped from her

hand.

 

“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Hart,” she said.

 

“Don’t be sorry, Emma, just do your job,” she said. Her pretty mouth twisted into a sneer.

“It’s not that difficult, is it? Making me look pretty?”

 

“No, ma’am, you’re a very beautiful lady,” Emma said. She nearly choked on the words as she twisted her mistresses hair into the coils. Georgia had married Jonathan three years ago with her beauty and her good breeding being her only assets. She’d always been jealous of Alice’s easy good looks and natural charm and it had started to make her twisted and hard and brittle.

 

“Not nearly as beautiful as the corpse but then, who is?” she asked. “I know I’m a minority in my opinion that Alice’s death was no great tragedy. She was beautiful, of course, but she had no abilities.”

 

Emma wasn’t shocked by the opinion, she’d heard it plenty of times before from her mistress’s lips, though she was slightly shocked that the woman wouldn’t observe the unspoken rule of not speaking ill of the dead. She shivered with superstition. It was bad luck.

 

“I’m sure you’re correct, ma’am,” she said.

 

“Of course I am, weakling,” Georgia said, slamming her fist into her vanity. Emma jumped.

 

“Yes, ma’am.”

 

Georgia settled down and Emma finished her hair and helped her into the black mourning dress that had been fitted to flatter her figure. Even in mourning, appearances were the first thing on Georgia’s mind.

 

 

“Really, Detective, I don’t see how there’s anything else to say,” Mrs. Georgia Hart said. Her hands lay in her lap and she stared at Alastair with withering contempt carefully hidden.

 

“We’ve suffered a great deal and while I’m certain my husband and the rest of the family appreciate as much as I do your diligence, we must accept the fact of this horrible accident.”

 

Alastair nodded. His eyes glanced to Jonathan who was not looking at either him or his wife but out the window into the night with a distracted gaze. He was beyond feeling, now, poor man, and beyond trying to control any aspect of his life. It was obvious to Alastair, and to the domestic staff according to John’s report, that it was Georgia who was in charge of the house

now.

 

Alastair wondered if there was a reason that the young woman was so unconcerned with her sister-in-laws death. Was she simply a sociopath? Or had she a deeper, more nefarious, reason to want Alastair and John to stop their investigation?

 

“I’m sorry, ma’am, we still have a few unanswered questions,” he said. “I understand that this is unpleasant but I’m sure you and the family would want to know the truth.”

 

Her contempt twisted her mouth but she concealed quickly.

 

“Do not presume to understand what we feel, sir,” she spat the title. “This is an intrusion into our privacy and nothing more. You have attempted to make a name for yourself on the scandalous death of an heiress and are disappointed that it turned out to be nothing more than the accident it appeared to be at first.”

 

If her husband agreed or disagreed with her sentiments he made no move. Alastair was a seasoned detective and her venom didn’t affect him. She’d intended to wound but he slanders worse than these had been hurled at him long enough.

 

“Ma’am, does the name Oliver Morris mean anything to you?” Alastair asked.

 

By gauging her reaction he judged the answer to be a negative.

 

“No, Detective, should it?”

 

“I met the man at the cemetery today. He came later, after everyone had left, and said that he had once been an acquaintance of Miss Hart. Mr. Hart, do you remember this man?”

Jonathan took a moment to realize that Alastair had addressed the question to him. He looked vaguely at him and then shook his head.

 

“Yes, I remember him. It was a long time ago, Detective Cargill. My sister couldn’t have been fifteen at the time and he left before she was sixteen.”

 

“Was there any hard feelings?”

 

Jonathan frowned. It was four or five years ago and he had been a young man on the verge of getting married at the time. His attentions were not with his sister.

 

“No, not that I can recall. He seemed a pleasant enough man.”

 

“Did your parents seem particularly adverse to him at all?”

 

“No. I mean, I believe my father made it clear that my sister could do better if she was thinking that the man could be a husband but other than that there was nothing.”

 

“And did she seem to be considering him in that manner?”

 

Georgia laughed. It was a choking and mirthless sound and both men cut to her. She shook her head.

 

“Everyone and no one was considered marriageable material to my later sister-in-law,” she said.

 

“What does that mean?” Jonathan asked.

 

“You know precisely what I mean. I know that I’m not the only one who observed her attentions and her whims. I understand that you are stricken with grief and don’t wish to sully her good name but we must be honest,” she said.

 

“Could you elaborate, Mrs. Hart?” Alastair asked.

 

“Alice was a terrible flirt. She would talk to anyone and she would laugh at their jokes and be friendly with everyone without regard to her reputation or the reputation of her family. She’d talk to the coal boy as she would a suitor. Is it any wonder that so many men thought they were favored in her eyes? But, she never focused on either of them, pointing out some flaw in each, she could never settle.”

 

A darkness settled on Jonathan’s features as he listened to his wife but he kept silent. Alastair found her testimony interesting but not for its implication that Alice Hart was flighty but for the obvious jealousy in Georgia.

 

Here, then, was motive. Jealousy of a younger woman’s outgoing and free nature, perhaps her very youth that Georgia had now lost forever. Jonathan and Georgia were both thirty. It must have been difficult for Georgia, who Alastair could tell was a vain and superficial woman, an observation corroborated by the household staff, to live with a young and vivacious girl surrounded by suitors. Once Georgia had been the youth and vitality of a house, the one on whom suitors called. Did she regret choosing so early? Or having chosen at all? Or that those days were now a thing of the past and all she had to look forward to now was the comparatively mild pleasures of motherhood and marriage as she lost her looks?

 

He’d seen women kill others for similar motives.

 

“I thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Hart.”

 

 

Alastair leaned back in the wingback chair in Michael’s office that night, still in his rain-soaked clothes.

 

“Two suspects,” Michael said. “The man seems the most likely, don’t you agree?”

 

Alastair raised an eyebrow.

 

“I was going to say the woman, her sister-in-law has more motive and opportunity. A young woman would think less of taking a walk around a lake with her sister-in-law than with a man she hadn’t seen in four years.”

 

Michael grimaced.

 

“I can’t imagine a woman being able to overpower anyone or being so vicious as to commit murder then lie so to you,” he said. Alastair smiled.

 

“Which is why women murderers get acquitted so much more often than men. Had she been a tall, brawny man we wouldn’t hesitate to blame and hang him with far less evidence.”

 

“You make a point,” Michael said. The idea of it made him sick to his stomach. Women were supposed to the last bastions of morality. If they were falling to the vice that so many men fell to, the vice of anger and jealousy, than where were Christian values? “How does the maid factor into this?”

 

Alastair frowned and leaned forward.

 

“That is a mystery. All of the household staff seem to think some other member let her go. The housekeeper, Mrs. Greene is certain that Mr. Peacock did it and he is convinced that it was her. I haven’t asked the family, yet.”

 

He shrugged.

 

“Of course, it could be nothing. With the death and our investigation who can keep track of one maid in that household?”

 

Michael nodded.

 

“True, they employ a great deal of help and it’s possible that one of the members of the family let her go and failed to mention it in the general melee,” he said.

 

“Of course, if she knows something,” Alastair said. He didn’t finish his sentence and let it hang.

 

“Of course, she may know something and may have been let go by her sister-in-law to keep her silent,” Michael said.

 

 

When Alastair and John went back to the house the next day they found it vastly changed than the night before. The household staff were running around, busy with the tasks of airing out the house and getting it ready for company. The speed of this, as Alice Hart had only been interred two days ago, was suspicious to Alastair.

 

He caught the coal boy, Martin, as he passed. He was a young man, in his teenage years, with flaming red hair and a smattering of freckles across his nose. The story was that he was a foundling, a child abandoned by a family too large and too poor to raise him, who had been raised by Mrs. Greene.

 

“What is going on?” he asked.

 

“The mistress has come downstairs, sir, she’s asked for a séance, says she wants to talk to Alice herself,” he said. His eyes were wide with superstitious fear.

 

Alastair let him go.

 

“We won’t get any information with this carnival,” he said to John. “Perhaps we can speak with the lady of the house, though.”

 

“Maybe we can sit in on the séance?” John asked.

 

Alastair’s mouth twisted in disgust.

 

“Don’t tell me that you believe in that stuff,” he said.

 

“No, sir, but it might be interesting to see what the medium says and what the reaction is,” he said.

 

Alastair looked at his young deputy with respect.

 

“Of course, you’re right,” he said.

 

They knocked on the door and asked to speak to either Mr. Gregory or Mrs. Claire Hart, making sure that the parlor maid understood that it was them he to whom he wished to speak and not their son, and were let into the library to wait.

 

Gregory Hart entered the room, pale and wan, and asked them to be seated.

 

“What can I do for you now, gentlemen? I assume that you have found no further evidence of any wrongdoing?”

 

Alastair sat.

 

“At the moment there are two persons of interest, sir, that we’d like to clear before closing the case.”

 

Gregory’s eyes opened wide.

 

“Two suspects? Who for God‘s sakes?”

 

“Persons of interest,” Alastair corrected. “Persons we simply wish to make sure were not involved. I‘d rather mention their names in case we‘re wrong we don‘t want to damage their character.”

 

Gregory shook his head. The poor man was a manager of a successful company but this confused him.

 

“I don’t understand,” he said.

 

“Sir, I understand your wife is holding a séance tonight?”

 

“Yes,” he said. He shook his head. “Since her mother died a year ago, she’s been interested in the occult. We had a medium here then, a Mesmiro, and I’m afraid that he’s convinced her of his powers.”

 

“You are less credulous?”

 

“Nonsense if you ask me but it keeps her happy, she feels that she’s connected with her mother,” he said.

 

“If you don’t mind, sir, we’d like to sit in on the séance,” Alastair said.

 

“Really? I didn’t take you for the type,” Gregory said.

 

“We’re not, sir, but the reaction of your guests might prove useful.”

 

Gregory was beyond caring. He was not going to attend the séance. It was witchcraft and he was pious enough not to want to get involved in witchcraft so it mattered little if Alastair and

John were there. He waved his hand wearily.

 

“You have my permission. Do as you wish,” he said.

 

 

The weather worsened as night fell. The banshee winds and the sleet slashed at the tall oak trees and the window panes. Inside the house, the servants tried to keep the fires blazing to keep the chill from the guests but it was impossible. This was a chill that went deeper than the inclement weather. It was a chill of the supernatural.

 

Alastair and John stood off to the side, not members of the household staff but also not guests. They were intruders and ignored as such. The guests were ushered in and given brandy and cigars for the men, wine and small confections for the ladies. They all wore black or dark purple in memory of the young woman. Even the staff had traded in their grey and white dresses for black with grey lace.

 

There was hushed talking among the guests who were all friends of the family, friends of Alice. Many of them had been at the funeral only the day before. Alastair and John split up to listen to their conversation but was unable to find anything of interest.

 

They met Mr. Robert Harris who was a tiny man with a shock of white hair and mischievous eyes but who was dressed in crisp almost effeminate elegance. He looked at Alastair with wariness for a moment.

 

“You are the gentlemen investigating our Alice’s death?” he asked before they were

introduced.

 

“Yes. Alastair Cargill, sir,” he said. He held out a hand to Mr. Harris who took it after a few moments.

 

“You believe it was -” Mr. Harris couldn’t finish the sentence. He shook his head and looked suddenly fragile and old. “I can’t understand it. I don’t know who would do such a thing.”

“I’m not sure, sir.”

 

Georgia swept into the parlor in an elegant black dress and she cast a withering look at the two police officers. She knew of their intrusion and because it was her father-in-law, and the man of the house, that had permitted it there was nothing she could say that would force them to leave, but she didn’t have to be civil to them.

 

Beside him, Alastair could feel Mr. Harris stiffen at the sight of the glorious young woman. It was interesting. He turned to the man and could see that he was visibly disgusted by Georgia Hart.

 

“You don’t like Mrs. Jonathan Hart, Mr. Harris?”

 

The older man was shaken to be caught but smart enough not to deny it. He shook his head at the woman.

 

“Do you see what she’s wearing? Black, yes, in respect for the mourning, but with a bodice so low cut we’d call her a harlot in my day. She’s only pretending to keep up appearances and not doing a very good job of it. She was always a vain and silly thing but I could never imagine that she would stoop so low,” he said.

 

“Mama will be out to see everyone very soon,” Georgia was saying to the guests. “She’s still very fragile, you understand. Until then, shall we adjourn to the dining room where the séance will begin?”

 

Everyone moved slowly through to the dining room, a room larger and even more elegant than the parlor. A large chandelier hung from the center of the room over a table with a black tablecloth already draped on it. There was a candelabra in the center of the table for additional light and there was a fire in the grate. The room was not dark, yet. The lights would be turned off only when the mysterious medium entered.

 

“Mr. Cargill,” Georgia said. She approached the police officer with a simpering smile. “If you would be so kind as to sit at the table with the rest of the guests. We feel that it would be a better opportunity for you to judge charlatanry.”

 

It was obvious that it had not been her idea. Alastair coolly accepted her invitation and John sat in the back with the servants. He sat near a very nervous Emma. Her fingers twisted into her apron and there was anxiety written clearly in her face but she smiled tentatively when she saw John sitting next to her.

 

“Good evening, Miss Emma,” he said to her as he sat.

 

She bobbed her head in greeting.

 

“Good evening, Mr. Clemens,” she said. She spoke low so that the guests and her mistress could not hear her. The servants were not permitted to speak but she desperately needed to speak to this man. She leaned very close to him.

 

“Sir, may I ask, did you find Anne?”

 

It took a moment for John to register the name. When he did he shook his head.

 

“We wish to ask the family first. It could be that she was let go by one of them and they forgot to tell the household staff,” he said.

 

It sounded reasonable but unlikely to Emma. She frowned. Mr. Peacock or Mrs. Greene were always informed. No matter what the circumstances that surrounded a maid’s termination the heads of the staff were always told and usually were the ones that dealt with it.

 

“I fear something terrible has occurred, Mr. Clemens,” she said. “I’ve received no letter from her.”

 

He smiled at her though the note was carefully added to his list of facts on the case.

 

“I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about but we’re going to ask the family tomorrow. She may have not had time to write to you yet with her duties to a new mistress and writing her family.”

 

Emma wished to say more but at that moment the door opened and a flamboyantly dressed man with a tiny mustache and long curling hair entered the room with the frail Mrs. Gregory Hart on his arm.

 

If she were faking her weakness she was a very clever woman. Claire Hart had been known for her vivaciousness, her wit and her charm, according to the townspeople. All of that, now, was gone and behind was only a shell of a woman, too pale under the somber black. She leaned heavily on the arm of the man.

 

There was something vaguely familiar about the man but as much as Alastair stared at him, and he was quite close to him, there was nothing he could see that sparked a name. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a decidedly Continental look about him. His black hair was curled around his ears and his mustache a pencil line on mobile lips. His eyes, being blue against his dark and swarthy appearance, had a mesmerizing quality.

 

Alastair, apparently, was not the only one mesmerized by the medium. The ladies watched him enter the room with a collective intake of breath. He had the exotic appearance that was alluring to women.

 

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am Mesmiro,” the man said. He had a slight Italian accent that Alastair wasn’t certain if it were fake or not. Certainly if it had been a thick one he’d be more suspicious but this was just a vague lilting quality, the rolling of the letter ‘r’.

 

“Please, if you will all take your seats, I will attempt to use the powers under my control to speak with our lost daughter,” he said. His smile was grave and formal, the perfect expression. He sat Mrs. Hart in her chair next to his and sat at the head of the table, his back to the window looking over the grounds.

 

“Join hands.”

 

Everyone placed their hands in each others hands and the servants, already aware of their tasks due to the séances for Mrs. Hart’s mother, doused the lights plunging the entire scene in half-light. The only light in the room now came from a two lit candles in the alcoves beside the fireplace. The light gave the entire scene an eerie quality enhanced by the lateness of the hour and the storm outside the window.

 

From his seat at the back of the room, John watched the proceedings with interest. He was not a religious man, nor was he particularly superstitious. Having been forced to survive on his own from the time he was quite young he had developed a skeptical mind. Mediums and magicians, he noted, couldn’t practice their craft in anything more than half-light and during late hours, it was all smoke and mirrors, then, and people with senses dulled had tricks played on them. His entire attention was on the medium, whom he watched with disgust as he fleeced the grieving woman for money with his hokum, and so couldn’t see Emma’s discomfort.

 

Alastair was closer than John and so could see the tricks of this man’s trade a little better. He was a better charlatan than most he’d seen. Most were drunk old women with fake gold earrings and Gypsy inspired stage names, or youths whose parents were capitalizing on their innocence for credibility. Either way, they were all hacks. He’d yet to find one self-

professed medium who could really do what they suggested they could.

 

With all the guests holding hands the circle, so important, was completed. Everyone bowed their head in concentration and, at the advice of Mesmiro, thought about Alice and nothing but Alice. All except Alastair who watched the rest from under his eyelashes.

 

Georgia was obviously uninterested in the proceedings. Her head was bowed and her eyes closed but there was no indication that she was thinking hard about anything and slight uptilt to her mouth suggested that if she were thinking about something it wasn’t Alice.

 

In contrast, her mother-in-law was thinking fiercely about Alice. Her eyes were closed in concentration and her mouth pursed together bitter pain. Unaware that anyone was watching her, Claire Hart was close to tears and the pain on her face was clear. Alastair felt embarrassed to have seen it and turned away. He could find neither guilt or shame on the faces of any of the others only sadness and interest.

 

Tension in the room as moments ticked by in silence. Nothing happened and they were all now acutely aware of each other and how they might be looking foolish. There was the beginning of restlessness with the other guests, the ones furthest away, emotionally and physically, from the family.

 

Then, there was a loud knock from the table. Everyone jumped.

 

“Hold hands!” Mesmiro said sternly but quietly. Everyone made sure their hands were still

touching even as their eyes now stared at the middle of the table.

 

“Am I conversing with the spirit of Alice Hart?” he asked in a gentle voice.

 

There was a hesitation. Then, another loud knock shook the middle of the table.

 

“Alice, your mother and your sister-in-law, your friends, they’re all here and they wish to talk to you. Do you want to talk to them?”

 

No hesitation this time. One knock for yes.

 

There was a gasp of joy from Claire and she bowed her head. Her eyes were wet.

 

“Alice, your mother wants to know if you’re happy where you are?”

 

One knock.

 

“Are you in Heaven?”

 

One knock.

 

“Is it beautiful?” Claire asked, her voice cracking. “Ask her if it’s beautiful.”

 

“Alice, is it beautiful where you are?”

 

One knock.

 

“Oh, thank God,” Claire said. There were murmurs all around the table people nodding, convinced now of the man’s ability.

 

“There are a few more questions, Alice. We don’t wish to distress you but there are a handful of police men who have been here. They want to know what happened to you.”

 

One knock.

 

Alastair looked to the man but he gave no indication of deception. He could only assume that Claire Hart had informed him of the investigation.

 

“Were you killed?”

 

Two knocks.

 

A shocked ripple of murmurs ran through the guests.

 

“Was it suicide?”

 

Two knocks.

 

Relief now. No one had thought to investigate suicide, it seemed unlikely that such a cheerful girl would resort to something so unchristian, but it was a relief nonetheless.

 

“Was this a terrible accident?”

 

One knock.

 

Claire’s face registered pained relief and Alastair felt for her. She wanted to believe it so much and this charlatan had given her exactly what she wanted to hear. Georgia’s face indicated contempt but for Alice or the magician or her mother-in-law was not clear.

 

There were other questions and other knocks but gradually the knocks seemed to be getting weaker and more hesitant and Mesmiro acknowledged that the spirit must be tired and thanked her.

 

The lights were turned back on and hands, sweaty now from the excitement, were dropped. Claire tearfully thanked Mesmiro, all ideas of decorum vanished from her mind with gratitude.

 

“My daughter,” she said, choking, “at least she’s happy. At least I could speak to her one last time. I’m so grateful even for that small comfort.”

 

“It was my pleasure to be able to reunite you with her even more a moment, Mrs. Hart. I’m sure she’s now with your mother, the late Mrs. Bennett, and together they are happy.”

 

“Oh would it have been me that was returned to Our Heavenly Father’s embrace,” the woman cried. Georgia placed her arm around her mother’s narrow shoulders but offered no other comfort. “I know He works in mysterious ways but why did it have to be Alice? My

darling Alice.”

 

There was a flicker of emotion across Mesmiro’s face and for a moment Alastair felt something for the man. He was a fake, yes, and it was dastardly that he took money from grieving widows and parents and children, but he did offer some comfort to them for that price. He was skilled at telling them what they wanted to hear in a way they wanted to hear it that, in normal realms, was impossible.

 

Alastair was patient waiting for his turn to speak to the magician. He watched the faces of the people as they spoke to him and found only awe-struck excitement. Georgia, on the pretense of getting her mother-in-law to bed, left the party and their maids went with them. Emma cast a glance at John as she left and he nodded to her.

 

The party slowly started to die down and people left. It was one in the morning and most were unaccustomed to staying up this late. A few were more excited and milled around fortifying their own tales of the supernatural with cups of coffee with splashes of brandy.

Alastair approached Mesmiro who was now standing in a corner getting ready to leave.

 

“That was really very clever,” he said.

 

“I am afraid I don’t know what you mean, sir,” Mesmiro said.

 

Alastair held out a hand which Mesmiro took.

 

“My name is Alastair Cargill, the detective working on the case,” he said.

 

“It is very nice to meet you, Detective Cargill,” he said. “I do not still understand what you meant.”

 

“Convincing the mother, Mrs. Hart, that her daughter’s death was nothing more than an accident. Unfortunately, I’m not quite so certain and I wonder how that’s going to affect her now. The truth is always much better than a platitude, don’t you agree.”

 

“I am confused, sir. I was under the impression that her death was an accident. The spirits never lie and why would Miss Alice lie about her own death?”

 

Alastair shook his head. It was never certain if the charlatans believed their own powers or if this, too, were clever tricks. There was nothing more to be gained from a man who lied as a profession.

 

“I hope you’re correct, sir,” Alastair said.

 

 

John Clemens was asleep when the knock on his window jolted him out of bed. He reached for his gun, always kept under his pillow after a lifetime of habit, and went to the window to peer outside.

 

All he could see was darkness. The storm was raging and rain fell in sheets. The trees smacked the side of the building viciously. No one could be out in this weather let alone knocking on his window instead of on the front door of the police station.

 

He was about turn around and go back to sleep when the figure of a young girl appeared at the window and she knocked again. Her white hand appearing out of the blackness like an apparition. He thought she was an apparition for a moment and jumped back. Then, he recognized the large dark eyes of Emma.

 

He ran to the front door of the police station, dressing himself hastily in the process, and let the poor girl inside.

 

“Emma, what’s wrong? Why did you knock at my window?” he asked. She was soaked to the bone and terrified.

 

“Is there anywhere private we can talk?” she asked. She scanned the room, they were the only ones awake at the moment but a housekeeper could wake up at any moment to the sound of a woman’s voice.

 

“Yes, of course,” John said. He led her to the police chief’s office and fixed her a cup of hot tea. He wished that he had clothes for her to change into, she looked so dreadfully wet and cold he was concerned for her health.

 

“Thank you,” she said. “But, we have little time for formalities, Mr. Clemens. I had to come see you.”

 

“Did you discover something new about the case?”

 

She hesitated then shook her head.

 

“Not about Miss Alice’s case,” she admitted.

 

“Then, about what? Who?”

 

“Anne, sir. I don’t believe she was let go by anyone in the family, sir. I think she’s missing.”

 

She was moved almost to tears and John comforted her as well as he could.

 

“How did you come to this conclusion, Emma?”

 

“I helped Mrs. Georgia put Mrs. Claire to bed with Esther and Mrs. Claire asked why she hadn’t seen Anne for a while. Mrs. Georgia said that she thought someone had let her go after Miss Alice’s death, but Mrs. Claire said that was impossible.”

 

“Why, Emma?”

 

“Because Anne was Mrs. Claire’s maid. She hired her especially and no one could let her go without consulting her, not even Mr. Hart,” she said. John could feel something cold slither through him with this news. It was intangible so far but there was something wrong. If the girl could only be let go under Mrs. Claire Hart’s orders she must have disappeared right after the death of Miss Alice and there were still too many unanswered questions about the death.

 

Had the maid killed her mistress? Or had she witnessed the accident and thought she would be blamed? Did she see her killed and see the killer?

 

The biggest question in his mind now was whether Anne was still alive.

 

 

Alastair and John stormed the house the next morning and were coolly rebuffed by Mr. Hart. He met them in the library with his hands clasped tightly behind his back and his mouth tense.

 

“Gentlemen, I can not let this go on,” he said. “You’re asking me about a maid, now. What could a maid possibly have to do with the death of my daughter?”

 

“Perhaps a great deal, Mr. Hart,” Alastair said. “She’s been missing since the day your daughter died.”

 

“I don’t know where she is, Mr. Cargill, and I don’t know why she left. I know that Anne was very close to Alice and that if she left it was out of grief.”

 

“Could it have been fear?”

 

Gregory shook his head.

 

“Fear, I can’t say how.”

 

“What if she saw Alice fall and was powerless to save her, could she have felt that she would be blamed for her mistresses death?”

 

“Of course not! She was one of the family,” Gregory said.

 

Alastair didn’t say that she was like one of the family whose disappearance had gone largely unnoticed by the entire household for over a week.

 

“What was her surname?”

 

Gregory thought for a moment. Who remembered the surnames of the lesser servants?

 

“Mitchell,” he said. “I believe.”

 

“Anne Mitchell. Did she have any family?”

 

Gregory shook his head.

 

“Not that I’m aware,” he said.

 

“Any known acquaintances?”

 

“No. Her private life was her matter.”

 

“Your wife hired her, correct? She was hired especially so that Mrs. Hart was the only one who could let her go. Why is that?”

 

Gregory sighed.

 

“My wife is one of the Bennett’s, Mr. Cargill. When we were first married she came from a more wealthy family than I, though the steel mill makes enough. We married for love but she did have one stipulation that she’d be the one to hire nurses and governesses and maids for any daughters we had. Her own female servants had been hired by her father and she’d hated them, she felt that a woman’s touch was necessary. I love my wife, Mr. Cargill, and if that was her only stipulation then I was happy to comply.”

 

“Can we speak to your wife, sir?”

 

Gregory balked and hesitated. It was obvious that he cared for her and she was fragile, still. He didn’t like to think that she would be disturbed if he could help it.

 

“It’s very important, sir. It may be the clue we need,” Alastair said.

 

 

Alastair was shown into Mrs. Claire Hart’s boudoir some half an hour later. John, instead, decided to go to the servants, in particular, Emma. The lady herself was reclined in her bed, her hair brushed but only coiled and laying limply on her shoulder, and a shawl around her shoulders. The room was tastefully done in tones of champagne and rose, not overly feminine.

 

“Mr. Cargill,” Claire said. Her voice was low and somber but not without that touch of grace that was indicative of her breeding. The Bennett family was one of the best families in Boston and could trace their roots to the very beginning of the colony. That history and breeding left a mark on the lady reposed in front of him that was unchangeable.

 

“Mrs. Hart, I do apologize for the intrusion,” Alastair said.

 

She waved a wan hand and asked him to sit. He did so.

 

“I’m sure you’re here because of Anne,” she said. Alastair was shocked and she noted his shock and laughed gently. “I’m still the lady of this house, Mr. Cargill, even indisposed as I’ve been news travels.”

 

“I am very interested in the fact of her disappearance. At first it seemed only an inconvenience and now it seems she may hold a key to entire affair.”

“If I didn’t let her go, you mean?” she asked.

 

“Precisely.”

 

The humor was too much of a strain for her and she sank lower on her bed no longer able to maintain the smile. She seemed to instantly age.

 

“I’m very sorry, Mr. Cargill. I don’t know what to say. I didn’t release Anne and I have no idea to her whereabouts.”

 

“Were they close? Your daughter and her maid?”

 

“Yes. I made quite sure that my daughter’s maid would be as a sister to her. My own lady’s maid, until I was free to appoint my own, was a hard woman who had an unpleasant character. My father hired her on the basis of her piety and her plainness,” she said. Her lip curled in distaste for the woman. Alastair had observed Esther, the lady’s new maid, a woman who was in her mid-forties, a little younger than Mrs. Hart, but who was still quite attractive and there was a wholesome wit about the woman.

 

“You don’t find those qualities best suited?”

 

“No,” she said. “One’s maid is there for you most days of your life and are often one’s most intimate companions. My father didn’t see it that way and I’m aware that many in my social circle don’t see their maids as anything more than furniture.”

 

The lip told Alastair that Mrs. Hart was thinking of some person in particular and judging how he’d observed Georgia Hart treating her maid Emma it was obvious who she was criticizing.

 

“However, I find that Esther is often the only woman with whom I can consult and I chose her for that reason. We are both women of similar age who have children.”

 

Her voice cracked at the word but she regained her composure quickly. Alastair nodded.

 

“I understand,” he said. He looked around and could not see any sign of the maid in question.

 

“Where is Esther now?”

 

“She’s off today. She gets one day off a week and she leaves by seven o’clock every day, unless there’s a social function.”

 

“That’s very generous,” Alastair said. Most maids lived in the house and had a half day off once every two weeks.

 

Claire shrugged.

 

“She has children, Mr. Cargill, and I’m not so helpless as to not be able to undo my own hair at night. Besides, she lives in town, a message to her takes less than five minutes to be answered.”

 

“Did the other maids enjoy the same privileges? Did Anne?”

 

“Anne, yes, but she had no family and so she lived here. She and Alice were such close friends that she rarely took the day off. Emma is on a more standard schedule.”

 

“I see.”

 

At that moment there was a hesitant knock at the door and Claire permitted them to enter. It was Emma, who looked at Alastair with fleeting hope, then ducked her eyes.

 

“Ma’am, I was requested by my mistress to aid you in dressing. Mr. Mesmiro is once again calling.”

 

A look of intense sweetness crossed Claire’s face at the mention of Mesmiro that made Alastair sick to the stomach. She desperately needed him to tell her what she wanted to hear and he knew it and was taking advantage of her.

 

“Of course, dear, of course.”

 

Emma entered.

 

“Mr. Cargill, if you don’t mind speaking to a lady while she’s dressing we can continue the interview.”

 

Alastair bowed slightly. She was certainly unconventional, Mrs. Hart, even though grief tore at her and made her lean on Emma as she rose from her bed, he could see the vivacious and free-spirited woman she’d been prior to her daughter’s death.

 

Had Alice been the same? Did it irk the more strict breeding of Georgia Hart enough to incite rage? Jealousy? He was beginning more and more to suspect the sister-in-law.

 

“I only have a few more questions, Mrs. Hart,” he said.

 

Emma led Claire behind a screen and there helped her into the binding corset and black dress that had become her uniform.

 

“Your daughter was friends with her maid, would she have asked her to accompany her to meet a lover or some other person for a rendezvous outside at night?”

 

“Of course. Anne went with her everywhere.”

 

“Even if she had no occasion to fear this person?”

 

She didn’t answer for a moment.

 

“Yes, I believe she’d still ask Anne to come, if only for the strangeness of the situation.”

There was a moment when the realization of what Alastair had asked and what the answer implied sank into all three parties. Then, Claire let out a gasp and Emma had to catch her from falling.

 

“Do you mean to say, Mr. Cargill, that Anne could be responsible?”

 

She leaned on Emma as she emerged from behind the screen, her face pale and deathly gaunt.

 

“I can’t believe it. They must have had a quarrel, but I can’t imagine over what.”

 

Alastair held the stricken woman’s hand as Emma applied a damp towel to her forehead.

 

“It’s possible, ma’am,” he said. Though it seemed to him unlikely. He’d, as yet, found motive for the maid though her disappearance was obviously suspicious. “However, I’m more of the mind that she saw the person who may have committed the crime and is in hiding to save herself from that person.”

 

“Oh,” Claire said.

 

“Is there anyone, anywhere, that Anne may have run to?”

 

Claire thought, her lips pursed together, but in the end she shook her head.

 

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t know where she would have run that you not have already found.”

 

Alastair was disappointed but Mrs. Hart had answered a great deal of questions, at least for him. It was obvious to him now that the missing maid was the key to the investigation.

 

 

The room was dark and very cold. She couldn’t risk lighting the fireplace even if she had the materials or the confidence that the shack would not burn down if she did. She was happy for the blankets that had been left behind and would have to make do with them. She wrapped one of the scratchy woolen blankets around her closer and stared into the gathering darkness.

 

Hunger and thirst and the cold were worrisome but so far she’d been able to find food and water enough to keep herself alive and the blankets were warm though uncomfortable. She could live out here for a few more days at least and maybe that would buy her the time she needed. Maybe in a few more days the thing she’d forgotten would come back to her.

 

She needed to remember. It was necessary for her to remember but no matter how hard she tried the memory was distorted and vague and slipped from her mind. It was like trying to capture smoke with a net and all the more frustrating for the sense of urgency behind it. She knew who killed her mistress if only she could remember.

 

 

Alice Hart’s rooms had been left as they were, untouched by the maids or the family. It was a sort of memorial, a shrine, to the life that had been so tragically cut from underneath them. Alastair understood. He’d seen it many times in the course of his career that a family would leave the personal space for the deceased as they left them, not even cleaning the room or rearranging the bookshelves, in case the person came back.

 

There was a layer of dust on the surface of everything and no footsteps in the thin powder. No one had entered the room after the initial inquiry into her death.

 

The room was decorated by the girl herself, Alastair was told, and at first glance seemed to be simply and elegantly decorated. The walls were cream with white wainscoting. The furniture was some light colored wood with a natural glaze. The curtains pale rose the same color as the bedspread and pillows. It seemed the room of a gently raised young lady, as Alice Hart was described to be, a woman whose taste and class would be best suited for the parlor and raising a family of her own. There were books by the window, indicating a studious nature, and a half-finished painting of a cottage in the woods, presumably by the girl, on a desk that showed an artistic, creative side.

 

Yet, there was something else here, Alastair thought. He entered the room cautiously. He didn’t wish to disturb anything but needed to get to know the girl. Her friends and family undoubtedly knew her but there were often hidden sides to people that few, or no, people ever saw. In a young woman like Alice these hidden desires and interests might be most studiously concealed.

 

There was a desk in one corner of the room, two bookshelves flanking the window, an armoire and a dresser. There was a door to the other side that connected to the maid’s room, also abandoned. Her room had once been her nursery and the connected playroom and the maid had the smaller of the two rooms.

 

Alastair moved to the bookshelf and looked at the titles on the spines. Some were relics from her school days, held for the memories or to be used later when she had her own children. Language primers and arithmetic books with her name scribbled in childish calligraphy on the inside pages. She’d been a very studious young girl with her math being as good as her letters.

 

The other titles were more strange. They would have been welcome in the libraries of scholars of medicine but in the room of a young woman, surrounded by childish adventure stories, they were conspicuous.

 

“What did you find?” John asked. Alastair showed him the spine of one of the books and the younger man whistled. “Pretty heavy reading, huh?”

 

“Most of them are like that,” Alastair said. He pulled out some of the others. Principia by Newton, The Origin of Species by Darwin. There were a number of books on the Spiritualist Movement now sweeping across America. At first, he thought she was as fascinated with the subject as her mother, considering the titles, but upon looking inside them and seeing notes debunking the tales, he changed his mind.

 

“She seems to have had a contempt for the movement,” he said. He showed John.

 

“Especially M, Mesmiro maybe?”

 

Alastair nodded.

 

“His initial is often repeated derogatorily,” he said. “I wonder if she felt that he was taking advantage of her mother after the death of her grandmother.”

 

Alastair set the book back and looked around the rest of the room. There was little else to glean from the room that they didn’t already know. Strangely, it seemed to Alastair, they didn’t find a diary, even a social diary. It was a rare girl that didn’t have her appointments and obligations written down. The conclusion was that she had it hidden somewhere. In that case, did she have cause to hide it or did she hide it out of habit?

 

“The maid’s room next, John,” he said. John was already moving in that direction. The room had been just as abandoned after the death and there were also no footprints in this room, either.

 

Anne’s room was the smaller of the two, and had fewer windows, but it was a bright and cheerful room. The walls were a pale white with tiny roses in the wallpaper. Her room was more sparsely decorated but it was clear that she was not without talent herself. There was a painting over her small bed of a woodland scene that was in a different style than the one in Alice’s room. To Alastair’s eye the one in Anne’s room was of a higher quality showing a patience that the other one didn’t have.

 

It was clear that whatever skill one girl learned she passed it on to her friend. They had been very close, then, more like sisters than a mistress and her servant.

 

“Alastair, I found her diary,” John said. Alastair looked up. John was holding up a small leather volume that had been found in the top drawer of a night table. Alastair looked through it but was disappointed.

 

“Nothing,” he said.

 

John shook his head.

 

“A dead end?”

 

There were the regular entries in the diary. Parties that she was expected to attend, she had been expected at a Christmas party in Boston, and a few correspondences that had been penciled in. Nothing was suspicious about any of it.

 

He flipped to the night she died. Nothing. There had been nothing written in for the day. The only thing that week had been another séance with Mesmiro that her mother had assumed she’d attend but there was no note that she did or made some excuse not to.

 

He handed the book back to John who replaced it.

 

“Maybe not a dead end, but I don’t have any information that would make anything

significant.”

 

Alastair looked around the room but could find no clue. The maid had no letters so there was apparently no one she wrote to. Not even hidden perfumed letters to a lover. None of the correspondences in Alice’s diary had seemed significant, either. It seemed that both girls were each other’s special friend and outsiders were only peripheral.

 

There must be something he was missing but damned if he knew what it was.

 

 

Emma pushed the door open and looked around hesitant to enter. The entire family was down at the séance with Mesmiro and Mrs. Hart but she hadn’t been needed tonight. Frankly, she was never needed at the séances and didn’t understand why so often it was required that she attend. She felt that it was simply because Georgia thought it was fun to frighten her.

 

There was little risk of being caught and yet she hesitated at the door to her friend’s abandoned bedroom. The investigator and his assistant had gone in earlier that day and they’d found little of interest. They wouldn’t know if she had entered now.

 

The room was dark and cold. No fire had been made in the grate and nightfall had dropped the temperature. The window had come a little open with the wind and the wind was squealing through the small crack. Shivering, she moved to close it and stopped.

 

Something had moved outside. Only for the briefest of seconds but she was certain. A shadow, slightly darker than the darkness, had flitted from behind a tree.

 

The window overlooked the back part of the house and the garden. Beyond the garden was a small forested area and beyond that the lake where Alice had died so tragically. Her bedroom window, then, overlooked the place she’d die. Emma was a superstitious girl and the implications of this coupled now with the shadowy figure made her freeze to the area she was standing. She couldn’t move.

 

It was Mesmiro. She was certain that man was playing with fire calling up the dead and the devil. It was unnatural, unchristian. She shivered. The wind through the crack still made its unholy sound and her eyes were transfixed on where she’d seen the figure but she saw it no more.

 

Emma didn’t know how long she stood there, waiting and fearing the return of the figure in the garden, but finally the cold reminded her what she was there for. She moved hesitantly away from the window, terrified to turn her back on it, and moved around the room with her candle.

 

She wasn’t sure what she had hoped to find that the two policemen hadn’t yet found. It seemed like arrogance now that she was shivering in the room searching. She found nothing and was about to leave when the light of her candle fell against the woodland

scene over her friend’s bed.

 

The style was fantastical, something out of a picture book, with a few deer and a fox eating together in a glade and a slant of soft light filtering through the trees hitting a rather ugly shack. That was strange. Most woodland scenes went out of their way to make everything in them seem more bucolic than reality and the shack was a stark reality in the middle of the fantasy.

 

She looked closer and a thrill of recognition went through her. She’d seen that shack

before. Where?

 

 

The main rooms of the house were brightly lit and their warm, cheerful glow melted onto the snow. Anne longed to go inside and sit by the fire and tell what she knew but she couldn’t. She couldn’t remember the man’s name, only see his face in her mind. Before she had that, she knew that she wasn’t safe. He’d find her and he’d fulfill the threat he’d made at the lake.

 

He was still around. She could see his face and knew it was familiar but she couldn’t remember his name, she couldn’t remember who he was. She could only vaguely remember anything now and her memory was slipping faster and faster.

 

Her mistress was the only thing that seemed real to her now and she only real in those last few moments. Anne was hidden, as she’d asked, behind a tree watching. She had been frightened and she could see the mask of courage slipping from her face. She floated in the darkness ahead in her white gown, a spirit more than a person. And he’d

been there and his blackness had engulfed her and she’d fallen.

 

Anne had jumped into the water after her unaware of any danger to herself and she’d caught the man off guard. He’d shouted her name and promised to kill her but she didn’t hear. The water was cold and it tugged at her and when she found her mistress dead, already blue, her eyes fixed on nothing, she’d given into the cold.

 

He thought she’d died. She knew that now. The man had left her thinking her dead and she was as good as dead. Only vengeance for her mistress kept her alive, forced her to wake from the blackness and crawl to the shack to light a fire and warm herself, and sleep. She wished she were dead now, she was as good as dead. She couldn’t remember who she had seen but she knew that he was still here and he’d remember her.

 

The party congregated in the large dining area and she could see in the bay windows. They hadn’t started yet and the windows were still open giving a view of the well-dressed men and women inside. They were standing around, some near the fire, with glasses of wine in their hands, all of them dressed in black or purple. She watched their faces but none of them were familiar.

 

Some of them should have been and she knew it. The men dressed as footmen had to be the footmen for the house, men she’d lived with for years, yet their faces were only vaguely familiar. The girls, too, weaving their way through the gentry, should be familiar. She couldn’t recall their names or who they were.

 

The lights dimmed inside and Anne dipped back into the shadows as one of the girls closed the curtains. Before the curtains closed all the way, though, she caught a glimpse of a man’s face and terror thrilled through her.

 

 

Alastair wasn’t a superstitious man. He didn’t believe in the Spiritualist Movement and felt that the mediums and people claiming to be sensitive to the other side were simply upper-class charlatans, the same you‘d find on the streets of very major town with a deck of cards. Perhaps, then, it was just that general animosity that made him sit in for the second séance. Perhaps it was something more.

 

It seemed uncanny that the girl would die right after getting involved with debunking the medium that her mother had seemed to receive with open arms. Could it be that she’d found some evidence against him and had made it known that she was going to out him? Or, he turned to the mother. The grief was marked on her face but he’d seen that before. It was a terrible thing to think but he couldn’t rule out any suspects until he knew for certain and he’d seen women killing their children before.

 

Had she become temporarily unbalanced with the death of her mother, her illusion and loyalty to the trickster’s apparent talents, that when her daughter came to her saying that he was a fraud her anger lashed out against her own daughter rather than the man who had swindled her?

 

Of course, it could be something completely separate from the séance and the man hosting it. It could be one of the footmen who was in love with her and had been rebuffed, one of the suitors who had gotten too friendly. She had been a very pretty girl and would have been a temptation for any man with unscrupulous morals.

 

The séance began in the same manner as before with everyone holding hands and concentrating. The lights were dimmed, for the benefit of the spirits, of course, which also had the added benefit of hiding the trickster’s games. And the seemingly

disembodied knocks started again.

 

As far as mediums went, Mesmiro at least played it simple, Alastair noted. He’d been to a few séances where the medium overplayed their card, went for theatrics rather than simplicity. They’d used all sorts of things in order to summon the dead: sheets, boiled noodles, wire, bits of paper.

 

He had to admire Mesmiro a little.

 

“Alice, your mother loves you,” Mesmiro said. “Is there something you want to say to

her?”

 

One knock. Yes.

 

“Do you want to say that you love her, too?”

 

Yes.

 

“Anything else?”

 

Yes.

 

“I’m sensing something, something of some urgency,” he said in a dreamlike voice. All around Alastair people moved in a little closer. “I’m sensing that she wants to impart some message, some message about her death, it’s very important. It’s something about the maid. Why haven’t they found the maid. Is that right?”

 

One knock.

 

“Is the maid dead or alive?” Alastair asked.

 

Mesmiro’s mouth turned down a little but the irritation was quickly masked. This was a séance, not a police investigation.

 

“Alice, is the girl alive?”

 

There was a hesitation, then three knocks.

 

“She doesn’t know. She thought so but she hasn’t been found. She thought she drowned.”

 

Claire Hart broke out into a sob and broke the circle when she covered her eyes.

 

“Oh God, I just can’t, I’m sorry, I can’t anymore.”

 

And the séance was over. The guests felt slightly disappointed but they couldn’t make their hostess do anything she didn’t, or couldn’t, do and so they were seen into the drawing rooms for brandy and conversation. Only Alastair and the magician stayed behind.

 

“Interesting séance,” Alastair commented. “We’ve been wondering about the girl as well.”

 

Mesmiro turned to him and nodded his eyebrows raised slightly.

 

“I remember that Alice had a maid, I wasn’t aware that she was missing,” he said. “Do you think she had something to do with this?”

 

Alastair shook his head.

 

“I don’t think she was the killer if that’s what you’re asking, no,” he said.

 

“Killer? Sir, are you still considering that her death was a murder?” he asked.

 

“Yes.”

 

Mesmiro seemed to be about to complain but then he closed his mouth and bowed slightly to Alastair.

 

“I’m sure you know what you’re doing, sir,” he said.

 

Mesmiro left with a swishing of his cloak and Alastair watched after him for a moment. There was something there. Something that he couldn’t quite yet put his finger on but something that was very troubling about the medium.

 

 

John had been looking around for Emma since the start of the séance and though he wouldn’t admit it to himself or anyone else he was upset that she hadn‘t been there. He knew it was foolish. She was a maid and he was a policeman in the city and there would be no way for them to have contact with each other after the ending of this case.

 

He left with the rest of the guests so that Alastair could confront the medium and went to look for her. He wasn’t expecting to find her really but was pleasantly surprised when he nearly ran into her on her way down the back staircase.

 

“Mr. Clemens! I’m so sorry,” she said. She was frazzled. Her hair, normally done so neatly, was coming out of its pins and flying everywhere. She looked as if she’d just seen a ghost.

 

He took her by the shoulders and settled her.

 

“Emma, please, I’m unharmed. Are you well?”

 

She looked at him and for a moment there was a flash between them of some emotion. It

was a comforting feeling, unlike what he had been expecting, as if he’d known her for years, like she were an old friend. He wondered, only for an instant, why.

 

“I think I’ve discovered something,” she said. She looked around at the room. They were alone but at any minute Alastair or the magician could exit the dining room and disrupt them or someone from the drawing room could come back this way. She moved him into the stairwell and closed the door.

 

The stairs were very dark and close and she stood very near him so as not to be heard on the other side of the door.

 

“I believe that Anne is here,” she said.

 

“Anne? We would have seen her,” John said.

 

Emma shook her head frantically, sending more wisps of hair flying.

 

“Listen to me, please. There’s a painting in her bedroom, there’s another one in Alice’s, both are of a shack in the woods.”

“We saw them.”

 

“I think it’s a real place,” Emma said. “They were girls together, they basically grew up together, and though I was a friend of Anne’s I was never allowed to know some things. I was so jealous of their friendship, since, well not to speak ill of Mrs. Georgia -” she stopped and blushed.

 

“Go on, Emma.”

 

“Well, I followed them one day and they had gone into the woods and went into this old shack. I didn’t think about it ever again. I figured that if they wanted to make some old building their secret place I wasn’t going to join them,” she said. She shuddered with the memory. It hadn’t been a very nice place and at the time she’d wondered why a lady and a lady’s maid had wanted to frequent a place that looked so unholy.

 

There was a gleam in John’s eye that Emma couldn’t see in the darkness of the stairs. He took her by the shoulders again but this time to squeeze her hard to him in an ungentlemanly embrace.

 

“Oh Emma! Emma! You’re wonderful,” he said. “Can you find this place again?”

 

She hesitated. She wanted to please the young policeman but the memory of the woods and what had happened there and the vision of the shadowy figure across the lawn made her afraid. On the other hand, there was Alice to think about, and Anne. Fear was replaced by determination and she nodded her head once.

 

They left the stairwell together and at the same time the door to the dining room slammed open and the swirling cloak of Mesmiro emerged from the room. He looked at them both with a ferocious glare then moved through to the drawing room. Beside John, Emma shivered.

 

“That man makes my skin crawl,” she whispered to him. “It’s unnatural what he says he

can do.”

 

She didn’t mention the figure on the lawn. She didn’t want to appear foolish. Too often people thought she was foolish because she was a lady’s maid and it was somehow very important that John wasn’t one of those people.

 

Alastair left the room moments later and John went to him.

 

“Emma thinks she knows where Anne is,” he said.

 

Alastair’s eyebrows shot up and he looked at Emma.

 

“Really?”

 

She nodded.

 

“Is it close? Can we reach it tonight?”

 

She nodded again.

 

“I can show you.”

 

“Yes, please do.”

 

 

The woods had been scary during the day but at night with the cold and the shadows making the trees seem taller and more menacing it was almost more than Emma could handle. She stayed close to John, his strength a comfort to her.

 

They passed the gazebo and after a moment of searching Emma found a small pathway that lead behind it that had been half-concealed by overgrown foliage. From then on the woods took on a more primordial feel. The trees seemed more menacing and Emma jerked with the sound of every broken twig.

 

“What was that?” she asked. John and Alastair stopped but neither could hear what

she’d heard. Alastair doubled back a little but could find nothing.

 

“I’m certain I heard something,” she said. John put his arms around her.

 

“We’ll take care of it,” he said. Looking at Alastair both men drew their revolvers from their jackets and moved them to their pockets. Emma noticed the movement and said nothing, her wide eyes conveyed all her fear.

 

Silently, though now all three of them listening intently to the night sounds, they moved through the woods. It took only fifteen minutes to get to the shack even with Emma getting slightly misdirected when the path forked. The shack was unlike what both ladies had painted, both had romanticized the place, and the reality was that it was an old and now abandoned smugglers shack. The walls were separating with age and sagging in the center.

 

“There doesn’t seem to be anyone here,” Alastair said, the disappointment was obvious. Emma moved forward.

 

“Anne?”

 

There was no sound. The entire forest seemed to be still. She crept forward and called her friend’s name again.

 

“Anne? It’s Emma.”

 

There was movement inside the shack, like the scuttling of a rat, and then the door opened only a tiny fraction. It was clear to John that Anne had, at one point, been a very pretty girl but the three weeks in the forest with no amenities had wasted her. She was pale and scarred with blisters from the cold, her hair that had shone golden was matted and sticking up with dirt. She was hollowed and emaciated from eating only that which she could steal without the kitchen staff noticing.

 

“Emma?”

 

Emma dropped her fear and ran to her friend and embraced the poor thing. Both were moved to tears and the gentlemen were grateful that the darkness hid their own emotion. They were allowed inside the shack, though warily, by the girl and were able to witness the conditions she’d been living in for the last three weeks. They were deplorable; worse than any poor house that Alastair had ever seen.

 

She had a cook stove that was now barely heating a small pot of some food she’d just stolen from the kitchen. The inside of the shack only just kept the wind and the cold outside but still wind got caught through the cracks of the walls and under the eaves creating a screaming banshee wail.

 

Yet, it was obvious that this had been a haven for two young girls for quite some time. There was a mattress in the corner and though the blankets on the mattress were stained or threadbare, obviously salvaged from the rubbish, the girl had made the bed in the precise manner she had been used to. There was also a collection of books on a make-shift shelf in the corner and few other amenities that seemed out of place in the hovel that had been taken from the house. There was a pen and a bottle of ink with the ink frozen in it near a pad of paper, a small writing desk, a teapot.

 

“Who are these men?” Anne asked Emma. She glared at the two policemen from near the pot and both men knew that she would blind them with the contents if they spooked her.

 

“Policemen, from the city, they want to talk to you, Anne. They’ve been looking for you,” Emma said.

 

“You think I killed her, don’t you?”

 

Alastair shook his head, he took only a step closer with his hands outreached.

 

“Anne, we think you’re a witness,” he said. “Maybe a victim, too.”

 

She watched him warily. She didn’t recognize his face but, then, she didn’t recognize many people now. The trauma that she’d suffered from being underwater, then hypothermic, had caused her to forget. She should have died, she knew that, but it had been the anger that had made her come back. She needed to know who killed her mistress and who had left her for dead.

 

And she knew now. The moment when she’d gone to the house to steal food for the night and had glanced in the window had been crystal clear. She’d recognized the man and the horrible knowledge had flooded back to her. But it was only the man she remembered and things pertaining to the man. That was all she could focus on now. Who she could trust was different.

 

Yet, she’d recognized Emma immediately. The warmth of their friendship, though lesser than her friendship with Alice, had hit her and doubled her over. She clutched the young woman’s hand and tears spilled.

 

“Anne, you know who killed Alice,” Alastair said. He didn’t ask. He knew. He could see in her face and in her posture the giving in. She’d been keeping herself alive out here through sheer willpower for three weeks. Three weeks! He would have had a hard time imagining a man doing the same, even himself.

 

Emma and Anne sat on the bed and Emma drew a blanket around her friend’s shoulders. The two men crouched on the ground.

 

“His name is Oliver Morris,” she said.

 

John turned to Alastair and Alastair nodded. He was too seasoned a cop to react though the revelation struck him. They’d had him at the cemetery! But, then, how could they have known.

 

“I didn’t recognize him at first,” Anne said. “He, I don’t think he wanted to be recognized yet, but Alice had known him for years and she figured it out quickly.”

 

“Why do you think he did it?” Alastair asked.

 

Anne shook her head. She was tired and suddenly very cold. It was over. It was all over and the tension that had been keeping her alive was now released. She looked and felt amazingly vulnerable and safe.

 

“She was going to expose him,” she said.

 

The men didn’t understand and she sighed.

 

“Oliver was always jealous, ever since we were little. He would mock me for only wanting to be Alice’s maid and told me I had no ambition in life. I only ever wanted to have a good, simple life but that was never enough for him. He wanted to marry Alice.”

 

“Was he in love with her?” Alastair asked, remembering the pain that he’d seen on the

man’s face. He was shocked to hear Anne laugh.

 

“No. He was in love with her power, her position. He was in love with a lot of things that Alice represented but not her herself. When she told him that she’d been thinking about giving up all her money to join a missionary group he dropped her.”

 

John’s eyes flew open.

 

“Was she going to?”

 

“No, of course not, but she had no interest in her father’s money apart from living expenses. She wasn’t going to stay here.”

 

“Unlike Georgia,” Alastair said. She nodded, there was a faint smile and they shared a moment of understanding.

 

“You’re correct, sir,” she said. “When Alice’s grandmother died, it seemed strange to us that it was Georgia that mentioned Mesmiro. She doesn’t know much about the Spiritualist Movement and always seemed to be down on it, yet she went to Mrs. Hart with the name. We found out that she’d met him when she went to New York and he’d recognized her from the society papers and wooed her.”

 

Emma’s hand flew to her mouth.

 

“How could she? Mr. Jonathan’s always been a gentleman to her,” she said, scandalized. Anne shook her head.

 

“That you didn’t know about it just shows how conniving she is,” she said.

 

“She didn’t take me to New York. She said I was a country bumpkin and that she was ashamed to be seen with me in so cosmopolitan a city,” Emma said. She lowered her eyes with real hurt. Anne placed her hand on her friend’s hand.

 

“Anne, please continue,” Alastair said gently.

 

“Alice and I found out that they were lovers and we were going to expose the two of them for that. Then, she found out that he was a fraud, as well. She’d just lost her grandmother and she couldn’t forgive him for cheating her mother.”

 

“So, Mesmiro, or Oliver Morris, was about to lose his lover, his connection to money, and his profession,” Alastair said.

 

“At the hands of a girl that he had rejected,” John said. Anne nodded. She closed her eyes and tilted her head to Emma’s shoulder. Alastair worried about the girl and what she’d been through. It was a long, cold trek back through the woods and he wasn’t certain she’d make it. Yet, they couldn’t leave her here. He’d have to get a cart and come back for her. He’d leave John to watch over the two women.

 

Alastair stood and told John and the two women his plans.

 

“I’ll get Sullivan to arrest the man before I come back so that he won’t be a threat to you,” he said.

 

Anne nodded weakly.

 

 

Alastair plunged into the cold again and trudged straight back to the police station.

There, he woke Michael Sullivan up and told him what he’d learned and they got a dog cart to go to the Hart’s house.

 

Mr. Hart was still downstairs when they knocked and they were shown to speak to him almost instantly.

 

“Gentlemen?”

 

“We’ve found the missing maid, Anne. She’s been in the woods for three weeks in a shack,” Michael said.

 

Gregory’s face went slack with shock.

 

“Oh my God,” he said. “Is she -”

 

“Yes, sir. We need to get her back here as soon as possible and get her some medical treatment,” Michael said.

 

“Yes, of course. I’ll call the doctor now.”

 

“Yes, sir, also I need to know where the magician is. Mesmiro,” Michael said.

Gregory frowned and shook his head.

 

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand. Why?”

 

“Do you know where he is, sir?” Alastair asked.

 

“No,” Gregory said, turning toward him. “He left some time ago.”

 

 

Alastair left the trio in the shack with John and his service revolver to protect the women until Mesmiro could be brought to justice. Emma laid Anne down on the mattress and covered her with the blankets then went to melt some of snow for water. The teakettle was on the old stove slowly coming to a boil as she watched her friend.

 

“I can’t imagine it,” she whispered to John. Anne was sleeping fitfully now, the exhaustion finally overcoming her, and Emma was slightly worried that she’d not wake up. John pressed his hand against Emma’s.

 

He was about to say something but had no idea what. What could one say that wouldn’t sound forced or trivial? He sat in silence. The shack was remarkably warm with the stove on but he still had to draw his jacket around his shoulders when the wind caught under the eaves. Emma was in just a shift dress and a housecoat and was shivering now that the adrenaline was gone. It was quiet in the shack with only the bubbling of the teakettle and Anne’s ragged breathing.

 

The door crashed in and a swirl of black engulfed the room like smoke. Emma screamed and Anne jerked upright. John jumped to his feet in time to see the flash of a knife in the man’s hand as he moved towards Anne and drew his revolver.

 

“Drop it, Morris,” he said.

 

The man turned to him, his eyes flashing. His fake nose was sliding off his face and the make-up was melting off with snow and sweat which made him look like a ghoul. The anger and fear drove him wild.

 

“She’ll not ruin me! Not after her death! I’ll see to it. I’ve worked too hard for this. Too hard.”

 

His voice was hard and high with panic. He lunged at the girl again but there was a shot and he crumpled to the ground, blood blossoming and staining the jacket.

 

Emma and Anne stared at the man, still menacing even as a corpse. In the silence that followed the teakettle screamed and no one moved. It screamed a high wailing sound like a punctuation on the violence. John moved to the stove and took the kettle off the burner and the shack was plunged into silence again.

 

 

Anne had been loaded onto the dog cart and John was walking with Emma back to the house, one of the blankets over her shoulders. Alastair and Michael stayed back in the shack with the body of Mesmiro.

 

“We’re sure he was the killer?” Michael said.

 

“John wouldn’t have shot to kill if he hadn’t been certain,” Alastair said.

 

Michael nodded. He placed a blanket over the man’s face and shook his head.

 

“This will cause a scandal,” he said.

 

Alastair smiled.

 

"People love scandals." 

“That’s