Cinderella Six Feet Under (3 page)

“Precisely. Her body was dragged from the street, through the carriageway, across the courtyard, and left in the vegetable patch.”

“When?”

“Judging by the merely damp, rather than soaked, condition of her gown, she had not been out of doors for more than a half hour or so.”

“If the murderer has been identified, were there witnesses to the crime?”

“Not precisely, but bystanders in the street reported seeing the murderer fleeing from the carriageway on foot, and he was recognized.”

“What of the fine gown she wore?” Ophelia asked. “
That
was not such as ladies who haunt street corners are wont to wear.” And—not that Ophelia could say it aloud—surely that girl's surpassing beauty would have protected her from walking the streets to find customers.

“She must have stolen the gown,” Malbert said. “
Madame
, the unfortunate creature was placed by chance, and only by chance, in my garden.”

“No, it is too, too great a coincidence,” Ophelia said. “Placed by chance in her own mother's garden?”

“Forgive me for saying so,
madame
, but reality is . . . untidy. In reality,
la chance
plays the greatest role.”

Ophelia's life had been just as pawed over by chance as the next person's, but being lectured by strangers didn't agree with her constitution.

The officers spoke with Malbert in French. Malbert looked at Ophelia. “They tell me that it would be wise for Mademoiselle Prudence to seclude herself until the villain has been arrested. And pray forgive me, dear ladies, for your inhospitable reception, and do consent to stay under my roof until the murderer has been arrested. It is clear, Madame Brand, that you are a lady of gentle breeding and that you are accustomed to better treatment. I shall reprimand my
majordome
, Baldewyn, and you and Mademoiselle Bright will be shown to the very best chambers in my home.”

“But why must Miss Bright seclude herself?” Ophelia asked.

“Because she could be in danger. She bears such a resemblance to the murder victim, it is possible that if the murderer sees her he may believe that his victim did not, after all, die. He might attempt to kill again.”

Kill Prue? Leaping Leviticus.
Where
was Henrietta? “I must insist upon being taken to the marquise this very instant!” Ophelia cried.

Malbert's cheeks trembled. “It is not . . . But you do not . . . the trouble is, Madame Brand, that the marquise, Henrietta, my darling wife, she is gone. Vanished. She has been missing since Tuesday.”

F
ourteen hours after Gabriel had first seen Miss Bright's morgue drawing in
The
Times
, his train chuffed and screeched into Gare du Nord in the middle of a sodden gray Paris morning.

After leaving his study at St. Remigius's College, Gabriel had made a ten-minute stop at his lodgings to fetch a valise of clothing, don a greatcoat, and give directions to his housekeeper. Then he had gone directly to London. From Charing Cross, he'd ridden the South-Eastern Railway to Folkestone. He had boarded, just in the nick of time, one of the night ferries that trundled back and forth across the Channel between Folkestone and Boulogne. Once in Boulogne, it was a few hours' anxious wait for the first morning train to Paris.

Gabriel had had a surfeit of hours to mull over a plan. So it was with a brisk step that he alighted from his first-class railway car and into the steamy hubbub of the
gare
. He was deaf to the babble of porters and hawkers, to the hisses of long, gleaming, eel-black trains. He was blind to the glass vaults above the platforms. He scarcely smelled the coal smoke, the whiffs of sweat, musky perfume, fresh bread, cinders, roses.

His only thought was, after so many hours caged in railway compartments and trapped with his thoughts, that at last he could
act
.

*   *   *

Le Marais—“The Marsh”—
on
the right bank of the Seine, was a neighborhood that had been favored by blue bloods until about a century ago. Now its edges were tattered. The Roque-Fabliau mansion at 15 Rue Garenne was a grand private town house, what Parisians called an
hôtel particulier
, much to the confusion of British and American tourists. Hôtel Malbert was, by the looks of it, a seventeenth-century noble house in the style of Louis XIII. Pale yellow stone, rows of tall windows, steep slate roofs, Italianate pediments and cornices.

Gabriel rapped thrice upon the front door. The knocker was shaped like a mouse's head.

Poetic touch.

A prune-mouthed steward cracked the door several inches.
“Oui?”

“Good morning,” Gabriel said in French. “Is a young lady by the name of Miss Ophelia Flax within?”

“No, indeed,
monsieur
, there is not. I have never heard of anyone by that name.”

Where was Miss Flax, then? Still in Germany? Returned to America?

“And the daughter of the house, the young American girl, is deceased as the newspapers claim?” Gabriel asked.

“Regrettably, yes.” The steward shut the door an inch. “None of the family had ever made the girl's acquaintance, however, so although it was a great shock to discover a corpse in the garden, it was not felt as a
loss
as such.”

Unfeeling wretch.

“I had hoped to locate the young American lady, Miss Flax, who had lately been traveling with the marquise's daughter. Alas, I fear she has journeyed elsewhere. No matter. I still wish to speak with the marquis.”

“Oh, you
all
wish to speak with Monsieur le Marquis.” The door closed another inch.

Gabriel wedged his foot in the remaining space. “You misunderstand. I am not a gentleman of the press.” He drew a solid gold card case—a gift from his mother—from his inner jacket pocket and pushed his calling card through the crack.

The steward took the card. “Lord Harrington, is it? My, my. One is able to purchase
anything
these days, is one not?” He returned the card. “My compliments to your engraver. Beautiful work.”

Another gentleman of Gabriel's station—his brother, for instance—would have cursed the steward, waved a cane about, made noisy demands. But Gabriel preferred more subtle tactics. He pulled his foot from the threshold.
“Merci
,
monsieur.”

The door thumped shut.

Gabriel was not in the habit of thinking a great deal about what one might term his heart. He had attained the age of thirty-four without anyone in particular stepping forward to claim that organ, and he was glad of it. His academic work consumed him utterly.

Yet, as he spoke to the driver of the hired cabriolet waiting at the curb, his heart constricted—or did it swell?—in his chest. Either way, it was behaving in a most uncomfortable and unaccountable fashion.

He climbed into the cabriolet.

What had he fancied? That he'd discover Miss Flax weak and weeping, that he'd drag her into his arms, rescue her like a knight errant?

Utter piffle. Miss Flax was not, by any stretch of the fancy, a damsel in distress.

His cabriolet rocked forward into the mist.

*   *   *

“Looks like they're
changing the lock on the carriageway gate this morning,” Ophelia said to Prue. “A locksmith is fiddling with it.”

“Interesting,” Prue said, and yawned.

“It
is
interesting.” Ophelia peered through the trickling windowpane. Her—or, properly speaking, Mrs. Brand's—guest chamber looked down upon the mansion's rear courtyard. The chamber itself was an Antarctic expanse of creaking parquet, moth-chewed tapestries, furniture with chipped gold paint, and a lopsided canopied bed that smelled of mildew and mouse. However, its windows afforded a bird's-eye view. Ophelia preferred not to look at the matted vegetable patch, straight down, where they'd found that poor dead girl. But she could just see into the shadowy carriage arch, and a man with a toolbox was changing the gate's lock. “It's interesting for a couple of reasons. Prue—are you listening?” She glanced over her shoulder.

“Course I'm listening.” Prue lolled on a brocade sofa. An ottoman-sized ginger cat lay in her lap. Prue popped a butterscotch drop into her mouth. “What's so mighty interesting about some locksmith?”

“Number one, when we went into the garden that night—”

Prue sucked harder on her butterscotch.

“—well, the gate was open. Not locked. Number two, the police said that they had identified the murderer—”

“Still haven't found him, though.”

“It has been but two days.”

“Feels like eternity. I got cabin fever, Ophelia.”

Ophelia had cabin fever, too. But there was no use dumping kerosene on a fire. “Listen. The murderer was said to be a derelict who dwells in the streets here. So, he wouldn't have had a key to the gate.”

“You're fishing for minnows.”

“Something doesn't sit right.” Ophelia turned to watch the locksmith some more. “I can't put my finger on it.”

“I know you caught a murderer back in Germany, but that don't mean you ought to meddle again. Could be dangerous. Guess you ain't concerned about danger, though, on account of your nerves got all frazzled out in the circus, standing on them trick ponies.”

“I cannot continue to twiddle my thumbs in this damp prison of a house while Eglantine and Austorga frisk about with their friends to the dressmaker's, the milliner's, lectures, concerts, lessons in—what did they say?—elocution, deportment—”

“Velocipede riding.”

“Surely not! Dinners, soirées, the theater, the sweet shop—”

“Austorga
did
bring me a bag of butterscotch drops, and some nice orange jellies. And they're keen to find husbands so they need all them refinements.”

“But they do not seem to care about that girl.”

“My sister.
Their
sister, sort of.”

“Yes. And your mother—it is as though she never existed.
‘Oh, she'll be back!'
Malbert keeps saying, and your stepsisters look away.” Ophelia had even searched Henrietta's bedchamber. It had been untidy, but it had offered up no clues as to her whereabouts. “The whole family is keeping things back, I'd wager. The servants, too.”

“A spooky lot, that's for sure,” Prue said.

Ophelia plopped onto the dressing table stool. She had been disguised as Mrs. Brand every waking minute for the last two days. Her scalp itched under the wig, her muscles ached from hefting around the rump and bosom padding, and her skin was dry and sore from the crinkly cosmetics. “And Malbert is downright peculiar.”

“Looks like a mushroom that's lost its cap, don't he?”

“What does he
do
in that workshop of his? No one seems to know. Not his daughters. Not the servants. When I asked him last night at dinner, he behaved in a most evasive fashion—did you ever see so much blinking and stammering?” The only thing Malbert had confessed was that he was the student of some famous clockmaker, but that he did not make clocks.

Prue picked a loose blob of fluff from the cat and flicked it into the air. “Ma says
all
fellers is sneaky, and if you think they ain't you'd best be double careful.”

What a distressing notion.

Ophelia got to work on her Mrs. Brand face. After that first night, she'd made certain to apply her greasepaint, and the flour paste that created the crepey effect, with a delicate hand so that it would stand up to close scrutiny. Heaven only knew how long she'd be stuck in this role, and now, well, there was no turning back.

Behind her, Prue began to snore.

When Ophelia had finished doctoring her face, she stashed her theatrical kit in the bottom of the wardrobe underneath a musty blanket. The housekeeper, Beatrice, had announced that no one would be cleaning their chambers, anyway, but Ophelia liked to be cautious.

She went to the sofa and jiggled Prue's woolen-stockinged toe. “Prue? Wake up, Prue. It's time to go down to breakfast.” There was a hole in her stocking, at the heel. Poor Prue. Pretty as a princess, always in rags.

Prue snuffled awake and lifted her head. “Huh? What is it? Is Ma back?”

“No. Not yet. Are you coming to breakfast?” Ophelia's eyes fell again on Prue's stocking.

“What?” Prue asked. “What are you gawping at my foot for?”

“Merciful heavens,” Ophelia murmured. There had been something familiar about the dead girl's foot, about the purple nails and that swollen jut on her big toe. “That is it. That is
it
.”

*   *   *

Ophelia found Malbert
hunched behind a newspaper at the breakfast table and demanded that he send at once for the police inspector. Malbert sent a note with an errand boy and returned to his newspaper.

Ophelia dug into her breakfast of coffee, buttery rolls, pungent cheese, ham, and hothouse oranges. Prue had probably gone back to sleep.

“I happened to notice a locksmith working on the carriageway gate this morning,” Ophelia said.

Malbert slowly lowered his newspaper.
“Oui?”

“Might I inquire why?”

“Madame Brand, you are most curious,
non
? What is it that they say about the cat and curiosity?” He blinked twice and raised his newspaper again.

Was that a threat?

Inspector Foucher, from the office of the
commissaire
, arrived at half past eight. Ophelia and Malbert received him in a formal salon. Foucher was one of those fellows with twig legs and a barrel chest. Small brown eyes like chocolate drops peered out from a swollen face. He held a bowler hat.

“Madame Brand,” he said in a weary tone, “I am a busy man. What is it?”

“Has the murderer been arrested yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Ah. Well, I have made a most fascinating realization that might aid in your investigation. Her feet, you may recall—or, at least, the one that I saw—were in a most pitiful condition.”

“The girl's feet were injured,
oui
.”

“Both of them?”

“
Oui
, as the result of her body having been dragged to its place in the garden.”

“I have a different theory. I propose that she was a dancer of the ballet.”

Malbert shifted in his chair.

“The ballet!” Foucher chuckled.

“I do not jest, Inspector. The feet of ballerinas are subject to the most grievous ill-treatment and injury as the result of supporting their entire weight upon the very tips of their toes.” Ophelia had seen it dozens of times, both in the circus and the theater. One dancer she'd known, Florrie, had had bunions like ripe crabapples.

Inspector Foucher frowned. “How, may I inquire, does a respectable lady like you know what the feet of a ballerina look like?”

“Oh, well.” Ophelia smoothed her cuff. “In Boston, you see, I am a member of the Ladies' League for the Betterment of Fallen Angels.”

“How charitable,” Malbert murmured.

Ophelia leaned towards Foucher. “There are many
fallen angels
, you understand, employed in the theater.”

“Ah,
oui
.”

“I urge you, Inspector, to consider searching for the deceased young lady's identity within whatever ballet theaters Paris possesses.”

“You almost seem to know who the victim was.”

“I do not. But it is worth investigating the ballet theaters, is it not?”