Mum's the Word (34 page)

Some folded sheets of paper fell from
Parenting for Pleasure
. What had we here? Ah, yes! Primrose Tramwell's letter. The one I had received on the day Ben heard from the Mangés, the same day she and Hyacinth made their surprise visit to break the news about the Black Cloud. Now I could hardly remember what the mystic Chantal had said … some vague spiel about finding the answer within myself. Did I owe my present feeling of powerlessness to some superstitious nonsense that last night's tragedy was predestined?
A house surrounded by water
—how well that described both Merlin's Court and Mendenhall along with hundreds of others! As for the words
fire and brimstone
and
swathed in shadow
, I thought of the clothes in Nelga's Fashions. One size fits all. Dear Primrose and Hyacinth! Having already
resorted to the smelling salts bottle on account of my pregnancy, they had panicked when Chantal had trotted out her vision and I, craving to be pampered, had clutched terror to my bosom and cried
woe is me
! But no more. The Black Cloud didn't blow up the cabin cruiser and I was neither helpless nor hopeless, although not so brave, I must admit, that I wouldn't have welcomed a swig of the herbal remedy Primrose enclosed: balm, horehound, pennyroyal, and cicely steeped in good ale in the midday sun.

Tossing off the bedclothes, I set my feet firmly on the floor—and my chosen path. Something was horribly amiss in this house, and I knew what it was. Believe me, I didn't relish the idea of being a snoop or a squealer, but I must at least try to find the missing knives. Even if they had been taken for a joke—provoked by shades of
Melancholy Mansion
—the matter should be cleared up. As for the ghastly possibility that our departed members might be more reverently named … the late lamented—I would think only … of the truth setting us all free. Save, that is, for the murderer of Mary Faith.

Hurrying my dressing gown over my head, I glimpsed myself in the dressing table mirror. Why does worry always settle around my middle? Was this my punishment for not eating dinner last night? Another five pounds. Heaven help me, in my green velvet with the lace collar I resembled a Victorian matron wearing a bustle the wrong way round. When I got home—should that glad day ever come—I would inform Dr. Melrose I was seeking a second opinion as to my due date.

“Courage!” Alas, the face in the mirror wouldn't look me in the eye.

Repairing to the bathroom, pink sponge bag in hand, I met no one
en route
. Once there, however, I wasn't tempted to linger. The warm sudsy water could not wash away the memory of those words scrawled on the tile:
THIS HOUSE IS GOING TO GET YOU
. And afterwards, brushing out my hair and plaiting it into a twist, I had no desire to snoop in the medicine chest. Too small to be the knives' hideaway, anyhow.

Time, Ellie! Dressed in one of my new maternity outfits—grey slacks and a smock appliquéd with the word
BABY
and a downward pointing arrow (making me afraid to bend over)—I
hesitated on the threshold of my room. Should I go back and remake the bed? No, I would get on with the job at hand. Creeping over to the banisters, I peered down into the sunlit well. All quiet on the hall front. No suspicious shadows. Death had changed nothing. The final Mangé Meeting would be in session, but I couldn't be certain that Pepys and Jeffries would be in attendance. As for Ernestine, I hoped she was making a morning of breakfast, but I would certainly knock before entering her room.

Searching the whole house being out of the question, I had to hope that whoever had taken the knives had hidden them in his or her bedroom. Were I the culprit, I would immediately think of the loose floorboard in my room. No, that was at Merlin's Court, not here. But wait a minute … surely I had crossed a room in this house and heard that same tell-tale creak?

Midway down the hallway I stopped in my tracks as if yanked tight on a rein. But not because of a piece of memory shaken loose. What caused the slam-banging of my heart was Marjorie Rumpson's door—open, just a crack. I was certain it had been closed earlier when I returned to my bedroom to dress.

Surely only the direst need would have taken Marjorie from the meeting! I was amazed she had been allowed to leave, unless … I tiptoed forward … she had been found to be ineligible to—A gasp escaped me. My blasted elbow had caught the door, causing it to slide inward, almost knocking Ernestine Hoffman off her feet. She had the drawer of the bedside table open and was holding a gleaming bouquet of swashbuckler knives.

“Well, what do you know!” Far from attempting to commit
hara-kiri
, the prodigy's mother seethed with righteous indignation. “That nice old gal! Who would have thought it!”

“Are you saying that Miss Rumpson is the knave … 
knive
person?” Backing away from the glittering blades, I closed the door. “And that you only came here to snoop?”

“You surely don't think I'm trying to shift the evidence to her drawer!” Impossible. Ernestine's pudding-basin hair and pajama-striped frock all testified to her respectability. On the dressing table lay Marjorie's black hat with the big bow,
which she had worn on first arriving at Mendenhall after dauntlessly navigating the river in her undies. On the bedside table in question, lay a paperback copy of
The Captured Bride
and a loose-leaf notebook, hand titled,
My Five Hundred Favourite Love Potions
. Mary wasn't the only author in the house.

“I don't know what to believe.” Ernestine had been carrying a knife last night, but she might have found it in the Red Room perhaps if it were the one used against the Cat Cadaver … which may or may not have been the same used to stab the Comte Vincent's prized recipe to his pillow. Wearily, I leaned against the door. That was rust on the smallest of the three blades, wasn't it? No maniac in his right mind would put away used weapons without first giving a quick wipe with tissue or shirt tail. Would he—she? My mind was screaming at me to stop. Don't think about the missing Groggs, the absent Browns or the decamped comte and comtesse. Just put one word in front of another. I intended to ask Ernestine if she'd had reason to be suspicious of Marjorie in particular or if she'd been in the process of searching other rooms, but came out with something quite different.

“You've done this sort of thing before, haven't you?”

“What are you saying?”

“Oh, I don't mean the knives,” I reassured her. “I'm sure if you'd done anything other than find them, you'd have had the sense to use gloves or wrap them in something.”

“Fingerprints!” Her voice hit a high note and the knives clattered to the bed. “I never thought, I …”

“Why would you? It's not as though you came here hoping to prove—or
disprove
—that Marjorie Rumpson is a criminal. All you wanted was to find something—
anything—
that would knock her out of the running as a Mangé.”

“You've sure got your nerve!” Ernestine was back in gear. “And I thought I was doing you a favour checking out your crazy accusations that there's been more going on here than Mary Faith being blown to smithereens! For your information, young lady, I have had my suspicions of Miss Rumpson since last night when she tried to make me believe
she
had solved the Browns' disappearance. Said she had been reading that book”—she pointed to
The Captured Bride
—“and that
she'd seen Henderson Brown with it. Some goofy tale about a man who kidnapped his own wife—”

“Yes!” I had trouble keeping my feet on the ground. I was buoyant with elation. “I'm sure that's it! Henderson playing the cryptic!
He
wrote the title on the mirror. The smudged B word was
Bride
! I suspect he tossed Lois over his shoulder and raced away with her into the night, probably in the
Nell Gwynn
.”

“What—?”

“And Lois would consider the Mangé world well lost for love. She was pining for romance from her meat-and-potatoes lover.”

“Make up your fairy stories.” Ernestine's plump face looked so like her son's. “My Frank always tells me I have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility because I went into puberty early.”

“Oh, quite!” I heard myself say. “Your zealousness as Bingo's Mum took you snooping the other day into my bedroom. Solange saw you coming out. Some things were moved … a paperback book. And a bag had been zipped up. A bag that contained a letter from my mother-in-law.”

“So?” She dropped down on the bed and popped right back up—pricked either by conscience or one of the knives.

“That's how you knew that Ben had worked for Eligibility Escorts. From reading his mother's letter. Somehow I didn't think that Bingo would have blabbed even had that information come out at a meeting.”

“No, he never would!” Ernestine's face had turned the porridgy grey of the wallpaper. “And you'd better not mention your ugly suspicions to my little boy. You can't prove them.”

“You're right. I'm only guessing that you started checking up on the competition your very first night here—and that you only pretended to get locked in the bathroom when you and Solange went in search of the Screamer. No one else has complained of that door sticking. It hasn't for me.”

“None of this,” Ernestine wet her lips, “alters the fact that Marjorie Rumpson hid these knives in that drawer.”

I shook my head. “I don't think she did. I think your Bingo put them there.”

The words just spilled out. Afterwards, I thought about
Chantal and psychic jargon such as transference and channeling. Only fleetingly, mind. Anything of that sort was stuff and nonsense. My subconscious might be kicking in, but not the supernatural.

“I expect he hid them first in his bedroom—who knows?—perhaps under a loose floorboard. And when things hotted up last night, he decided to find somewhere safer.” No need to mention that he had tried to move his horde of food goodies to safer—higher—ground in the bird's nest. “In his place I'd probably have tried to return them to the dining room—stick them in a drawer or tuck them behind the curtains—some place where the incident would be waved aside as trivial. My guess is Bingo
did
head downstairs last night and that he saw someone. A ghost perhaps.”

“Another prankster?” Furious smile.

“I don't know,” I conceded. “Maybe he took fright at a shadow. Or did he make her up? On our first night here, when Jeffries roused the house with her primal scream, I came upon Bingo in the hallway and he was carrying a towel.”

“He's a very clean child!”

“He's a very
bright
child. By telling me he had just seen the ghost of The Lady in the Portrait, he kept me from wondering why he was having a bath at midnight.”

“Make up your mind! Did Bingo have something up his sleeve or inside the towel?” Ernestine was pumping herself up with sarcasm. I could feel myself deflating. I hated this. I didn't think her an evil woman. She just had an overactive need to succeed through her boy. Sort of like an overactive thyroid.

“My guess is he'd stuck the comte's recipe to the pillow and wanted to listen in to the fun or even pull another stunt.” Anxious to get done, I said, “Returning to last night, Bingo backed off from going downstairs because the coast wasn't clear—He saw or heard someone. Would a glimpse of—say Pepys or Jeffries—have deterred him had his errand been something as innocuous as stealing a cookie? As things were, he must have thought luck was giving him a second chance when he spied Marjorie Rumpson's open door. What could have been simpler than to slip inside, open the bedside table drawer? Then the horror of seeing the bathroom door directly
opposite open. No time to do more than crawl under the bed. No wonder he had a coughing fit.”

“Hard to believe”—Ernestine gripped the bedpost so hard her knuckles were white—“that I liked you. We had fun that first evening, us and the Frenchwoman, almost like a slumber party. You know, I almost forgot that I was here for Bingo. Didn't I help with smuggling in Miss Rumpson? I thought, why can't life be like this more often—me giving myself a good time. But by morning, I'd my head back on. I could sure see Bingo wouldn't be getting a fair shot. There was Ms. X lapping up your husband with her eyes, the comte up to his tricks, and Mrs. Brown and Miss Rumpson ready to cry sex discrimination! How about this to make your day: I actually thought God was punishing me for searching your room and the others when Bingo went missing!”

“But this morning you remembered you hadn't got around to checking out Miss Rumpson?”

“Okay! I thought—finally I'd find something I can use.” Ernestine sank onto the bed, gripping the post as if she were riding a merry-go-round horse. She looked dizzy. She believed my accusations of Bingo. Maternal instinct. Not feeling so great myself, I sat down next to her. After a minute she continued, “I never thought Miss Rumpson had used the knives for anything wicked. I don't know what I thought—just that she was a bit off-the-beam, I suppose.”

“Ernestine, Bingo isn't a homicidal maniac. He reminds me of myself at that age. I was the token fat kid in the class. I would have raided the fridge at dead of night if staying at the Vatican. And I can imagine pulling such stunts as writing scary messages on bathroom walls and pinching the knives to strike terror in the hearts of all, and having everything go hopelessly awry when murder intrudes.”

She ground out a laugh. “Thanks for not suspecting my boy of dismembering our missing members and burying them in the cellar.”

“But you believe … the rest?”

“That's a mother for you.” Cheeks pinking with pride. “Easiest thing in the world to believe the very best of our kids, and the very worst. What I have to do now is figure out why the little monster took them.”