Speaking From Among The Bones (7 page)

Teach
you
to accuse me of listening at keyholes
, I thought.

The blood drained out of Feely’s face. I knew instantly that my sister was not the murderer. You cannot fake pallor.

“Mr. Collicutt? Body?”

She leaped to her feet and sent the teapot crashing to the floor.

“ ’Fraid so,” I said. “In the crypt. Wearing a gas mask. Most peculiar.”

With a truly terrifying wail, Feely fled the room.

I followed her upstairs.

“I’m sorry, Feely,” I called softly, tapping at her door. “It just slipped out.”

Her sobs were muffled by the wooden panels. How long would she be able to resist begging for the gory details? I’d have to wait it out.

“I know you’re upset, but just think how Alberta Moon is going to take it.”

A long, shuddering sob ended abruptly in a hiccup.

I heard the sound of shoes on the carpet and the turning of a key. The door swung open and there stood Feely, damp and devastated.

“Alberta Moon?” she asked, her hand trembling in front of her mouth.

I nodded sadly. “Better let me come in,” I said. “It’s a long story.”

Feely threw herself facedown on the bed. “Tell me everything. Start at the beginning.”

Oddly enough, she used nearly the same words as Inspector Hewitt had, and I told her, as I had told him, my
gripping tale, leaving out only those essentials which I wished to keep to myself.

“A gas mask,” she sobbed as I finished. “Why in heaven’s name would he be wearing a gas mask?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said.

Actually, I
did
know—or at least I had a fairly good idea.

In the past eight or nine months I’d spent a good many hours poring over the pages of Taylor’s
Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence
, whose photographically illustrated volumes I had been fortunate enough to find hidden away on a high shelf in the stacks of the Bishop’s Lacey Free Library. By a remarkable stroke of fortune, these were similar enough in size to Enid Blyton’s
The Island of Adventure, The Castle of Adventure
, and
The Sea of Adventure
that, through a clever bit of jiggering with the dust jackets, I was able to study them closely for as long as I pleased in a remote corner of the reading room.

“My goodness, Flavia!” Miss Pickery, the head librarian had said. “You
are
a bookworm, aren’t you?”

If only she knew.

“Perhaps there was a gas leak,” Feely said, her voice muffled by the comforter. “Perhaps he was trying to escape the fumes.”

“Perhaps,” I said, noncommittally.

Although a carbon monoxide leak from the iron monster in the church basement was a distinct possibility, the problem was this: Since the gas is odorless, colorless, and tasteless, how could Mr. Collicutt have been aware of its presence?

And it seemed unlikely that, after six weeks, there
would be measurable traces of the stuff in whatever was left of his blood. In cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, as I had good reason to know, the gas (CO) bonded to the blood’s hemoglobin, displacing the oxygen it was meant to carry to the body’s cells, and the victim died of simple suffocation. As long as he remained alive (once dragged from the gaseous atmosphere, of course) the carbon monoxide would pass off fairly quickly from the blood, its oxygen being replenished by normal breathing.

Dead bodies were a different kettle of fish. With respiration at a standstill, carbon monoxide could remain in the body for a considerable length of time. Indeed, it was a fairly well-known fact that the monoxide could still be detected in the gases given off by a cadaver that had been dead for months.

With no easy access to the late Mr. Collicutt’s blood, or his inner organs, it would be nearly impossible to be sure. Even if there
had
been a pool of blood hidden beneath his body, it would long ago have been reoxygenated by exposure to the air of the crypt, however foul that may be.

I thought of the moment I first stuck my face into that abyss—of the wave of cold, acrid decay that was swept into my nostrils.

“Eureka!” I shouted. I couldn’t help myself.

“What is it?” Feely asked. She couldn’t help herself, either.

“The bat in the organ!” I said excitedly. “It got into the church somehow. I’ll bet there’s a broken window! What do you think, Feely?”

As an excuse, it was as stale as yesterday’s toast, but it was the best I could come up with on such short notice.

It’s just as well she couldn’t read my mind. What I was thinking was this: The cold draft coming out of what ought to have been a closed crypt reminded me of what Daffy had told me about the verse on Cassandra Cottlestone’s tomb.

“She lies at the church’s door,” Daffy had said, “because she was a suicide. That’s why she’s not buried with the rest of the Cottlestones in the crypt. By rights, she shouldn’t have been buried in the churchyard at all, but her father was a magistrate, and was able to move heaven and earth, as it were.”

I thought for a moment of poor Mr. Twining, Father’s old schoolmaster, who lay in a plot of common ground on the far side of the riverbank behind St. Tancred’s.
His
father, evidently, had not been a magistrate.

“Mrs. Cottlestone, though, had arranged for a tunnel to be dug between Cassandra’s tomb and the family crypt, so that her daughter—or at least the soul of her daughter—could visit her parents whenever she wished.”

“You’re making this up, Daffy!”

“No, I’m not. It’s in the third volume of
The History and Antiquities of Bishop’s Lacey
. You can look it up yourself.”

“A tunnel? Really?”

“So they say. And I’ve heard rumors—”

“Yes? Tell me, Daffy!”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t. You know how cross Father can be when he thinks we’re filling your mind with specters.”

“I won’t tell him. Please, Daffy! I swear!”

“Well …”

“Pleee-ase! Cross my heart with a silver dart!”

“All right, then. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. Mr. Haskins told me that once, when he was digging a new grave next to Cassandra Cottlestone’s tomb, the edge gave way, and his shovel fell in the hole. When he found he couldn’t fish it out with his arm, he had to crawl in headfirst and—you’re quite sure you want to hear this?”

I pretended to be biting off my fingers at the knuckles.

“At the bottom of the grave, beside the shovel, was a mummified human foot.”

“That’s impossible! It couldn’t have lasted for two hundred years!”

“Mr. Haskins said it could—under certain conditions. Something to do with the soil.”

Of course! Adipocere! Grave wax! How could I have forgotten that?

When buried in a damp location, a human body can be wonderfully transmogrified. The ammonia generated by decay, in which the fatty tissues break down into palmitic, oleic, and stearic acids, working hand in hand with sodium and potassium from the grave soil, could turn a
corpse into a lump of hard laundry soap. It was a simple matter of chemistry.

Daffy lowered her voice and went on. “He said that not long before this, he had sprinkled red brick dust on the crypt floor to see if rats from the riverbank were finding a way into the church.”

I shuddered. It was less than a year since I’d been locked in the pit shed on the river’s edge, and I knew that the rats were no figment of my sister’s imagination.

Daffy’s eyes widened, her voice now no more than a whisper. “And do you know what?”

“What?”

I couldn’t help it: I was whispering, too.

“The sole of the foot was tinted red, as if it had stepped in—”

“Cassandra Cottlestone!” I almost shouted, the hair at the nape of my neck standing on end as if suddenly blown by a cold, invisible breeze. “She was walking—”

“Exactly,” Daffy said.

“I don’t believe it!”

Daffy shrugged. “Why should I care what you believe? I give you a fact and you give me a headache. Now buzz off.”

I had buzzed off.

While I was lost in recollection, Feely’s sobs had subsided, and she was now staring sullenly out the window.

“Who’s the victim?” I asked, trying to cheer her up.

“Victim?”

“You know, the poor sap you’re going to carry down the aisle.”

“Oh,” she said, tossing her hair and coughing up the
answer with surprisingly little urging on my part. “Ned Cropper. I thought you’d have already heard that at the keyhole.”

“Ned? You despise him.”

“Wherever did you get that idea? Ned’s going to own the Thirteen Drakes one day. He’s going to take it over from Tully Stoker and rebuild the whole place: dance bands, darts on the terrace, lawn bowling … blow a breath of fresh air into that coal hole … bring it into the twentieth century. He’s going to be a millionaire. Just you wait and see.”

“You’re warped,” I said.

“Oh, all right, then. If you must know, it’s Carl. He’s begged Father to let me be Mrs. Pendracka and Father has agreed—mostly because he believes Carl to be of the bloodline of King Arthur. Having an heir with those credentials would be a real feather in Father’s cap.”

“Sucks to you,” I said. “You’re pulling my leg.”

“We’re going to live in America,” Feely went on. “In St. Louis, Missouri. Carl’s going to take me to watch Stan Musial knock ’em out of the park for the Cardinals. That’s a baseball team.”

“Actually, I was hoping it was Sergeant Graves,” I said. “I don’t even know his first name.”

“Giles,” Feely said, looking dreamily at her fingernails. “But why ever would I marry a policeman? I couldn’t bear the thought of living with someone who came home every night with murder on his boots.”

Feely seemed to be getting over poor Mr. Collicutt’s death quite nicely. Perhaps there was a drop of de Luce blood in her after all.

“It’s Dieter,” I said. “He’s the one who gave you the friendship ring at Christmas.”

“Dieter? He has nothing to offer but love.”

As she touched the ring, I noticed for the first time that she was wearing it on the third finger of her left hand. At the very mention of his name, she couldn’t keep from smiling.

“It is!” I’m afraid I shrieked. “It
is
Dieter!”

“We shall make a fresh start,” Feely said, her face more soft than I had ever seen it before. “Dieter is going to train as a schoolmaster. I shall teach piano and the two of us shall be as happy as dormice in cotton.”

I couldn’t help hugging myself.
Yaroo!
I was thinking.

“Where is Dieter, by the way?” I asked. “I haven’t seen him for a while.”

“He’s gone up to London to sit a special examination. Father arranged it. If you breathe a word I’ll kill you.”

Something in her voice told me that she meant it.

“Your secret’s safe with me,” I told her, and for once I meant it.

“We shall be engaged for a year, until I’m nineteen,” Feely went on, “simply to please Father. After that it’s all cottages and columbines and a place to turn handsprings whenever one feels the urge.”

Feely had never turned a handspring in her life, but I knew what she meant.

“I shall miss you, Feely,” I said slowly, realizing that my heart was in every word.

“How too, too touching,” she said. “You’ll get over it.”

W
HENEVER
I
’M A LITTLE
blue I think about cyanide, whose color so perfectly reflects my mood. It is pleasant to think that the manioc plant, which grows in Brazil, contains enormous quantities of the stuff in its thirty-pound roots, all of which, unfortunately, is washed away before the residue is used to make our daily tapioca.

Although it took me an hour to admit it to myself, Feely’s words had stung me to the quick. Rather than brooding about it, though, I took down from the shelf a bottle of potassium cyanide.

Outdoors, the rain had stopped, and a shaft of warm light now shone in through the window, causing the white crystals to sparkle brightly in the sudden sun.

The next ingredient was strychnine, which, coincidentally, came from another South American plant, and from which curare—arrow poison—was derived.

I’ve mentioned before my passion for poisons and my special fondness for cyanide. But, to be perfectly fair, I must admit that I also have something of a soft spot for strychnine, not just for what it
is
, but for what it’s capable of becoming. Brought into the presence of nascent oxygen, for instance, these rather ordinary white crystals become at first rich blue in color, then pass in succession through purple, violet, crimson, orange, and yellow.

A perfect rainbow of ruin!

I placed the strychnine carefully beside the cyanide.

Next came the arsenic: In its powdered form, it looked rather drab beside its sisters—more like baking powder than anything else.

In its arsenious oxide form, the arsenic was soluble in water, but not in alcohol or ether. The cyanide was soluble in alkaline water and dilute hydrochloric acid, but not in alcohol. The strychnine was soluble in water, ethyl alcohol, or chloroform, but not in ether. It was like the old puzzle about the fox, the goose, and the bag of corn. To extract their various essences, each poison needed to be babied along in its own bath.

With the windows thrown wide open for ventilation, I sat down to wait out the hour it would take for all three solutions to be complete. Solutions in more than one sense of the word!

“Cyanide … strychnine … arsenic.” I spoke their names aloud. These were what I called my “calming chemicals.”

Of course I wasn’t the first to think of compounding several poisons into a single devastating drink. Giulia
Tofana, in seventeenth-century Italy, had made a business of selling her Aqua Tofana, a solution containing, among other ingredients, arsenic, lead, belladonna, and hog drippings, to more than six hundred women who wished to have their marriages chemically dissolved. The stuff was said to be as limpid as rock water, and the abbé Gagliani had claimed that there was hardly a lady in Naples who did not have some of it lying in a secret phial among her perfumes.