by Tedd Hawks
But, if what he thought were true, Brontë’s mission with August would be a dead end. He suspected that August returned the family vault key to Corinthiana, who put it securely away in a place only a few would know and be able to access.
As Crockett evaluated all the clues, Petrarch eyed him interestedly.
“Are you all right, Crockett? You seem lost in thought.”
Crockett jerked from his scheming reverie. “I am,” he said emphatically. “I think an overactive imagination is all.” He continued, “I haven’t told you yet, Petrarch, but I think Brontë and I found the murder weapon—or at least its sibling.”
Petrarch started. “Where? How?”
“We found a sword in the family vault that matches the weapon used against Beatrice. It was a bit of a lucky find—the sun caught the arms collection at just the right moment.”
“You’re sure?”
“Brontë’s going to ask her father what he knows. We think he was the last one to have the key to the vault with all the weapons.”
Petrarch grunted. “Another key, another turn in the labyrinth.”
Doubting his own meandering theory, Crockett turned to Petrarch. “Do you think it could be August?” he asked.
“Augüst,” Petrarch said distractedly. “It could be. There is motive—his belief in the family fortune. He also carried the emotional weight of being trapped in this old house with June’s family for many, many years; that kind of stewing would make anyone homicidal. He could have shot Bixby Hawsfeffer in his boat and thought he’d gotten away with it. Then, of course, Corinthiana delayed everything, meaning that the money kept slipping from his grasp. If Bixby Hawsfeffer confided in him that I have a second copy of the tomb key, the killing of Beatrice could have been committed to draw that out from me and complete the burial so that he could finish the affair once and for all.”
“That all makes sense. He also knew the house well enough to plan the séance scheme.”
“And he’s a sportsman. He’d know how to gut an animal like poor Beatrice.”
The wild theory Crockett cultivated earlier, vanished in the light of this cold, hard logic. Without thinking, he chuckled to himself.
“Something funny, my boy?”
“I had an idea earlier, a fatuous one. When we lay out the facts, it seems even more so.” Crockett rose from his seat next to Petrarch and paced to the window. “I think Kordelia might be infecting me with oddness.”
“In this house oddness is contagion.” Petrarch lifted himself up and waddled beside his young apprentice. “It seems like we have a buttoned-up idea, but I think we are merely seeing a mountain peak thrusting up from a gray mist. There are several individuals in this house who have an air of mystery about them.”
“Robert Edward,” Crockett said.
“May, Martha, Dexter...”
Crockett laughed humorlessly. “In that case, I’ll keep entertaining my bizarre theory. With what we’ve seen, there may be no explanation too grandiose, too full of lunacy.”
“That, my boy, is what I’m afraid of. If no key is found this afternoon, I will make it known I have a copy.” Petrarch finished the rest of the glass of water in one gulp and handed it to Crockett. “I still find it a bizarre coincidence the key and the note are somehow tangentially involved in this, but, as we discussed, they could also be unrelated.”
“You think revealing the key may draw the killer out? Or give us more clues?”
“I think it will provide new evidence.” The old man rocked back and forth on his heels. “Find out what Brontë discovered from her father, but I also think we should start looking backward.”
Crockett instinctively looked behind him.
“To the past, Crockett. To the past.”
“You think the answer is there?”
“I think the beginnings of it are, if only to discover more about the money, where it came from, and where it went. Perhaps it is Augüst, but we have the wrong motive. Let’s not rest yet. I feel the game may be just beginning.”
Chapter 13: Sleuthing
The key was not found.
In the afternoon, the disgruntled parties rested in the sitting room, exhausted. August had spent hours searching. When unsuccessful in his designated part of the house, he moved to others. Corinthiana made an effort at seeking out the key, but when she came across one of the many scarves she used to put around Beatrice’s bowl, she was so overcome with emotion it took twenty-three handkerchiefs to dry her tears.[27]
Brontë and Crockett interacted briefly after their own adventure. It was a very short exchange, enough for Crockett to understand Brontë had not spoken to her father about the weapon.
Outside, the weather matched the tone of the house—stuffy, stagnated, still. Simply sitting on the pink couches of the great room caused rivulets of sweat to pour down Crockett’s neck. June kept instructing Martha to open and close the windows, unsure whether the hot breeze from outside would cool the house or make it warmer.
In this sweaty stillness, Crockett rose from the couch with the intention to clear his head. He knew there could be no advancement in the case with everyone at rest. All parties were silent or gathering their own thoughts; no one was in the mood to speak openly about the events of the day or the past. Corinthiana was about the house, but he felt it was indecorous to speak to her about what woke her and led her to discover Beatrice. Her current emotional state was dire, a continuous string of “awrks” and tears leaked from her as she slowly paced from one end of the house to the other.
The next move in the game would come in the evening. Petrarch would divulge the truth of his key, and Brontë would have retrieved all she could from her father. That would be all that was needed—from that point, they could leap into a fresh perspective on their investigation.
Crockett was on the verge of abandoning any further contemplation of the case, but, when he rose, his eyes settled on Beatrice’s opulent bed, and he remembered a piece of his discussion with Brontë—they needed to look for evidence of the killing in the laundry. Although Crockett’s detective novels weren’t guidebooks, they did seem to make it clear that some kind of sleuthing was always required to gather additional clues. The laundry was most likely at the back of the house, near the servants’ quarters. At the very least there had to be a towel or discarded linen which held some traces of the catastrophe.
He approached Beatrice’s bed and did a cursory search; nothing had been removed or sullied. Despite the fish sleeping in a bowl of water, Corinthiana had filled the gilded cage with enough amenities and comforts to rival his own sleeping arrangements. Two of Beatrice’s silk pillows were thrust to the back, and it looked as though the silken sheet used to wrap her bowl was slightly mussed. The bowl itself was removed by Martha immediately after the event; it appeared nothing else had been taken. The criminal had obviously been hurried, but as was typical of cases of fishicide (Crockett assumed), there was no clear evidence of a struggle.
“Ze bed vas ruffled,” Robert Edward said, seeing Crockett’s interest. “But no vun could find anyzing missing!”
Crockett thanked Robert for his help and turned his attention toward the back hallway to the kitchen. He knew somewhere in the servants’ quarters there was a pile of linens that was worth seeking out. Something had to carry the mark of horror that would have been left as a sign of Beatrice’s demise.
Crockett avoided the general area of the kitchen after his first interaction with Martha on his way to get water. Prior to his nightmare about the carriage master and his canary, one entire dream had been about him running through a dark hallway where the only light was Martha’s gleaming eye, which pursued him no matter how quickly he ran. It ended with him falling into a large pie[28] and celebrating Christmas, but, prior to the pastry, he had been quite terrified.
It was this very eye that met his gaze as he entered the kitchen. Not only the eye, but its host, Martha, covered in blood, hacking at the shank of a large animal. He’d hoped her poor eyes
ight would have allowed him time to quickly slip away; however, Martha focused her full attention on the young solicitor. She appeared to have a preternatural sense in the kitchen. A scream didn’t wake her in the night, but Crockett’s soft shoes alerted her immediately when he crossed the threshold.
“What do you want?” she asked. Her one eye narrowed; the other spun more slowly.
“I’m very sorry,” Crockett said quickly, backing away. “I was trying to see if there were any traces of gore from the incident with Beatrice. We never fully investigated. Is there a collection of linens for the laundry?”
Martha shook her head. “Me, Dexter, and Awwgooost looked that night, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. It was a very clean job.” Whether out of intimidation or simply poor manners, Martha absentmindedly licked some blood off of the cleaver she was using to cut up the meat.
Crockett shivered.
The look of distrust slowly ebbed from Martha’s expression. She put down her blade and crossed her arms. “Clever of you to come looking,” she said. “I did laundry the day after—Sundays are always laundry days—and looked through all the rags, aprons, and linens to see if there was anything out of the ordinary.”
“Did you find anything?” Crockett asked, still uneasy despite the woman’s change in disposition.
She shook her head. “No, I butcher meat nearly every day. It helps align my humors and alleviate my acute female hysteria.” To emphasize this, she picked up the cleaver again and slammed it into the wooden table.[29] “There was blood on a number of aprons and work clothes, nothing strange.”
Crockett nodded, unsure whether he felt the old maid was less of a suspect, more of one, or simply a psychopath. “Well, thank you.”
As he was about to turn away and make an escape, his eye caught Beatrice’s fishbowl sitting near one of the maid’s oversized blades. A rush of hope gave him goosebumps—the murderer’s fingerprints could be pasted all over the clear glass.
“Martha,” he said excitedly, “Can I see the bowl?”
The old woman shrugged. “Help yourself. It wasn’t my favorite thing to clean. The missus wanted it spotless for Beatrice’s burial in the tomb.”
Crockett’s face fell. “It’s clean?”
“Absolutely spotless. Took me the better part of an hour.”
The young man’s heart sank. Should he ever be at the head of a murder investigation again, he would need to be more proactive in his evidence collection.
He was about out of the room when he heard Martha’s grizzled voice call after him, “You want to take a few swings at the meat? It may make you feel better.”
“No, thanks, no—I’m quite—no, thank you!” He said this staggering backward, stumbling down the back hall.
Unsettled by the events, he rushed through the sitting room to the front door. Between the eerie conversation, his failure with the fishbowl, the oppressive heat in the house, and the sight of all the slaughtered blood on Martha’s clothing, Crockett’s desire to flee had grown overwhelming. It was with great relief that he placed his hand on the front door and exited onto the front stoop.
Once outside, the entire length of the house between himself and the maid, he took several deep, stabilizing breaths. Although the air was startlingly warm, each inhalation proved detoxifying, bringing him clarity and pushing out his thoughts of gore, his dream of Martha, and the general, tentative fear that had swelled with each passing day in the manor. The sun on his skin also helped relieve these feelings of trepidation. After a few minutes of calming breathing, the homicidal-looking maid and her cleaver diminished from his thoughts completely. He felt more himself and could focus his attention on the house grounds.
After a few judgmental thoughts about the state of the place (a squirrel was sitting on a pile of discarded newspapers), his attention fixed on the tomb. It looked ominous in the warm, summer sunshine, a bleak, dark marble structure in the middle of an arcadian image of blue skies, white clouds, and emerald grass and leaves. The appearance of a figure near its entrance made him jump. Dexter, holding sharp pruning shears, appeared at the main entry of the melancholic eyesore. Today he was wearing what appeared to be a full suit decorated with the American stars and stripes. On his head he wore a hat which had a papier-mâché eagle perched on its tip.
Crockett felt goosepimples as he realized the groundskeeper was one of the few who had no alibi for the day of the disappearance. In his favorite detective story, The Fantastic Death of Captain Discord,[30] the entire murder was solved when the lead detective finally found the rutabaga farmer who witnessed the magician’s disappearance.
Perhaps Dexter was his rutabaga farmer.
The groundskeeper saw the young man approaching and realized he would not have time to avoid the encounter. He let out a loud, obnoxious sigh and turned to face him with a look of utter disgust.
“Hello,” Dexter said. Crockett had forgotten the clang of his American vowels, which he had been first introduced to during their earlier discussion over the corpse of Beatrice. Up close he now noted that, in addition to the papier-mâché bird, his hat was covered in a loose coating of downy feathers.
“Hello, Mr. Fletcher. Lovely day.”
“Too hot.”
“Yes—good.” Crockett suddenly realized he should have planned this interview better. “Well,” he tried with great difficulty to stop himself, but the only question which came to his mind followed, “Have…you ever….killed anyone?”
Dexter, in spite of himself and his annoyance with the young man, laughed loudly.
“Sorry,” Crockett’s face turned bright red; indeed, the power dynamic had shifted. “Mr. Fletcher, I’m trying to discover anything we missed. I’m sorry for the clumsiness, but I’ll be frank—You were here the day that Master Hawsfeffer died and have access to all the house grounds and,” Crockett indicated Dexter’s dress, “the family vault where the costume collection is kept.”
Dexter’s eyes narrowed. “Is this an accusation, then?”
“No, sir. It’s an open question.”
Dexter shook his head. A small glimmer in his eye revealed an excitement underlying his anger. “I’ve been an honest, hardworking member of this house for years. Bixby Hawsfeffer took me in, even after the other Bixby—Von Bunson—abandoned me here. I did find Bixby Hawsfeffer’s empty boat; Martha was with me. And I do have a key to the vault, but I only go down there for my costumes. They keep me happy, if you must know. This house has been a mess for years—everyone is always feuding. During my time here, I’ve seen both Lucinda and Bixby Hawsfeffer vanish. There are always thoughts of foul play because the place is a nightmare—but it’s not spirits like Miss Corinthiana believes; it’s plain old bad people doing bad things." He paused, his gaze locked on Crockett. "But do I think they're killing each other? No. Their rancor is petty not homicidal.” The old man crossed his arms emphatically, then spit, as if declaring this the end of his statement.
Crockett’s goosepimples turned to a burning shame. “So…you don’t have any idea who could have killed Beatrice?” The young lawyer’s voice was an embarrassed whisper.
“As I told you that night, better that fish than one of the people.”
With that, he abruptly threw his pruning shears over his shoulder and walked away.
“Thank you, Mr. Fletcher…” Crockett felt horribly embarrassed, not only in the interpersonal interaction, but, again, for his lack of composure under pressure. His fainting had ceased in moments of terror, but he was yet to gain any control over his speech. A detective who began with the question “Did you do it?” was as bad as a lawyer who covered his idiocy under words like “deblightful.”
Crockett needed additional air to recuperate from the double failures of his investigations into Martha and Dexter. Perhaps he wasn’t cut out to be a sleuth. There was likely nothing going on at all. His own prejudices against spinning eyes and theatrical fashion choices were clouding his understanding of what this house really was—a collection of c
haracters, brought together by tragedies, who, despite mental imbalances, did hold some kind of affection toward each other.
Brontë also fueled his wild theories with her thoughts of murder and mayhem. It could be that the true explanation of the events in the house was simple, not linked to bizarre personal behaviors which were simply general oddities. Dexter’s speech made this clear; the house was a mess. For years there had been fighting and chaos—bad people doing bad things. The death of Beatrice, then, was an extension of this, not an anomaly, but rather the natural end to years of pent-up petty frustrations and loathing. It was obnoxious but not homicidal, at least not to humans.
He felt embarrassed for the ludicrous solution he entertained earlier, one which linked the mysterious past to the nefarious present. Petrarch’s earlier, rational theory and Dexter’s shaming made him realize that there was no need to exert his imagination so far. If there was foul play, it was most likely a simple solution—August knew where the key was, had motive, and was probably expediting the reading of the will. He knew Corinthiana’s tendency to fear the macabre; he may have been behind the playing of the nursery rhyme, too. Perhaps he even convinced Kordelia to play along with the blaming, the act of a loyal daughter. The key to the tomb and the note left by Lucinda, then, were coincidental, a forgotten part of the family. It was random happenstance Petrarch was entrusted with them with all those years ago.
“Sometimes the shortest way around is the best,” Crockett said to himself as he continued his walk.