Midnight in Austenland

by Shannon Hale

  Like Mr. Wattlesbrook’s car.

  Charlotte crept back downstairs, a ghost in her white robe haunting the spiral staircase. It felt nice to think of herself as the ghost; it offered a kind of armor to her jumpy fear. Ghosts can’t get re-killed. She tiptoed past the dead eyes of the wall portraits and the shut doors, known to no one but the house itself, her companion in the creeping.

  I’m sorry I didn’t like you at first, she thought at the house. And I’m sorry I thought for a minute that you might be an evil monstrosity. Let’s be friends?

  Sleepy and alone at dawn, the thought didn’t feel ridiculous.

  She opened her door and heard a creak behind her. She whipped around. Nothing.

  “Someone there?” she whispered.

  Old houses creak, she told herself.

  And sometimes, said her Inner Thoughts, people make them creak by sneaking around. Maybe with a knife in hand. Ha ha …

  Charlotte ordered her Inner Thoughts to take a hike. She closed her door and wished, not for the first time, that it locked.

  Home, over a year before

  There were the late nights, the unexpected trips out of state, the irregular laundry patterns. There were the phone calls from unlisted numbers, the caller hanging up if Charlotte answered. There was the odd way James touched her now, or didn’t touch her at all, the curtness in his tone, with no explanation of what she’d done wrong. Things escalated, as they tend to do: a neighbor saying she’d run into James downtown when he was supposed to be in New York on business; a local hotel calling to say James had left behind a phone charger; finding the wrapped lingerie in his closet and assuming he’d forgotten to give it to her on their anniversary—and forgotten her size.

  It is much easier to solve someone else’s mystery than to take a step back to survey the one haunting your own home. Charlotte had the gall to be blindsided by James’s confession. Perhaps, Charlotte thought later, she was not so clever. Perhaps she was in the habit of seeing only what she hoped to see.

  Austenland, day 11

  Everywhere Charlotte looked, she saw signs of murder. The eerie, knowing expressions on the portraits’ faces, the silence in the hallway, the clatter of a plate in the dining room, the emptiness in Mrs. Hatchet’s room.

  Charlotte had bathed and dressed after her daybreak snooping and was just about to descend the stairs to breakfast when she heard voices on the landing. She peeked one eye around the corner. Mrs. Hatchet and Miss Gardenside.

  “I came to check on you,” said the mother/nurse.

  “I’m doing better,” said Miss Gardenside. “A lot better. In fact, I’ve never felt so good.”

  “Good. That’s good. You have three more days to go?”

  Miss Gardenside nodded.

  “Good. That’s good,” Mrs. Hatchet repeated. “So, do you need anything?”

  “No, I’m fine. I’m good.”

  “Good.”

  They both looked out the window.

  “You got all dressed up,” Miss Gardenside said, gesturing to Mrs. Hatchet’s navy blue dress. “Are you staying?”

  “I just wanted to check on you. But I can stay if you aren’t handling things well on your own.”

  “I’m handling things just fine.”

  “Well. I will see you next week. Behave yourself.”

  “I am,” Miss Gardenside said through clenched teeth.

  Mrs. Hatchet nodded and left. Miss Gardenside remained alone on the landing, still staring out the window.

  “Riveting,” said a voice beside Charlotte’s ear.

  She startled back.

  “Eddie. You love to sneak.”

  He peeked back at Miss Gardenside, who sighed and then headed downstairs. “I do hope Miss Gardenside was providing better entertainment before I interrupted you, or I might suggest more interesting avenues for spying. Such as through Mr. Mallery’s keyhole. I have not spied that out myself, but perhaps Miss Charming could give you a review. Or Colonel Andrews.”

  “Mrs. Hatchet was here,” Charlotte said, ignoring him. She didn’t want to talk about Mr. Mallery with Eddie. “That’s the interesting part. Because she isn’t dead.”

  “That is a relief, though I wasted an afternoon drafting a damn fine eulogy. Wait—how did Mrs. Hatchet die again?”

  “In the conservatory, by Colonel Mustard, with her own name,” Charlotte said, pretending she was joking too, so that she wouldn’t have to mention dead bodies again. After all, anyone could be the murderer. Even Eddie.

  Eddie offered his arm. “No more mystery for you or your womb, sister dear. Breakfast trumps all.”

  And for that matter, if the murder was real and not part of Colonel Andrews’s game, then the victim could have been anyone as well. Still, now that Mrs. Hatchet was confirmed alive, Mr. Wattlesbrook’s disappearance the day of Bloody Murder put him at the top of Charlotte’s Probably Dead list.

  “What did you gentlemen do with Mr. Wattlesbrook that day he showed up drunk?” Charlotte asked Eddie and Colonel Andrews over breakfast. The others had already dined and departed.

  “I was for tossing him out the front door,” Colonel Andrews said. “But driving … a carriage in his condition did seem a mite dangerous. Grey feared for his life.”

  “Or the lives of others,” said Eddie.

  “So he proposed we lock him up till he sobered up.”

  “On the second floor?” Charlotte asked.

  Eddie nodded. “In an uninhabited bedroom. But in the morning the door was unlocked and he was gone.”

  “Don’t take it personally, Grey,” said Colonel Andrews. “Perhaps he did not particularly enjoy that jab to the jaw.”

  Eddie rubbed his face.

  The colonel laughed and said, “The old man would not shut up, speaking nastily about his wife, and your brother, here, decided a fist to the face was just the remedy.”

  “Did any of you stay with him?” she asked.

  “No,” said Eddie, looking at her curiously. “We locked him up and left. There was a bed in the room and a pitcher of water—”

  “And a chamber pot,” the colonel added.

  “So how did he get out of the room?”

  Colonel Andrews shrugged. “I suppose Mrs. Wattlesbrook let him out. Why? Have you seen the gentleman about?”

  “No,” she said significantly. “Is that strange?”

  The colonel shrugged again, and Eddie did not answer.

  Neville entered and began to clean up.

  The butler’s got a thing for the missus, Charlotte thought. But enough to motivate him to murder her husband? He didn’t seem guilty.

  Then again, neither had James.

  Charlotte joined the gentlemen and ladies for a walk around the gardens and wondered who else might want Mr. Wattlesbrook dead. He’d signed away Windy Nook and Bertram Hall and burned down Pembrook Cottage. Perhaps someone feared Pembrook Park was next.

  “What a lovely day!” Miss Charming declared, her face strained, as if desperate for it to be true.

  Why so desperate? Charlotte observed her all morning. Between the “halloos” and “what-whats,” before the giggles and after the gusty sighs, Charlotte detected fear.

  She followed Miss Charming to her room before lunch and sat on her bed, waiting till she emerged from her bathroom.

  “Charlotte! You made me jump out of my skin.”

  “Lizzy, I’ve noticed that you seem to be … well, afraid. Of something.”

  Miss Charming began to blink rapidly. She looked behind her at the open door, as if checking for eavesdroppers.

  “It’s all right, Lizzy,” Charlotte whispered, patting the bed beside her, an invitation. “You can tell me.”

  Miss Charming sat, squeezed her eyes shut, and nodded. She whispered wetly, “It’s my Bobby.”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “My Bobby. And that toothpick.”

  Charlotte wasn’t sure how a toothpick was involved—as a murder weapon?

  Miss Charming began t
o talk like an erupting volcano. “Bobby and me’d been together since grade school. We were king and queen of the prom! And then thirty—er, a few years later, I catch him on a mattress sample with that toothpick of a girl. We sold mattresses, you know. Thousands of them. Eighteen stores in the tristate area, best bargains east of the Mississippi. ‘The Mattress Shack has got your back!’ ” she sang. “I came up with that jingle. I was the brains, he was the brawn, till I found him on a mattress sample with an assistant salesclerk named Heather. What kind of name is ‘Heather’ anyway? Sounds like a disease.”

  This was not the course Charlotte had been expecting.

  “So, you were afraid?” Charlotte prompted.

  “I took the alimony and ran—cruises and resorts, till I found Pembrook Park. And I don’t want to leave, ever. ’Cause back home I’ll be the fat girl Bobby Murdock dumped, and our stores aren’t mine anymore, and at least here no one can dump me again.”

  A burbling sound started inside Miss Charming that soon changed into sobs.

  “You’ve been a guest at Pembrook Park for how long?” asked Charlotte.

  “Well … I started on last fall, but they close up for December and January, and so I went on a cruise to the Mediterranean. And Greece is snazzy, honey lamb, and the food in Italy was bushel baskets better than here, but I got lonely. I came back again in March, and now everything’s great!” She smiled with big, white teeth, her cheeks trembling a little to hold it.

  “How can you afford to just stay here, session after session?”

  “Oh, I got loads.” She blew her nose. “I guess that’s all I got.”

  Charlotte rubbed Miss Charming’s arm. She knew from experience how little such a gesture could do to relieve that stabbing heart pain.

  So she said, “My husband left me for a woman named ‘Justice.’ ”

  “Seriously? ‘Justice’? That’s worse than ‘Heather’!” Miss Charming put her arms around Charlotte and squeezed her like a favorite teddy bear. “I’m so glad you’ve been dumped too.”

  Charlotte guessed that wasn’t exactly what Miss Charming meant, so she hugged her back.

  “We’re not supposed to talk about our other lives,” Miss Charming whispered.

  “I won’t tell. Were you serious before, when you said you can tell fakes from real?”

  “Lifelong talent. I should’ve seen Bobby’s affair from a mile off, but it’s hard to get a good look at someone when he’s breathing in your ear.”

  “Don’t I know it. What do you think about the other Pembrook folk. Fake or real?”

  “Lemme see … Colonel Andrews is real in a way, but just because his phoniness really is him. Mr. Grey seems real, but I’m not sure. Miss Gardenside is as fake as they come. Mr. Mallery and Mrs. Wattlesbrook are real as real.”

  “And me?”

  “You’re solid gold, weighed and minted.” Miss Charming gave Charlotte a big wet kiss on the cheek, sniffed deeply, and smiled despite her red eyes.

  Charlotte left feeling determined. Miss Charming was not the murderer, but someone was. Charlotte wanted to cross a line, ford the Rubicon, commit herself to solving this whodunit so she could put it behind her and get ready to fall in love with Mr. Mallery at the ball. Her vacation was almost over, and there hadn’t been enough vacationing going on.

  She marched downstairs, peeking into rooms until she found Eddie in the library. He’d asked her to include him in her investigations, after all. And he really had the most innocent face.

  “Off on an adventure?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Will you come with me?”

  Caesar wasn’t alone as he waded into the waters of the Rubicon. When Charlotte solved a violent, shocking murder, it would be nice to have a friend beside her. Because when she thought about what she was about to do, she felt a buzzing in her fingers warning that her hands were most likely shaking. She gripped Eddie’s arm harder to try to keep them still.

  “And where are we going?” he asked, placing one of his hands over hers.

  “The pond.”

  The pond lay dull and gray between the trees, no breeze to finger its surface into uneasy ripples. The sky was clogged with clouds, preventing reflected sunlight from winking mischievously on the waves, as one might expect if the waters did indeed hide a secret. But the pond resisted all personification, neither begging for inspection nor warning of horrors best left alone. It just lay there, uninterested.

  Which was really irritating. Charlotte would have appreciated some seductive shore lapping, ripples beckoning like a curved finger, that sort of thing. But no. Thanks a lot for nothing, pond. So Charlotte did her best to supply the scene with the necessary exaggerations to provoke her to action.

  See there, how that cloud’s reflection was shaped like a hand?

  My, but wasn’t there a great looming shadow in the water’s depths?

  Hark, but didn’t the twittering of birds in the trees seem to sort of imply that the wildlife was all aflutter about something horrid and unnatural that took place here, such as, oh, I don’t know, murder most foul?!

  Eddie and Charlotte stood on the banks of the pond. Staring at it. At least one of them wishing it looked more intriguing.

  “So here we are,” said Eddie. “At the pond. I certainly hope this vapid gaping does not qualify as an adventure, or I might have to take aggressive action and save you from the continued dullness of country life.”

  “Nope. I’m just gearing up to take a swim.”

  She started stripping down before he could reply.

  “Er … several responses are coming to mind,” he said, holding his head as if it hurt. “Hard … to choose … between them all.”

  “Just like we used to do back home,” she said. That sort of logic usually worked with Eddie. Besides, there was no view of the house or any of its outbuildings from the pond. It was unlikely that Mr. Mallery or one of the others would come along. And her corset, chemise, and bloomers were far more modest than twenty-first century bathing fare, even if they did qualify as weird underwear.

  “If you’d rather not, I’ll go it alone. I’m just … uh, dying in this blazing sun.”

  Eddie squinted suspiciously at the overcast sky.

  “Right. Blazing. You always were impetuous. Weren’t you?”

  “Always,” she confirmed. Not really, but it was nice to imagine a brother who thought of her that way—wild Charlotte, unpredictable Charlotte, dive-into-unknown-waters-in-search-of-clues Charlotte. She could be that—for a little while, anyway.

  “Yes, I remember well. So. It would appear my brotherly duty is to stand guard, because I am not climbing into that cesspool.”

  “Spoilsport,” she said and jumped in.

  Chilly. Oh yes, most definitely chilly. But she swam around, warming up her muscles, and the exercise felt great, as long as she avoided the shallower parts and the greedy little pond plants that reached up to tangle her ankles. Way creepy sensation in a pond where a murderer might have dumped a body.

  She didn’t want Eddie to know what she was really doing. Because, honestly, what on earth was she doing?

  Charlotte flipped her hips up and dove underwater, swimming with her eyes open. It was deeper than she’d thought, and the water wasn’t exactly country club clear. She came up for a breath.

  “Doing your mermaid impersonation?” Eddie called from the shore.

  “Come on in, the water’s fine!” she called.

  “So sings the siren before pulling the unsuspecting sailor down to Davy Jones’s locker. I am no water nymph. And I do not like … fish.” He shivered.

  “What, you’re afraid of teeny little pond fishies nibbling on your toes?”

  He grimaced.

  “Fish!” Charlotte screamed and went underwater as if pulled from below.

  “Charlotte!” Eddie shouted, standing.

  She popped back up with a wet grin. He glared and threw a chunk of grass at her.

  She dodged and went underwater again, swimming towar
d the middle. Something was there. Something was really there. Her heart beat harder, making it difficult to hold her breath. She came up, breathing in deeply, and floated on her back, looking up at the sky. Once her breath slowed, she dove straight down.

  Straight down to the roof of a car. Despite the murkiness, there was no mistaking it. She could see the silver glint of a BMW decal on the hood. Those had been tire marks on the edge of the pond after the rainstorm. Someone had driven a BMW into the pond and then stamped over the muddy tracks to try to disguise them. If Mr. Wattlesbrook, drunk and stupid, had driven his own car into the pond, then who had covered his tracks?

  She came back up, breathing rapidly.

  Don’t think too hard yet or you’ll freak out. You are like Jacques Cousteau. You are investigating underwater wildlife, like algae and sunfish and Beamers. That’s all. Keep breathing.

  Down she went again. She kicked hard till she could grab the door handle and peer in the window. Little light filtered through the dirty water and car windows, but if there’d been a body at the wheel, she could have made it out. As near as she could tell, there weren’t even keys in the ignition. The windows were rolled down partway, as if welcoming in the water, and the doors were locked. Something was dangling from the ceiling of the car. Her motion caused it to slowly spin. It was a glove, pockets of air in the fingertips suspending it in the water. In natural light, she guessed, it would be yellow.

  Charlotte swam around to the trunk and tried to pry it open with cold, awkward fingers. Locked.

  There’s a body in there, she thought.

  Suddenly her lungs did fine imitations of rabid dogs, snarling and snapping at her. MUST HAVE AIR, they said. Her eyeballs hurt, the cold pressure of the water unbearable. She released her held breath in a flurry of bubbles and beat her way to the surface.

  Charlotte came up with a shudder and a gasp. She swam lamely to the side and hoisted herself onto the grassy bank.

  “You’re trembling,” said Eddie, putting his coat around her shoulders.