Murder on Waverly Place

by Victoria Thompson

  When he stepped through the door, the girl rose from where she’d been sitting on the sofa between Sarah and her mother. “Did they find him?” she asked anxiously.

  “Not yet,” Frank said, giving nothing away. “Do you have any idea where he’d go?”

  Her expression told him clearly she had no intention of saying so, if she did. “He did not kill her,” she said instead.

  “Then who did?” Frank challenged.

  “I told you, all of them wanted her dead,” she insisted.

  “All of them?” Frank echoed. “You mean all the people at the séance?”

  She lifted her chin in defiance. “Yes.”

  Frank glanced meaningfully at Mrs. Decker.

  “Not Mrs. Decker,” she amended quickly. “She was new, and Mrs. Gittings had not started trying to get money from her yet.”

  “Mrs. Brandt,” Frank said. “You and Mrs. Decker should leave. The press will be getting wind of this any minute now, and when they do . . . Well, you know what will happen.”

  Sarah knew only too well. “Mother,” she began, but Madame Serafina interrupted her.

  “Please, do not go,” Serafina begged Sarah. She seemed genuinely frightened.

  “Mr. Malloy won’t hurt you, child,” Mrs. Decker assured her.

  “He has to arrest someone for this,” Serafina pointed out, “and Nicola is gone. Please, stay with me!”

  Sarah shrugged helplessly, and Frank sighed in defeat. He turned one of the armchairs to face the sofa and sat down, wishing he could put his feet up. “All right, tell me why you think these other people wanted to kill Mrs. Gittings.”

  The girl sat back down, her expression wary. She was a pretty little thing, he noticed, and those eyes, they could look right through you. She was trying to look through him right now. He gave her no encouragement.

  “Mrs. Gittings charged a lot of money for the séances, but she said . . .” She glanced at Mrs. Decker uneasily and then went on. “She said that was just the beginning. She said these people had so much money that they would not miss a little bit more, so she figured out ways to get more.”

  “How did she do that?” Frank asked with interest. He’d known the séance was a confidence game, but he hadn’t imagined there was more to it than just taking money to let people talk to their dead relatives.

  “She would do different things for different people. She would find out things about them and then figure out the best way to get their money.”

  “Was she getting money from all the other people who were here today?” Sarah asked.

  Frank gave her a glare designed to silence her, but she didn’t even notice.

  “Yes, she had a plan for each of them.”

  “What was she doing?” Frank asked before Sarah could.

  Plainly, Serafina hated to reveal these secrets. She looked down to where her hands were twisting in her lap.

  “It’s all right,” Mrs. Decker said, putting an arm around her. “It’s not your fault.”

  Frank wasn’t so sure about that, but he didn’t say so. No reason to discourage the girl from talking. “What was she doing to Mrs. Burke?”

  “Mrs. Burke did not have as much money as Mrs. Gittings hoped,” Serafina replied. “At least she could not get any from her husband after the first few times. He did not like her going to séances, and he refused to give her any more money for them, not even to pay for the regular sittings.”

  “But she was here every week,” Mrs. Decker said. “How was she paying for it?”

  “She was . . . selling things. Jewelry, I think,” she admitted reluctantly.

  Sarah’s eyes grew wide, and her expression told Frank she knew something about this. She opened her mouth to say it, but Frank gave her a quick shake of the head. He didn’t want to interrupt the girl.

  “To raise money so she could keep coming to the séances,” Frank guessed.

  “Yes, and Mrs. Gittings would arrange private sittings for her, too, when she could pay for them. But she was getting frightened, Mrs. Burke, I mean. She was afraid her husband would find out what she was doing. He would have been very angry.”

  “He most certainly would,” Mrs. Decker confirmed grimly.

  “Mrs. Burke had an argument with Mrs. Gittings last week,” Serafina said. “She thought Mrs. Gittings was charging her too much for the sittings, and she said she had no more jewelry to sell.”

  “Why didn’t she just stop coming?” Frank asked quite reasonably, or so he thought.

  “She could not,” Serafina told him. “That is the secret, you see. I only tell them just enough so they must come back again to hear the rest.”

  “And the next time, you tell them a little more and then a little more,” Frank guessed.

  “Yes, that is it,” she said, relieved that he understood. She turned to Mrs. Decker. “I am sorry, but that is what she made me do.”

  Mrs. Decker looked too shocked to reply, but Serafina didn’t seem to notice.

  “I guess Mrs. Gittings wouldn’t lower the price for Mrs. Burke,” Frank said, drawing the girl’s attention back to him.

  “Oh, no. In fact, she raised it. Mrs. Burke was furious.”

  “I’m sure she was,” Mrs. Decker said, outraged on the other woman’s behalf.

  “I had no part in this, you understand,” the girl said, and Frank assured her that he did.

  “So what about Cunningham and Sharpe?” he asked.

  “Albert, Mr. Cunningham, he was in love with me,” she admitted a little reluctantly.

  Frank had seen that clearly. “Was she charging him for that?” he asked sarcastically.

  She stiffened. “I am not for sale, Mr. Malloy.”

  “I’m sure Mr. Malloy didn’t mean that,” Sarah said, giving him a black look.

  “No, I didn’t,” Frank agreed. “I mean, was she charging him more to come back because she knew he was in love with you?”

  “No, she . . . He had inherited a lot of money when his father died last year, but he didn’t know much about business. Mrs. Gittings and the Professor arranged for him to invest some of it with a friend of theirs.”

  This was getting more interesting now. “Invest? What do you mean by that?”

  Serafina’s lovely mouth thinned down with disgust. “I told him . . . I mean, Yellow Feather told him about some investments he should make. He would do anything his father told him to do, so I told him that his father wanted him to make these investments.”

  “But this friend was a fake, wasn’t he?” Frank guessed.

  “I do not know what they did,” Serafina claimed. “All I know is that Mr. Cunningham had lost a lot of money, and Mrs. Gittings said that Yellow Feather had to tell him to invest even more.”

  Frank could see Sarah’s expression out of the corner of his eye. She looked as if she was about to explode. She knew things Frank needed to know, but at least she understood the importance of staying quiet at this moment. “Do you think he’d figured out that Mrs. Gittings was cheating him?”

  “I do not know, but he was getting very frightened, too. Mrs. Gittings had tried to talk to him, to convince him everything would be all right, but he was angry with her, I know.”

  “That leaves Mr. Sharpe,” Frank recalled. “Is he in love with you, too?”

  Serafina folded her hands primly. “You will have to ask him about that,” she said.

  “Why was he angry with Mrs. Gittings, then?”

  “Because he . . . he wanted to be my sponsor.”

  “What does that mean?” Frank asked, thinking he knew but not wanting to make a mistake about it.

  “He wanted to buy me a house and support me so I did not have to see other clients. He wanted me all to himself, you see.”

  “To be his mistress?” Sarah said before Frank could figure out how to ask it.

  “Oh, no,” Serafina assured her. “He just . . . He believes so strongly, you see. He thought it was wrong that I had to charge people money. He said he would take care of
me so I could use my gifts to . . . to help people.”

  Frank thought that sounded a little fishy, but he let it pass, for now. “I don’t suppose Mrs. Gittings liked that idea much.”

  “Oh, no,” the girl said. “But you see, he did not know she was already my sponsor, not at first. He came to me and made me this offer, and I had to tell him that . . . Well, that she would never allow it.”

  “So he knew Mrs. Gittings was never going to let you go,” Frank said.

  “Yes,” she agreed eagerly. “So you see, all of them had a reason to kill her.”

  Of course, Frank just had her word for it, and he was pretty sure none of these very rich, powerful people would confirm any of this, especially if it implicated them in a murder. He risked a glance at Sarah, and he could see she also understood the situation perfectly. Justice wasn’t blind where rich people were concerned. She looked out for them very carefully and overlooked much more.

  “But dear,” Mrs. Decker was saying, “none of them could have killed Mrs. Gittings. We were all holding each other by the wrist, remember? Someone would have known if one of us let go to . . . Well, to do murder.”

  Serafina’s lovely face twisted in anguish. “I . . . Yes, but . . . There are ways . . .”

  “What ways?” Frank asked with interest when she hesitated.

  But she closed her mouth and shook her head in silent refusal.

  “The Professor said Nicola was hiding in the cabinet during the séance,” Frank said, surprising her. “What was he doing there?”

  The girl licked her lips, plainly trying to figure out whether to tell the truth or not. “He . . . He helps me.”

  “How does he help?” Frank asked.

  She hated this. “He makes sounds sometimes.”

  “What kinds of sounds?” Frank asked.

  “Just . . . Today he was playing a fiddle, just scraping the bow to make strange sounds.”

  “That’s what I heard,” Mrs. Decker remembered. “I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what was making that sound.”

  “And the noise comes from inside the cabinet,” Sarah said, “which is why they sound so strange and far away.”

  Serafina was looking at her, twisting her hands again. She hated betraying her secrets. She nodded.

  “Oh, dear!” Mrs. Decker said suddenly.

  Everyone looked at her, but she was looking at Frank, her expression awestruck. “Don’t you see, Mr. Malloy? This boy Nicola, if he was playing a violin . . . I heard that sound the whole time we were talking to Yellow Feather.”

  Frank frowned, not seeing at all.

  She leaned forward in her eagerness to make him understand. “He was in the cabinet, playing the music, the whole time . . . the whole time Mrs. Gittings was being murdered. If he was playing the music, he couldn’t possibly have killed her!”

  THE CORONER’S MEN HAD LONG SINCE REMOVED MRS. GITTINGS’S body, so Sarah felt no hesitation to enter the séance room. She looked around, trying to picture the scene when Mrs. Gittings had been killed.

  “All right, what is it you need to tell me?” Malloy asked, closing the door behind him.

  “She’s telling the truth,” Sarah said. “Madame Serafina, I mean. I’m sure Mrs. Gittings must have been doing all those things she said.”

  “How do you know?” He frowned suspiciously, the way he always did. She supposed he had good reason to be suspicious most of the time, but certainly not of her.

  “Because of what happened at the séance I attended, the things Yellow Feather said to them.”

  Malloy crossed his arms over his broad chest in silent challenge. “What did he say?”

  “He said . . . I know it sounds odd, but it was so easy to believe someone else was saying it and not Serafina. Her voice changed completely when Yellow Feather was supposed to be talking. I wonder how she does that.”

  “You can ask her later,” he said impatiently. “What did this voice say?”

  “Let me see if I can remember exactly,” she said, closing her eyes so she could imagine herself back in time on that day. “Mother could probably remember, too. First of all, Mrs. Burke. Mrs. Burke’s sister and her mother—their spirits, that is—were telling her something about a diamond brooch.”

  “Jewelry,” Malloy remembered. “Did they tell her to sell it?”

  “Not right out,” Sarah said. “It didn’t make any sense to me then, of course. I had no idea why Mrs. Burke seemed so upset when Yellow Feather mentioned this brooch that her mother had given her. She said it had been in the family forever, but her mother told her something about it was all right.”

  “What would have been all right?”

  “I’m just guessing, of course, but it seems likely that she was telling Mrs. Burke it was all right to sell this family heirloom. If her mother had given it to her, she probably didn’t want to sell it, so Mrs. Gittings would have told Serafina to encourage her to do it.”

  “How did she even know about it?” Malloy asked skeptically.

  That was a good question. “I have no idea. Perhaps we can ask Serafina.”

  He gave her one of those looks that made her feel hopelessly naïve.

  “Serafina wants to protect Nicola,” she reminded him. “And she doesn’t have to protect Mrs. Gittings anymore.”

  He shrugged. “What about the others? Did she say anything to them?”

  Sarah closed her eyes again. “Cunningham,” she recalled, opening her eyes to find Malloy staring at her with unsettling intensity. “He was very anxious to contact his father.”

  “Did he?”

  “No,” Sarah remembered, “not that day, although he asked for him several times. It was almost as if . . .”

  “As if what?” he prodded.

  “As if she was tormenting him. That must be what Serafina meant when she says she only tells them a little each time so they’ll keep coming back.”

  “And if Cunningham didn’t hear anything at all, he’d have to come back,” Malloy guessed.

  “That seems cruel,” Sarah mused.

  “The whole thing is cruel,” Malloy reminded her. “She can’t talk to the dead any more than I can.”

  He was right, of course, but she wasn’t going to say so. “But Cunningham did keep asking questions. Something about needing his father’s advice. He was afraid his father would be angry, although he said that he’d done exactly what his father had told him, and it hadn’t worked out.”

  “That could have been the investments Serafina was talking about.”

  “Yes, Yellow Feather probably told him his father wanted him to make these investments, and when he lost money, he’d be afraid his father would be angry, and of course then he’d need more advice.”

  Malloy nodded. At least he wasn’t looking down his nose anymore. “What about Sharpe?”

  “He was speaking to his wife,” Sarah said, and then she remembered something else that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

  “What is it?” Malloy demanded, seeing her reaction.

  “I just remembered, Yellow Feather said someone—one of the spirits—had a rose. Sharpe said that was his wife, that he’d always given her roses for their anniversary.”

  “What’s so surprising about that?”

  Sarah felt a chill at the memory. “I could smell roses!”

  “It was your imagination,” he scoffed.

  “No, no it wasn’t. I could really smell them. It was faint at first, but then, I was almost sick from the scent, it was so strong. Mother smelled it, too.”

  “Another one of Nicola’s tricks, probably,” Malloy said.

  Sarah looked around, trying to figure it out. “Did Serafina say Nicola was in the cabinet?” she asked, walking over to it.

  “The Professor said it.”

  “Where is the Professor?” she asked, reaching for the knobs on the cabinet doors.

  “Still in the dining room where I sent him after Nicola escaped, I guess,” he said.

  Sa
rah pulled the cabinet open. She’d half expected to find a violin lying there, but the cabinet was completely empty. “It’s big enough for someone Nicola’s size to sit in,” she noted.

  “But wouldn’t somebody open it, just to make sure nobody was inside?” Malloy asked.

  “Nobody did the day I was here, but I suppose that’s always a possibility. If they saw Nicola in there, the whole scheme would collapse.” Sarah turned to see Malloy pulling open the door to the hallway. “Where are you going?” she asked, but he was gone.

  Sarah hurried after him. He pushed open the door at the end of the hallway and disappeared inside. She followed, finding herself in the kitchen, but Malloy was looking at one of the walls. A black curtain hung down near the corner, and he pushed it back to reveal a doorway, and ducked inside. She was right behind him.

  “What’s this?” she asked, looking around. They’d entered a long, narrow space crowded with all sorts of curious objects. She saw some crates filled with the leftovers of someone’s life. A gramophone sat on a battered stand of some sort. Oddly, and looking completely out of place, a small safe sat at the far end of the room.

  “This is a false wall,” he said, pointing. “It’s the back side of the séance room, where the cabinet is.”

  Sarah could see that now. Why would they have built a false wall? Then she noticed the window on the other side of the narrow space and realized they had probably wanted to ensure that no light from a window would spoil the total darkness needed for the séance.

  Malloy reached down and picked up a violin, holding it up for her inspection.

  “Is that Nicola’s fiddle?” she asked.

  “I’m going to guess that it is,” he said.

  “How did it get in here?”

  “He probably brought it with him when he sneaked out of the séance room to hide.”

  “Is this where they found him?” she asked.

  “No, he . . .” Malloy stopped and looked around again.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Malloy frowned. “They didn’t find him at all,” he said, obviously thinking out loud. “O’Toole said they searched the whole house, but they didn’t find him.”

  “Maybe they didn’t find this space.”

  “No, they found it. O’Toole told me about it.”