Snow White Red-Handed (A Fairy Tale Fatal Mystery)

by Maia Chance

  Schubert’s assistant, Herr Benjamin, an unkempt young man forever dabbing at his nose with a straggling handkerchief, scribbled in his notebook.

  “He was murdered, you understand,” Schubert said.

  “On purpose?”

  “That is generally what murder means.”

  “The apple?”

  Schubert had been pacing, but now he leaned over the table. A hankie was spread over something. He whisked it off with a conjurer’s flourish. “Behold.”

  There was the apple, with a single bite out of it. The exposed flesh was dried and brownish.

  “The only apple of its kind,” Schubert said, “on the tea table. The other apples were red, perfect, shiny. This apple alone was smaller, green, even—observe—containing a worm hole.”

  Ophelia studied the apple. “Mr. Coop preferred those orchard apples. He said they reminded him of the pippins from America. And he didn’t fancy those the greengrocer delivers to the castle. Said he couldn’t tell the difference between those and wax apples.”

  “So I am told. What I would like to know is, Miss Flax, where is this orchard?”

  “Somewhere near the castle, I’d expect. I don’t know.”

  Schubert pressed his wizened face close to hers. His breath smelled of sour coffee. “Are you lying?”

  “No.” She drew back. “I’ve been here only two weeks. Besides, I work inside the castle, and I haven’t been out-of-doors much.”

  Schubert straightened. “And Miss Bright—Prue, she is called. She loves the fairy tales, does she not?”

  “Prue?” Ophelia’s tired, cobwebby mind couldn’t piece together what Schubert was angling at. “She’s never read a fairy tale in her life.”

  “Impossible.”

  “If you think that, then you don’t know her.”

  “And what is it I should know about Miss . . . Bright?”

  Ophelia hesitated. Schubert had pronounced Prue’s surname with a shade of irony. Could he have already discovered that Prue’s mother hadn’t been married to her father, the Reverend Arthur Sewall of Brooklyn, New York? Prue didn’t confess that to anyone.

  “It is Miss Bright, is it not?”

  “Of course.”

  “Not . . .” Schubert said, wrapping his tentacle-like fingers around the back of a chair, “Miss Coop?”

  “Prue? A Coop?”

  The assistant had stopped his scribbling to gawp at her.

  Ophelia felt queasy. “Where is she?”

  Schubert ignored the question. “A certain person informed me that they heard a most interesting exchange between Miss Bright and Mr. Coop this afternoon—”

  Holy Moses.

  “—an exchange that indicated that she is, in fact, the secret daughter of Mr. Homer T. Coop.”

  “Go along!”

  “This appears to come as a surprise to you, Miss Flax.”

  “You bet it does.”

  “That is all, then. You are free to go.”

  “But—”

  “And please,” Schubert said, “tell everyone to gather here in the library immediately. I have an announcement to make.”

  * * *

  Botheration.

  Gabriel slapped the magazine shut and tossed it aside. He simply couldn’t bear to peruse another issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book or another three-week-old newspaper column about the American stock market. He rose from his chair in the drawing room, where he’d been waiting for the police to finish.

  His own questioning had taken all of five minutes. He’d explained to Inspector Schubert that in the hour or so before tea, he’d gone back up to the cottage site alone, partly for a breath of fresh air, but also to examine the cottage more closely. Schubert had seemed satisfied.

  Gabriel set off down the corridor.

  The best books in the castle would be, of course, in the library, but since that was currently being used by the police, he hoped he would find something to read in the late Mr. Coop’s study. He had noticed the study in passing that afternoon.

  The study door was slightly ajar. He pushed it inward.

  It was dim inside, but a long, clear moonbeam stretched across the center of the room. In the middle of the moonbeam was a desk, and bending over the desk, shuffling through a stack of papers, was Princess Verushka.

  Her eyes, luminous in the darkness, flared. She straightened, and a few papers floated to the carpet.

  “This is not,” she said, “what it may appear to be.”

  “No? I’d rather thought you were searching for a fresh deck of cards for yourself and Mr. Hunt—I noticed you were playing écarté in the drawing room.”

  “Oui, oui.” She patted her sleek coiffure. “Cards. Precisely. But I simply cannot find any.” She twitched up her skirts and wafted past Gabriel, out into the corridor and away, trailing civet perfume.

  Gabriel paused. It was none of his affair, but . . . He went to the desk, thumbed through the stack of papers the princess had been rifling through. They appeared to be the driest of business documents.

  What would a pampered princess want with those?

  “Professor Penrose,” someone uttered from the doorway.

  Hang it.

  It was the first footman, the one who’d been tippling that morning in the wood. His eyes were bloodshot and pouched. If he was surprised to see Gabriel going through his late master’s things, he didn’t show it.

  “Inspector Schubert,” the footman said, “requests that we all assemble in the library.”

  * * *

  Everyone gathered in the library. Everyone, that is, but Inspector Schubert and Prue.

  “I see you are all present.”

  Ophelia turned to see Schubert in the doorway. Prue was just behind him.

  Ophelia’s belly twisted; Prue’s wrists were tied together with rope.

  “I have assembled you all here,” Schubert said, “to announce that I have found our murderess.”

  There was a collective gasp. Prue cowered like a fawn.

  “You’re off your nut!” Ophelia tried to shout. It came out as a croak.

  Mrs. Coop lunged at Prue, fingers outstretched like claws. “You little trollop! Murderess!”

  Mr. Hunt and Karl rushed forward to restrain her.

  “Silence.” Schubert turned to his assistant. “Benjamin, the evidence.”

  Benjamin went to a sideboard, bringing forth a tray with a few objects on it. He placed it on the table in the center of the library, next to Professor Winkler’s gold-testing paraphernalia, the dirty piece of wood, and the covered skeleton.

  Schubert circled to stand beside the tray. “This evening, Benjamin and I inspected the bedchamber Miss Bright—or so we shall call her for the moment—shares with the lady’s maid. Imagine our surprise when we discovered three curious objects upon the chest of drawers in that chamber.”

  Ophelia could scarcely breathe.

  “First,” Schubert said, holding up a small leather book, “a volume of the English translation of Kinder- und Hausmärchen—Children’s and Household Tales—by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.”

  “That’s not hers,” Ophelia said.

  “Miss Flax, you shall refrain from speaking.”

  Ophelia pressed her lips together.

  “Second”—Schubert held up a small bottle of clear, glittering liquid—“potassium cyanide. The poison that killed Herr Coop, the same bottle used by Professor Winkler in his tests this afternoon. I am told the good professor informed Miss Bright of its lethal dangers.”

  Winkler nodded.

  Everyone was watching! Ophelia wanted to scream. Everyone heard it was poisonous!

  “Third,” Schubert said, “a knife.” He held up a small paring knife with a green wooden handle, which Ophelia recognized as belonging to the castle kitchens. “The blade of t
his knife is sticky with what appears and smells to be apple juice, and a sliver of apple seed was found affixed to it as well.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Professor Penrose said.

  “Simply, that Miss Bright, in a duplicitous guise, located the father who had cast her off—”

  “Her father?” Mrs. Coop screeched. She lunged again in Prue’s direction. Mr. Hunt and Karl held her fast.

  “—cunningly insinuated herself in his household, and murdered him.”

  6

  Murmurs welled up. Inspector Schubert shushed them.

  Ophelia’s tongue went sawdust dry.

  “I am saying,” Schubert said, “that Miss Prudence Bright, her head turned by the romance of a foreign castle, coupled with an unwholesome fascination with the kinder stories of the Grimms, murdered her father, Homer T. Coop, by lacing an apple with potassium cyanide.”

  “That’s the silliest yarn I ever heard,” Ophelia said.

  “Is it?” Schubert’s tone was supercilious. “For the sake of thoroughness, allow me to hypothesize that Miss Bright did not, at first, intend to kill her father. However, when the opportunity presented itself—the lethal poison at her fingertips, the knowledge that only her father ate the orchard apples—she ceased to think clearly.”

  “Arrest her!” Mrs. Coop shrieked.

  “Hold on a tick,” Professor Penrose said. “You can’t arrest the girl, you know.”

  “Although she is,” Schubert said, “presumably a citizen of the United States of America—she failed to produce identity papers—it is still well within my jurisdiction to arrest her.”

  “There is no requirement for identity papers when traveling across European borders,” Penrose said, “especially for ladies. You know that. The fact is, you haven’t enough evidence. Besides which, I assume the Baden-Baden jail is stuffed to the gills with thieving gamblers and members of the demimonde. Your alleged murderess, despite what you believe, is but a girl.”

  “She shall attempt to flee,” Schubert said.

  “In a foreign country? Where she does not speak the language?”

  “She is clearly desperate and deranged. She must be locked up.”

  “The tower,” Mrs. Coop howled. “Lock her in the tower! Oh, I cannot bear the sight of her!”

  “Tower?” Schubert said.

  “I believe, sir,” the footman Karl said, “Madam is referring to the battlement tower on the far side of the castle courtyard. It has traditionally been used as a fortification in . . . on these sorts of occasions.”

  How often did people get locked up in this horrible castle, anyway?

  “Very well,” Schubert said. “The tower must serve for now. Pray show the way.” He clutched Prue’s arm and pivoted her around.

  “Ophelia!” Prue cried over her shoulder.

  “This is madness!” Ophelia rushed forward, but Benjamin stepped in her path. She stood in the doorway and, panting, watched them lead Prue away.

  * * *

  “You don’t hold it against me,” Mrs. Coop said, “do you?” Her words were slow and thick.

  Ophelia ran a tortoiseshell hairbrush through Mrs. Coop’s frizzled yellow locks, preparing her for bed. Outside the boudoir windows, dawn was beginning to blush. “No, ma’am,” she forced herself to say. “If Prue is dangerous, she must be locked away.”

  She longed to hurl the hairbrush at Mrs. Coop’s reflection in the dressing table mirror, to blubber and howl, to rush to Prue’s side. But for one thing, Ophelia was a Yankee, and Yankees don’t blubber and howl. And for another thing, she was an actress. Right now, everything depended on her acting.

  “You’re a sensible girl.” Mrs. Coop could barely keep her head up. “How did you fall in with a little criminal like that?” The village doctor had come earlier in the evening, and he’d evidently dispensed something for her hysterical grief. Her eyes were as glassy as a stuffed toy’s, her pupils mere pinpricks.

  Laudanum.

  “You never can tell about people,” Ophelia said, tying a ribbon in Mrs. Coop’s hair. “I knew Miss Bright only a few weeks before we met you on the steamship.”

  A thumping lie. But Ophelia’s gut told her to distance herself from Prue; she needed to stay in Mrs. Coop’s good graces in order to get Prue out of this scrape. It was lucky Mrs. Coop hadn’t turned on Ophelia yet—but peculiar, too. Was it the laudanum? Or was she pleased that Mr. Coop was dead?

  “Now,” Ophelia said, “the doctor ordered that you try to rest. You’ve had a terrible shock.” She helped Mrs. Coop to her feet and guided her to bed. “Everything will get put in apple-pie order.” She tucked Mrs. Coop’s silken quilt around her.

  Mrs. Coop’s eyelids drooped shut. She began to snore.

  * * *

  Ophelia knocked on Amaryllis’s bedchamber door.

  “Go away!” came the muffled reply.

  Ophelia sorely wished she could. Instead, she said, “Allow me to ready you for bed, miss. You’ve had a trying day.”

  It would be prodigiously trying to murder your brother-in-law and frame the scullery maid all in one crack. And that’s exactly what Ophelia figured had happened: Amaryllis, humiliated by Mr. Coop’s nasty scolding in the presence of her beloved Mr. Royall Hunt, had taken her vengeance with that bottle of poison.

  The door opened. “Go away, Flax.”

  Ophelia faked a Selfless Servant simper. She’d done it hundreds of times onstage. Never had it felt so difficult. “Allow me to help you.”

  Amaryllis’s lusterless eyes fastened on Ophelia. She said nothing, but Ophelia couldn’t look away, even as her heart began to thud. The gaze lasted a smidgen too long.

  Uh-oh. She knew what Ophelia suspected.

  “I no longer require your assistance,” Amaryllis said. She slammed the door.

  * * *

  Finally, Ophelia returned to the bedchamber she’d shared with Prue. It was high up under the eaves, so close to the roof you could hear the clatter of sparrows on the tiles. One tiny, mullioned window admitted pinkish dawn light.

  The two narrow iron bedsteads were as neat as she’d left them. The chest of drawers where the police claimed to have found the fairy tale book, poison, and paring knife were empty.

  Ophelia’s eyes flew to the top of the wardrobe. Yes. It was still there, hidden behind the washing pitcher and Prue’s bonnet. The police had missed it.

  She stood on tiptoe and brought down a battered leather case. She set it on the floor and knelt beside it.

  The brass lock had not been touched.

  Phew. Ophelia’s shoulders sagged.

  She retrieved a key, which she’d wedged between two floorboards under her bed, and opened the case. Inside were tiny glass jars and broken, paper-covered sticks of theatrical greasepaint, pots of glue, false beauty spots and moustaches, powder sifters, paintbrushes, a set of false teeth, soft wax for modeling noses and the like, and a couple of wigs. She’d brought the kit along for sentimental reasons, she supposed; she’d cobbled it together over eight hard years of circus and theater work.

  Two envelopes hid at the very bottom of the case.

  What if Inspector Schubert were to discover her greasepaint or these forged letters of reference? She ought to hide the case and destroy the letters.

  Later. She’d have to do it later.

  Ophelia locked the case, stowed the key back between the floorboards, and replaced the case on top of the wardrobe. She wrapped a shawl around her shoulders and hurried out of the bedchamber, down the coiling, bone-cold stairs, and out into the castle courtyard.

  Across the courtyard was a tall tower with a lone window at the top. Against the dawn-streaked sky, the tower was a black, menacing silhouette.

  How was Prue faring in there? Was she cold? Hungry? Certainly, she’d be scared.

  Ophelia had been in the courtyard sever
al times, playing lady-in-waiting to Mrs. Coop. The courtyard was divided from the kitchen gardens by a tall stone wall with a wooden gate. This gate usually stood open. Ophelia had glimpsed, through the gate and across the kitchen gardens, a mysterious barred door. The door was set in the bottom of the long, stone battlement that formed the fourth wall for the gardens, and that connected the tower with the rest of the castle.

  Now, common sense hinted that the door might take a person up to the tower. And when common sense hinted, well, wise ladies lent an ear.

  Folks figured actresses were flibbertigibbets who did nothing but practice melodramatic faces in the looking glass when they weren’t lolling on divans and mowing through boxes of chocolate creams. But the truth was, actresses were some of the hardest-working ladies you could find. Theatrical life had made Ophelia as practical as an iron nail and, some claimed, just as hardheaded.

  And she wouldn’t stand for this. No, she would not. The gumption, the absolute brass of that Schubert fellow, tossing Prue in the tower like yesterday’s dirty socks!

  Ophelia swiped a strand of windblown hair from her eyes and marched along a gravel path towards the kitchen garden gate.

  All of a sudden, a movement caught her eye on the far side of the courtyard, along the base of the western castle wing.

  Yes. There.

  Oh, golly.

  A person was passing through the courtyard’s geometric shrubberies and walks. No, two people.

  Ophelia dove, palms first, behind a row of big potted shrubs. She crouched, held her breath, and had a look-see through the branches.

  Two gentlemen in black clothes and black top hats crept along through the shadows. They carried something long and large, wrapped up in cloth.

  A corpse.

  No—wait. The wrapped thing was too narrow for that and a little too long.

  They vanished through the gate in the castle wall that led out to the kitchen gardens.

  What in Godfrey’s green earth was going on around here?

  After a minute, to make sure those creepy fellows weren’t coming back for a curtain call, Ophelia popped out from behind the shrubs and made a mad dash.