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

by Maia Chance

  “Yes, sir. Just like the one in the manuscript and the one in that painting of the girl at the Order’s house.”

  “She must be buried on the cliff somewhere.”

  “Miss Gertie knows it,” Prue said. “And so does Franz.”

  “Franz?”

  “He saw the comb this morning and said something I didn’t understand till now. He put the pieces together, see, and guessed that if I had that comb—”

  “Which he would have recognized, like we do, from the manuscript and the portrait.”

  “Right. He must have guessed, since we were talking about the grave and the footprints, that I found the comb on the cliff. And he realized that if Snow White’s comb came from up on the cliff, she’s probably buried up there, too. And so is her treasure.”

  Hansel placed the comb back in Prue’s hand. “Keep it.”

  “Truly?”

  “Yes.” He grabbed Prue’s hand, and they set off at a canter towards the railway station.

  * * *

  Ophelia and Professor Penrose rode into Baden-Baden and went directly to the Conversationshaus. Ophelia waited in the carriage while Penrose went inside. He wore his evening clothes and carried the brief note he’d jotted at the inn. It read,

  Herr Ghent,

  Understanding that you are a gambling gentleman, I’d like to propose a game. If I win, you talk. If you win, I’ll leave you in peace.

  Lord Harrington

  Penrose disappeared through the Conversationshaus doors.

  Ophelia drummed her fingertips on the carriage seat. What would she do if this plan flopped? Smuggle Prue out of town in a traveling trunk? Join a band of gypsies, maybe? Or surely there were circuses here in Europe. Circus tricks and acting weren’t the only things Ophelia knew how to do, anyway. She could garden, cook, and sew. Churn butter, lay up preserves, delouse cats. . . .

  Three minutes went by. Seven.

  It was only a matter of time before the police tracked her down. They’d find the revolver hidden in her chamber, of course—

  Penrose emerged, strode down the steps. His expression was bleak.

  “Ghent’s accepted my offer,” he said, climbing inside the carriage. “I am to play roulette tonight at ten o’clock. But he’s changed the terms. He sent a note down saying he’d talk if I win back my original stake seven times over—”

  “Yes?”

  “—but if I lose, he’ll make certain we never talk again.”

  “This is mullet-headed. You can’t!”

  “He’ll never get away with it.”

  “You didn’t agree, did you?”

  “It is possible that Ghent, for some reason, means to do away with us either way—recall the two thugs shooting at us in the wood. At least this way we might have a bit of a say in the matter. Now.” Penrose eyed her rumpled woolen dress. “You must accompany me tonight. There’s nowhere else for you to go, and I mean to be there when Schubert puts in an appearance. So we’ve got to get you something to wear.”

  * * *

  Baden-Baden had an uncommonly great need for pawnbroker’s shops, Ophelia soon learned. The back streets were crammed with them.

  “Because of the gambling,” Penrose said. “The wheel of fortune revolves rather quickly here, I’m afraid. That, and everyone here wishes to display their every thaler on their backs or in their equipage.”

  They chose an unassuming shop in a quiet court. The front of the shop was cluttered with the usual pawnbroker’s shop fare—violins, candlesticks, books, china, and watches—but a back room held stacks of oil paintings, marble sculptures, wardrobes overflowing with opulent clothing, and a case of winking jewels.

  The shopkeeper was an odd little chip with a pince-nez and a greasy waistcoat. He assisted them in finding an evening gown. It was a deep, shimmering, sea blue silk, with a gorgeous cream lace overskirt and an open neckline edged with another wide band of lace. The lady who’d been forced to pawn it off had also sold her crinoline, cream satin elbow gloves, a matching blue silk reticule, and dainty blue and white slippers with a high heel.

  Ophelia sighed when she saw the slippers. Her toes throbbed already.

  Penrose paid for the clothes, and they left.

  They spent the rest of the day in a humble café in an unfashionable district. When evening fell, Ophelia changed into the gown in the washroom, fixing her hair as best she could in the cracked mirror. She stuffed her feet into the slippers. Ouch.

  She emerged from the washroom.

  Penrose, still at the table, looked up from his newspaper.

  He didn’t seem to notice the way she was hobbling like a lame pony.

  “I hope it’ll do,” she said. “I’ve played grand ladies on the stage, but never . . . up close.”

  “I daresay,” he said in a curiously gruff voice, “it’ll do.”

  * * *

  Ophelia and Professor Penrose swooped into the gaming rooms just before ten o’clock.

  “You choose the table, Miss Flax,” Penrose said in her ear. “You are luckier than I.”

  Ghent’s two guards were watching them from the other side of the room. They stood like great black andirons, with their hands behind their backs.

  Ophelia led Penrose to a table near the back. The table was less crowded than the others, with a grave cloud hanging over it. The green felt table was mounded with bank notes and coins.

  Everyone held their breath as the croupier released the ivory ball into the spinning wheel, and everyone cheered when the ball fell home. The croupier raked money into eager hands.

  Seemed a lucky enough table. If you believed in that sort of thing.

  “This should do it,” Ophelia said.

  Penrose stepped up to the table.

  “Monsieur?” the croupier murmured. He had oiled black hair and a narrow moustache.

  Penrose placed a modest stack of gold Napoleons on black.

  The wheel spun. The ball fell on black 15. Penrose swept half his winnings off the table, and left the remainder on black with his first stake.

  The croupier spun the wheel again. This time the ball landed on red 7, and Penrose’s stake was whisked away by the croupier’s L-shaped stick.

  Penrose placed a new modest sum on black.

  Ophelia watched, standing just behind Penrose’s elbow as he continued to place his stake on black. He was playing it safe. Since he was betting on all of the black numbers and keeping his wager fairly low, he never lost very much. But he didn’t win much, either.

  She frowned.

  As the hour wore on, she observed another player at the table, a frazzled old dowager with a faded velvet reticule and curly white hair. She bet on only a few numbers at a time, and the payout when her numbers came up far exceeded Penrose’s winnings.

  After an hour and a half, Penrose had barely doubled his original stake.

  Ophelia had never played roulette before, but the lads backstage at the theater had whiled away the time gambling on simple coin-toss games that had fifty-fifty odds. One fellow—he’d managed the footlights—often won big by always doubling his bet after a loss. That way, he’d boasted to the admiring circle around him, when he won again, he’d make up for all previous losses.

  The ivory ball clicked and hopped onto red 9. There was a collective murmur and sigh around the table. But the frazzled old dowager took in several thousand francs.

  “Could I have a few coins?” Ophelia whispered to Penrose.

  He glanced back at her, his eyebrow lifted.

  “Let me have a try,” she said, “or we’ll be here till doomsday.”

  “I’m insuring against catastrophic losses, Miss Flax.”

  “But also against large winnings.”

  He straightened his spectacles and plopped a fistful of gold Napoleons into her gloved hand.

  * * *r />
  Gabriel continued to employ his conservative strategy. Beside him, Miss Flax won four times in a row by placing her stake on only three numbers. Remarkable. A throng swelled round the table as people came to join their luck to hers or simply to admire the lucky young lady in blue.

  And she was admirable—and very nearly beautiful, with the flush in her cheeks and that flash in her brown eyes. Her upswept hair shone amber in the chandelier light, and the lines of her shoulders and throat were worthy of a muse.

  Something coiled darkly about Gabriel’s heart. Miss Flax didn’t cringe away from all those gazes as a proper young lady, used to quiet domestic scenes, would. What gnawed at him even more, however, was the simple fact that she seemed quite in her element gambling. Almost, in fact, as though she’d done it before.

  She was an actress. A former circus performer and factory girl, for God’s sake. He had no right—and, naturally, no need—to care one way or the other how she conducted herself. He’d been a fool, of course, trying to shield her virtue when that well had surely dried up long ago.

  “Are you mad?” he whispered in her ear, as she nudged a pile of coins onto a single number—13.

  “You said yourself that I’m lucky,” she said.

  The sparkle in her eye was diabolical.

  The croupier spun the wheel, tossed the ball.

  Gabriel stared in disbelief as the ball fell home on 13.

  The crowd exploded into an uproar.

  Ophelia laughed as the croupier pushed a tinkling mountain of gold towards her.

  “You’ll break the bank if you keep this up, miss,” a British gentleman said, sucking on the stump of a cigar.

  Gabriel felt a heavy tap on his shoulder. He turned. It was the guard with the enormous chin.

  “Herr Ghent will see you now,” he said.

  * * *

  Ophelia and Penrose followed the guard up the staircase they’d taken before and down the third-floor corridor with its hissing gas sconces.

  Ophelia’s reticule jangled with all the coins she’d won. She knew it rightly belonged to the professor—after all, he had put up the original stake—but still, it felt delicious to be lugging around all that gold. If it were hers to keep, well, just think what she could do with it. She’d buy herself and Prue first-class passage back to New York, buy her dairy farm and an entire herd of the best Brown Swiss cows—

  “Gold gone to your head?” Penrose said.

  His eyes were distant, but his lips curved upwards in what appeared, at least, to be good humor.

  “It does seem to feel different than other things. Heavier and, I don’t know, warmer, somehow.”

  Now his mouth was set. “Seductive, isn’t it?”

  The guard stopped at the door to Ghent’s office. He thumped once with his huge fist.

  The door opened a sliver.

  It was the tiny, papery little secretary they’d seen before. In the crack of the door, his blue eye glittered like a shard of glass. “Ah,” he said, fixing his eye on Ophelia. “Mademoiselle Luck.” His eye swiveled to Penrose. “And the professor—or should I say earl?”

  “We’re here,” Penrose said, “to see Herr Ghent.”

  “He is expecting you.” The secretary opened the door. “That,” he said to the guard, “will be all.”

  The guard bowed and left.

  The secretary led them through the outer room, which was filled with velvet sofas, dusky oil paintings in gilt frames, and marble statuettes. He opened another door and, without announcing his arrival, led them in.

  They found themselves in an office with polished mahogany shelves and cabinets, green leather chairs, and a massive desk, behind which was a high-backed chair, turned to face the other way.

  Ophelia and Penrose stopped just inside the door.

  Ophelia stared at the chair, expecting it to swivel around and reveal—what? A lion-headed patriarch, massive and threatening and—

  Her jaw dropped.

  The secretary had seated himself in the chair and turned it to face them. The chair dwarfed him; he looked like a marionette’s puppet.

  “I am enjoying the expressions on your faces,” he said.

  “You are,” Penrose said, “Herr Ghent?”

  “Yes. And you are the nuisances who have given my guards such a trying time of it.” He tilted his head. “I thought they would have killed you by now—that is, after all, what I instructed them to do. But here you are.” He studied Ophelia.

  Even though Ophelia could probably lug Ghent around on her hip like a baby, she shrank back under his gaze.

  “You,” he said to her, “thought you would break my bank, did you?”

  “I thought I’d try.” She pretended boldness. “I didn’t get a chance to finish.”

  “Well, close enough, close enough. When my messenger came up from the gaming rooms and said the young American lady was on a lucky streak, my curiosity got the better of me.”

  Ghent swung his legs to and fro beneath the desk. His feet didn’t even reach the floor.

  “I assume,” Penrose said, “that even though you stopped the game short, you’ll uphold your end of the bargain?”

  “Of course. I am a gentleman.”

  “Then tell us, pray, what is Mr. George Smith’s true name?”

  “You cannot guess? I thought university professors were attentive.”

  Ophelia’s breath caught. Ghent’s eyes. She’d seen that shade of blue before. Recently. “Mr. Smith’s real name,” she said. “Is it . . . Ghent?”

  “The maidservant outthinking the scholar!” Ghent smacked his small palms together. “Delightful.”

  Penrose’s mouth was tight, but other than that his expression remained mild. “Mr. George Smith is, what? Your brother?”

  “Cousin. My father’s brother’s son. He went off to seek his fortune in California during the gold rush of 1849. He left me to tend our family greengrocer’s shop by myself.” Ghent sniffed. “He told me he would not stay poor, like me, nor would he consent to sharing the profits of one small shop. He said that he would find gold and become a wealthy man. I stayed behind, scraping together enough to travel to Paris for a time and invest in speculative stocks. I earned enough money in Paris to purchase a small hotel in Baden-Baden, and it grew into a success. Over time, I saved and invested enough to buy this gaming establishment and make it into the triumph it is today.”

  The weight of all that gold in Ophelia’s reticule no longer seemed delicious. It was a burden. Gold drove people to leave their families, to circle the globe, to sacrifice. To kill.

  31

  “Princess Verushka,” Penrose said to Ghent, “intimated that learning Smith’s true name would reveal something important about the deaths of Mr. Coop and Count Grunewald. Yet I fail to see the connection between those crimes and the fact that the owner of the Conversationshaus happens to have an American cousin.”

  “No?” Ghent looked to Ophelia. “And you, Mademoiselle Luck? Have you any guesses?”

  “Gold,” she blurted. “You both want gold. There’s gold hidden somewhere on the castle land, isn’t there?”

  “Very good. What a clever maidservant you are.” Ghent sneered at Penrose.

  Penrose shoved his hands in his trouser pockets.

  “The gold is not precisely hidden, however,” Ghent said. “There is a gold mine somewhere, said to be richer, deeper, than anything to be found in California. My cousin has been searching for it. But I shall have it.”

  “How did Smith—your cousin, that is,” Penrose said, “know there was a mine on the estate?”

  Ghent steepled his toy-like fingers. “Our family has known there was a rich mine, somewhere in the Schwarzwald, for generations. We have been searching for it, without luck, as we grew poorer and poorer. But that mine by rights belongs to us. It is our inheritance.�
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  “Are you. . . .” Ophelia furrowed her brow. “Are you Grunewalds, then?”

  “Ach, perhaps you are not as clever as I thought. No. The Ghents are descendants of an ancient race of men who worked these mountains, bringing up gold.”

  “You are descended,” Penrose said in a slow, wondering tone, “from Snow White’s dwarves.”

  Ghent pounded his tiny fist on the desktop. “As though we belonged to that girl! As though we were her servants! No. The dwarves in that tale were my ancestors. But there is much more to the story than that. They had worked the mines since time immemorial, until somehow—no one is certain what happened—they lost access to their mines, and the knowledge of the mines’ whereabouts was forgotten.”

  “Until Smith arrived,” Penrose said.

  “Yes. My cousin learned, I know not how, that the richest mine of all was located in the forest of Schloss Grunewald. He convinced Coop to purchase the castle, and he set to work searching for the entrance to the mine. When I learned he had returned to the Schwarzwald, and when my men reported that he had been sighted in the hills, making maps and testing the rocks, I knew at once what he was doing.”

  “Did you kill Mr. Coop?” Ophelia said.

  “Of course not. I had no opportunity. When he died, however, I did send my men into the schloss to retrieve the skeleton and the rest of the contents of the house.”

  “Why?” Ophelia said.

  “Would you want scholars poking and probing the remains of your ancestors?”

  “Where are those relics now?” Penrose said.

  “Relics, you say. As though they were meant to be in a museum. Or perhaps filed away in a crate on a university shelf.”

  Penrose flexed his jaw.

  “The skeleton was buried,” Ghent said.

  “And the relics?”

  Ghent smiled. “I sold them.”

  “Sold them!”

  “You do not believe you are the only person in the world interested in folk relics? There are certain persons—collectors, properly speaking—who pay extravagantly for such things. And, as it turns out, it is fortunate that I sold them off quickly to the highest bidder, because I have, now, a deficit to make up in my gaming rooms.” Ghent sighed. “I have revealed enough. Now listen. You, both of you, are to take the first morning train out of Baden-Baden—I care not where—and never return. If you do not leave, I shall make certain you are killed and buried so deeply in the Schwarzwald, no one but the wild beasts shall ever discover your remains. Go now. The thrill has worn off.” He turned to some papers on his desktop.