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

by Maia Chance

  “There’s Eggy,” Prue said. “Maybe that’s the sister she mentioned.” A young lady in a lavish green tent of a gown sat next to Eglantine.

  “Same dark hair,” Ophelia said.

  “Same mean little eyes.”

  “A good deal taller, however, and somewhat . . . wider.”

  “Spit it out. She looks like a prizefighter in a wig.”

  “Prue! That might be your own sister you’re going on about.”

  “Stepsister. Look—they’re having words, I reckon. Eggy don’t seem too pleased.”

  The young ladies’ heads were bent close together, and they appeared to be bickering. The larger lady in green had her eyes stuck on something across the room.

  Ah. A gentleman. Fair-haired, flushed, and strapping, crammed into a white evening jacket with gold buttons, medals and ribbons, and epaulets on the shoulders. He conversed with a burly fellow in black evening clothes, with a lion’s mane of dark gold hair flowing to his shoulders.

  “Ladies quarreling about a fellow,” Ophelia said. “How very tiresome.”

  “Some fellers are worth talking of.”

  “If you are hinting I care to discuss any gentleman, least of all Professor Penrose, then—well, I do not, I sincerely do not, feel a whit of sentiment for that man.” Well, maybe Ophelia felt a smidge of vexation and a trifle of fury. But nothing else.

  “Oh, sure,” Prue said.

  Ophelia longed for things, certainly. But not for him. She longed for a home. She longed, with that gritted-molars sort of longing, to be snug in a third-class berth in the guts of a steamship barging towards America. She’d throw over acting, head up north to New Hampshire or Vermont, get work on a farmstead. Merciful heavens! She knew how to scour pots, tend goats, hoe beans, darn socks, weave rush chair seats, and cure a rash with apple cider vinegar. So why was she gallivanting across Europe, penniless, half-starved, shivering, in this preposterous disguise?

  Her eyes slid sideways.

  Prue. She was doing it for Prue.

  “Duck!” Prue whispered.

  There was a clatter above, voices coming closer; someone was pushing a window open.

  Ophelia and Prue stumbled off to the side until they were safely in shadow once more. They’d come to the second wing of the mansion. All of the windows were black except two on the main floor.

  “Let’s look,” Ophelia whispered. “Could be your ma.”

  “Sure. Could be a wolf, too.”

  “A wolf? In Paris? Indoors?”

  They picked their way towards the windows, into what seemed to be a marshy vegetable patch.

  Ophelia stepped around some sort of half-rotten squash and wedged the toe of her boot between two building stones. She gripped the sill and pulled herself up. Her waterlogged rump padding threatened to pull her backwards. She squinted through the glass. “Most peculiar,” she whispered. “Looks like some sort of workshop. Tables heaped with knickknacks.”

  “A tinker’s shop?” Prue clambered up. “Oh. Look at all them gears and cogs and things.”

  “Why would there be a tinker’s shop in this grand house? Your Ma married a nobleman. Yet it’s on the main floor of the house, not down where the servants’ workplaces must be. And it looks like a library. A fancy one.” The chamber was walled with bookshelves. A fire burned in a carved fireplace, and thousands of gold-embossed book spines glimmered.

  “Crackers,” Prue whispered. “Someone’s in there.”

  Sure enough, a round, bald man was hunched over a table. One of his hands held a cube-shaped box. The other twisted a screwdriver. Ophelia couldn’t see his face because he wore brass jeweler’s goggles.

  “What in tarnation is he doing?” Prue spoke too emphatically and bumped her bonnet brim on the windowpane.

  The man glanced up. His goggles lenses shone.

  Holy Moses. He looked like something crawled out of a nightmare.

  The man stood so abruptly that his chair collapsed behind him. He lurched towards them.

  Ophelia hopped down into the vegetable patch.

  Prue recoiled. For a few seconds she seemed suspended, twirling her arms in the air like a graceless hummingbird. Then she pitched backwards and thumped into the garden, a few steps from Ophelia.

  “Hurry!” Ophelia whispered to Prue. “Get up! He’s opening the window!”

  Prue didn’t get up. She screamed. The kind of long, shrill scream you’d use when, say, falling off a cliff.

  The man flung open the window. He yelled down at them in French.

  “Get me off of it!” Prue yelled. “Oh golly, get me off of it!”

  Ophelia crouched, hooked her hands under Prue’s arms, and dragged her to her feet. They both stared, speechless, down into the dark vegetation. Raindrops smacked Ophelia’s cheeks. Prue panted and whimpered at the same time.

  Then—the man must’ve turned on a lamp—light flared up.

  A gorgeous gown of ivory tulle and silk sprawled at Ophelia and Prue’s feet, embroidered with gold and silver thread that shone like spider’s webbing in the gaslight.

  A gown. That was all. That had to be all.

  But there was a foot—mercy, a foot—protruding from the hem of the gown. Bare, white, slick with rainwater. Toes bruised and blood raw, the big toenail purple.

  Ophelia’s tongue went sour.

  There was hair. Long, wet, curled hair, tangled with a leaf and clotted with blood. A face. Eyes stretched open. Dead as a doornail.

  Ophelia stopped breathing.

  The thing was, the dead girl was the spitting image of . . . Prue.