The World's Greatest Detective

by Caroline Carlson

  “She might even be a murderer,” said Ivy. “What if she’s a murderer Mr. Abernathy helped to catch? And what if she killed him in revenge?” Her eyes were wide. “What if Julia is the Colebridge Cutthroat?”

  “She can’t be!” Toby’s mouth felt dry. “Can she?”

  “Of course not,” said Mrs. Webster, but she didn’t sound convinced.

  “Well,” said Ivy, “whoever she is, Mr. Abernathy knew about it.” She handed the warden’s letter back to Toby. “And now Mr. Abernathy is dead.”

  In the hallway beyond the Investigatorium, something shuffled and creaked.

  The trouble began to prickle its way up Toby’s neck. “What’s that noise?” he whispered.

  Ivy sighed and got to her feet. “Just Percival again. He’s always wandering off.”

  “Ivy?” Toby’s whole face was prickling now. “Percival’s over there. He’s chewing on Egbert.”

  Ivy froze. She stared at Percival, who was gnawing happily on the skeleton’s ankle. Then she ran to the Investigatorium door and flung it open, making the whole room shake.

  “There’s no one here.” Ivy stuck her head out the doorway and looked both ways. “I’m sure we’ve just spooked ourselves. We’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  Toby looked again at the thick, poisonous chokevine. He really hoped Ivy was right.

  CHAPTER 22

  THE THIRD M

  “The third M,” said Ivy as she paced the Investigatorium. “The motive for Mr. Abernathy’s murder. At first, we didn’t have any idea what that motive could be.” She spun dramatically on her heel. “But now we’ve got too many motives. Did Julia kill him for revenge? Did Rackham murder him to keep his secrets quiet? Did Miss March and Miss Price finally put their sinister warnings into action? Or was it someone else”—here she spun again, to face her mother—“someone who couldn’t afford to pay Mr. Abernathy another cent?”

  “I’ve told you fifty times, Ivy—”

  “I know, Mother; you swear you’re innocent. And we’ve got plenty of other suspects who might have killed Mr. Abernathy instead; the house is crawling with them.” Ivy stopped suddenly, as though something had just occurred to her. “Mother, didn’t you say you had to go talk to Cook about dinner?”

  “Well, yes,” said Mrs. Webster, “I did, but I’m sure that can wait a little longer. Actually, children, I’ve gotten awfully intrigued by your investigation, and I’d love—”

  “—to leave us alone? How thoughtful of you.” Ivy took her mother by the elbow and lifted her off the sofa before Mrs. Webster could do anything about it. “Toby, would you help me show Mother out the door? We’ll need to hurry: Cook hates to be kept waiting, and she’s got an enormous number of knives.”

  Toby didn’t know quite what Ivy was up to, but he could recognize the urgency in her voice when he heard it. “Of course, Inspector!” he said, taking hold of Mrs. Webster’s other elbow. Between the two of them, it wasn’t that hard to carry her across the room and out the door. “Thanks so much for your help with the case, ma’am. I’m sure Ivy will let you know if she has any more questions for you.”

  “But what about Miss Hartshorn?” Mrs. Webster said as they deposited her in the hallway. “Do you think she’s really a convict? And that dear Mr. Rackham; shouldn’t we try to help—”

  “Good-bye, Mother.” Ivy pulled the Investigatorium door shut. Then she turned back to Toby and dusted her hands together. “There. I hope poor Mother isn’t too flustered, but I couldn’t see how we could possibly continue our investigation and look after her at the same time. She’d only tell us to be careful and behave ourselves, and if we follow advice like that, we’ll never get anything done.”

  “I thought you wanted to keep an eye on her,” said Toby.

  Ivy shrugged. “I did, but we’ve got too many suspects to worry about now. We can’t possibly watch them all. If Mother tries anything funny, we’ll know where to find her, but for now, we’ve got work to do.”

  Toby was already gathering the scattered files from the floor and stacking them back into neat piles. “I still don’t understand what Mr. Abernathy was doing with all these papers,” he said. “Why would he have brought them with him to the manor?”

  “It’s like you said earlier.” Ivy stretched out on the sofa. “He wanted to learn more about the detectives who were entering his contest.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense!” said Toby. He hadn’t meant to speak so loudly, but even Percival jumped at the noise. Toby wondered if this was a side effect of spending so much time with Ivy. “Mr. Abernathy’d had some of these documents for years,” he explained. “He probably learned all about the detectives’ secrets a long time before he invited them to the manor. If he knew such awful things about them, why did he want to give each of them a chance to be his successor?”

  “That’s a very good question, Detective Montrose. I hadn’t thought of things that way.” Ivy wiggled her toes. “Do you think he was being kind? No, never mind; that doesn’t sound like Mr. Abernathy at all.”

  “Oh, Ivy, he wasn’t that awful—”

  “He blackmailed my parents.” Ivy’s voice was icy. “Who knows what else he might have been up to while Mr. Peartree was busy writing all those nice things about him in the Sphinx? Hugh Abernathy had a lot of secrets, Toby—his own, and other people’s. I’d like to know exactly what he was planning to do with them.”

  Downstairs in the parlor, the detectives were in a tizzy. Hugh Abernathy’s body was still mysteriously absent, according to the telegram Mr. Peartree had just received from Doctor Piper, and now poor Mr. Peartree himself was practically pulling his hair out with frustration as the investigators argued about what should be done. Julia Hartshorn wanted to ask volunteers to comb the woods around the mortuary, Mr. Rackham advocated for a pack of hunting dogs, and Miss Price even dared to murmur that perhaps the police should be enlisted to search for the corpse. That was when everyone started shouting at Miss Price.

  “I only said perhaps,” Miss Price protested. “If we weren’t all locked up in this house for the rest of the day, I’d begin the search myself.”

  It didn’t seem like a particularly good time for interruptions, but Toby didn’t have much of a choice. He could already hear the toes of Ivy’s tall buttoned boots tap-tap-tapping with impatience in the hallway (she was dressed as Madame Ermintrude again), and he’d promised her that he could handle this assignment by himself. Only two people in the world knew more about secrets than Mr. Abernathy did, and fortunately or dangerously, both of those people were in the parlor.

  “Miss Price?” he said, tapping the detective on the shoulder. “Miss March? I’d like to speak to you both.”

  Miss Price’s cheeks flushed as pink as red currant jam, and she smiled at Toby. “Hello, dear,” she said. “Of course you can speak with us. Can’t he, Anthea?”

  “It’ll have to be in private,” Toby added. There was that new voice of his again—the louder, firmer one that made him swallow with surprise. “Will you come with me?”

  “I’m sure there’s nothing you can’t ask us right here, Toby,” Miss March said. “We’re very busy at the moment. We’ve got theories to discuss, evidence to organize, a corpse to find, and only a few hours left to solve this case before the police arrive.”

  “I know,” said Toby. “That’s why I need to talk to you right away. My partner and I want to know the truth about Hugh Abernathy.”

  Miss Price blinked at him. “What in the world do you mean?”

  “You wrote him threatening letters,” Toby said quietly enough to keep the others from hearing. “I’ve seen them, so there’s no point in denying it. What did Mr. Abernathy do to you, and why did he keep those letters?”

  Miss March and Miss Price exchanged a look. Neither of them was smiling anymore.

  “Oh, my dear.” Miss March put her hand on Toby’s shoulder. Her fingers were thin and stiff and cold. “What have you gotten yourself into?”

  The af
ternoon sky had darkened and grayed. The smell of thunder hung in the air, and even the sun didn’t dare to show its face as Miss March and Miss Price directed Toby and Ivy briskly out of doors. “We mustn’t be overheard,” Miss March commanded, steering them across the lawn. The crowd at the gates had grown since the morning; it was overflowing the road, and more than a few bystanders were trying to scale the iron fence. Miss March headed resolutely in the opposite direction. “What do you say, Flossie? Shall we go into the maze?”

  “The maze will do nicely,” Miss Price agreed.

  Toby wasn’t sure there was anything nice about the hedge maze. It looked dark and close and shadowy, like it had spent a long time waiting for a chance to swallow up a few detectives. Toby had been planning to take Miss March and Miss Price back to the Investigatorium, but it was obvious that he and Ivy weren’t in charge of this interview any longer. For all he knew, Miss March and Miss Price were planning to strand them inside the maze and leave them for packs of wolves, escaped convicts, or hungry reporters from the Morning Bugle to find. “Do you go into the maze a lot, Ivy?” he asked. “I mean, Madame Ermintrude?”

  The wind whipped a scarf across Ivy’s face. “Mother won’t allow it,” she said grimly. “We’ve lost three gardeners and a house cat inside it, and only the cat ever made its way out again.”

  “It’s a lucky thing we’re not gardeners, then, isn’t it, Anthea?” Miss Price sounded positively cheerful as she squeezed through an opening in the tall hedges. “A shame we aren’t cats, but there’s nothing to be done about it. Come along, children! We haven’t got time to waste!”

  Inside the maze, the wind died abruptly and the noises of the crowd faded away. The hedges’ thick branches pressed against Toby, and their needles whispered old, earthy secrets to one another as he brushed past. He had to hurry to keep up with Miss March and Miss Price. They were surprisingly quick, and Toby wasn’t about to let either of them out of his sight.

  The path diverged in two directions, left and right, and Miss March paused at the fork. She licked her fingertip, held it in the air for a moment, and turned down the left-hand path. Ivy looked awfully skeptical behind her motoring goggles, but she followed Miss March anyway, and Toby did the same. He hoped the detectives knew what they were doing.

  When they had rounded several more corners and buried themselves so deeply in the hedges that Toby could no longer tell which way they’d entered, Miss Price suddenly stopped walking. She cupped a hand around her ear and listened. “Good,” she said. “We’re quite alone, my dears, so let’s get down to business. You say you want to know the truth about Hugh Abernathy, but I’d like to know: are you absolutely sure that’s what you want?”

  “Of course it is,” said Ivy. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “The truth can be a tricky thing,” said Miss March. She was walking again now, quickly, and her curls flapped at her temples like a nest of fledglings. “Our clients hire us to search for the truth, but more often than not, they’re unhappy when we find it. It’s not their fault, poor things; it’s human nature. If facts comforted us in the same way fictions did, we’d all spend cozy evenings reading our encyclopedias around the fire.”

  “Just think of the wonderful stories Mr. Peartree writes,” Miss Price said. “Everyone in the city loves to read about Hugh Abernathy’s adventures. Wouldn’t you like to keep thinking of Mr. Abernathy as the man in those stories?”

  Toby thought about all the lazy mornings he’d spent sprawled on his stomach with the newest issue of the Sphinx spread in front of him, and all the nights he’d spent dreaming about Mr. Abernathy’s adventures, each more remarkable than the last. But he hadn’t been a detective then. “I think it’s too late for that, ma’am,” he told Miss Price. “I’d rather know the truth, even if it’s awful. It’s a lot better than not knowing anything at all.”

  Miss Price nodded. “So you’re your uncle’s boy. I’m glad.” She rounded a corner of the maze, and her words floated back to Toby over the hedge. “All of us on the Row prefer to know the truth about things. Actually, I think Hugh Abernathy preferred it most of all. He loved finding out absolutely everything there was to know about the universe: its animals, its substances, its secrets. That is what made him an excellent detective.”

  “Among other things.” Miss March’s voice was dry as sand. “Flossie, are you sure you haven’t missed a turn?”

  “Quite sure.” They had reached what looked to Toby like a dead end, but Miss Price ran her hands nimbly along the wall of branches in front of her. “You’re right, though, Anthea. Mr. Abernathy loved the truth not only because it showed him the nature of things, but because it gave him power—and there’s nothing he adored more than that.” Her fingers slipped through an overgrown gap in the hedge, and she smiled. “This way, dears. I think we’ve reached the heart of it all.”

  Toby squeezed through the gap. The center of the maze was small and silent, a little square clearing of root-ridged dirt just large enough to fit the four of them. Toby was glad he couldn’t see the remains of the three lost gardeners anywhere in the clearing. It felt like the sort of place that kept its secrets close.

  “Your uncle Gabriel noticed right away that Hugh Abernathy was a hard worker,” said Miss March. “When the two of them were partners, Hugh spent every waking moment investigating their clients’ cases. Sometimes he solved mysteries the clients didn’t even know they had. But Gabriel noticed something else, too. Hugh had an unfortunate habit of using his clients’ secrets against them.”

  “He blackmailed them.” Ivy looked thunderous.

  “To put it bluntly, yes. Hugh never could keep his hands off a juicy scandal or a shocking truth, particularly if it put money in his pocket. Gabriel was furious when he found out. He tried to convince Hugh to stop, but Hugh swore if he said a word to anyone, he’d destroy Gabriel’s career.”

  “And he nearly did,” Miss Price said. “Has anyone told you the true version of the adventure of the Colebridge Cutthroat, Toby?”

  Toby squirmed under Miss Price’s gaze. “I’ve heard it,” he said. “Uncle Gabriel was jealous of Mr. Abernathy, and he started a fight that almost cost them the case.”

  Miss Price looked bewildered. “Oh, my dear,” she said, “that’s not what happened at all!”

  “Your uncle’s not a fool,” Miss March agreed. “By the time Montrose and Abernathy took on the case at Entwhistle House, Gabriel knew Hugh was blackmailing their clients, but he tried not to let his concerns interfere with the job he’d been hired to do. He stood guard outside Lord Entwhistle’s bedchamber while Hugh Abernathy kept watch in Entwhistle’s study. When the hour came to switch posts, however, Gabriel walked into the study and found his partner reading through all of Entwhistle’s private papers. Hugh had even tucked some government documents away in his pockets.”

  “That,” said Miss March, “was when Gabriel lost his temper. They had the most enormous argument. Gabriel shouted at Hugh to return the documents at once, and when Hugh refused, Gabriel hit him.”

  “Not hard enough, if you ask me,” said Miss Price. “Unfortunately, the men were so caught up in their fight that they nearly missed the Cutthroat’s entrance, and I’m sorry to say that Hugh Abernathy was first to Lord Entwhistle’s bedchamber door. He blamed the whole mess on Gabriel.”

  “And everyone believed him?” Toby asked.

  “You met Mr. Abernathy,” said Miss March, “so you know how charming he could be. Besides, who could doubt the word of a man who’d just captured the city’s most dangerous criminal? Hugh Abernathy became the world’s greatest detective that night, and he’d been happily manipulating his clients away from their money ever since.” She pursed her lips. “I’m not at all sorry that someone finally put a stop to his schemes.”

  “Are you?” Ivy crossed her arms. “If you wanted to stop Mr. Abernathy, why didn’t you do it yourself? You could have sent him to prison ages ago!”

  Ivy was stubborn, but Miss March was stubborner.
“What makes you think we didn’t try?” she asked. “When Gabriel came to us and told us the truth of what had happened at Entwhistle House, we hoped we could set matters straight immediately.”

  “But we didn’t have proof,” said Miss Price, “not the kind the police or the courts would accept. All we had was Gabriel’s word, and it wasn’t worth much, particularly against Mr. Abernathy’s.”

  “Flossie did write Hugh some wonderfully nasty letters,” Miss March said, smiling a little. “I understand you’ve read them. Honestly, I’m surprised he saved them all these years. I would have tossed them in the fire long ago.”

  “Mr. Abernathy wouldn’t have.” Toby felt sure of this. “I bet he never threw anything away. He just collected information and waited for it to be useful to him. He had files on all the detectives here this weekend!”

  “Really?” said Miss March and Miss Price in unison.

  “You didn’t know?” said Toby. “But you know everything!”

  Ivy groaned. “Lesson five of the correspondence course, Detective Montrose,” she said. “Keep your mouth shut.”

  Toby clamped his lips together—too late, he knew, but it was better than nothing. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  “Don’t worry, Ivy, dear.” Miss Price squeezed Ivy’s hand. “Whatever there is to know about the other detectives on the Row, I can assure you we already know it.”

  This didn’t seem to make Ivy feel any better. “Well, then,” she said, “there’s something I’d like to know. If you and Mr. Abernathy disliked one another so much, why did he invite you to his competition this weekend? And why did you accept his invitation?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t answer your first question,” said Miss March. “I have no idea what the man was thinking. But as for the second—well, we were curious! We are detectives, after all. We wanted to find out what Hugh thought he was playing at.”

  “Gabriel told us we were being foolish,” said Miss Price, “but Anthea and I never could resist a good murder. Apparently, at least one of the other guests felt similarly.”