My Brother's Crown

by Mindy Starns Clark

  On the cot just a few feet in front of us lay a man, an old man with a withered face and gnarled hands. Dressed in a tan shirt and dark pants, he was on his back, his legs stretched out in front of him as if he’d just laid down for a quick nap. But from the middle of his body protruded the wooden handle of a long knife. The rest of it, the shiny sharp metal part, was buried almost all the way in his chest.

  The second big thing I noticed after the knife were his eyes, which were open. Glassy and clouded, it seemed as if they had once been blue, but it was hard to tell. His mouth was twisted open as well, almost as if he’d died midscream.

  And there was no question he was dead. Not just because of the knife and the eyes and the stillness, but because of the blood. Lots and lots of blood, way more than a body could spare. Even at nine, I knew enough to realize the knife must have pierced his heart or maybe sliced some artery, because it was everywhere. Pooled on his chest, splattered on the wall behind him, soaked into his clothes, puddled on the floor below.

  “Do you think he’s sleeping?” Nicole whispered, startling me from my observations.

  I stepped closer, looking for signs of movement, for a chest rising and falling, but I already knew. This man was not asleep.

  I felt the three of them behind me, watching, waiting for me to do something, anything. I was the oldest after all, even if only by a few months. But I didn’t know what to do. In the distance, a robin sang. A chipmunk chattered from a tree. And the four of us just stood there, staring down at the grisly sight.

  “Wake up, mister,” Nicole said. Then she stepped forward, reached out, and patted him on the shoulder.

  Somehow, I don’t think she’d comprehended the knife before then, or the dead open eyes, or the blood. But when she looked down, she realized she was standing in a dark syrupy puddle, the tip of her boot coated in red as if she’d dipped it into a jar of finger paint, and then she began to scream.

  That’s all it took.

  In an instant, we were all screaming, all hysterical, all certain that whoever killed him was going to kill us next.

  Nicole ran to the door and then out, and we had no choice but to take off after her, even though we knew at the moment we were probably safer inside, where no killer was lurking, than outside, where surely he was lying in wait, ready to strike again.

  We’d never run so fast. You would think by being the smallest that Nicole would be the slowest, but it was all we could do to keep up with her. The hike that had taken us maybe half an hour coming in couldn’t have taken more than ten minutes going out.

  At least we never saw anyone, never heard anyone behind us, never spotted any lurking killers anywhere. We burst out of the trees and headed for the footbridge, pounding across as our screams started up again, running toward the rest of our family, who were still eating and enjoying the sunshine as if nothing was different, as if our four small lives hadn’t been changed forever.

  Hearing the ruckus, our parents came running to meet us. I flew into my father’s arms and just held on and sobbed, my body trembling violently as I tried to tell him, between gasps, what we’d seen. Around us, my cousins were explaining to their parents as well, and soon a whole group of concerned and angry Talbot men were preparing to go see exactly what this was about.

  It took Granddad to talk them all down, saying it wouldn’t be safe, that the killer could still be lurking nearby, that they simply had to wait for the police. Only when they finally agreed to wait, albeit grudgingly, did he head for the house to call 911.

  It took forever for the police to get there, but when they finally arrived and had questioned us and were ready to venture into the woods, they allowed only the three fathers to go with them. Everyone else—including us girls—had to stay behind.

  They were gone a long time, maybe half an hour, and I knew the moment they came back and I saw the weird expression on my dad’s face that something was wrong. Much of what followed was a blur to me now, but a few parts I could still remember. The shock of being told there was no dead body in there, no blood. Just a pile of blankets and a stick and a puddle of rainwater.

  I remembered becoming angry, really angry. I marched over to Nicole and demanded, “What do you call this then?” as I pointed down to her bloody boot.

  Only the blood wasn’t there anymore. It must have washed away as we ran down the muddy and puddle-ridden path.

  I remembered Maddee and Danielle sobbing, Nicole curled up in her mother’s lap sucking her thumb—a habit she’d given up long before. I was the only angry one, the vocal one who refused to believe what they were saying. Eventually, reluctantly, the men agreed to go back to the cabin one more time and bring us with them.

  Once there, the sight in front of us was even more shocking than the old dead man with the knife in his chest: the lack of anything remotely resembling the grisly scene we’d encountered when we were here before. No body, no blood, no knife. Just a scene that had been staged to make it look as if we were idiots, children so caught up in our imaginations that we didn’t know the difference between a pile of fabric and a recently slaughtered corpse.

  It wasn’t long before we were the laughing stock of the reunion—at least in snickers and whispers and appraising looks. A few of the boys dubbed us the Liar Choir, a name that stuck for years.

  My mother gave us the benefit of the doubt, but only to the extent that she thought perhaps a practical joke had been played, that someone had created a fake grisly scene and then removed it again once we were gone. But even that infuriated me.

  There had been nothing fake about any of it. I knew it then, when I was nine.

  I still knew it now, whether tonight’s test proved it or not.

  “I think we’re getting close,” Maddee said, startling me from my thoughts.

  Suddenly, I wasn’t a child anymore. I was an adult. My three cousins were adults. And for the first time since that horrible day, we were almost back to the scene of the crime, at the cabin in the woods.

  I felt my heart surge with righteous indignation, pushing away the fear. It was high time we did this. I was ready.

  As soon as we came around the final bend, there it stood. The cabin. During the walk, the clouds had drifted away, letting the moonlight through. Now it shone down on the place, which was smaller than I remembered and so ramshackle by this point that I wasn’t sure if it was even safe to go inside.

  But Blake didn’t seem to share my concern. I felt a warm hand on my back, and I turned to see him next to me now.

  “You okay?” he asked softly.

  I nodded.

  “Good. Still want to do this?”

  I nodded again.

  “Good.” He let his hand drop, and then he stepped forward to address the group.

  “I’ll go in alone first and check for structural integrity. If it looks okay, I’ll come get Renee so she can help me set things up. You three should probably wait outside until we’re ready to spray the luminol, but then we’ll call you in so you can watch as we do it. Sound good?”

  My three cousins nodded, their expressions somber.

  He and I began moving toward the cabin. When he reached the door, he pushed at it, but it didn’t budge.

  “You know the drill,” Maddee said, teasing Nicole.

  “Yeah, right. I’m not y’all’s trained monkey anymore.”

  We all smiled.

  I was wondering how we might get the door unlocked without having to repeat the old method when Blake surprised us by giving it one swift kick, knocking it open.

  “If we’d known it was that easy,” Danielle said, “we could’ve done it like that all along.”

  “Be right back,” he said before carefully making his way into the blackness.

  While he checked things out to make sure the place wasn’t going to collapse on our heads, I took in the full sight of the cabin and tried to render it down to size. I had thought of this place as my enemy, of sorts, for nineteen years, but I realized now it was about to bec
ome my friend. If it really had held on to its secrets all this time as we hoped, it might even be one of my best friends.

  “Okay,” he announced, suddenly appearing in the doorway, framed by an odd reddish glow. “No flashlights.”

  Sucking in a deep breath, I took one last glance back at my cousins and then stepped into the old cabin. My eyes went first to the opposite wall, to the spot that still haunted my dreams, but it was empty. Only the cot remained, with not even a mattress on it anymore, much less the blanket. Or the stick.

  “We can mix this over here,” Blake said easily, knowing the perfect antidote for my current terror would be to engage in a little science. Directing my attention away from the far wall, I realized the red glow was coming from a nearby lamp, providing just enough light to see by while still maintaining our night vision for when we sprayed the luminol. Clever.

  Blake led me to the rickety wooden table and told me what to do, and then he turned his attention to setting up the camera and tripod. As instructed, I went to work combining the luminol with some potassium hydroxide and water, and then I poured that into an empty bottle and added in an equal amount of hydrogen peroxide. Then I screwed the sprayer onto the top and told him I was done.

  So far, so good.

  When he finished with his task, he gave me an affirming smile before moving to the doorway and inviting my cousins inside.

  They entered one at a time and huddled together off to the left, to a spot Blake indicated.

  “You sure there are no snakes in here?” Maddee asked, stepping gingerly.

  “I took a look when I first came in and didn’t see any,” he replied, which wasn’t exactly a no but better than nothing.

  “All right, here’s what’s going to happen,” he told us. “We’re going to turn off the red light so it’s completely dark, then Renee is going to start spraying the luminol on the floor and the wall. If we’re lucky, some blood will still be here, it’ll react, and we’ll see a blue glow. Okay?”

  We nodded.

  I held my breath as Blake stepped over to man the camera, which was on the tripod, pointed down at the floor.

  Then he gave me a nod and I turned off the red lamp.

  Plunged into darkness, my heart began pounding so hard I could barely breathe. Trying to hold my hands steady, I pointed myself in the direction of the blood, steeled my nerves, and squeezed the trigger. With a steady swish-swish, I sprayed the luminol.

  Almost immediately, like the Milky Way bursting to life on a planetarium sky, little blue dots began to flash and glow on the floor in front of me. More spray, more glowing, the incessant snapping of the camera. Soon the wall and the floor were lit up like a Christmas tree, blue sparkling everywhere, especially where the puddles of blood had once collected.

  “Look!” Danielle cried, and though I couldn’t see her in the dark, I realized what she was talking about, an odd glowing splotch a short ways off. Spraying and moving, I managed to illuminate five similar splotches total, leading toward the door.

  “No way,” Nicole whispered, sending shivers down my spine.

  It was the print from the toe of her bloody boot, from when she was only six years old.

  The luminol had worked. The blue glow all around us was the proof.

  And for the first time in nineteen years, I knew how it felt to be truly vindicated.

  As we set off back down the trail toward home, equipment in hand, we decided we weren’t going to wait one more minute to get this on the record. We were going immediately to the police station, even if it was the middle of the night.

  Though I could tell Blake would have rather waited till tomorrow, he agreed to come along, and soon all five of us were piled in his SUV and heading down the empty roads toward the station in town.

  We were there for maybe two hours, each of us taking turns in a small room with a uniformed officer and a recording device, telling our version of the story, then and now. The officer was very nice, very polite, though not all that captivated by our tale until he saw the photos of the luminol and spoke with Blake about our procedure.

  He said a detective would be in touch with us tomorrow and take it from there. In the meantime, he would write up our statements and assemble all the information so the case could proceed. That was their next step. Ours was to tell Nana all about our experiment first thing in the morning before she heard about it some other way.

  Blake drove us home, and once we got back to the house, my cousins practically leaped out of the car the moment it came to a stop, obviously so that he and I could be alone. I was embarrassed by their actions, but he just laughed, saying we probably did need a few minutes to ourselves after all that had happened.

  He turned off the car and we both settled back in our seats, a deep calm overtaking me as I gazed through the windshield at the night sky. We didn’t speak at first, but it was a good silence, especially when he reached out and took my hand.

  “There’s no way on earth I can ever thank you for what you did tonight,” I said finally, my eyes still on the stars. “Not just for me but for my cousins too.”

  “I was happy to do it.”

  More silence, and then he added, “Though you know my efforts weren’t entirely altruistic, right?”

  I smiled. “Yeah, I know. You were hoping to make copper nitrate.”

  “Oh?” he said with a chuckle.

  I turned to him as I explained. “Simple chemical displacement. Do you know what happens if you mix copper with silver nitrate?”

  “Refresh my memory.”

  “The copper knocks the silver out of the way so it can bond with the nitrate and become copper nitrate.”

  I let him think about that for a moment, and he didn’t disappoint.

  “So I’m copper,” he said slowly, “you’re nitrate, and that cabin and all the baggage that came with it is silver. Am I on the right track?”

  “You got it.”

  “Well?” he asked with a sly grin. “Are we a compound yet?”

  My pulse surging, I met his gaze.

  “I do believe displacement has occurred,” I replied, giving his hand a squeeze. “Silver took a hike the second that first blue dot began to glow.”

  By the time I went inside, my roommates were in bed and sound asleep—all three of them, I realized, my heart filled with joy at the sight of Nicole there too.

  I knew that I would probably be awake for hours—but I didn’t care. My first date with Blake Keller was scheduled for tomorrow evening at six.

  Ignoring the Pandora ’s box that our actions tonight had opened, I settled in under the covers and closed my eyes. All the questions that lay ahead—Who was the dead man back then? Who killed him? Why? Where did his body go?—were important, but they were for another day. For now, I would revel in the fact that after almost two decades, we finally had the proof we’d always wanted.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Catherine

  That was him! That was the king!” Catherine exclaimed as they pushed through the door into the courtyard. She had been surprised by the man’s smile. She had not expected that at all.

  “And Madame de Maintenon too!” Eriq said, grinning.

  They moved through the courtyard of the palace and onto the grounds, giddy from the sighting.

  “Too bad we don’t have more time,” Eriq said, gesturing around them. “We will not be able to see it all in half an hour.”

  “Then let us see as much as we can,” Catherine responded, lifting the skirt of her gown and hurrying forward. They covered as much of the grounds as they could, scurrying past fountains, statues, and the Orangerie, where perfectly manicured lawns, bushes, and trees lined the pathway.

  Catherine couldn’t help but think of the crowded slum on the edge of town, of the destitute throughout Paris and the entire country, but then she pushed the thoughts away.

  By the time they reached the canal, her mind was only on the beautiful view—a ship with three masts, gondolas, and rowboats all moored cl
ose by.

  Eriq linked his arm through hers. “It’s amazing, is it not? They have turned a vast, dry area into a garden. Like Eden.”

  “Oui. It is beautiful.”

  He laughed. “Non. It is magnificent!”

  Catherine didn’t say anymore. She did not know what to say. But as they walked back to the palace, she felt a little dizzy. It was beautiful, but all so much. So vast.

  A wave of homesickness passed over her. Here she was, in a place she had long dreamed of visiting, and she was left feeling uneasy even with Eriq at her side.

  “Lyon has nothing for us,” he said. “Not compared to Paris. Not compared to this.” He stopped and took her hand. “Your uncle hinted at the possibility of my working for him.”

  Catherine took in a sharp breath. “But what about our families?”

  “We cannot keep waiting for Pierre and Jules to make a decision, can we? Besides, your grandmother could come here too.”

  “She would never agree to it. Neither would Amelie,” Catherine answered. Amelie would not want Valentina raised in Paris.

  Eriq squeezed her arm. “But you could still decide to come. You like Paris.”

  Catherine wrinkled her nose. “We would not be safe here. Besides, I am still hoping to go to London.”

  “You heard your grandmother talking to Suzanne. She never said a word about London. It sounds as if she plans on either staying in Lyon or following Jules to the Plateau. If those are your options, would you not rather live in Paris?”

  There were things she liked here, that was true. “But we would be identified as Huguenots. You are the one who said the Temple at Charenton will soon be burned.”

  Eriq shrugged. “Your uncle had some ideas about all of that. You should speak with him.”

  The sun was nearly overhead. “Let’s go back,” Catherine said. “It would not do for us to be late.”

  When they reached Suzanne’s suite, the duchesse stood and beckoned Catherine over. “Would you copy this for me, dear? Your hand is so much steadier.”