I let my eyes close completely. The family was too secretive, too closed off, to know what was going on at any given moment. There were underlying meanings in everything that they did or said, and I couldn't hope to understand them any more than I understood myself.
The room went black even though it was still daytime. Out of the shadows of my dreams, Mrs. Marlowe sat up from her bed in the Augustus Suite and scolded me for failing to save her. Her face was still frozen by death and only her mouth moved, and when I tried to apologize her lips parted to reveal fangs that threatened to sink down into my skin. I tried to run from her, but the windows in the room had been boarded up like the one in the nursery, and when I looked back at her she had become my mother, though she asked the same question: Why can't you help me?
It was nighttime when I woke. My head lurched and my body swayed as I got to my feet, and I fumbled to get to the door. My shoulder smacked the wall as I walked down the hall to get to the bathroom, and when I reached it and yanked the chain to turn the light on, it was so bright that I thought I would be sick. I quickly turned it off again and fumbled my way though the darkness to go to the bathroom, then turned the water on full blast in the sink to wash my face, wishing that I could wash away the image of my mother along with it.
Forget about it, I told myself, but the words didn't help. There was nothing worse than forgetting. I didn't lift my head, frightened that if I looked in the mirror, I would see her resemblance staring back at me in my down-turned eyes and frowning lips. John's words rang back at me. Who will take care of her when your aunt no longer can? Because he was right: it wouldn't be me – not if I had no money and no means of supporting her.
I straightened up and glared at the outline in the mirror. Whoever had killed John Marlowe had ruined my life. They had taken the last chance of many last chances that I had struggled to get, and I wasn't going to leave the island empty-handed. If I couldn't get back into my doctorate program, then the very least I could do was find out who had killed him and make sure, when the police finally arrived, that they would be imprisoned for the rest of their life the way that I refused to be imprisoned by what they had done.
I left the bathroom and went downstairs to have a cigarette, smoking quickly to avoid standing outside for too long. The wooden mermaid in the pillar beside me eyed me as I stood there, and I threw her a wary glance back. She looked more alive than I had felt in a long time – but that was because she was made of wood, I reasoned, whereas I, as far as anyone knew, was made of stone.
I returned to the Foyer and climbed the stairs to the second floor. The darkness was disorienting, and my head felt light and woozy from the nicotine and medication. When I reached the landing and turned to go to the next staircase, something opposite me flickered in my blurred vision.
A woman, covered from head to toe in a long black veil that fell over a gown of the same color, was gliding along the hallway. Her dress was adorned with beads that made a clinking sound as she walked as though she was chained at the ankles, and on her hands, diamonds and sapphires glinted from a ring that had caught the low light of the wall sconces. A ring that I had just seen, only hours before, on the hand of the dead woman in the Augustus Suite.
Chapter 5
“Mrs. Marlowe?” I asked.
The woman in black paused and looked over at me.
“Yes?” she answered. Her voice was soft and childlike – innocent, almost, but not quite: perhaps simply naive. It was the same partially British accent that the rest of the Marlowes spoke with.
“I …” I began, having not expected her to respond. I wished I hadn't taken the medication. My head was pounding and the logical thinking that usually steered my mind had been pushed off course, and for a moment I felt truly unsure as to whether or not I was actually seeing a ghost. As I blinked, though, the uncertainty vanished. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” she returned, then slipped through the door to the Augustus Suite and closed it behind her.
I turned and walked up the stairs to the third floor, then followed the hall to my room. Once inside, I took a seat on my bed, forcing myself to think rationally.
She was dead. I had seen her laying in the bed in the Augustus Suite on numerous occasions. I had seen her – I had smelled her. It was impossible for the figure in the hallway to be real, which meant one of two things: that I was seeing things, or that someone was playing a trick on me. And both of those thoughts, I found, made me very uneasy.
I fumbled for the bottle of pills on my nightstand and snapped the rubber band against my wrist to remember how many I had taken. Four, just like always, I was sure. Taking them early wouldn't have had such an adverse effect on my brain, and even if I had taken too many, they wouldn't cause hallucinations. I made to replace them on the table, but they slipped off the edge and fell to the floor with a shatter that rang out in the quiet of the night. Glass skated across the floor and the pills followed in every direction.
“Alexandra?”
Lennox was calling through the door. He twisted the handle and let himself into my room. I hadn't locked his door.
“I'm fine,” I said quickly, hopping down from my bed and hurrying to pick up the pills, but it was so dark that I could barely see them. Lennox's footsteps creaked as he stepped further into the room, and a moment later the light flicked on. I didn't turn to face him, instead focusing on picking out each white pill from beneath the glass. He stooped to help me.
“I'm fine,” I repeated, placing a handful of the medication on the nightstand.
He wordlessly added the remainder of the pills to the pile I had started. I grasped at the neckline of my nightgown, wishing that I had put on my dressing gown.
Lennox glanced around the room.
“I thought I heard someone come in here,” he said.
“No, that was just me. I went out for a smoke.”
I stood up. Lennox remained crouched on the floor with the glass. He raised his eyebrows.
“At this time of night?” he asked.
“I needed a cigarette.”
“I'm sure you did; I'm just surprised that you would wander the house at this time, given what happened last night.”
“Whoever killed John isn't going to kill me.”
“You don't know what they might do. And everyone in the house is on edge: you might have startled someone and gotten attacked for it.”
“I appreciate your concern, Dr. Lennox, but I wasn't attacked, and I have no intention of being attacked, either.”
Lennox put his hands on his knees and pushed himself up. His pants were wrinkled and his shirt was unbuttoned as though he had just thrown it on over his undershirt; he must not have brought nightclothes for what was supposed to be a short stay.
“I only meant that you might want to be more careful,” he said, his voice low.
“Whoever killed John isn't going to kill me,” I repeated. “They have no reason to.”
“How can you be sure of that? You don't know who killed him: you don't know what they're after. I heard the cook tell you that you should have left him out in the snow – what if that was what the killer intended? And you found him and messed up their plans? Then, on top of that, insisted that he was murdered and found out how?”
“So I should have just kept my mouth shut? Funny how men always think that's the best thing for women to do.”
Lennox leaned in closer to me. His voice was still barely more than a whisper.
“I have no qualms about your boldness: I think it's admirable. But there's a time and place for it, and this is neither. Someone on this island killed John, and if they're willing to do that, then they're probably willing to do whatever's necessary to ensure that their plan is successful.”
He shifted slightly, his bare feet dangerously close to stepping on the glass. I lifted my eyes to his.
“That's good advice,” I said, “though I don't know why you're giving it to me.”
He didn't seem to understand. Perhaps it w
as the nature of his profession to offer guidance, though the way he said it made me uncomfortable. It was as though he thought he knew me well enough to do so. He certainly seemed to think he knew me well enough to walk into my room in the middle of the night.
“I'm trying to help you,” he replied.
“Why? For all you know, I could be the killer.”
“I –” he began, caught off guard by my bluntness. “I suppose you could be. Though if you were, then I don't know why you would have given me an alibi. If anything, you should have said that you saw me leaving the room last night and had everyone think I was the one who did it.”
He turned away from me, carefully stepping around the broken glass to get back to his room. The strange figure from downstairs was still flitting in and out of my thoughts, and for the briefest of moments, I had the urge to ask him to stay.
“Do you think something else is going on here, Dr. Lennox?” I said suddenly, stopping him as he entered the nursery and made to close the door.
He glanced up at me, half-hidden in the shadows of his light-less room, and a frown pulled at his brow.
“Something other than a murder, you mean?”
I gave him a halfhearted shrug. I couldn't hope to explain it without sounding paranoid, but I was beginning to feel like everything that had happened since I had arrived on the island was all part of a plan that had been masterminded solely to toy with me: having my wages stolen, finding Mrs. Marlowe dead, knowing that John had lied to me about the job, being put in the room with Lennox, finding John dead, seeing a supposed ghost of the family matriarch …
“It just seems like there have been an awful lot of odd coincidences since I arrived here,” I clarified.
Lennox gave a slow, thoughtful nod.
“Yes,” he said. “It certainly does.”
He shut the door between us. I sat back on my bed, not bothering to turn off the light as I stared at the wood separating us. On the one hand, it eased my thoughts ever so slightly to know that he found something off about our current situation; yet on the other hand, it bothered me that he hadn't explained himself any further.
I snapped the rubber band against my wrist, hoping that my thoughts would organize and rearrange all of the strangeness into something that made sense to me. When they failed to do so, though, I let out a long sigh and leaned back against my pillow. And it occurred to me, as I drifted back into an uneasy sleep, that there was nothing straightforward about the Marlowe family.
***
“Wake up.”
Someone was prodding my shoulder, and I leaped out of bed and fell onto the floor. Mrs. Tilly was standing at my bedside with a scowl on her face.
“The family is due to eat in ten minutes,” she said. “You were supposed to be down hours ago – and I'm not covering your duties again.”
“What?”
“I can't cook and serve,” she said irritably. “Some of us actually work for our salaries.”
I pushed myself to my feet and stood up, shaking myself from my grogginess. Someone had cleaned the glass from the floor, though I doubted that it was Mrs. Tilly.
“Really?” I said. “My mistake: I thought you just made money by taking it out of other people's wages.”
Mrs. Tilly's coal-like eyes narrowed.
“Yes, and quite a bundle it was, wasn't it?” she said. “Mr. Marlowe must have been very pleased with your … services.”
She held up the worn brass key that locked my room.
“I'll be taking this back,” she said. “Unless there's a particular reason you need to lock your door?”
I narrowed my eyes.
“Only to keep you out.”
“Well, feel free to ask Mrs. Carlton if you can have it back – but I wouldn't waste your time. She was the one who told me to get it back from you.” She nodded down to the key to the nursery that was still on the nightstand. “You can keep that one, though. No one minds having that man locked up.”
When she left, I put my uniform on, shoving the frilly cap over my head and pulling my stockings up just beneath where the money was strapped to my thigh. I was glad that I had kept it there; she would have undoubtedly snatched the rest of it had it been laying in the nightstand drawer with the keys.
I hurried down the hallway and staircase, momentarily contemplating that the ghostly figure might have been Mrs. Tilly's idea of a joke – but as much as I would have liked another reason to despise her, she was far too short and stubby to be the figure beneath the black veil. All I could hope was that whoever was trying to scare me would give up after seeing my lackluster reaction to their costume.
Yet as I reached the Foyer and saw the ghost gliding down the opposite staircase to my left, it was clear that that would not be the case after all.
“Ah, so you've decided to come down,” came a loud voice from below, and I looked over the banister to see Bernadette addressing the ghost from the Foyer. She didn't seem remotely frightened by it, and instead cast a disapproving look in its direction as though she was often met with the inconvenience of the dead getting up from their funeral beds, and was simply wondering if she should shepherd it back to its room or wait until after breakfast.
“Well, I suppose that means the table will need to be set for nine again,” Bernadette said. “Such a shame: an even number is much more pleasant on the eye … Though lovely to see you, of course, Cassie.”
The ghost gave her a nod and waltzed past her in the direction of the Breakfast Room. As Bernadette made to follow her, she finally took notice of where I stood on the steps.
“Well?” she berated. “Don't just stand there, you lazy girl – come set the table!”
She waddled off, though I didn't follow her immediately. I was too busy feeling foolish for thinking with such certainty that someone had been trying to delude me when I ought to have realized that it was Cassandra: she was the only person in the house whom I hadn't yet met. It occurred to me now that I had heard her high, clear voice on the first day I had arrived at the house. I snapped the rubber band against my wrist several times, harder and harder, angry with myself for being so stupid and for forgetting such a recent memory, and fearful of how befuddled the pills had made me that I hadn't realized it right away. I had to be more careful, especially given the circumstances. The medication was just to give me enough reprieve from my thoughts to let me sleep, and I couldn't take advantage of taking them without them taking advantage of me in return.
I descended the remaining stairs and went to the buffet table to retrieve plates and silverware with which to set the table, still debating if I ought to have been following orders anymore at all when all I wanted to do was find out who had killed John. The fact that the family was still eating meals together rather than actively trying to find a way off the island and away from which one of them had killed him irked me and disturbed me all at once, as though each one of them was acting that way on purpose to conceal the fact that were the murderer. My hand clenched around the bundle of forks and knives and I peered over my shoulder to where the family was settling down at the table to eat, and as my eyes ran over them, I opened the files for them that I had created in my head in which I stored every memory of them, more determined than before to figure out which of them had done it.
“I see Mrs. Tilly's making quite the elaborate breakfast,” Bernadette said as I laid the silverware. “I suppose I should be happy that not all my staff have succumbed to laziness.”
She indicated the unfinished table.
“She's probably just worried that the murderer will do her in if she doesn't cook well enough,” Marjorie replied. She looked over at her black-veiled sister. “I see you've decided to join us, Cassie.”
Cassandra turned in her direction.
“I felt, given the circumstances, that it was best for us all to be together,” she said. “What with losing both Mother and John.”
“That and the fact that I banned Mrs. Tilly from sending any more food to her room,” Berna
dette said in her carrying whisper, leaning toward Marjorie.
I went and filled the coffee pot, poured Bernadette her usual cup of cream and tablespoon of coffee, then approached Cassandra.
“Would you care for some coffee, Mrs. Marlowe?” I asked politely, emphasizing the name that she had responded to when I had addressed her twice before.
“Miss Marlowe,” Bernadette corrected. “Cassie's not married – and she's a Marlowe by birth. Mrs. Marlowe would be incestuous.”
“She was Mrs. Marlowe last night,” I said, causing Bernadette's eyebrows to raise. Cassandra gave a little chuckle.
“You must be mistaken,” she said.
Marjorie waved her empty cup at me. I quickly poured Cassandra a cup and left it on the table, then went to fill her sister's. When I looked back, the cup had disappeared under her veil. I wondered what else she was hiding under there: certainly the secret of what she had been doing in her mother's room the night before.
When I returned to the room with the platter of crepes and oatmeal, Edie was just taking a seat. Her pale skin had turned nearly transparent, and the blue of her veins was visible beneath her eyes.
“I think we should discuss John's death before the rest of them come down,” Marjorie said, taking a sip of her coffee.
“The rest of them meaning my husband?” Edie asked.
“If that's what you're calling the man whom you no longer have relations with, then yes,” Bernadette said in her infamous whisper.
Edie's cheeks went from white to red.
“No one thinks it was Bill,” Marjorie said impatiently. “And we know it's not Rachel or James.”
“I'm glad you can be so certain,” Bernadette said. “Who knew you held us in such high regard?”
“It had to have been Amalia or Lennox, despite his excuse of being with the maid,” Marjorie carried on, not seeming to care that I was in the room. “It's the only thing that makes sense.”
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