“What do you think that was?” I asked, hoping to sound casual. My uninjured fingers had curled into a fist in my fright, and as I un-clenched them, I realized that the key had left a mark against my palm. I slipped it into my skirt pocket.
“It sounded like someone fell out of bed,” he replied.
I tried to nod but gave an involuntary shiver instead. I had underestimated just how cold the room was; my maid's uniform was too thin to offer much warmth.
“Would you like my coat?” Lennox asked, not waiting for an answer before setting down the lantern he had brought and taking it off.
I pulled it on, muttering a thanks. It was far too large, and the herringbone material was permeated with cigarette smoke.
“Would you like my cap?” I offered in return, taking it off for him as the smell of death slipped over to where we stood from the mother and son laying in their temporary resting places. It was mild due to the breeze blowing through the room, but unpleasant enough to notice, and I certainly didn't like the idea of breathing it in. I pulled my turtleneck up to cover my mouth and nose.
He accepted it and placed it over his face as a makeshift handkerchief, then lifted up the lantern again. Soft light spread over the room. After going over to the window seat where John was laying, he set the lantern next to the body.
“Here we go,” he said, his voice muffled through the fabric. He squinted at me through the dim lighting, his gaze moving up from my eyes to my hair. I wondered if it was disheveled from being under the cap all day.
John's body was covered in a thin layer of snow. In the darkness, it looked as though someone had put a sheet over him. His lifeless eyes stared up at me: no one had bothered to close them. I kept glancing at the enlarged pupils, half-expecting them to slide over to stare at me accusingly. Though his form was cold and hard like the marble counter-tops in the kitchen and his skin had turned a grayish-purple color that matched the silk trim on pillowcases in the room, it was somehow difficult to understand that he would never move again. Every time I looked away, I thought I could feel his fingers circling around my wrist.
Lennox fumbled with John's wool coat, pulling it back to reveal where the letter opener had stabbed him through his crisp white shirt.
“Let's see here,” Lennox mumbled, lowering himself to the handle's eye-level.
“It's exactly the same pattern. See there? Where that bird's tail ends, it continues onto the sheath.”
“But it can't be: it wouldn't be long enough to kill him. There must be a longer one with the same pattern.”
“No one has matching letter openers for different sized envelopes,” I told him. When he didn't agree, I lost my patience. “Look –”
I reached forward and yanked the blade upwards. It popped from John's chest to reveal a two and a half inch blade, the silver stained with blood. Lennox gaped.
“Alexandra – you can't just pull it out –!”
“I'll stick it back in,” I said, ignoring his complaints and shoving it back down. It protested against the frozen body, and as I pushed it down so that the handle was exactly as far down as it had been before, a grotesque feeling came over me. I quickly released the cold metal, lessened only slightly from how I had held it with my shirt sleeve rather than my bare fingers, and wishing that I hadn't been so rash solely for the point of proving that I was right.
“We can't tamper with the body,” Lennox said, eyeing me over the top of the cap.
“Well, it's too late now, so let's just get on with it.”
He turned back to John's body. I was fairly certain I saw him roll his eyes as he went.
“Something's not right here,” he said a moment later. “This shouldn't have killed him.”
“Sure looks like it did,” I replied. “It's plunged right into his heart.”
“No, the blade's too short for that. And the heart's difficult to stab anyhow because it's protected by the sternum and ribs, not to mention all the connective tissue you'd have to get through. Unless the attacker was extremely strong and either very knowledgeable of where to strike or extraordinarily lucky, there's not a good chance that this would have killed him – especially not quickly.”
“Maybe it wasn't quick. Maybe they wanted him to suffer.”
“And did what? Stood over him to make sure he didn't crawl away?” Lennox raised his eyebrows skeptically. “If they wanted to be certain he would die, then they should have either stabbed him multiple times or in a more efficient spot.”
“What's more efficient than the heart?”
“The carotid artery or the spinal cord would be best,” he said. “There's also the axillary artery in the armpit: that probably would have been the best choice with a blade like this. If you know what you're doing you can aim for the liver – that's almost always fatal – or the femoral artery.”
I stored the information away in the back of my mind, hoping that I would never need to use it.
“Well, then, it obviously wasn't someone who knows anatomy,” I said.
Lennox hummed, seemingly unsure.
“You just said they didn't hit the right spot,” I said, almost annoyed.
“But that's just it: he's dead.”
“So it was the right spot?”
He sighed in frustration.
“I guess it's possible, but it just doesn't seem right. One stab and he's dead? Even knowing the most efficient places to stab someone, I think I'd hit them multiple times just to make sure.”
“Well, maybe they didn't want to get too messy.”
“What?”
“You know – with all the blood. Can you imagine any of the Marlowe women ruining her coat by staining it?”
“I … hadn't thought of that.”
“It'd be a bit of a giveaway if they brought me their laundry and asked me to get a bloodstain out.”
Lennox thought about it, then said –
“I suppose they could have done it naked.”
I had the briefest vision of a nude Bernadette waddling out into the snow with the letter opener clutched in her hands, and I didn't know whether to be repulsed or amused.
“I'm all for exploring every possibility, Dr. Lennox, but I think we can both agree that no one walked out into a snowstorm naked to murder John Marlowe.”
“But they stabbed him once to avoid making a mess? It just doesn't seem like a wise plan.”
“That's because you're thinking like a doctor. You might have stabbed him in an artery, but someone like Amalia wouldn't know better, so she stabbed him in the heart without realizing that she should have used a knife with a longer blade and got lucky.”
“But that's just it …” he said. “What did you say before? About being messy?”
I clicked back several sentences in my head to retrieve it.
“I said, Well, maybe they didn't want to get too messy. You know – with all the blood. Can you imagine any of the Marlowe women ruining her coat by staining it?” I repeated blandly.
“With all the blood,” Lennox echoed, and his frown deepened. He turned slowly back to the body, his eyes running over the opened tuxedo jacket and crisp white shirt, and then he said, “There's not enough blood.”
I glanced over at John's chest.
“Meaning?”
He turned to look at me, and despite the fact that he seemed to have made a discovery, he looked more puzzled than ever. Out of the corner of my eye, something moved by the four-poster bed; a curtain must have caught the wind. I didn't look over at it. My eyes were still on Lennox.
“Meaning that either I'm totally confused and this short blade somehow did reach his heart, then plugged up the wound so that barely any blood escaped, or – and more likely, I believe – he was already dead when he was stabbed.”
I blinked. The movement by the bed caught my eye again, but I couldn't seem to break my gaze with Lennox.
“But that doesn't make sense,” I said. “Why stab someone who's already dead?”
Lennox looked up and down John's body, sear
ching for something unseen.
“To hide what really killed him,” he said. “We have to do a full examination.”
His eyes were hungry now, just dark orbs quivering in the light from the lantern. He tossed down the maid's cap to work better, and as his hands began to undo the buttons on the dress shirt, I watched how delicately his fingers moved as though he was playing the piano rather than undressing a dead man, wondering if he had been a surgeon before becoming a psychiatrist. My gaze was transfixed on his hands as they finished undoing the buttons and opened the shirt, and as he shifted, the lantern light caught something that I had failed to see before: a thin golden band, nearly the same color as his skin, circling his ring finger and nearly imperceptible if not for the light making it gleam. My heart sank before my mind could forewarn it not to feel. He was married.
“He might have been struck, choked, poisoned –”
I could barely focus on what he was saying. Every part of me felt deflated as though someone had squeezed the air from my lungs, and I wished that I could transport myself back outside into the snow and remain there until I went numb.
“Can you hold the light up more?” he said, throwing the words over his shoulder at me, and I wordlessly obliged. The lantern sent patterns dancing over the curtains and floor, illuminating the darkness and sending it retreating back to hide. I felt the truth settle in my stomach like a huge, empty hole. I trained my eyes on the squares of yellow that stretched over the room, boring into them to keep the tears from escaping onto my face and making me feel even more ridiculous. He was married. How could I have missed that? Why had I failed to notice the wedding band before now?
Yet whatever answer I had hoped for would have to wait, because in the soft lantern light, I saw something that momentarily pulled me from my thoughts.
“Dr. Lennox.”
“A little higher,” he said, not paying attention to anything but the way my arm had slumped back down.
“Dr. Lennox,” I repeated, this time more forcefully. I wasn't sure what I was seeing: perhaps I truly did have a concussion and the shadows of the room were playing a trick on my eyes.
“Higher, Alexandra. It needs to be over my shoulder or else he's thrown into shadow …”
“Dr. Lennox.”
I had dropped the lantern fully back to my side, and as the light stretched across the floor to the bed, the image became clearer. Lennox turned to look at me, but I didn't see if he was irritated or concerned. As I pointed behind him, he followed my gaze.
“What the …?”
There, in the middle of the four-poster bed, was the form of a woman – but whereas Mrs. Marlowe had been laying down before, she was now sitting bolt upright and staring directly at us.
Lennox grabbed me by the wrist and hoisted the hand holding the lantern up, throwing the bed into light. My shoulder cracked painfully from the sudden movement.
“What are you doing?” said the coarse, gravelly voice of a woman, but I was too shocked to respond. My eyes blinked against the bright light flooding into them from the too-close flame, trying to regain focus on the sight in front of me, and though Lennox's grip on my wrist tightened, I could feel him shaking. “What are you doing?”
My head was pounding even harder now and I couldn't think to process what was happening, let alone respond. She was dead. I was positive she was dead. The chill in the air had become more intense, and I was shivering despite Lennox's warm coat as I tried to make sense of how the sight in front of me could be possible. For I knew it couldn't be Mrs. Marlowe, but it was certainly someone, and that someone could very well be the killer – keeping watch over her victim's resting place.
And then the answer hit me. For surely enough, there was a woman sitting up in bed, though it wasn't Mrs. Marlowe, who still lay dead in her spot. Cassandra was glaring at us from beside her mother.
“We were just examining Professor Marlowe,” I said. “To see what killed him.”
If I had thought that the truth might appease her, then I had been sorely mistaken. Cassandra's veiled form sprung up like a black cat and crawled across her mother's body to get nearer to us.
“You shouldn't be in here,” she hissed at Lennox. “You have no right to be in here –”
She hopped down to the floor and lurched forward. Her black, ghostly form neared us, getting closer and closer like a stain moving across the carpet.
“We were just trying to help, Cassandra,” Lennox said soothingly. “We want to find out what happened to your brother –”
“You had no right!” Cassandra yelled. “Don't touch him! Don't touch my boy!”
“I apologize, Cassandra,” Lennox said in the same calm tone, though the hand holding me gave me a slight tug in the direction of the door. “We didn't mean to startle you. We'll go –”
“What's wrong with you?” Cassandra said, but from behind her black veil it took me several moments to realize that she was speaking to me. “Didn't I teach you better? What do you think you're doing running around with this man you hardly know –?”
She reached forward as though to grab me, but Lennox yanked me sideways across the room. I danced around the head of the polar bear rug to avoid stepping on it, then narrowly managed to avoid slamming into a floor lamp –
“You have no right –!” Cassandra yelled again, but now we were at the door. Lennox gave my arm a final wrench and pulled me out into the hallway, hurriedly shutting the door behind us.
“Jesus,” I said, unsure of whether I felt more confused by her actions or irritated that she had interrupted our work. I leaned my head against the door, listening for the sounds of following footsteps, but all was quiet. I took out my key and locked the door for good measure. After all I had seen of Cassandra, I didn't put it past her to come up to my room, even if it was just to brush my hair again or else snuggle up beside me as I slept. I shoved the key away and grimaced at the thought.
Lennox's arms were crossed. He was staring at the lock on the door, his teeth clicking together as he thought. Then, much to my surprise, he let out a swear.
“Damn.” He briefly turned away from me to face the wall, then spun back around. “Well – now what are we going to do? She's going to tell the others – they're going to want to know what we were doing in there.”
“So we'll tell them the truth,” I said.
“That we were examining John's body? And how are we going to explain that we're working together?”
“I doubt we'll need to. They'll know as soon as Cassandra tells them she saw us.”
“Oh, wonderful.”
I wasn't sure why he was so upset. Logically speaking, the fact that he was working to solve John's murder would indicate that he hadn't been the one to kill him – though, I reasoned, the Marlowes weren't known to be very practical.
“This was exactly what I didn't want to happen,” he muttered. “If they think we're working together –”
He broke off without finishing the sentence. I raised my eyebrows at him, unwillingly becoming more and more wooden as I listened to him.
“I didn't realize you had stated that condition so clearly,” I said coldly. “My mistake. Had I known, I wouldn't have agreed to go to the Augustus Suite with you.”
I took a seat on the side of my bed and scooped four pills onto my bandaged hand, then popped them into my mouth and swallowed them dry. It was two hours past the time when I normally took them, and I could feel my mind starting to flood with all of the things I didn't want to think about anymore. What would it matter if Cassandra told everyone? Surely they would either not believe her or be more concerned that she was sleeping beside their dead mother than they would be that we had been examining John.
I reached down and pulled off my shoes. My toe had poked a hole in my stocking, sending a run up the front of my leg. I was down to one good pair. I patted my thigh to make sure that the bundle of money was still strapped there.
“Just tell them Cassandra's lying,” I said. “It's not like it would
be hard to believe.”
“Even with Cassandra's mantra of fabrications, I doubt they'd believe us over her,” Lennox said. “And a quick look at John's body will tell them someone was examining him, so I don't see the point in denying it.”
I sent a glare over at him, hating the way the word us sounded coming from his mouth. There was no us: there should have never been an us. How foolish I had been to go against all of my better instincts and ask for his help. My eyes went to the ring circling his finger again, and I focused on the anger I felt at him rather than the other feeling that threatened to push it out of the way: the disappointment – the brokenness – that I had allowed myself to be attracted to him.
“What do you think she was doing in there?” Lennox asked.
“Sleeping,” I replied irritably, no longer interested in having a conversation with him.
“Why in there?”
“Maybe she misses her mother.”
“Plenty of people miss their mothers – that doesn't mean they snuggle up to their corpses.”
“You're talking about a woman who's convinced that she's a grand duchess. Are you really surprised by anything she does?”
“Making up an identity and laying with a decomposing body are two different categories. And why did she call John her boy? He was older than her.”
“I don't know. You're the psychiatrist – you figure it out.”
Lennox gave me a stern look.
“There's no need to be short with me, Alexandra. I'm sorry if it sounded as though I was blaming you: I'm just upset because I specifically said I didn't want the family knowing we were working together.”
“You didn't specifically say that. Believe me: I remember. The only thing you specifically said was that you were doing this because you didn't want me to get hurt.”
“Which is true –”
“Really? Because you only seem concerned about yourself at the moment.”
“You want me to be concerned about you?” he said heatedly. “Fine. I'm concerned that you've gotten yourself far enough on Marjorie's bad side that she's willing to openly hurt you the way that she did. I'm concerned that you continue to act rashly without remotely considering the consequences first. And I'm concerned that you just took four times the recommended dose of an anxiolytic and you'll probably pass out before the conversation ends.”
The Marlowe Murders Page 20