by Beth Byers
“We all know Theo was a snake,” Ham told Rita, ignoring Jack. “If Theo has been blackmailing one person, he could be blackmailing any of the guests. The entire party is suspect. Some devil saw the altercation between Jack and Theo and decided to rid himself of an expensive problem, knowing Jack would be the primary suspect.”
“Certainly,” Victor said, grabbing onto the idea. “There’s that bloke that was fighting with Theo in the alleyway before Algie’s party, all of Algie’s in-laws—except maybe the dames. You invited Lyle Longfellow, didn’t you Vi? He’s hated Theo since we were ten years old.”
Vi nodded.
“Poor Lyle has been under Theo’s thumb for ages. Maybe he finally snapped.”
“So we’re agreed that Jack didn’t kill Theo,” Vi said, speaking only to Ham.
He nodded, probably trying to convey something assuring in his look, but she didn’t feel assured. She felt as though she could drown at any second. This wasn’t just any murder. It was Jack on the line. Jack’s freedom. Jack’s future. Her future with Jack. The dreams for this house, for eventual children, for books to write and places to visit, and the life they were going to live.
“Ham,” she said, her voice breaking before she tried for a cheery grin and failed miserably. “If it’s possible…” Vi trailed off at the threat of tears. “God,” she muttered, and it was a prayer not a curse. She’d have dropped to her knees in that second and begged without shame if she thought it would save her Jack.
“If it is possible,” Ham swore, taking her hand and squeezing it hard, “I will have him, at the altar, on your wedding day. I will do every single thing in my power and the power of Scotland Yard to find the real killer and clear Jack of any suspicion.”
She nodded, grabbing hold of those rogue emotions of hers with an iron fist. She glanced at Jack, winced at the look in his gaze, and darted her eyes away from all that he felt combined with what she felt, and it was too much for her to bear with a stiff upper lip.
“We’re all hands on deck for this one,” Ham told the others. “Everyone we can pull in. Isolde, Tomas, your father”—that bit was directed to Vi and then he glanced at Jack—“and yours. Everyone we can muster is going to help us beat the pavement, the jazz clubs, the offices, whatever it takes. I’ll be damned if I see my best friend arrested.”
Violet nodded. Melodramatic and a little bit of a prima donna to leave Jack in the garden though it was, she went inside. She walked up the steps past the new butler, ignoring his concerned look. He had to be wondering just what was happening. All they’d done was send a footman for the local police with a note from Ham.
Would Ham work this case himself? She immediately knew he wouldn’t. Ham oversaw cases, didn’t work them. He’d assign someone ethical, and then Ham would do whatever could be done.
The local police boys had already arrived and made themselves at home. Of course, Vi’s sister Isolde had stepped in, controlling the flow of guests, police, and refreshments. She was an excellent hostess, raised to reign as she was at that very moment. Vi stood back from the goings on and watched, trying to keep her mind blank.
Ham returned to the ballroom and gave the police boys instructions about what to ask and to chart the location of who had been where during the party. No explanations were given beyond an unfortunate accident having occurred. Vi heard him tell them to expect an Adam Clarkson.
Maybe Violet should have taken the knife. She could have hidden it where they’d never find it. Professionals or not, Violet knew she’d have succeeded. Of course, Jack would never have let her. She was going to be fighting his honor the whole of this case, she thought.
She glanced at her friends, seeing the Piccadilly Ladies Club members gathering with their dates. They were brought to the policemen working out of Vi’s parlor. Vi had a surreal moment where she realized she hadn’t sat in that parlor yet and talked with anyone. The police had christened the room for her with their interviews.
Focus, Vi told herself. Focus on the issues at hand. She knew her mind was spinning because she’d tucked away too many emotions and moments of the evening. She needed to curl up in her bed and write them all out into her journal, allowing herself the freedom of confessing all of her emotions and thoughts, be they good or bad, generous or unkind, furious or forgiving.
One of the women of the Piccadilly Ladies Club met Vi’s gaze, and Vi found herself looking at Miss Emily Allen, reporter for the Piccadilly Press and one-time betrothed of Jack. Apparently also Jack’s one-time lover. Vi refused to linger on that. She’d have guessed if she had bothered to let her thoughts bend that way.
Miss Allen nodded once at Vi. There was no apology in her gaze, and it took Vi a moment to realize that there shouldn’t be. What happened before Vi wasn’t Vi’s concern, and Vi had little doubt that nothing had happened since Violet and Jack had realized they were in love.
Vi’s mind scattered again, and she stared up at the ceiling as she remembered the feeling in Bruges. Tomas had followed Vi to ask her—once again—to marry him. Vi had told him she couldn’t. She loved another. That was when she hadn’t known how Jack felt, and she’d been worried that the attraction between them had died. She’d thought she’d return to London and discover his attention and potential love had turned to another.
The memory of that panic somehow grounded her in the moment. Many things had happened since then, but she knew that Jack was both capable of devoted love and that he adored her with all the love he had to give.
“What’s happening, Vi?”
Vi was jerked from her thoughts and found Tomas in front of her. He had never loved her. Seeing him made her smile. “Do you remember all of those proposals?”
He blushed deeply. “I didn’t know what love really felt like then.”
Vi nodded. “Jack told me that once.” She didn’t expand as she felt Tomas’s worried gaze on her. “Is my brother still here?”
“I thought Victor was with you,” Tomas said, looking even more worried.
“Gerald,” Vi said. Really, though, it should have been obvious.
“Ah, yes. He was questioned by the police. He, Isolde, and I were the first. Afterwards, he went into the library to steal one of Jack’s cigars.”
Vi ran her fingers over her lips. “Would you get him to keep Lady Eleanor away tomorrow?”
“Will she be coming?” Tomas demanded.
“Unless you want to tell her about that baby of yours, we’re going to get her full attention. The good news is we’ll get Father’s regardless of the baby. You might just survive Father’s anger if you play your cards right.”
“What do I do?” Tomas sounded almost desperate.
“I have no idea,” Vi confessed. In a low voice she explained what had happened. “The question,” Vi finished, “is whether Father wants to rid the family of Jack, regardless of his innocence, or if he’s on our side.”
“What if Jack isn’t cleared, but they can’t convict him. Will you stay with him?”
Vi jerked, surprised. “Would you leave Isolde after something like this?”
“If she were the suspect?”
Vi nodded.
“Never.”
Vi lifted a brow and then said, “There’s your answer.”
Chapter Nine
Violet ran up the stairs to her boudoir, but she left it carrying an empty journal and a pen, making her way to the balcony area that overlooked the ballroom. She glanced down on the throng. The full lights had been turned on along with the candles in the chandeliers. The floor no longer shone with the dancing and skating. It needed to be polished again.
The banquet tables holding trays of food had been picked over, the sweets were entirely gone, and the barman had stopped making drinks, turning away all requests with an unapologetic shrug. Vi frowned for a moment and then realized the policemen probably had requested the drinks to stop. Better to question people who weren’t still working on getting thoroughly zozzled.
Most hadn’t realized tha
t someone had died, but they knew something was wrong given the low whispers and the way they were clustered together. People were brought from the ballroom, and they didn’t return. Vi did her best to write down as many names as she could. Her lists was pages long, but she needed to be able to rule out who she could.
She’d get Ham to give her the list his men made and compare the two to her guest list. There had been people she’d seen who she hadn’t invited. Companions of guests or folks like Theo who had just determined to come. It wasn’t as though Violet had sent out official invitations or had servants turning anyone away. They’d answered the door and let in anyone who’d come for the party on the theory that no one would show who wasn’t invited. Clearly she could have been more careful, but she hadn’t minded sharing cocktails and nibbles with a few uninvited guests as long as they were there to have fun with the rest of them.
Vi breathed in slowly, letting her breath out with a soft hooting. Her mind wasn’t thinking so much as stumbling about in thoughtless, useless circles. She bit down hard on her lip and told herself to focus, but she wasn’t able to do much more than think of Jack, shudder, and write down another name.
She just couldn’t. If she thought too hard, all she could see was herself at the aisle waiting for Jack to have him not appear.
She heard a sound behind her and didn’t look. It was, of course, Victor since it couldn’t be Jack. She wasn’t even surprised Victor had found her. He knew her so well, he probably had talked to Tomas, watched the policemen for a few minutes, and then thought: What would Violet do next?
Go get her journal as though it were a security blanket and clutch it, trying to find some resolution. She wasn’t surprised when he placed a hand on her back as if to pull her back to herself, but she wasn’t ready to face him or what had happened.
“Do you think they’ll arrest him?”
“No,” Victor told Violet, and she was too panicked to tell if he was lying to her. She looked up at him, begging him to make her believe, and he added, “Ham knows Jack didn’t kill Theo. If there is any reason to make a case that Jack didn’t do it, Ham will. He promised you so.”
“He assigned someone else the case, didn’t he?”
Victor’s jaw flexed before he nodded once.
“He’d assign someone super ethical. Someone who was good and known for being honest no matter what. Someone who would arrest Jack if he had to.”
Victor took in a deep breath. “But we know Jack is innocent.”
“We do.” Violet didn’t even try to hide her doubt that anyone else would.
“Which means there is no evidence that Jack killed Theo.”
“This was a crime of opportunity,” Violet told Victor, having it click together in her mind in a moment. “What do you want to bet that knife is Jack’s? Maybe from his office? Maybe from the silver? Who knows where they got it. It wasn’t like anything deadly had been hidden away in case a random person decided to use a letter opener”Vi’s voice cracked. Their aunt had been murdered with her own letter opener—“or some other likely object. Jack’s in trouble, Victor. Comforting lies won’t make it any less true.”
Victor cleared his throat and glanced below at the ballroom. “There’s Lyle Longfellow. He went to school with us. Me, Tomas, Algie, Theo. Poor Lyle’s father is a vicar and a believing one too. Not just one of those fellows who fell into the work and says the right things. Lyle has been under Theo’s thumb time and again because of the vicar father and Lyle’s endless crimes against morality.”
Violet nodded.
“The vicar is pretty wealthy too, and he has a son who’s a curate or some other such thing. Working his way through the church ranks. Guess who has been threatened to live a righteous life or lose his inheritance?”
“Lyle,” Violet said, feeling a flash of rage. “Is he so bad?”
“He’s like us, Vi. Lyle likes to dance and sing. He makes a mean old-fashioned and smokes too much. It’s not like he has a slew of bastards or committed drunken crimes.”
The rage just intensified in sort of a pre-reaction to Lady Eleanor’s coming visit. “I am so tired of parents thinking they can control us with their money. You know what would be honorable? Not raising your child to expect money and then using it as a—a—whip to make that child do whatever you want even after they are adults.”
Victor rubbed Vi’s back as though the comfort of her twin would somehow fix things. It wouldn’t. It couldn’t. Nothing could.
“It’s their fault,” Vi whispered, letting the first tear fall. “Their fault to expect the unfair. If you want to disinherit a child for thieving or for gambling their allowance away, I can understand. If you want to do it because they love someone honorable but not who you wanted—that’s not right. They should have, at the least, made it clear that those choices weren’t theirs to make if they wanted money.”
“It’s not fair to think you can control someone with money. Maybe they should stand on their own, though.”
Vi didn’t disagree. She was just so angry. If she had to guess at that moment, it would be that someone had murdered Theo to keep their lifestyle. Was it a wild guess into the dark? Yes. She knew it was. Maybe they were hiding a real problem like Barty Roche frittering away his fortune or something that didn’t deserve to be hidden, like a legitimate child with a Cuban woman.
Violet curled her hands into fists and turned into Victor’s chest, hugging him tightly.
“I’m not thinking clearly,” she confessed, pressing her face into him. “What if I lose him?”
“You won’t.”
Vi looked up at her twin, meeting a gaze that matched what she saw in the mirror every morning. “You can’t make that promise.”
“If I have to bribe guards and smuggle him to a yacht, you won’t lose him.”
Violet laughed a wet, woeful sound and then let her forehead fall against his chest. “You know Jack wouldn’t let himself be smuggled. He’d just march back to the prison and hand himself over.”
“What he’d do to stay with you might surprise you, Vi. We’re not going to let it come to that.”
“Do you promise?”
“I don’t have to promise,” Victor said, dropping a kiss on her forehead. “You are brilliant and clever and willing to break the rules and throw a fortune at this problem. I won’t need to fix it for you. Darling devil, you know you’ll fix things for yourself.”
Vi’s wet laugh didn’t have the same confidence, but it was a good reminder.
“Start by hiring whoever Ham recommends,” Vi told Victor, stepping back. Her mind was finally falling into focus. “We want every private eye that Ham respects working for us. Pay them whatever they want to starting right now. I need to know every single person Theo was blackmailing or had manipulated out of money in the last…at least three years.”
Victor nodded.
“We also want every single person that was here looked into. At first superficially, but more deeply as needed. We need an overlap of names. Those are the likeliest suspects with the entirety of that Roche family at the head of the list.”
“Good idea.”
“We need Denny diving into all that gossip with that way of his. He gets people to tell him things because they think he’s too stupid to realize what they’re giving up. We want Papa looking into the elder crowd. He’ll know who would actually disown a child or prevent a wedding and who wouldn’t. Father will help, won’t he?”
“Father likes Jack,” Victor said, “and Father can make anything look like a conspiracy against Jack once we have the truth. Father can use all his connections to manipulate public opinion and the press for Jack.”
“Dishonorable,” Vi muttered, but she’d take it. She’d take whatever she could for Jack, even purchased press articles if that was what it took for them to tell the truth about her soon-to-be husband.
“Whatever it takes, Vi,” Victor told her. She didn’t disagree, so she simply nodded. Whatever it took indeed. It was too late to get st
arted that evening other than collecting names and maybe sending hand-delivered notes to the private detectives’ residences.
Violet pressed her hand to her forehead. “I have a lot to do.”
“You need to talk to Jack and maybe even look at him,” Victor told her.
“I didn’t want to cry in front of everyone.”
“You have to do it, Vi. It can’t wait.”
She nodded.
“He can take your tears.”
Vi bit down on her bottom lip, afraid that he’d think she was crying over what was lost instead of the battle ahead.
“Vi,” Victor said, taking hold of her arm and turning her to him, making him see her gaze. “Jack wants your tears and your worries. If you keep them from him, you start to scupper your marriage before you even get started.”
“Does Kate tell you that stuff?”
“She taught me to tell her, love. You need Jack’s worries too, love. Make sure he tells you.”
Violet’s eyes pooled with tears, but she wasn’t ready to let them go, not really. So she just nodded and found her way back to the boudoir. Next door was the room she’d shortly be sharing with Jack. She sat down at her desk and started pulling her jewelry off, setting it onto the tray in front of her vanity. Pearls, bangles, earbobs, headpiece.
Everything except her engagement ring.
Chapter Ten
“What are you looking for, Violet?” Jack asked from the doorway of her bedroom at Victor’s house.
She glanced away from the window. She’d been staring up at the sky where nothing but the moon shone through the pollution and she’d been wondering if that was all that was going to be left of her dreams. Stars that no one would ever see.
She nibbled at her bottom lip, which had gotten rather bruised from all the times she’d bit down on it to prevent a more extreme reaction to the evening. “I don’t know.”
His gaze was too penetrating as usual, and she didn’t have the press of bodies and suspicions to hide behind anymore. She could hear her brother in her head. Talk to him.