Cold-Blooded Myrtle

by Elizabeth C. Bunce

  Miss Judson pulled her feet onto the bed, tucking them neatly beneath her. “I suppose that could mean a lot of things. Maybe he bribed her—gave her money so she could run away.”

  “Miss Carmichael said he loved Olive. Maybe they ran away together!”

  Miss Judson was nodding. “When I was at school, girls were always plotting elaborate escapes with imagined beaux. Just like this—” She waved a hand to encompass our surroundings, chatting late into the night. “And we do know at least one couple who eloped,” she reminded me.

  “But Olive and David didn’t go through with it—Olive disappeared, and David died later in the Alps. In a climbing accident. Or not.”

  Miss Judson had started sketching idly in one of the notebooks. I watched her pencil turn round and round, forming a Pictish spiral on the page. “The ritual in the tower, Olive Blackwell’s disappearance, Mr. Leighton’s murder. What ties them together?”

  I sat up and started from the beginning. “We know that Mr. Leighton’s death has something to do with Olive’s disappearance.”

  “Mmm. And we know that Professor Leighton’s retirement from Schofield College is also connected to Olive’s disappearance. It caused a scandal that Mrs. Leighton still hasn’t recovered from.”

  Miss Judson’s circling pencil hypnotized me into almost understanding something. “Why did Olive disappear?”

  “We don’t know,” Miss Judson said. “Oh, I see what you’re doing, Socrates,” she added, with a touch of irony. “Why did Professor Leighton resign?”

  “Because Olive Blackwell disappeared. Why did Olive Blackwell disappear?”

  “Because Professor Leighton resigned?” Miss Judson’s spiral turned and met itself. “We’re going round in circles.” She flipped to a fresh page. “Professor Leighton resigned because of a scandal.” She made a mark, swooping it out into a small spiral of its own.

  “Olive Blackwell’s disappearance,” I supplied.

  “Right. But something precipitated that disappearance. One”—she drew a question mark—“and two: Olive Blackwell. And three: Professor Leighton.” She scribbled a fierce circle around the question mark. “What happened here?”

  Blood pounded in my ears. “Of course. Corrupting the youth of Athens! The real scandal wasn’t Olive’s disappearance—it was whatever led to Olive’s disappearance and Professor Leighton’s involvement in that.” I recalled Nora’s chilling words: Little Olive can’t hurt us anymore. “Olive knew something that the rest of the Hadrian’s Guard would kill to keep secret.”

  “Perhaps it was something that could damage the professor’s career or reputation? So she had to disappear.”

  “But she did disappear, and it ruined his career anyway.” I groaned. This was circular reasoning at its worst—we just kept treading the same ground and getting nowhere. “All I know is, Mum was involved.”

  And that, I reasoned—in a perfectly straight line—was cause enough to keep Investigating.

  * every detail, Dear Reader

  † I knew that cheetah, Dear Reader—a specimen prepared by a taxidermist who had clearly never seen one in the wild. It was stuffed plump as a leopard. LaRue had probably ridiculed it for being stouter than the other cheetahs.

  ‡The perfectly felicitous avunculicide applies to the murder of an uncle—which could not possibly have come up nearly as often throughout history.

  §and a lovely week that was. Aunt Helena was in jail for most of it.

  12

  Algor Mortis

  Even in our modern era, nothing is quite so cheering on a frigid day as a roaring fire, a hot drink, and convivial company.

  —H. M. Hardcastle, A Modern Yuletide

  Aunt Helena’s guest room was surprisingly cozy, and the snow we’d trudged through made me feel snug and sleepy. After Miss Judson retired, I drifted off to curiously pleasant dreams about being served cocoa in bed by a sweet and subservient Dawes.

  What actually woke me was a shrill whistle, shattering the predawn. Police whistles! Throwing aside the bed curtains, I slipped to the cold floor and padded through the dimness, dodging furniture, to the window. The glass was thick with frost. I rubbed at it with the curtain and stared through, onto a seascape of grey.

  I couldn’t see what was wrong, at first. It was still dark, the sky a fading blue, stars winking away. I wrestled with the window, and nearly lost it to a whip of wind—but I spotted a uniformed man in the street below.

  The constable’s whistle wailed and wailed, as if it might bring the whole village down. As my eyes adjusted, I finally made out a strange, lumpy form in the snow near where the constable stood, blowing frantically. I found my shoes—still wet from last night and no more useful in the snow than they’d been six hours earlier—unearthed a dressing gown, and threw myself into the hallway—

  Right into Miss Judson. Wordlessly, we sped toward the stairs, nearly mowing down Dawes as we went.

  “What the devil is that racket?” Aunt Helena had emerged from a bedroom, an India rubber mask strapped to her face, concealing all her features save her bellowing voice. It took me a moment to recognize it as a sort of horrifying beauty device.

  “It’s the police!” I cried.

  “Well, don’t stand about lollygagging, Helena Myrtle!” Aunt Helena’s eyes twinkled behind the mask. “Go and see what it’s about!”

  With that, Miss Judson and I fairly dived out the back door and plunged into the darkness.

  The sky was clear and cloudless, and the cold instantly bit into my cheeks and toes. We hastened across the circle, where a motionless form floated adrift in a sea of snow, a single set of footprints leading to—and fro. It was a rug, rolled up and abandoned, like it had just slipped from a removal van.

  The policeman who’d discovered it had evidently paused to Investigate. Part of the rug was unrolled, and its contents spilled out: a bare, pale arm, purplish-blue against the starlit snow, two angry red punctures just inside the elbow.

  I halted in the street, and Miss Judson bumped into me. This was just like the latest Display at Leighton’s. “Cleopatra,” I managed, in a strained whisper. Miss Judson grasped my hand and marched me forward. “Who—?” I couldn’t finish the question.

  Miss Judson was grim. “We’ll soon find out.”

  As we approached the scene, a police carriage rolled up, and Constable Carstairs and another constable hopped out, landing in a puff of snow. They stalked over, like a bulldog and an eager terrier behind him. Constable Carstairs greeted us with a gruff nod, shocking me. I was too cold and numb to nod back. I could hardly stop staring at the rolled-up rug and its grisly contents.

  “Get back,” Constable Carstairs growled, and Miss Judson took half a pace backward. Her hands were on my shoulders, holding me steady as we watched them work—but whether to keep me upright or to keep me from interfering, it was impossible to say. I didn’t even know myself what I would do.

  I tried to study the scene before Investigation wiped it all away. There was very little snow atop the carpet, and somewhere in my mind I knew that could tell us when this latest tableau was created. But only the first policeman’s tracks led near the body. My brain jangled with the inconsistency. How did someone leave a body in the snow without leaving tracks? It wasn’t possible.

  Just like it wasn’t possible to drop from a hundred-foot building and leave no trace.

  “Ready, sir?”

  Constable Carstairs had Observed the scene, taken a spatter of notes, and now nodded at the younger constables. “Go ahead. Let’s see who’s—in there.”

  Grimly, the two other men, working as gingerly as they could, unrolled the carpet. For a few heartbeats, all I saw was a flash of red and blue Turkish wool, a flutter of fringe . . . then a long gold dress and dark, dark hair.

  Cleopatra was Nora Carmichael.

  Miss Judson did not let me linger to watch the policemen. My teeth betrayed me by chattering, and after giving a bri
ef perfunctory statement to Constable Carstairs (amounting to “You know where to find us”), she turned me round and sped me back into the house, whereupon Aunt Helena, who had been Observing the Scene with her lorgnette through her drawing-room windows, bustled us to the kitchen to be fussed over by her cook and kitchen maid, who were entirely out of character for my aunt’s household. They must have been new.

  The kitchen was compact and tidy, with shiny modern appliances and a glorious hob that would have driven Cook to tears of envy—iron painted red with three oven compartments and a finely sculpted chimney, beside which warmed a pot of cocoa. The new housemaid bade us doff our shoes and arranged us at the table with toast and cocoa and hot bricks wrapped in rugs for our frozen toes. Only Peony could have made the scene more cozy. Peony, and the lack of a dead body lying just outside the door.

  The neat worktable was spread with cookery books—some in French—all open to a mysterious-looking sort of pudding shaped like a log.

  “Bûche de Noël ?” Miss Judson inquired.

  The new cook turned toward her. “It’s very fashionable in France,” she Informed us. “The Mistress is expecting French company for Christmas dinner.”

  “Est-ce vrai ?” Miss Judson said softly. She turned to me with an unreadable expression, and I was grateful to have something else to look at—some other image in my mind besides Nora Carmichael displayed like Cleopatra delivering herself to Caesar. The killer had mixed up two historical events, however. Cleopatra’s death by asp happened years later.

  Of course, we didn’t know that the killer had used an asp*—where would he get an asp in England in December, anyway? Not to mention a host of other practical complications, not least of which was convincing said snake to deploy itself as you bade it, and not wherever it pleased or, worse, upon yourself. (All things considered, a most unwieldy weapon.) But he’d certainly gone to some lengths to replicate the Egyptian queen’s famous death. Just as he’d gone to lengths to stage Professor Leighton’s death like Socrates’.

  I supposed we knew one thing now, though it was cold comfort. Nora Carmichael wasn’t the killer. I stirred my cocoa disconsolately, as Miss Judson idly flipped through the cookery books.

  Gradually it dawned on me that the cook and the maid—whose names were Mrs. Hodges and Cora—were still preparing tea and slabs of hot buttered bread, despite having already stuffed me and Miss Judson full as turkeys.

  “It’s for themselves,” Mrs. Hodges said, with a reassuring air of snootiness. “The Mistress said to have them in for a spell.”

  Upon those words, the back door opened and all three constables stepped carefully inside the threshold, delicately tapping their snowy boots off. Cora expertly relieved them of their helmets. “Don’t worry none about that,” she said briskly. “Come warm up by the stove.”

  “Thank you, Miss,” said the youngest constable, the one who’d reminded me of a terrier. Now his boyish, freckled face looked drawn and white, despite the cheek-chapping cold.

  Soon enough, the efficient cook and maid had the policemen settled round the table with us, clutching cups of tea with a dash of brandy, and staring grimly at their hands. Constable Carstairs downed his in one gulp, but the one who’d found the body and sounded the alarm was looking a bit green.

  Mrs. Hodges pushed a plate of biscuits on him. “Gingersnaps,” she said authoritatively, like she soothed policemen during homicide investigations every day.† “They’ll help.”

  He nodded weakly.

  None of the men seemed to even notice the two barefoot Young Ladies of Quality in their midst, and as the tea and gingersnaps and brandy and warmth went to work on them, their tongues unfroze as well.

  “D-----est thing I ever saw,” Constable Carstairs swore. I supposed even by Swinburne standards, two murders inside a week was a bit much.

  “And it was just like they showed in that shop window? How horrible!” Cora shivered with relish. “We read all about it in the Tribune, those stories by Miss Shelley.”

  “Now Cora,” scolded Mrs. Hodges, “let the poor men eat in peace. They’ve had quite the ordeal this morning, poor things.”

  “It was pretty awful,” Constable Terrier agreed. (It turned out his name was, in fact, Terrence.) “I just kept thinking, how cold she must be.” He shook his head at the memory.

  My own brain was finally thawing, and I realized that Aunt Helena had somehow engineered this whole tableau—her niece and governess at her kitchen table as the constables confided in the staff. Maybe Miss Judson was right, and the urge to Investigate was contagious. Or hereditary. Or whatever reverse-heredity would be, going upward through generations. I bit my lip and clutched my mug tight and tried to listen carefully without interrupting.

  “But who killed her?” Cora pressed. “And why leave her here?”

  That was an excellent point. The killer, having staged it in the Display beforehand, must have chosen this location deliberately.

  Miss Judson and I spoke up together—reminding everyone of our presence. “The Mansion House,” she said, just as I said, “The Mayor.”

  “Eh?” Constable Carstairs looked pointedly at us. At me.

  “Cleopatra wrapped herself in a carpet and had herself smuggled to Julius Caesar,” I explained. She’d been trying to secure the throne of Egypt and the support of the Roman Empire and, like the killer, had a flair for the dramatic.

  “I’ve seen th’ paintings,” the constable growled. “What’s it got to do wiv Mayor Spence’tings?”

  “I’m not sure.” Nora was planning to meet an admirer after the museum gala—had she had a liaison with her murderer? “But she was staged that way and dropped on the Mayor’s doorstep.”

  “Like Caesar and Cleopatra,” Constable Terrence put in eagerly.

  Constable Carstairs grunted. It was a noncommittal response, but I could tell we’d got him thinking. He pulled out his notepad and flipped back a few pages. “The shopkeeper died like whosit—Socrates, eh?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, trying to decide what else to say. It was the job of the police to solve this crime, after all, and they would need all the evidence to do that. But I still didn’t know how Mum was connected, and I didn’t want the police rummaging about clumsily in her past.

  That was my job.

  Miss Judson was clearly considering this as well. After a discreet glance at me, she spoke directly to Constable Carstairs. “We saw Miss Carmichael at the museum gala last night. Myrtle witnessed”—I could tell she regretted that choice of words—“Myrtle overheard a . . . heated conversation between the Mayor and Miss Carmichael.”

  All the constables’ eyes wheeled toward me, and I worked hard at not fidgeting. “I couldn’t tell what they were talking about,” I lied. “But they both knew Mr. Leighton, from years ago, at the college.” There. That was enough for the constable to begin Investigating on his own.

  “Olive Blackwell!” breathed Cora, right on cue.

  Still, Constable Carstairs seemed uncomfortable at the prospect of interrogating the Mayor. “I reckon we’d better go’n see what Himself has to say,” he finally said—looking not at all inclined to depart from Aunt Helena’s comfortable kitchen.

  But Aunt Helena had an answer to that as well. With timing that could not have been accidental, she strode into the room, clad in a blue walking coat and a huge fur stole (it appeared to be an entire bear), and announced, “Hodges, do you have that fruitcake for the Spence-Hastingses? I thought I’d pay my call on the Mayoress this morning.”

  Mrs. Hodges, having anticipated this development, handed Aunt Helena a tin and a bottle of wine. “Herself likes a fuss made,” she explained to no one in particular.

  Tin in hand, bear slung across her neck, and walking stick held like a scepter, Aunt Helena glared impatiently at the constables. “Well, Carstairs,” she harrumphed, “aren’t you coming?”

  Dear Reader, I should like to report that Miss Judson and I availed ourselves of the
opportunity to question the Mayor alongside Aunt Helena and the constable, but sadly, we missed that particular Family Amusement. As we stepped outside, another police carriage rolled up, dispatching Inspector Hardy, looking authoritative and smart in his black uniform and flat cap. I was surprised to see Dr. Munjal with him—shouldn’t Dr. Belden still be handling the case? Dr. Munjal must have felt it was important enough to have Swinburne’s official Police Surgeon take matters into his own hands.

  Unless he was here at the Mayor’s bidding.

  I felt a spike of traitorous alarm at that thought. Dr. Munjal would never tamper with evidence! Still, he was one of the few people remaining who could possibly know what had become of Olive Blackwell. The survivors were dwindling by the minute. And his motive was the same as whoever had killed Mr. Leighton and Miss Carmichael.

  For of course I didn’t believe for a moment that there was more than one killer, or that these two murders weren’t connected. The sense of theatrics and the selection of victims was obviously not random. Probability argued against the likelihood of two killers, acting independently, with overlapping motives and the same gruesome interpretation of Classical History. The splashy headlines rang in my head. Olive Blackwell Strikes Again.

  It wasn’t possible.

  I didn’t believe it.

  And yet . . . Hadn’t I seen the impossible evidence with my own eyes? How a body had simply appeared atop the freshly fallen snow, without leaving any trace of how it was deposited? It was impossible for Olive Blackwell to have survived a fall from the Campanile. Just as it was impossible for Nora Carmichael’s body to have—levitated into position, as if her rug were Aladdin’s flying carpet. Olive couldn’t be back from the dead to take her revenge. Could she?

  Lost in thought, I nearly missed the other significant development at the crime scene. It took two loud ahems from Miss Judson and a neat, polite stomp of my toes before I finally looked up across the dazzling snow—and my vision clouded over again.