Cold-Blooded Myrtle

by Elizabeth C. Bunce

  Her tone grew low and dramatic. “Every few years, since she disappeared, ‘Olive’ gets in contact with her old friends. And then her friends start to die.”

  I sat in stunned silence, and Miss Judson lifted one neat governess finger. “Clarify.”

  “Thirteen years ago, letters in Latin were sent to David Carmichael, claiming to be from Olive Blackwell. Within a few months, he had his tragic ‘accident’ in the Alps.”

  “How do you know about these letters? What did they say?”

  “Then five years ago—” She stopped, blood flooding her face, and fumbled through her notebook. “Er—and just this year, the Leightons received their own letters supposedly from Olive.”

  I was no longer listening. “Five years ago, what?”

  She continued to study her notes in a way that was all too familiar. “Nothing,” she said softly. “I misspoke. The Leightons’ letters—”

  I crossed every boundary of proper behavior and grabbed the notebook from her, flipping frantically back until I found it. 1888. The year Mum died.

  “‘Letters sent to Jemima Hardcastle, née Bell’? I never heard about any letters! And my mother died of cancer. Nothing mysterious about it.”

  There wasn’t. I knew there wasn’t. I remembered every moment, every visit from Dr. Belden, every symptom, every cough and fever and sleepless night, every meal refused or brought back up, every stone, pound, and ounce of weight shed from her slim figure as she faded away. She had known what was killing her, and had grimly studied up on the condition, monitoring for herself the tumor’s growth, as it choked off her breath and crushed the life out of her.

  I didn’t realize I was gripping the notebook so tightly my fingers were shaking, until Mr. Blakeney reached in and gently untwined them.

  “She never got any letters,” I whispered.

  Genie put her hand on her brother’s, atop mine. “I don’t know what it all means,” she said. “I’m trying to find out what happened. To Olive. And everyone.”

  After a long moment, Miss Judson spoke up. “Perhaps we ought to pick this up at another time. It’s been rather a lot of excitement for one day.” The lunch crowd had started to gather and I realized how late it was. Even Miss Judson—always revived by a spirited gathering—looked weary and wilted, and Mr. Blakeney seemed positively outnumbered by Irrepressible, Incorrigible, and Otherwise females.

  Genie rose first. “You’re quite right. I have a story to file.”

  “Wait!” I cried. “You can’t print anything we’ve said here. We’re—” I was at a loss for words.

  “Off the record?” Mr. Blakeney supplied. “Good luck with that.”

  Miss Judson saved the day again. She sized up Genie Shelley Blakeney with one level, fidget-inspiring gaze, skirt hems to messily knotted hair, and said coolly, “We would appreciate your discretion, Miss Shelley. Investigator to Investigator.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out,” I promised her. “Maybe my father remembers the letters. We all want to figure out who killed Olive and the others.” I took a deep breath and faced Miss Judson when I added, “Even if it makes Mum look bad. But I want to know first.”

  “That’s fair,” Genie said. “I promise to come to you before I print anything.”

  We glanced to Mr. Blakeney for confirmation. “You can trust her,” he said—looking terrified of the consequences if he was wrong.

  14

  Amantes Ira

  Although Christmas is meant to be a peaceable season, it is not immune to frayed nerves and short tempers. Indeed, it is particularly susceptible to displays of high emotion. Best to steer well clear of fraught topics and the easily overset until the conclusion of the merriment. —H. M. Hardcastle, A Modern Yuletide

  Father and Miss Judson were fighting. I didn’t even have to hide in the water closet (my usual surveillance post) to listen in; all of Gravesend Close could hear them, hollering at each other at the tops of their lungs. And it wasn’t just Father scolding me-via-Miss-Judson-by-proxy, either. This time both sides freely launched their volleys—and they all seemed to strike home.

  They were fighting about me, of course. Some things never change.

  I sat at the top of the stairs, Peony in my lap, although she squirmed to be free, just as concerned as I by the battle below. She finally wrestled from my grip and fled for the safety of my bedroom.

  “Coward.” I hugged my stockinged knees to my chest instead, and listened.

  “Really going too far! Can’t let the two of you out of my sight!”

  “—your aunt’s doorstep! We could hardly avoid—”

  “Oh, you certainly could have avoided!” Father’s voice rattled the plates on the picture-rail. “I doubt a mob of armed ruffians came in the middle of the night and forced you at knife-point to stomp into a crime scene!”

  I shuddered—that image was far too apt for comfort, given everything going on.

  “And recruiting Aunt Helena into your exploits is simply unforgivable. She’s an old woman, for pity’s sake.”

  (Miss Judson wisely did not mention that Aunt Helena had recruited herself.)

  “Not to mention that newspaper reporter!” he said. “Was it necessary to drag her into this as well, or just your perverse amusement? I’m already getting enough pressure from the Mayor and the magistrate. They’re demanding answers and retribution, and I don’t even have anyone to put on trial!”

  “I don’t blame them,” Miss Judson returned. “There are far too many murders in Swinburne for my way of thinking. I’ve been considering relocating somewhere safer. Like back home to Devil’s Island!” Her voice reached an unfamiliar pitch on this last statement, and the room fell into shocked silence. I could hardly believe it—Miss Judson scarcely even joked about leaving us. The idea of her fleeing for French Guiana’s most infamous penal colony was anything but amusing.

  Father thought so, too. “Well, now, that’s just childish.”

  Her pause suggested the deadly gaze she’d fixed him in. “I see. Since the child of this house is my responsibility, I suppose that’s only logical. Now if you’ll excuse me, Mr. Hardcastle, I have some childish duties to attend to. Do try and find someone to prosecute. And see if you can’t manage for them to be guilty, for a change.”

  With that, she swished out of the parlor—with, disappointingly, no door to slam.

  I (Childishly, if not exactly Dutifully) scrambled to my feet and out of sight. Hardly more heroic than Peony, I slipped into my bedroom and closed the door. I could only hope that Miss Judson would burn herself out, somehow, before barging in and turning her wrath on me. The source of Father’s ire was clear enough, but I couldn’t tell what she was so mad about. Except a general and intractable disagreement with Father.

  She did not appear, and I cowered on my window seat, overlooking the cul-de-sac outside. A moment later a homburg-hatted figure appeared below, brief-bag in hand, stalking out of the neighborhood toward the cab stand. Where was Father going, this late in the afternoon?

  “Mrow?” Peony put a paw on my foot, eyes large and worried.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “I’ve never seen them this mad before. Not at each other.” More often they formed a united front against me.

  Miss Judson’s door slammed, and I knew she, too, had seen Father storming out of the house. I listened for the sounds of steamer trunks being hauled out, and I could not stop my wild worries tumbling together: Would Miss Judson need a fur-lined cape in Cayenne? What about the embroidered gloves Father had given her for Christmas last year? Or the brolly, her splendid brown brolly with its spoke bent from when she’d once used it to stop a runaway pram from rolling into the path of a carriage?* Would she need a separate ticket for all her luggage? Would they let her bring her easel and all her sketchbooks? Even the ones with our Investigations detailed in them?

  I chewed on my thumb, feeling hot and sick and simmery, like milk scalded at the bottom of a p
ot. Peony propped herself on the windowsill, ears forward and eyes alert, watching and waiting for Father to circle back and come home.

  But he didn’t.

  Eventually I decided that he must have turned his attention to the Investigation, and that I might as well do the same. The imagined sounds of Miss Judson packing for French Guiana had sparked an idea.

  We didn’t have a carriage, so the carriage house was used for storage. Father and Cook between them kept it neat, uncluttered, and blessedly spider-free.† The well-oiled door left an arc through the snow in the drive and stayed open on its own. Peony trotted in, tail high, hopeful for voles or hedgehogs—or dust—and set about her own Investigation.

  Hands on my hips, I wondered what I was searching for and where it might be lurking. Obviously not among the rakes and lawn mower leaning against the wall, or with Miss Judson’s trunks, still safe beneath a layer of dust and dead moth and the bicycle pump, which we hadn’t seen in weeks. I returned it to the hook where it was meant to live, stretching to reach past a box of my old playthings. With a swell of nostalgia (which sounds like an unpleasant medical condition), I wriggled the twine loose and prized free its lid, unearthing old schoolroom papers—my very earliest Latin efforts in oversized, uneven handwriting. Beneath that, I spotted a tuft of velveteen.

  “Rufus!” I cried softly, pulling him from the box.

  “Who?” demanded Peony from the corner, where she was eyeing the carcass of the moth with disappointment, having experimentally tasted it. Twice.

  I smoothed my old plush fox’s worn nose and bristly ears, and the row of sutures lovingly set along the ridge of his (sawdust) skull. My fingers went to my own hairline, and for a moment I was five years old again, not kneeling in a freezing carriage house, but snuggled up beside Mum while she stitched a scrap of lacy cotton into her crazy quilt. It was from one of my nighties, which I’d been wearing while trying to reach a book in Father’s study—the shelves not being designed for my five-year-old stature—and fallen, cracking my head on the corner of the desk.

  “Why on earth are you using the bloody bit?” Father had asked. “That’s rather gory, isn’t it?”

  “Not at all,” Mum had replied. “Myrtle earned this bloodstain. It’s a badge of honor from an adventure.”

  “A misadventure,” Father revised.

  “An adventure. It’s my quilt, and I get to remember it however I want.”

  Mum had tried to interest me in the needlework, but I was more interested in the stitches she’d set in my own skin. She’d made me wear a babyish bonnet for the whole time they were in, because I couldn’t stop trying to see and feel them. But to appease me, she’d done minor surgery on my stuffed toy, using her surgical silk and the fascinating single knots of sutures. Those stitches had never been removed, and Rufus V. Vulpe still bore the scar, forever unhealed.

  Mine had healed so well I couldn’t even find it with my fingers anymore. I stroked Rufus’s wound, feeling unaccountably like crying.

  A rustle beside me was a welcome distraction. The Mighty Huntress had moved on from dead Lepidoptera and was inside the trunk, considering which of the old papers looked most appetizing.

  “Stop that,” I said, shifting her aside. A folded letter with a wet, chewed corner stopped my hand. It had a postmark and stamp from Egypt. Another note from Nora? What was it doing in my things? No—I did remember. Mum had once given it to me as a sort of puzzle, to keep me entertained and quiet trying to untangle the maze of words. She must have felt my young brain would not grasp the significance of the content.

  It was an old-fashioned “crossed letter”: two letter writers shared the same single sheet of paper, one writing the normal way across the narrower span of the page, the other turning it ninety degrees to place her—his?—own words across and between those, fitting words into the spaces as he scrawled a message overtop the other. It was an obsolete (and rather challenging) way to write a letter, from the days before the cheap penny-post. But postage from Egypt evidently being dear, these two correspondents had revived the tradition.

  Now I squinted at it, hoping its meaning would be more clear. The page was a chaos of different inks and handwriting, neither of which was especially legible at the best of times. It was too dim and cold in the carriage house to manage it here, so I tucked it into my pocket and started packing the box back up again.

  “Oooh, taking up archæology, I see!”

  I whipped around. Father stood in the carriage house doorway, looking falsely jolly. Peony, genuinely jolly (or at least as jolly as the surly creature ever gets), trotted over to see him.

  “You weren’t gone long,” was the first, foolish thing I thought of to say.

  Father answered ruefully. “I forgot there was no late tram on Sunday.” He came inside and crouched beside me. “What are you looking for?”

  I shrugged and resumed shoving my things back in their carton.

  He sat down tailor-fashion, long legs angled and gangly like the spiders that were not present in this carriage house, that were absolutely not scurrying across the brick floor right now, and reached into the box, drawing out the Latin conjugations. “Amo amas amat?” He turned to me, and in a grave voice, eyes twinkling, said, “Te amo, Filia.”

  He held out one hand, pinky finger extended—like he hadn’t done since I was small. I hooked my own finger in his and tugged gently. “Te amo, Pater.”

  A moment later, I burst out, “I hate it when you and Miss Judson quarrel!”

  “I do, too.” He sighed.

  “Then you should apologize,” I urged. “She’s still upstairs. You won’t let her leave us, will you?”

  He scowled. “Leave us? What—oh. I think she was joking.”

  I crossed my arms and scowled right back. “It wasn’t very funny.”

  “No, it wasn’t.” Shoving a hand through his hair, he still looked angry. “And, by the way, I don’t have anything to apologize for! She—you both—were clearly in the wrong.” He looked like a sulky little boy. Now who was being childish?

  “You know it wasn’t our fault Miss Carmichael’s body was left there. And we were some of the last people to see her alive. It was our duty, as witnesses, to come forth!”

  “You could have ‘come forth’ at the police station. Or come forth home and told me, and I could have made the report. There was no reason you needed to—” He waved his hand in frustration, at an imaginary body lying in the snow. “Why do these things keep happening to you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said in a small voice. I had now known some four murder victims, which surely exceeded one’s lifetime quota—and I hadn’t even begun my proper career yet. For a moment I felt the weight of all of them: Miss Wodehouse, Mrs. Bloom, poor Mr. Leighton, and now Miss Carmichael. Even Olive Blackwell’s disappearance seemed to press on me. That was Mum’s mystery—but I was the one left behind to solve it.

  “I miss her.” That came out before I knew it. I was still holding the fox, and Father knew exactly who I meant. Except—I didn’t, mostly. Mum had been a memory for me now almost as long as she’d been a real person. I think I missed knowing her, learning what she was like as I got old enough to understand her. I remembered a smart, silly woman who stuck out her tongue at Father and stitched up my cuts and read to me in Greek. And I remembered the pale, tired, coughing and hollow-eyed woman who’d taken her place, the one we’d had to tiptoe and whisper around. I’d read to her. Wherever she was, did she remember that?

  Father tousled my hair. He smelled of coffee and lemon and evergreen. “I do, too. I suppose right now more than usual. This—everything—it would have made her so angry. She’d be burning up with the need to find the truth.”

  “That’s exactly how I feel!”

  “I know,” he said softly. “And that terrifies me. It might not scare you, and it wouldn’t have scared her, but . . .” He shook his head. “She’s gone, and this can’t hurt her, but even so, I can’t help thinking
. . .”

  “What?” I cried when he didn’t finish the thought. “Can’t help thinking what?” That she must have been involved?

  And why couldn’t either of us say that out loud?

  But Father didn’t answer, just kept sifting through my old papers as if they were the most gripping documents in England.

  I couldn’t stand his silence. “Mum never would have stood by and let Miss Carmichael and Mr. Leighton’s murderer go free.”

  Father didn’t answer for the longest moment. He did not meet my eyes when he finally spoke. “Your mum was fearless,” he agreed. “Nothing scared her. Except leaving you behind. And she believed in justice. And I am sorry every day that she is not here to see the young lady you are growing into. She would be proud of you, Myrtle Hardcastle. She really would.”

  He finally turned, taking up my hand in his. My sallow, ink-stained fingers looked frightfully small in his great pale grip. “But when I look at you, all I can think of is how hard it was to lose her—and how I can’t bear to go through that again. Don’t you understand? Every time something like . . . this morning happens—” He cut off abruptly, not finishing that sentence. But he rose to his feet and hauled me up to standing, too. “So I need you to promise me that it ends here. This was the last of it. You won’t get any more involved in Mr. Leighton’s or Miss Carmichael’s murders.”

  I didn’t agree with Father’s logic, and I could hardly promise that nobody would drop a dead body on my doorstep again (although probability suggested otherwise). I was prepared to say as much—when my eyes went to Miss Judson’s trunks. They were too easily accessible should “something like this morning” happen yet again.

  I bit my lip. I could object for my own sake—and for Mum’s—but I would not put Miss Judson’s position at risk. She was all we had. Losing Mum was bad enough, as he’d said. We couldn’t go through it again.

  Still, it gave me no small pang to stand before him and bow my head. I had to trust him. He and Dr. Munjal and the police could figure this out together.