Escapade (30 page)

Mrs. Corneille glanced at me and then looked back at Miss Turner. “But Jane,” she said. “The Earl was bedridden. Paralyzed.” “Yes,” said Miss Turner, nodding, excited now, “that’s what I told myself. But then I thought, what if he weren’t? What if he were only shamming? He knows Maplewhite. He’s lived here all his life. It would’ve been so easy for him to sneak into my room, and then run out again, while I was behaving like an hysterical schoolgirl. He could’ve slipped right past Mrs. Allardyce. It takes her forever to wake up.”

I said, “Mrs. Allardyce said she woke up when you screamed the first time.”

Miss Turner shook her head. “But that’s not possible. He had to run past her, in order to leave the room. I’m sure he must have done. I’ve been going over it tonight, trying to remember.”

“You told me,” I said, “that you weren’t sleeping when it all happened.”

“No.” She drank some brandy. “I was just lying there, in the darkness. And then, as I told you, I heard a sound, a sort of clicking noise, and I rolled over and switched on the light. And he was standing there. At the foot of the bed. Wearing an old nightgown. He had long white hair and a long white beard—I mentioned that, didn’t I?”

I nodded. “And you screamed?”

“No,” she said. “No, not then. I think I was too frightened. To do anything, really. And then he . . .” Her eyelashes fluttered. “And then
he
did something. And said something.”

So she hadn’t told me the truth before, or all of it. “Did what?”

I asked. “Said what?”

She took another deep breath, and I got the feeling that she was steeling herself to get through this. It was the same feeling I’d gotten this afternoon, when she thanked me in the hallway.

But she didn’t talk to me this time. She turned to Mrs. Corneille. “He pulled up his nightgown,” she said, her voice flat and deliberate, “and raised it to his stomach. He was . . . naked. And he said”—she swallowed—“he said, ‘Want a nice little piece of this, dearie?’ ”

She was trying to be cool and detached, but the skin of her face had gone pink. I hadn’t noticed before, but it was very nice skin. It was a very nice face.

Mrs. Corneille frowned, looked at me, looked back at Miss Turner. “You honestly believe that the Earl of Axminster did
that
?”

“Yes,” said Miss Turner, leaning toward her over the brandy snifter, as if trying to convince her by intensity alone. “It
must
have been the Earl.”

“Okay,” I said. “What happened then?”

She swallowed again and sat back. “He made a move toward me, as if he were going to climb onto the bed. He was still holding up his nightgown. That was when I screamed. I screamed once, and he stopped moving. He seemed rather alarmed himself, actually.”

She smiled faintly. “In a different context, I suppose, it might have been almost comical. He dropped his nightgown and he looked around the room as though he were afraid that someone had heard me. And then I screamed again and I snatched up a pillow and threw it at him. Then I rolled off the bed, to the floor.” She took a breath. “I don’t know what I was thinking to do down there—simply trying to get away, I expect. I scrambled across the carpet to the wall. And then I turned around, and he was gone. Vanished. I pulled myself up from the floor and I looked all around and I couldn’t see him. That was when I ran into the other room. The—Mrs. Allardyce was just getting out of bed.”

“So there was time,” I said, “for the ghost, or whoever, to get past her.”

“There must’ve been,” she told me. She looked back at Mrs. Corneille. “Don’t you see? It was the Earl.”

“Jane,” said Mrs. Corneille, and her voice was kind. “You said at breakfast this morning that you’d dreamed the ghost.”

Miss Turner shook her head. “I was embarrassed. And confused.

I didn’t want to believe that I’d actually seen . . . what I’d seen. She turned to me. “You suggested as much, when I saw you on the lawn this afternoon. You said that I sounded as though I were trying to persuade myself. And you were right.”

“But Jane,” said Mrs. Corneille, “do I understand you correctly? Are you saying that the Earl’s ghost is actually feeling guilty about this attack on you, and that somehow that Spirit Guide of Madame Sosostris—”

“No, no, no.” Miss Turner shook her head so vigorously that her hair whipped back and forth. “No, I don’t believe in any of that. Spirit Guides, the afterlife. But I’ve read about mediums, people like Madame Sosostris. They obtain their information from whatever sources they can find, don’t they? From newspapers, from servants, wherever. And that’s what she must've done, don't you see? One of the servants must’ve known it was the Earl in my room last night, and he told Madame Sosostris.”

“But Jane,” said Mrs. Corneille. Then she frowned, as if reconsidering what she’d been about to say. Her cigarette case and a box of matches lay on the coffee table. She set her snifter on the table and picked them up.

“Okay,” I said. “So you went to the Earl’s room. You were looking for proof.”

She nodded to me and then turned to Mrs. Corneille. “It was wrong of me, I realize. Sneaking about at night. But I could hardly go to Lady Purleigh and ask her about it. And I simply had to know. Can you understand that? I’d been thinking I was going mad.”

Mrs. Corneille smiled at her. “I told you last night, Jane. You’re probably the sanest of us all.” She had one of her brown cigarettes free now. She put it between her lips.

“I very much doubt that,” said Miss Turner, and smiled another weak smile. “But thank you.”

I leaned toward Mrs. Corneille, reaching for the matches, but she shook her head. She struck a match herself and held the flame to the cigarette.

Miss Turner turned to me. “So, yes,” she said, “after the seance I asked the footman, Parsons, where the Earl’s room was located. And then later, after midnight, I went up there.” For some reason she blushed again. Again it deepened the blue of her eyes. She looked away from me.

Mrs. Corneille had blown out the match. She sat there, immobile, holding it over the ashtray, watching Miss Turner. She said, “But you didn’t find anything?”

“Not at first.”

Mrs. Corneille arched her eyebrows and dropped the match into the ashtray.

She looked everywhere, Miss Turner said. In the wardrobe, in the bookcase, in drawers of the cabinet. She had no idea what she was looking for—but whatever it was, she didn’t find it. After a while she gave up. She had closed the door before she turned on the overhead light. Then she walked over to the entrance, turned off the light, and opened the door a crack to peek out.

She saw candlelight moving toward her in the darkness, through the parlor.

“Who was holding the candle?” I asked her.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t tell. All I could see was the light, coming closer.”

“What happened?”

“I closed the door,” said Miss Turner, “and I fumbled about in the darkness until I found the bed. And then I crawled beneath it.

She waited there, lying on the hard wooden floor amid the dust and the bits of fluff. The door opened and the thin wobbling light of the candle moved through the room. Miss Turner tried not to breathe.

From beneath the bed, in the dimness, she could just make out the feet of the person holding the candle. It was a woman.

I said, “What kind of shoes was she wearing?”

“Boots,” said Miss Turner. “A woman’s boots. And a long dress or skirt. Black. It came down to her ankles.”

Mrs. Corneille took a drag from her cigarette.

“Okay,” I said to Miss Turner. “Then what happened?”

The woman sat down on the bed, said Miss Turner. Just sat there. Said nothing. Did nothing. Miss Turner kept herself frozen in position. Pale yellow light trembled around the room.

And then she realized that the woman was crying.

“Not loudly,” she said. “Not sobbing or wailing. Just a small, quiet sort of private weeping. The way people sometimes do when they’re alone, remembering someone.”

Mrs. Corneille pursed her lips and sighed out two small silent streamers of smoke.

Miss Turner turned to her. “I felt badly for her,” she said. “Isn’t that absurd? I was lying there under the bed like a spy, and I had virtually no idea who she was or why she was crying, and I felt badly for her.”

Mrs. Corneille smiled. “It isn’t absurd at all, Jane.”

“How long was she there?” I asked her.

“Five minutes,” she said. “Perhaps longer. I don’t know, really. It seemed like years.”

Finally the woman got up from the bed and walked out, closing the door behind her. Miss Turner waited a few moments, and then began to move out from beneath the bed. As she did, her hand plunged through the floorboards, down into a kind of hole. She felt something inside there.

“At first,” she said, “I thought it was a rat, something alive, and I nearly screamed.”

But whatever it was, it didn’t move. Miss Turner slid away from the bed, turned on the end table’s electric lamp, and looked more closely.

One rectangular section of planking had been sawed free and made into a kind of lid for a box built under the floorboards.

“And it wasn’t a rat I’d found,” she said, and there was a small light of triumph in her blue eyes. Miss Turner was coming to her proof. Holding the brandy snifter in her right hand, she reached into the left-hand pocket of her bathrobe and pulled something out. “It was this.”

It looked pretty much like a dead white rat. About eight inches long, dense and furry. Then Miss Turner bent forward, set down her brandy, and spread the thing out along the coffee table.

It had scraggly white sideburns and, in its middle, an opening for a mouth.

A false beard.

“There was a wig in there as well,” said Miss Turner. “Made of the same material. And these.” She shifted the snifter to her left hand and reached into the right pocket of her robe and pulled out a handful of small items. She dumped them onto the table.

“Jane!” said Mrs. Corneille, sounding surprised. “You took them from the Earl’s room?”

“He took them first,” she said. She set down the brandy snifter and she picked up one of the items. “This is my comb. Here on the back, you can see where I’ve scratched my initials into the tortoise shell. It went missing sometime today. I didn’t think much about it—so much else has happened. But it was taken from my room. And it was taken by the Earl.”

Mrs. Corneille stubbed her cigarette into the ashtray and looked up at me.

I looked at the knickknacks scattered across the table.

An inexpensive metal watch fob. A pencil stub. A copper button. A metal nail file with an ebony handle. A shaving brush. A small key.

“My goodness,” said Mrs. Corneille. She reached forward, picked up the file, examined it. “But this is mine, ” she told me. I hadn’t even realized it was gone.”

I leaned forward and lifted the key from the table. A simple key, base metal. I could just make out, stamped along its shaft, tiny letters that spelled out
Mueller and Kohl
.

“Is it yours?” asked Miss Turner.

“No,” I said. “But I know what it opens.”

“And what’s that?” asked Mrs. Corneille.

“A pair of handcuffs.”

“THE HANDCUFFS BELONG to Mr. Houdini?” Mrs. Corneille asked me.

“In a way,” I said. I slipped the key into the pocket of my dinner jacket. I said to Miss Turner, “Tell me about the knife.”

She sat back. She was a bit breathless again, as though she had just physically relived the whole thing. She drank some brandy.

“Well,” she said, and she inhaled deeply once more. “I wanted to tell someone. Show someone what I’d found.” She looked over at Mrs. Corneille. “I thought about coming to you, to discuss it. But it was late, and there didn’t seem to be any real urgency. I told myself that it could wait until tomorrow morning. So I returned to my room.”

She paused to sip her brandy. “Mrs. Allardyce was still asleep, and she didn’t wake when I tiptoed past her. She’s a very sound sleeper.” She blinked. “But I’ve said that.” She turned to me. “Haven’t I?” I think she was beginning to feel the brandy.

I nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “Well. I’d put a bolster on the bed, under the blanket, when I left, and I’d arranged it to look like someone sleeping. To look like me sleeping, on my side. I didn’t really expect Mrs. Allardyce to come into my room, but I wanted to make certain that if she did, she’d think I was still asleep. When I came back and switched on the light, the bolster and the blanket were just as I’d left them. But the knife was . . . sticking out. I stood there and I went through one of those incredibly stupid moments, telling myself, But I didn’t leave that there. It seemed so strange—the knife, I mean—so bizarrely
out of place
. And then I understood what must’ve happened, and I started to shake. The knife was in exactly the spot where my chest would've been.”

She turned to Mrs. Corneille. “It was extraordinary, really. You read about people shaking when they’re frightened, and you think it’s a figure of speech. But I was literally quaking.” Her voice was level, but she used both hands again when she lifted her brandy to her lips.

Mrs. Corneille touched her knee. “But it’s all over now, Jane. And you removed the knife and you brought it here.”

“Yes. And I apologize for—”

“Hush, dear,” said Mrs. Corneille. “You did absolutely the right thing. You’ve been terribly brave.” She sat back and looked at me. She said, “Who could’ve done that?”

“The knife?” I said. “I don’t know.”

“But it’s
horrid
.”

I nodded.

“Someone meant to
kill
her?” she asked me.

“Sounds like it.”

“But that’s insane,” said Mrs. Corneille. “Why? Why would anyone want to harm Jane?”

I looked at the young woman. “Miss Turner? You have any ideas?”

She widened her eyes and arched her eyebrows, surprised at the question itself, or maybe at my asking it. Then she smiled another small smile that was both tentative and ironic. “Well,” she said, “Mrs. Allardyce wasn’t altogether pleased with the way I packed the luggage.”

I grinned. A real surprise, Miss Turner.