Louisa and the Crystal Gazer (10 page)

“I will assist,” offered Sylvia, seeing that Cobban wished to stay on the hall side of the door and watch the experiment.

With a backward glance and a smile that was as much directed to Cobban as to me, Sylvia went through the door and closed it. We heard the key turn in the lock, and the bolt shoot home.

“Ready,” she called, her voice muffled by the thickness of the door. “What am I to do now?”

“Leave the key in the lock,” Mr. Barnum shouted back. “Now,” he said gleefully. From his coat pocket he took an envelope he had ready for posting. It was of good-quality writing paper and quite thick. This he placed on the floor, directly under the lock, so that half the envelope was in the hall and the other half on the other side of the door.

“Now, I need a strong piece of wire,” he said. “Ah. Just happen to have this…” From his watch pocket he withdrew a coil of gleaming wire. He unwound it, bent it twice to thicken it, and put it into the lock, bouncing it up and down
and sideways for several minutes. We heard a little thud from the other side of the door; Mr. Barnum carefully slid out the envelope from under the door.

“Just so,” he said, holding up the key.

“Any schoolboy knows how to do that,” said Cobban. “What about the bolt?”

“Part two,” said Mr. Barnum, frowning over Cobban’s comment about schoolboys. “We must assume that the killer performed part of this trick in advance, and for that purpose I will ask your friend’s assistance.” He twisted the wire again so that there was a loop at one end of it. “Miss Sylvia, put the loop over the head of the bolt,” he called, pushing the wire under the door to her side.

“Done,” came Sylvia’s voice a moment later. She sounded very far away.

“This is how the bolt was locked from the outside,” said Barnum. “The killer hooked the loop around the bolt before leaving the room. He shut the door and locked it. Then, he carefully pulled the wire he had already placed around the bolt, and the bolt slid into place, in effect locking the room from the outside.” Mr. Barnum began tugging on the piece of wire. “He carefully…” He tugged a little harder. The wire came through the door, unlooped, and the bolt was still open rather than closed.

“He would have brought thicker wire,” Mr. Barnum said crossly.

Cobban snorted.

“Try again with the wire, Mr. Barnum,” I suggested.

He tried again, a second, third, and fourth time, and each time the bolt stayed stubbornly in place and the wire slipped out again with the loop pulled straight.

“Well, it works in theory,” he finally said.

“In theory, the Earth might be flat,” Cobban said.

I do not know why men must always outdo one another with an act or a comment. Even noble Father and kind Mr. Emerson, during a discussion of self-reliance or the Over-soul, will get that gleam in their eyes and it will be understood that a challenge has been issued and accepted, and they will argue back and forth till one of them simply runs out of breath.

“May I come back out?” Sylvia asked in a small voice. “I think someone is in here with me.”

“Quickly!” I said, frightened for my friend, for if Mrs. Percy’s death had been a planned murder, as Mr. Barnum’s theory suggested, then this house might still contain secret dangers. “Undo the bolt, Sylvia!”

There was a rattling and a squeak; the door swung open and a very pale, trembling Sylvia rejoined us in the hall. “I think I heard something in there,” she whispered, her eyes large as saucers.

Cobban’s nightstick was already swinging from his hand. “A person?” he asked. “Did you see him? Where? Behind the curtains?”

“No, actually it was more of a voice,” said Sylvia, fanning herself. “Mrs. Percy’s voice, I think. She said, ‘Peace! I require peace!’ At least, I think that’s what she was saying. Of course, it could have been ‘lease’ or ‘please.’ What do you think it was, Louy?”

An overactive imagination, I thought. “You must have overheard a conversation from the street,” I said. Outdoors, the air was thin and light with that transparency that comes
at the beginning of a storm, when sound travels well. Undaunted by Sylvia’s trembling, I strode into the room and pulled back the curtains, revealing the broken windows.

There, staring back in at me, was a face so pale, so ghastly, that when Sylvia screamed I was half tempted to scream along with her.

“I do beg your pardon,” said Miss Amelia Snodgrass.

Constable Cobban crossed the room in three strides and stood next to me, staring out the window. “You would be Miss Snodgrass,” he said, recognizing her from the description we had given of her brown coat and hat.

“And you are?” She tilted her head.

“Constable Cobban. Will you come in, Miss Snodgrass? The front door is still open, I believe.”

“I cannot. I am in a hurry, you see.” She turned, but Cobban reached through the broken glass and grasped her arm.

She gave him a livid look of disdain, but he would not relinquish his hold on her.

“I insist,” he said. “Mr. Barnum and Miss Alcott will come round and help you up the stairs. They are icy.” For a young man his voice could be quite authoritative. We three did exactly as he said, and a minute later Miss Snodgrass stood with us inside Mrs. Percy’s red-papered sitting room. The ferns were wilting from the cold and a lack of water, but the air still smelled sweet and sickly heavy, despite the broken windows.

“I was merely walking past. What right have you to detain me?” Miss Snodgrass exclaimed, lifting her chin high and throwing her shoulders back. Her hair was even lighter in color than Sylvia’s, and I couldn’t help but think that here
before me was the ideal of femininity Father had so often described, blond and of medium rather than tallish stature, with small, fine features. A very handsome woman, indeed, yet dressed like a drudge. “I often walk this way. It is a public street,” she said.

“You were standing in the garden outside the room where she was killed,” Cobban corrected.

“Killed?” she asked in a shaking voice.

“So it seems,” Cobban said. “Moreover, items are missing from her rooms.”

“Items?” Miss Snodgrass’s hand went to her throat.

“Jewelry. Money.”

“You have gone through her rooms?” Miss Snodgrass was now so pale, her voice so weak, that I sighed and rose, knowing I should begin looking for smelling salts. There must be a vial somewhere in the bureau. But Sylvia was one step ahead of me. “Here, Louy,” she said, taking salts from her own reticule.

“It distresses you that we have searched Mrs. Percy’s personal items?” Cobban asked, though the answer was already plainly visible on Miss Snodgrass’s ashen face.

“Did you find…letters?” she asked. And then she swooned.

The next half hour was spent fetching glasses of water and a compress from the pantry, no easy chore, since the maid, Suzie Dear, was still missing and Mrs. Percy’s housekeeping arrangements had been haphazard at best. The glasses were in a drawer, not a cupboard, and the compress lint was in a basket, not a drawer. Marmee would have set this pantry to rights in a couple of hours, and as she worked I knew what her discussion would be: how a pantry and a
kitchen often indicated a woman’s state of mind, and the mistress of this pantry was in a very bad state of mind, indeed.

Very bad, Marmee, I told her in my thoughts. She’s been robbed and murdered.

“What were you doing in the garden?” Cobban asked Miss Snodgrass as I returned with the glass of water. I could tell from his voice that he had asked this question several times and was growing impatient.

“I…I…I,” Miss Snodgrass stuttered, and did not answer. At least she is not an accomplished liar, I thought. If she does answer, we can accept it as truth.

“I…I was hoping to encounter someone. A chance encounter.” She blushed, her white face now turning crimson.

Now I understood—both this and her earlier reference to letters. She had been looking for someone who seemed to be avoiding her, someone to whom she had written letters, probably of an indiscreet content, and thought both the letters and the person might be discovered here.

I wondered if Mrs. Percy’s stepbrother, Mr. Nichols, was a particularly handsome young man. Mr. Barnum, sitting in a deep armchair in what appeared to be a rapt state of attention, cleared his throat and tapped his fingers disapprovingly on the carved armrest.

Constable Cobban seemed to understand as well. “Go home, Miss Snodgrass.” He sighed. “I may have more questions later for you.”

“You are certain that Mrs. Percy was murdered?” I asked when the door had shut behind the brown costume of Miss Snodgrass.

“Yes. Her stepbrother’s testimony about her health is not
to be denied,” said Cobban. “She was of a strong constitution, and her use of the drug was not so abundant as to endanger her health.” Cobban sat on the edge of the crystal gazer’s settee and studied the carpet. It was a new carpet, a new settee, in an expensive, newly appointed home.

Crystal gazing must offer a good living, I thought. Was that why Mr. Barnum had taken an interest in the subject? Perhaps he had come here looking for a new attraction for the American Museum, only to be very disappointed by that dismal first performance of which even a beginning amateur such as myself could find the methods of the “apparitions” and other parlor tricks. He must have been very disappointed, indeed.

“There’s more than the stepbrother’s testimony.” Cobban looked up.

“The thefts,” I said.

“More even than that. Have you seen a dead person—that is, a person who died peacefully more or less in their sleep?”

I had. Making visits with Marmee last winter, I had come across the body of old Mrs. Witherington, asleep in her bed, dead at the age of eighty-three. Surprisingly, at her great age there had been no evidence of disease or damage other than her dowager’s hump and her swollen joints. Her face had been peaceful, exactly as the old adage goes; she looked as if she were merely asleep.

Mrs. Percy’s face had not been at all peaceful. The mouth had been contorted, the eyes wide with shock or horror.

“Well, I’m down to the harbor to find our Suzie,” Cobban said. He stood and put on his wide-brimmed hat, though he was still indoors and etiquette required that he remain bareheaded till he stood directly in front of the door by which he
would leave. One of the qualities I admired about the young constable was his almost total disregard of etiquette.

“May we come with you?” I asked.

“Miss Louisa!” Mr. Barnum protested, his spiky black eyebrows moving up and down with disapproval. “The docks are no place for a lady!” For a man who had stitched together the top half of a stuffed monkey and the bottom of a fish and called it a mermaid, he could be, I thought, very obstructionist.

“If you find Suzie, I think it would be well to have a woman with you,” I said to Cobban. “She looks the hysterical kind, I think. And I don’t understand why Suzie, if she had murdered her employer, let us sit in that waiting room for so long instead of just telling us to go home. Wouldn’t she have tried to remove us if she knew her employer was dead?”

“She wasn’t thinking clearly,” insisted Cobban.

“I’ll come, too,” spoke up Sylvia. She gave the young constable another sideways glance.

For the third time we quit Mrs. Percy’s waiting room.

“I’d like to see the cook’s room again,” I said.

“Female curiosity?” asked Cobban, with a knowing smile.

“Perhaps something more,” I said, but did not specify. I wondered how Mrs. Percy had treated her cook, and the room itself would tell me much of that relationship.

We found the bedroom just off the kitchen, a large corner room with several curtained windows, a rug on the wood floor, and a tile stove with a large bucket of coal next to it. It was a fine room, comfortable and convenient. From it, I would have guessed that relations between cook and employer were amiable. Appearances, however, can be deceiving.

“Satisfied?” asked Cobban, revealing a masculine indifference to what lace curtains and a thick carpet can say about the management of a household.

“Yes.” I said. We returned to the front hall and went back out that front door, leaving behind the dim and dreary aspect of a house too expensively furnished and too poorly lighted, leaving behind the nuances of emptiness behind all those heavily closed doors. It was a very, very big house for a woman and a single servant and a brother who visited occasionally, and a sense of Mrs. Percy’s isolation and loneliness pierced me like an arrow: to die alone like that, behind a locked door, and perhaps violently.

We went into the bright afternoon winter, the white-and-silver streets and the bustle of humanity on those streets, and as we passed through Mrs. Percy’s white wicket gate I had a strong sense of leaving behind the true Slough of Despond, of which Mr. Bunyan wrote: …
for still as the sinner is awakened about his lost condition, there ariseth in his soul many fears and doubts, and discouraging apprehensions, which all of them get together, and settle in this place. And this is the reason of the badness of this ground.

Thank you, Father, I thought, for reminding me to read
Pilgrim’s Progress
. Where else could I have found such an apt description of the confused souls who seek their dead and lost ones in hired parlors, and of the woman who lived so well off those fears and doubts?

At the corner, Mr. Barnum tipped his top hat and went off in the opposite direction. “I will write to your father, if I may,” he promised jovially. “I still await Mr. Alcott’s response.”

Cobban’s silence was so pointed that Sylvia felt compelled to explain. “He has offered to hire Mr. Alcott for speaking engagements,” she said.

“Father will not agree, of course,” I added.

But young Constable Cobban’s mouth went very tight as he repressed a smile, obviously enjoying the same bizarre vision that I’d had of Father onstage seated between a magician and a contortionist.

Cobban and Sylvia locked eyes and then looked furtively away from each other.

“One other thing,” Cobban said. “We still haven’t found the pipe she used. Searched all over that room. Seems strange, don’t it?”

“Many things about this affair seem strange,” I said. We three walked in companionable silence then, concentrating on keeping our footing on the slick sidewalks and thinking our own thoughts.