Murder at Marble House (5 page)

To mirror the happy destinies about to be foretold?

Or to sit in garish contrast to the gruesome image that greeted me as I lowered my gaze.

A figure swathed from head to toe in varying shades of violet sat slumped over a cloth-covered card table, her head angled awkwardly to one side. The jeweled turban had fallen off her head and rolled to the edge of the table, and short, thin wisps of graying brown hair stuck out in all directions from her scalp. I moved farther into the pavilion until I could see her face; her eyes protruded from their sockets, staring unblinkingly at the crystal ball inches away. A colorful deck of cards fanned out from beneath her cheek, several of them scattered on the floor beside the table amid a sprinkling of coins. Her lips were a sickly shade of blue and . . .

A crimson gash scored her throat. My stomach roiled—but no. I looked again and realized there was no blood anywhere. Instead, around her throat a scarf of deep red silk was twined so tightly her neck bulged from around the fabric.

“Dear God.” I circled the table and shoved a stupefied Clara aside. From behind Madame Devereaux’s chair, I grabbed the woman by the shoulders. I hauled her upright, then leaned her limp body against the back of the chair.

In a frenzied blur I dug my fingers around the silk scarf to loosen its grip. Even as the ends slipped free I knew it was too late. Madame Devereaux had breathed her last, and no amount of hoping would coax her lungs to fill again. A trickle of blood spilled from the corner of her mouth. Her lips gaped and her tongue lolled, showing where she had bitten clean through. A bruise was already forming on her temple, where her head had struck the table in front of her. Or . . . perhaps she’d been struck, before being strangled.

A whimper came from one of the ladies grouped in the entrance of the pavilion. I looked up to see them gaping, dumbfounded. Then, as one, they lifted their gazes to the person whose presence I’d all but forgotten.

“I didn’t . . . I didn’t . . .” Clara stammered. She stood with her small back plastered to one of the structure’s carved columns, looking like a child called to the headmistress’s office and babbling incoherently.

Aunt Alva’s arm came up, her forefinger aimed at the maid. “Your hands were around her neck. I saw you.”

“I swear . . . I didn’t . . . I swear . . . she was like that . . . I only tried to help . . .”

“Shut up,” Aunt Alva ordered. “Just shut up.”

Her command may have silenced Clara, who clamped her lips tight, but it also released a flurry of cries and exclamations from the other women. Alva whirled about to shush them. Her gaze must have landed on her daughter, because she immediately said, “Go back to the house. Tell Grafton to call for the police. Go, Consuelo, now.”

I don’t know how much my cousin saw. I wanted to go to her, to comfort her, but when I looked up from the sight that held me so horribly entranced, she had gone.

“W
e caught you red-handed, girl. What other reason could you have had for being out here?”

Aunt Alva had Clara backed up against that support column so tightly I could have sworn the wood creaked in protest. Clara sobbed hysterically, continuing to shake her head in denial.

“Why did you murder Madame Devereaux?” Aunt Alva pressed her flushed face close to Clara’s, spittle flying from her lips. “You’d better start talking, girl. . . .”

It was that imminent
or else
that propelled me across the pavilion to them. I’d wanted to stay with Madame Devereaux until the police came, just stand at her side to watch over her. It seemed heartless to simply leave the poor woman half slumped so grotesquely in her chair, where she could easily tip to one side and slither to the floor. She deserved more dignity than that, didn’t she?

Yet the living also deserved their dignity, and Aunt Alva was doing a blasted good job of stripping Clara of hers. I stepped up beside them and placed a hand on each of their shoulders— Clara’s thin, shaking one and Aunt Alva’s much sturdier one. Aunt Alva veered toward me as if to swing a punch. I winced, but the blow never came.

“Aunt Alva, we don’t know that Clara did anything wrong. Please, we should wait for the police.”

“What other reason could a housemaid have for being in the gardens?” Alva never took her eyes off of the blubbering Clara. “Well? Why were you out here?”

Clara clutched at the railing on either side of the column behind her until her fingernails scraped the wood. “I . . . I . . . came to see if anyone needed anything. If Madame wanted—”

“Liar!” Alva’s shout squeezed a sob from Clara, who shut her eyes and turned her face away. “It’s not your job to see if my guests need anything. Grafton wouldn’t have sent you out here.” The emphasis Aunt Alva put on
you
reduced Clara to the status of the lowliest street urchin.

“I only w-wanted to . . . to help, ma’am.”

“Then why did we catch you standing behind her, as if you’d just wrapped the scarf around her neck and squeezed the life out of her?”

“I didn’t . . . I didn’t.” Releasing the column behind her, Clara buried her face in her hands and broke down into unintelligible sobs.

“Mrs. Vanderbilt, your niece is right.” Mrs. Stanford’s stern face appeared beside me. “Badgering the girl will accomplish nothing. Leave it to the police. They should be here soon enough.”

I noticed now that the other women had retreated back down the pavilion steps and stood gathered on the walkway. The Spooner sisters had their arms around each other. Their faces were mottled, their eyes watery. Lady Amelia stood off to one side hugging her middle, a pained look on her face.

Hope Stanford, on the other hand, seemed her usual self: stoic, sensible, single-minded. In fact, she moved away now to extinguish the incense and the candles Madame Devereaux had apparently lit in preparation of telling our futures. Was Mrs. Stanford always so unshakable, so calm in the midst of a crisis? Or was her composure due to some other reason? I moved back to Madame Devereaux’s lifeless body, but I studied Hope Stanford until the police arrived.

 

Three of the ladies made their way back to the house while Aunt Alva and Mrs. Stanford and I waited in the pavilion until the police arrived. At Mrs. Stanford’s insistence, Aunt Alva stopped pressing Clara for answers, though she never unpinned her gaze from the girl, not even for an instant. Not that she had much to worry about. Clara barely moved, but instead continued in an almost catatonic trance with her back jammed against the column.

I maintained my vigil beside Madame Devereaux and on one occasion even had to nudge her upright or she might have tumbled over at my feet. That slight movement of her body had seemed so lifelike, bolts of alarm shot through me, and only a firm inner admonishment could resettle my nerves. I’d closed Madame’s eyes, but that didn’t make it any easier to gaze down at that lifeless face or place my hand on that frigid, stiffening shoulder.

Once I felt assured of having her well balanced in the chair, I used the opportunity to study my surroundings. The tarot cards, fanned across the table, meant little to me at first—merely tools of the woman’s trade—until I connected them to the coins littering the tiles beside the desk. Then it struck me. The medium hadn’t simply been awaiting the arrival of Aunt Alva and her guests; she had been engaged in reading someone’s fortune.

Whose, Clara’s? Would a maid have money for such a frivolity? I considered questioning Clara right then, but another glance at the glazed vacancy in her eyes assured me of the unlikelihood of receiving a lucid answer. I resumed my inspection of the pavilion, until something sent me hurrying from Madame Devereaux’s side.

“Look at this,” I said to no one in particular. I bent low, examining bits of muddy grass and tiny pebbles tracked across the floor. I traced the untidy path from Madame Devereaux’s chair to a few feet from the pavilion’s entrance, where the concentration of plant matter suddenly thinned, no doubt due to the arrival of the ladies and me. Apparently we had scattered the evidence with our own footsteps.

Still, I searched for telltale contours that might with some accuracy be called footprints, yet I could make out nothing substantial enough to identify a type or size of shoe. My only educated guess was that the shoes had been damp in order to have tracked in the mess.

Odd. It hadn’t rained in days.

“Finally. The police are here.” The sounds of tramping feet rendered Aunt Alva’s announcement unnecessary.

I couldn’t have said which emotion reigned supreme inside me, relief or chagrin. Yes, I was thankful the authorities had arrived, but the expression on Detective Jesse Whyte’s face made my stomach sink. But perhaps I should clarify. The moment our gazes met, his ironic expression proclaimed he’d not only realized I was once again caught up in a murder investigation, but that he wasn’t the least bit happy about it. I suddenly wished I’d returned to the house when Consuelo had.

Jesse’s first words to me dismissed any doubts I might have had about his sentiments. “Really, Emma? So soon after last time? Is this something you particularly enjoy?”

 

“There were footsteps. I heard them, sir. Running across the grass.”

“She’s lying!”

Once again I hastened to intervene between my aunt and Clara Parker. “Please, Aunt Alva, let her answer Detective Whyte’s questions. How else will we learn the truth?”

“We won’t learn the truth if the chit insists on lying.”

While the uniformed men proceeded to question Marble House’s battalion of servants, the rest of us had moved into the house and upstairs to the room that had once served as Uncle William’s study during the short time he’d lived here before the divorce. Of all the rooms in Marble House, this was the least ornate and the most practical, with clean, masculine lines rendered in leather and hardwood furnishings. Here, one needn’t hesitate to sit for fear of ruining priceless embroidered silks or smudging a gilded finish.

Clara was seated in a stiff-backed side chair in the middle of the room, her body so rigid she might have been held with ropes. One by one, Roberta and Edwina Spooner gave their statements to Jesse and his partner, Detective Dobbs. Next, the officers questioned Lady Amelia, and finally, Hope Stanford. Each gave a nearly identical version of the story. Had they seen anyone other than their little group enter or leave the pavilion? No. Had they seen anyone else in the vicinity of the pavilion? No. In the gardens? No. Were they together during the estimated time of the murder? Yes. And what did they see upon entering the pavilion?

Again, the answers were all the same: Madame Devereaux slumped over the card table and Clara Parker standing directly behind her, her hands on the dead woman’s neck.

Clara protested with a loud whimper at each mention of that last detail. “I was trying to take the scarf off her!”

“There were the tracks of grass on the pavilion floor,” I reminded Jesse. “That does seem to indicate that someone had been in the pavilion before the rest of us arrived.”

“Yes—her!” Aunt Alva’s finger jabbed in Clara’s direction.

I swung to face her. She and I sat together on the camelback sofa beneath the mounted sabers Uncle William had brought home from the family’s trip to India last year. I couldn’t help feeling those crossed swords symbolized Aunt Alva’s and my currently opposing views. I only hoped they were mounted securely. “Are you so eager to see your own maid accused of murder?”

Clara let out another whimper as Aunt Alva replied, “Of course not. But neither am I eager to see a murderess go free.”

“The grass could have been tracked in by Madame Devereaux herself.” This came from Jesse’s partner, Detective Anthony Dobbs. The man sat at Uncle William’s sturdy desk, a pencil in hand, a writing tablet open before him. I scowled at the sarcasm that dripped from the medium’s name. Whether or not the woman had been swindling her customers, she didn’t deserve anyone’s mockery now. Especially this man’s. I narrowed my eyes at him, but he took no notice.

I’d known both police officers most of my life. Jesse lived near my childhood home on the Point section of Newport, beside the harbor on the other side of town. Though he was quite a bit younger than my father, they’d been friends and Jesse had joined us for supper on many a night. Now he was my half brother Brady’s friend, and as often as not kept Brady out of trouble—and jail—whenever my boisterous brother overim-bibed or became tangled in any number of ill-advised activities.

Jesse and his partner couldn’t have been more different, neither in looks nor temperament. Where Jesse’s features bore the youthful, almost delicate look of a boy and his frame tended toward the lean and wiry, Anthony Dobbs sported the face of a bulldog and the body of a prizefighter, and it seemed he derived no shortage of pleasure from bullying my brother at every opportunity.

Would he enjoy doing the same to Clara?

“Clara could have tracked in the grass,” Aunt Alva pointed out.

“I didn’t, ma’am. I stayed on the path.”

“So you say,” Aunt Alva countered.

No one commented, but Detective Dobbs scribbled in his tablet.

One by one Jesse dismissed the ladies until only Aunt Alva and I remained. Aunt Alva I understood; she owned Marble House and was Clara’s employer. As for me . . . I couldn’t help a twinge of pride that perhaps Jesse thought I could help, as I had in Newport’s last, and still quite recent, murder investigation.

Jesse went to look over Dobbs’s shoulder at the notes scrawled in the tablet. He glanced up with a frown. “Mrs. Vanderbilt, isn’t your daughter in residence?”

My aunt stiffened. “She is.”

“We’ll need to question her, too, then.”

“Oh, no, you will not.” Aunt Alva compressed her lips and glowered.

“Was she with you all when Madame Devereaux’s body was discovered?”

Aunt Alva started to shake her head, but a quick glance at me seemed to change her mind. “She was, but she didn’t see anything. I sent her back up to the house before she ever entered the pavilion. It was she who instructed my butler to call the police.”

“And where is she now?” Jesse asked.

“In her room. Where else would she be?”

Jesse scrubbed a hand across his eyes. “Will you please send for her, ma’am.” It wasn’t a question. “It’s possible she might have seen or heard something from her room. On a day like this I’m sure her windows must be open.”

“Her room faces the south garden. She couldn’t have witnessed a thing.”

Jesse met my gaze and I gave a tiny shrug. When Aunt Alva dug in, nothing could persuade her to change her position. If Jesse wanted to question Consuelo, nothing short of a warrant would grant him access to her.

“I can attest to the fact that Consuelo was in her room immediately before we all went out to the pavilion,” I said calmly. “And I’m equally sure she returned there after asking Mr. Grafton to call the police.”

“What makes you so certain?” Dobbs’s voice held a belligerent note.

“I know my cousin.”

“All right, we’ll let it drop,” Jesse conceded. “For now.” He perched at the edge of Uncle William’s desk and crossed his arms over his chest. “Miss Parker, tell me about these footsteps you heard.”

“Allegedly heard,” Aunt Alva murmured. She seemed about to continue. I placed a hand over hers and shot her a warning look, which had the desired effect of silencing any further protests. Instead, she rolled her eyes at me.

Clara fidgeted with the edges of her pinafore, ripping tiny threads from the hem. “I heard them as I came down the path. I looked around, but I didn’t see anyone. Hardly surprising what with all the trees and hedges around the pavilion. Honestly I didn’t think anything of it at the time. There’s so many of us working here, it could have been anyone, or it could have been one of Mrs. Vanderbilt’s guests.”

“According to each of them,” Officer Dobbs mumbled as if to himself, “they were together during the time of the crime. They’re each other’s alibis.”

“Think, Clara.” Jesse bent at the waist to peer into her face. Dobbs scratched away on his pad. “Were they heavy steps, like a man’s? Or lighter, like a woman’s?”

The maid scrunched up her forehead as she considered. She sniffed loudly and wiped the back of her hand across her nose. “I suppose . . . they were heavy. Could have been a man’s. Except. . .”

“Except what, Clara?”

Officer Dobbs’s rapid scratching paused and the room grew silent. Clara’s head turned, her red-rimmed gaze landing on the sofa where Aunt Alva and I sat watching. Clara’s arm came up and she pointed a shaking finger in our direction.

“Except it could have been a woman, if the woman were as stout as Mrs. Vanderbilt.”

“Why, you!” Aunt Alva sprang to her feet. “How
dare
you, you little guttersnipe!”