Must the Maiden Die (9 page)

Glynis didn't know what to think. Should she
be reassured by the widow's display of remarkable self-control, or
be concerned that Helga Brant might be in shock, and beyond
comprehending the violent death of her husband? She was about to
decline the offer of tea when Mrs. Brant reached for the braided
cord that would summon a servant, and gave it a tug.

"Maybe the lady would prefer something
stronger, Mother," said a male voice at the far corner of the
parlor. The voice was accompanied by the chink of glass.

Startled, Glynis spun round to see Helga
Brant's younger son, Konrad, standing at a richly carved mahogany
pier table. Ash-brown hair curled over his linen collar, and while
his coloring was similar to that of his mother, in voice and
posture he resembled almost exactly his blond brother, Erich.
Glynis, in fact, had initially been sure it was Erich who had
spoken.

At the moment, Konrad was pouring into a
tumbler what the bottle's label showed to be the blended dark
whiskey called Kentucky bourbon.

"Care to join me, Miss Tryon?" Not waiting
for a reply, Konrad briefly raised his glass to her before throwing
back his head and downing the bourbon in several swallows. "Damn
it," he unexpectedly muttered, "if Kentucky votes to secede, I'll
have to stop drinking its bourbon. Certainly a deplorable
hardship."

Glynis couldn't sense which to him would be
more of a hardship: Kentucky's secession or the want of its
bourbon. Or possibly it was both, because bringing the tumbler down
hard on the table, Konrad stretched out his right hand again for
the bottle. "Once more for the Union and President Abe!" he
forcefully declared.

"Konrad, I'd prefer that you didn't
indulge," Helga Brant objected, in a firmer tone than Glynis would
have thought her capable.

"That's right, Konrad, my sweet," came
another voice, this belonging to a shapely, dark-haired woman,
probably in her early thirties, Glynis guessed, who had just
entered the parlor. She had slipped sideways through the doorway,
to accommodate her wide, black hoop skirt. In so doing, she did not
seem to note, or care to note, that her revealing neckline, not
quite in keeping with the occasion, had edged down to reveal still
more.

She waved the wine glass in her hand at the
bourbon bottle, purring to Konrad, "Mama thinks you've had enough
of that. Remember, dear boy, you must mind your mama!"

Konrad ignored them both by pouring himself
another generous measure of bourbon.

The woman, whom Glynis had belatedly
recognized as Erich's wife, moved with lithesome grace to the
table, where she brushed her hand slowly over her brother-in-law's
cheek. And while the voluminous skirt made it impossible for her to
brush any more than a hand over him, the gesture was clearly
intended to be intimate. When it evoked no visible response from
Konrad, his sister-in-law smiled up at him in a faintly taunting
manner, and reached around him for a decanter.

The decanter might have contained wine,
although Glynis was too distracted by the unnatural atmosphere of
the room to pay much heed. She had the sudden notion that these
people were not the immediate relatives of a recently deceased man,
but were a company of actors, or impersonators hired by a family
too distraught to face outsiders.

Erich's wife now looked over at Glynis with
lustrous eyes, dark as jet beads in the ivory oval of her face. "I
don't believe we've ever been formally introduced, Miss Tryon."

"No, Tirzah, probably not," said Konrad. "I
doubt you'd have much occasion to visit a library." He turned to
Glynis, saying, "Tirzah doesn't read, you see. But no one minds
this defect, particularly not my brother, for whom
beauty is its
own excuse for being. A
mawkish defense if ever I heard one—and
who was it wrote that?"

Glynis, confused by this abrupt turn, and by
the sardonic half-smile that he directed at her with brows raised
in question, responded reflexively, "It was Emerson." Then felt a
flush rise as, to her embarrassment, this earned a prolonged look
of appraisal from Konrad.

"Ah, yes, Emerson," he said, fingering a
small, metallic American flag pinned to the lapel of his box coat.
"And happily, unlike our Tirzah, you evidently read, Miss
Tryon—which must be a decided advantage for a librarian."

Again came the smile that was not a smile,
and this time Konrad lifted his glass to his sister-in-law before
tossing back the drink as he had the previous. Glynis wondered how
long he had been at this.

Tirzah, having cheerfully ignored him, now
said to Glynis, "As you see, Miss Tryon, my brother-in-law has very
bad manners. Would you care for a glass of port? Surely my
venerable mother-in-law won't object to that! Then again she might,
so we shall all have to beg her forgiveness."

After Glynis murmured a refusal, she stole a
glance at Helga Brant, and found the woman watching her
daughter-in-law with a disconcerting intensity. Then her gaze moved
to Glynis. For a brief instant their eyes met, before Mrs. Brant
looked away.

To Glynis's profound relief, she heard
Cullen's voice coming from the hall. When he didn't materialize,
she nodded to the others, and started for the doorway. And nearly
collided with the dining room's silver tea service. The servant
carrying the tray—at least Glynis assumed the man was a servant,
since he had a deferential manner that no one else in the house
seemed to possess—stopped and bowed briefly. Then he stepped aside
to allow her past him.

Glynis came face-to-face with a pinch-faced
woman in a black maid's uniform, who had been following the man.
She was holding a plate mounded with something that was covered
with a large white damask napkin and smelled like freshly baked
pastry. Glynis tried to move aside, but the woman swayed directly
into her, sending fruit tarts flying in all directions.

The maid gasped dramatically and sank to her
knees, and then began sobbing. Since everyone else in the room
seemed to be frozen in place, Glynis bent over the woman and put a
hand on her shoulder in an attempt to apologize—for what she wasn't
certain, but the poor woman must have felt humiliated, and
something had to be done. The woman shoved Glynis's hand away,
while continuing to sob with a rising intensity that sounded
perilously close to hysteria.

"Phoebe, do calm down," said Konrad Brant.
He lifted the distraught woman to her feet and, while nearly
dragging her from the room, said to Glynis over his shoulder, "Not
to worry. She does this every so often. Clements," he added,
"please see to Miss Tryon."

Glynis felt a hand grasp her elbow, and she
was whisked from the room by the manservant, who deposited her in
the hall and, with another short bow, immediately returned to the
parlor. Someone, probably at Cullen's direction, had placed
several lanterns in the hallway, thus diminishing the gloom.

Sobs interspersed with prolonged wails from
the end of the corridor implied where the unfortunate Phoebe had
been taken. Then a door closed, the sobs ceased, and Konrad
reappeared. He passed Cullen and Neva, who were standing in the
hall, and gave Glynis a wry smile before he disappeared again into
the parlor.

She saw Neva and Cullen waiting near a door
beyond the dining room. They were both looking at her with
incredulous expressions, but she decided that she would not even
try to explain the scene in the parlor. And if that slightly ajar
door by which Cullen and Neva stood led to Roland Brant's library,
she would go no farther. Neither would she return to the Brants,
none of whom she could characterize as grieving, at least not in
any sense that she understood. They were unmistakably tense, yes.
In shock, perhaps. But not grieving.

She had paused at the foot of the oaken
staircase, but Cullen motioned for her to come down the hall. If
she shook her head, the light was still so dim he might not see it.
If she spoke to him, it could bring Konrad and Tirzah out into the
hall with wine and bourbon in hand. The quantity of spirits being
consumed here was guaranteed to rankle Dr. Cardoza-Levy, and it
might be best to avoid this. Seneca Falls was in the forefront of
the temperance movement, and Neva had been known to deliver a
lecture on abstinence for less cause than what she would find in
that parlor. Glynis doubted that a lecture would prove fruitful
here and it would prolong their stay. Then the sound of steps at
the top of the staircase gave her no choice. She went down the long
hall, passing by another closed door, as Erich descended the
stairs.

He paused at the foot, sending the three of
them a glowering look before going into the front parlor, his
behavior Glynis finding more appropriate than what she'd witnessed
of the other family members. Erich, at least, seemed to have
grasped the fact of his father's murder. Or it might be, she
thought uneasily, that for good reason he'd had more time to adjust
to it. She suddenly wondered if Roland Brant had made a will. And
who in this house stood to gain most by his death?

"Glynis, I'd like you to take a look in
there," Cullen said when she reached him, gesturing toward what
must be the dead man's library.

"Whatever for?"

Neva ran a hand over her eyes in obvious
fatigue. "Because I would like to leave this madhouse and go home!"
she stated. "But the good constable here insists that we continue a
discussion that would be better left until tomorrow. I am not
performing an autopsy tonight
—
I'm too tired to think
straight! So let's get your thoughts, Glynis."

"Thoughts about what?"

"The library," answered Cullen. "I want your
impression of it. And by the way, Clements thinks that when he
found Brant's body, the far, outside door of the library had been
closed and bolted—though he grudgingly admitted he might be
mistaken about it. But he was certain that he'd bolted that door
himself last night. Said he always checked it."

As Glynis had dreaded, there seemed little
hope of avoiding this undertaking, as from experience she knew
that Neva and Cullen could continue to argue for some time. And
she
,
too, wanted to go home.

"Very well," she said, "but I don't know what good
it will do." She drew in a breath, let it out, and walked into
Roland Brant's library. The room held a pungent, unpleasant odor
that she tried in vain to ignore.

A pendant kerosene library lamp suspended
from center ceiling gave adequate light, and polished the tooled,
dark leather spines of volumes that almost filled two
floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Some other volumes, though, lay strewn
over the floor, their spines cracked and their pages torn, causing
Glynis to wince. A desk with papers scattered in disarray over its
surface, and behind it an overturned leather-covered chair, stood
in front of a curious-looking door. It consisted of small panes of
glass, much like one of the tall, mullioned windows in her own
library. She'd never seen anything like it before, and wondered if
the door had been acquired during Roland Brant's frequent travels.
The glass door stood with its drapery drawn aside, and when she
went to it and turned the brass handle, the door readily swung open
onto a small, bricked terrace. The servant Clements had said the
door had been closed and bolted; Glynis saw now that the brass bolt
could only have been shot home from inside the room. And none of
the small panes of glass appeared to be broken or newly
glazed.

Against another wall of the library sat
heavy mahogany cabinets, one of which, from the intricately shaped
keyhole on its door, was obviously a safe. Its hinged door stood
open. When Glynis bent over to glance inside, she could see several
steel boxes with their lids raised and a jumble of leather folders.
Presumably Cullen had asked if anything had been removed. She also
presumed, since the open safe and the room's disorder so clearly
suggested robbery as the motive for Brant's murder, that he might
want her to look for something less obvious.

A grouping of small chalk-and-ink etchings
of Ruben's nudes hung on the only wall lacking cabinets and
shelves. Several of the etchings were askew, as if disturbed during
a search or a struggle; otherwise the room, in stark contrast to
the parlor, was free of ornamentation. Glynis took a hesitant step
around the desk and looked down. There, on a rich burgundy and blue
Persian rug at the desk's far side, and thus concealed from the
view of anyone passing down the hall, was the rigid corpse of
Roland Brant, the bone handle of a knife protruding from his
chest.

Although she had been expecting it,
imagining it, the reality struck a hard blow for which she could
not have prepared herself. She backed up against the desk for
support, and stood there in an attempt to merely observe. Cullen
wanted her impressions and she would fail him unless she could move
past this first numbing impact.

The scene looked incongruous to her—not
withstanding that suspicious death always looked that way—but this
death looked particularly so. Roland Brant had been a man she
thought of as vigorous, capable, forceful in presence. The position
of the body seemed telling: rolled partially on its side, the
forearms stiffly raised, the fingers curved like claws.

Although a rather short man, he had been
sturdily built and should have been able to defend himself, unless
his killer had caught him unawares. That could point to a stranger,
in spite of Cullen's dismissal of the notion as farfetched. Brant
might have surprised a thief already inside the room when he
entered. Or, if Clements had erred about the door being bolted, and
if Brant had been seated at his desk, the thief could have come in
behind him and Brant's reaction had not been fast enough.

Then, too, the killer could have been
someone familiar to him; someone who he had learned, but learned
too late, meant him harm. Else why the curved fingers that might
before death have been clenched into fists?