Snow White Red-Handed (A Fairy Tale Fatal Mystery) (16 page)

Prue knew a pawnbroker’s shop when she saw one. Ma had squeaked them through the lean times, between benefactors, by selling off jewelry, fancy clothes, and furniture that she’d been given by some gentleman or other in the first flush of his ardor. Which, Prue knew, never lasted. Just like a pastry, you had to make the most of a man’s lovesickness when it was fresh and hot.

Well, when they rolled by the pawnbroker’s shop, Hansel slowed the mule to a crawl. He stared into the display window like he was searching for something. His expression was sort of yearning and bleak all at once. His eyes landed on something—Prue thought it was maybe one of the snuffboxes, one with a gold lid—and his cheeks went red. Then he urged the mule faster.

“Looks like you saw a ghost in that window back there,” Prue said.

“You might say that.” Hansel’s voice was a growl. Sort of like a wounded dog.

Maybe it was better not to talk.

A few moments later, someone called, “Hansel.”

They were trying to get through a clog of pedestrians and carriages in front of a drinking establishment. Traffic had stalled. Coarse laughter and clanking beer glasses sailed out on a tide of tobacco smoke and stinky whale-oil lamp fumes.

Hansel’s shoulders hitched and something—what? Pain? Anger?—washed over his features. Whatever it was, he recognized the voice. He turned.

“Good evening, Franz,” he said.

Franz. Why did that name ring a bell?

Franz was a handsome young man—in a smallish, dark, dapper sort of way—standing on the busy sidewalk. He reminded Prue of a magician. Or maybe an otter. He was about twenty, trim in a black swallowtail coat and crisp white shirt. His black silk stovepipe hat tilted at a rakish angle, and his tie was undone.

Liquored up. No doubt about it.

“Good evening,” Franz said to Hansel. He stepped into the street, close to the hay cart. “Are we speaking English on account of that pretty little thing?”

Prue tilted her chin and gazed past his shoulder. Although it was a relief to learn that two days in the tower hadn’t completely spoiled her looks.

Hansel introduced Prue as his American cousin, Lottie.

Franz—his last name was Lind—sidled even closer. “I had no notion”—he snatched up Prue’s hand and kissed it—“that you had a beautiful little American cousin hidden away somewhere. How positively modern of you.” His accented voice was custard smooth.

“Yes, well,” Hansel said. “Second cousin, actually. She is here paying a visit.”

“Well, Hansel, my man, what are you doing in town?”

“An errand. For the castle mistress.”

A smile spread over Franz’s face. “Oh? Keeps you busy, does she?”

Why was this was such a mirthful topic of conversation for Franz? And such a sore one for Hansel?

“And you, Franz?” Hansel inspected Franz’s fancy duds. “Are you still employed as a croupier in the gaming rooms?”

Something dark flickered across Franz’s face. “No. I am a student now at Heidelberg.”

Hansel tensed.

Something weird was going on between these two.

“Come into the inn here, and have a drink with me,” Franz said. “Surely the mistress of the castle does not have you on
such
a short leash.”

Prue noticed that Hansel’s fists were clenched around the mule reins. But he said, “All right.”

H
ansel helped Prue down from the cart and left the mule under the supervision of a small boy. They entered the stuffy, smoky inn. They found an empty table, and Franz wiggled his fingers for the barmaid.

As they sank into their rough wood chairs, Franz flipped his evening coat so as not to squash his swallowtail. Prue glimpsed a bit of ribbon folded over his belt at his hip. A ribbon striped red, black, and white.

Prue considered herself an authority on fashion. Ladies’ fashions, mostly, but she knew plenty about gents’, too. Ma had subscribed to
Godey’s Lady’s Book
,
Le Salon de la Mode
, and
Peterson’s Magazine
, and Prue had learned the alphabet on their fashion plates. Yet she had never seen anyone wear a bit of colored ribbon over their belt like that.

“If you are studying at Heidelberg, what brings you to Baden-Baden?” Hansel said to Franz, once they had three glasses of beer before them.

“I do, of course, make my home in Heidelberg now. But Baden-Baden has its allures.”

Hansel stared at him coolly over the edge of his beer glass. “You have been gambling.”

Franz shrugged. “This, that, and the other, as they say.” He swigged his beer. His movements were loose and jerky, like he’d been drinking for hours.

“Is that,” Hansel said, leaning forward, “how you are paying for university? And for these fine clothes? With winnings from the gaming rooms?”

Franz ignored the question. “What
I
would like to hear about is the murder at Schloss Grunewald. It has been plastered all over the newspapers and on every serving wench’s wagging tongue.”

Hansel and Prue described what they knew, leaving out the tidbits about Miss Gertie. Oh, and the fact that Prue was not really Hansel’s American cousin Lottie, but the accused murderess herself.

“The objects from the cottage were taken?” Franz repeated, when they got to that part. He lurched forward, sloshing his beer. “Even the skeleton?”

“Even the skeleton,” Hansel said. He leaned in, lowered his voice. “Do you remember, when we were boys, finding that small bone up on the cliff? With my dog?”

That’s
where Prue had heard about Franz. That story.

“Of course,” Franz said. “That little bone gave me nightmares for years. I was frightened that it belonged to a diabolical elf hiding under my bed.”

“It was a dwarf’s bone,” Prue blurted. “Snow White’s dwarf.”

Hansel bugged his eyes at her.

Crackers. Was she not supposed to have said that?

“A dwarf’s bone!” Franz reached over and chucked Prue’s chin. “Fancy that.”

She recoiled.

“Do you mean to suggest,” Franz said, “that the skeleton in that cottage was dug up from the place where we found that bone when we were boys?”

“Yes,” Hansel said. He seemed reluctant to fess up to it.

“How fascinating.” Franz’s eyes glittered.

He wasn’t really drunk. Prue saw it now. He was playacting.

What if some of those boot prints in the dirt, up at the cliff gravesite, had been Franz’s?
That
would give him something to hide.

“Listen here, Lottie.” Franz scooted his chair next to hers and put his mouth so close she felt his moist breath on her earlobe. “What say you about having a bit of fun while you are here on your visit? I am told you American chits are game for a laugh.”

“Now see here,” Hansel said, his voice hot.

“There is,” Franz went on, ignoring Hansel’s warning and Prue’s wrinkled nose, “a masquerade ball here in Baden-Baden tomorrow evening. Fairy tale costumes. Meet me there, and I shall give you an evening you shall never forget.”

“Never.” Prue scooted her chair away.

“No? Not even if I said that I know who you really are?”

Prue’s eyes flew to Hansel. He looked like he’d just tippled an entire bottle of cod liver oil.

“You are that murderess,” Franz said. “Not cousin Lottie.”

“I’m
not
a murderess. That’s slander.”

“Oh, no? Then prove it. Say you shall meet me at the ball tomorrow evening.”

Prue narrowed her eyes. “That’s blackmail.”

“Is that what it is called?” Franz stood and slapped a few coins on the tabletop. “I would be curious to hear how the police would characterize it.” He smiled down at her, revealing too-small teeth and red gums.

Prue suppressed a shudder. “Fine.” She’d go to the ball with him all right. And she’d squeeze his secrets out of him like she was a juicer and he was the last lemon in the world.

But one thing was firm: Prue couldn’t breathe a word of Franz or the ball to Ophelia. If Ophelia knew about Franz, she’d sniff out the risks. She’d put her foot down about Prue taking any more sneak-outs. She’d have reason to look slantwise at Hansel, too.

Prue didn’t give a fig about risks, though. There was no way in creation she was going to miss going on Hansel’s arm to that fairy tale ball.

*   *   *

“So, Miss Gertie
Darling wasn’t fibbing,” Prue said, summing up her excursion to Baden-Baden to Ophelia through the keyhole. “She ain’t an invalid, but she
is
staying at the sanatorium.”

Ophelia nodded, crouched in the cold shadows outside the tower door. What a relief. This would put an end to Prue’s excursions. “I reckon she had nothing to do with it. A dead end. Which means, Prue, you should sit tight in the tower from now on.”

Dead silence on the other side of the door.

“Prue?”

“Yes ma’am,” Prue said. “I’ll sit tight till the cows come home.”

Ophelia stood and headed back towards the main castle. Why did she have the suspicion that Prue was holding something back?

*   *   *

Directly after breakfast
the next morning, Gabriel walked up to Schloss Grunewald. The funeral was scheduled for later, Gabriel had heard, and he had no wish to attend. But the gardener boy, Hansel, had never replied to his note, and Gabriel desired to investigate the gravesite on the cliff with such fierceness his every muscle was taut.

Gabriel discovered Hansel hoeing a long, lush row of beans in the kitchen gardens.

“Hello there, lad,” Gabriel said.

Hansel froze and turned. “Professor Penrose, is it not? You sent that note.”

“Yes. I won’t beat around the bush, Hansel. I see you’ve work to do. Miss Flax apprised me of the existence—the possible existence—of a gravesite on a cliff in the woods about here. Of your suspicion that the skeleton found in the cottage was, in fact, dug up from that cliff.”

Hansel leaned on his hoe. His expression was pleasant yet closed. “Yes.”

“Would you tell me how I might reach that cliff? I wish to examine it myself.”

Hansel shrugged. “Very well.” He gave Gabriel directions, starting from the bottom of the orchard.

“Seems simple enough,” Gabriel said. “I am most obliged.”

“No trouble,” Hansel said, hoisting his hoe. “No trouble at all.”

*   *   *

Homer T. Coop’s
funeral was held in Schloss Grunewald’s dim, vaulted chapel. Reddish light bled through the stained-glass windows, and the tapers on the altar sputtered. Spiders scurried across the flagstone floor.

Ophelia’s skin crawled as she watched yet another eight-legged mite dart behind a hymnal. What a pity Inspector Schubert wasn’t here to frolic with his kin.

She sat with the other servants and Mr. Smith in a rear pew.

In the pulpit, a robed priest with a big sniffer and hooded eyes droned on in Latin.

Mr. Coop had not, as far as Ophelia knew, been a pious man. He probably would’ve never guessed his funeral would be conducted by a German Catholic priest, or that he’d be laid to rest in the ancestral crypt of a fizzled-out aristocratic family. But Mrs. Coop had insisted on these arrangements. It seemed she was bent on staying in the castle indefinitely, now that her husband’s business ventures would no longer require her to return home.

But Ophelia wasn’t paying much attention to the funeral mass. When she wasn’t dodging spiders, she was watching the back of Mr. Hunt, who sat between Mrs. Coop and Amaryllis in the first pew.

If Mr. Hunt had killed Mr. Coop, and if he planned to kill Mrs. Coop next and then marry Amaryllis for her money, there had to be some sign of it.

Ophelia scrutinized them with eagle eyes.

Mrs. Coop wore a black crepe gown and a complicated black veiled hat, and her plump shoulders heaved with silent sobs. Now and then, she stole a sidelong glance at Hunt—gauging, by the looks of it, what effect her display of grief had on him.

Amaryllis, in a nun-like gown of black wool, a plain black shawl, and a close, spinsterly hat, now and then cast vitriolic glances at her elder sister. Ophelia saw, in profile, her carrot-like nose and curled upper lip.

Hunt, dressed to crisp perfection in a dark suit, merely seemed bored and paid neither lady any heed.

Yet he had accepted Miss Amaryllis’s scented hankie and Mrs. Coop’s invitation to the funeral. Why would he have done those things, if not to further his sinister plot?

*   *   *

Karl and Wilhelm,
the two footmen, with the aid of Hansel and a burly gent from Schilltag, hauled Mr. Coop’s coffin down the stone stairs to the crypt beneath the chapel.

Everyone followed.

The stairwell was covered with lacework patches of lichen, and the air smelled of cold minerals.

Inside the crypt, with its arched ceiling and marble pillars, there were rows of carved stone sarcophagi with the blank eyes and crossed hands of generations of Grunewalds.

Ophelia tasted in the back of her throat, rather than smelled, decay. She drew closer to Cook and Freda.

The men slid the coffin onto a stone dais. Mrs. Coop launched into a fresh bout of weeping, and the priest started up with more Latin.

Ophelia had a better view of Hunt now, which was only somewhat obstructed by short Mr. Smith just in front of her.

Hunt stood partially behind one of the marble pillars, and his sculpted features were as empty as those of the sarcophagi. Yet he seemed to be fidgeting with something inside his breast pocket.

Ophelia’s heart squeezed. He wouldn’t dare murder Mrs. Coop in front of all these people, would he?

She stood on tiptoe, straining to see better. That would foil his carefully laid plans, and—

“
Ach
,” Cook hissed in Ophelia’s ear. “You trod on my toe, clumsy girl.”

Ophelia gave her a sheepish smile. “Sorry,” she whispered.

Cook sniffed, and Katrina threw her the evil eye.

Mr. Smith glanced back with a sharpness in his usually mild blue eyes. Ophelia saw that his eyes were reddened. She gave him an apologetic smile.

When she looked over to Hunt again, he was no longer fidgeting with his pocket.

But—she glimpsed a flash of white a few steps from Hunt—Amaryllis was furtively edging an envelope beneath her black shawl.

*   *   *

Gabriel hiked with
Winkler to the site in the wood.

Gabriel was in an ill temper, and hot, and furious with Hansel. The lad’s directions had sent Gabriel on a wild goose chase that led him right back to where he had started, at the bottom of the orchard. Hansel did not, it seemed, wish for Gabriel to go anywhere near that cliff. Like every other local resident, Hansel was hiding something.

The thicket around the cottage had been almost completely cleared, leaving the cottage exposed to the late morning sunlight. From behind the house, echoes of chopping rose up.

“Herz is still cutting away,” Winkler said in response to Gabriel’s quizzical look. “He claims that he shall finish today, although he seemed reluctant to be done with it.”

“That is . . . all he said?”

“He did mutter something about payment, too—these peasants are always begging for handouts, are they not?—but I suggested he take that up with the lady of the castle.”

Good. Gabriel tossed his knapsack onto the mossy ground. Herz had not thought it fit to mention having captured Gabriel in a steel man-trap in the wood the night before last. Perhaps whomever Herz was working for had thought it best to simply watch and wait.

They approached the cottage. It was of half-timbered construction, and the spaces between the wooden beams were filled in with what appeared to be wattle and daub, a substance of slats, straw, and clay. Flecks of gold winked in the clay.

The cottage could be very, very old. Wattle and daub was a building technique that had been used for eons.

The chopping noise stopped. Herz emerged from behind the house, beetle-browed and perspiring, with his sleeves rolled back.

Gabriel met his stare. Herz’s lips peeled back.

“Good morning,” Gabriel said to him in a genial tone. “Splendid work on clearing the place.”

Herz said nothing in response but turned to Winkler. “I am finished.”

Then he looked back at Gabriel as he swung his axe, with rather more force than necessary, over his shoulder.

“I shall just go look it over,” Winkler said, toddling round the corner of the cottage.

As soon as Winkler was out of earshot, Gabriel said softly, “Not especially gallant of you, Herz, to have hauled a lady about like you did two nights ago. And Miss Flax is, if you weren’t aware, Mrs. Coop’s maid. She could have your head for that.”