Death at the Manor, page 6
The look the other woman gave her was wry. “As soon as we returned to that parlor, we would be kicking ourselves for losing the opportunity. I am no good at leaving anything undiscovered if I might know more about it, and you rarely like to keep to your own business.”
Ofelia would have laughed at the very accurate assessment of their respective characters if she hadn’t wanted to keep quiet. But the moment of levity still provided the boost she needed. “Then shall we press on?”
“A moment.” Mrs. Adler approached the room, but instead of going inside, she bent to examine the door, running a single finger over the lock. “There are very few scratches. And they look quite fresh.”
Ofelia drew next to her, squinting at the metal plate. When her father had once gently suggested that she consider wearing spectacles, she had told him airily that she was too young and too vain to consider such a thing. But the difficulty making out such close details made her regret her previously dismissive attitude. She drew back a little, angling her head until the scratches that Mrs. Adler was pointing to came into focus. “They said the manservant Isaiah had to pick the lock because the old woman kept the only key inside with her.”
“So either these scratches are from him, or someone else did the same thing last night.” They both kept their voices low as they spoke, and Mrs. Adler glanced back over her shoulder as though worried someone would overhear them.
“In that case, he would either have had to not recognize them or to have chosen not to say anything,” Ofelia said thoughtfully as she straightened, rubbing the spot between her eyes.
“And if they are from him this morning, that would indicate that either the lock was not picked before or that someone did it very carefully.”
“A difficult feat at night, when someone might have noticed a bright light being carried through the hall.”
“Indeed.” Mrs. Adler straightened as well, her shoulders drawing back as though she were gathering her strength as she finally looked at the room. “But the door is rarely the only way into a room for someone wishing to remain unseen. Shall we continue?”
The room was chilled; with no chance for a maid to come tend to it, the fire had died, not even the banked embers still smoldering. But the curtains were half drawn, and the clouds had parted enough that there was light coming in. Ofelia took deep breaths through her mouth, trying to ignore the smell of death, and glanced at Mrs. Adler. “Where do you want to begin?”
“Well …” The older woman frowned thoughtfully, glancing around. “As I said, the door is not the only way in. And the others are much more difficult to lock from the outside once you have departed.”
While she strode across the room, brisk and determined, to check the windows, Ofelia took a survey of the room. She couldn’t quite bring herself to look at the bed and its lonely occupant—not yet. Instead, she walked slowly around the other three walls, looking for anything to catch her attention.
On the wall next to the door was a small wardrobe, built of heavy, dark wood that looked as though it hadn’t been moved in over a generation. Glancing down, Ofelia could see the wood of the floor had bowed under its weight, but the door swung open noiselessly when she peered inside. Almost no clothing hung there—only one long coat and three dresses that were fussy with lace and nearly a decade out of fashion. Pegs held a lace cap and two limp purses that hung lifelessly from their strings. It could have been the clothing of any genteel but impoverished lady in her declining years. The door was inset with a beautiful mirror, though, but Ofelia caught a glimpse of the bed reflected there and quickly closed it.
Opposite the door was the sitting area in front of the cold fireplace, where presumably Mr. and Miss Wright had sat with their mother before they all retired for the night—though as Miss Wright had let slip, retire was not quite what Mr. Wright had proceeded to do.
On the wall between the main door and the fireplace were two things. The first was a door to a small chamber off the main room. Peeking in, Ofelia saw that it was a privy closet with a fireplace—cold and clean, indicating it hadn’t been used in a few days—a hip bath, and a chamber pot discreetly tucked in the corner. The room was otherwise empty.
The second thing was a writing desk with a chair tucked underneath, and the desk was the only spot in the room that looked crowded. Ofelia stepped over to it eagerly. A crowded desk was often one that had something to reveal about its owner.
In spite of its fullness, though, the desk was surprisingly tidy. There were stacks of unused writing paper on one side of the blotter, a dish full of pens in need of mending, and a single, usable one set out on a tray with the ink bottle. Letters slotted neatly into cubbies, and Ofelia could see as she sifted through them that each cubby was dedicated to a single correspondent. Several of them looked to be lawyers or accountants, one local and one in Winchester. There were no letters from either of her children.
Ofelia frowned. Neither of the Wright children had married or moved away from the family home, a circumstance that spoke of a degree of attachment in the family. But devoted children would have been likely to write to their mother whenever they traveled or visited friends. The absence of any correspondence was … strange.
Ofelia was still puzzling over that when she opened the single drawer in the desk and discovered it held one of her favorite things: a ledger of the household accounts. She seized it eagerly. There were very few things, in her opinion, that could shed more light on a family’s secrets and idiosyncrasies than their daily finances.
It only took her a few minutes of scanning the pages to realize there was indeed something odd about the Wright family’s accounts: they were unexpectedly wealthy.
Ofelia frowned and, flipping back several pages, read through the columns more carefully, doing the sums in her head as she went. There was a great deal of money coming in, noted in a neat, tiny, feminine hand: a mixture of investment income that arrived every month and rents on several buildings in two nearby villages. But there were very few expenditures beyond basic household expenses. The servants, she was glad to note, were not being underpaid—but it seemed as if Mrs. Wright’s children were, with almost no notations for personal expenses or an allowance. Even Thomas Wright, whom Ofelia would have expected to be the actual owner of the house and main recipient of any income from the family’s invested or real holdings, received only an occasional moderate sum to cover his bills. And these, she could see, were paid directly where they were owed, rather than to the son of the house.
It didn’t make sense, not when the house contained such worn furniture and threadbare carpets, so many cold fireplaces and so few servants. Even the old woman’s wardrobe spoke of entrenched penny-pinching and shabby gentility. Ofelia even went further back, expecting to find a large expense for repairing the house or notes about long-standing debts. There was nothing of the sort. As far as she could tell, the Wright family had enough money to live in far more comfort and style than they currently did.
So why did they look as though they were teetering on the edge of poverty?
“They’re all locked from the inside.”
Mrs. Adler’s sudden statement made Ofelia jump, and she slammed the ledger shut without thinking, which in turn made Mrs. Adler jump. They stared at each other for a moment, wide-eyed and alarmed, before each laughed a little nervously.
“My apologies,” Mrs. Adler said. “I had no intention of startling you. What were you looking at?”
“Household accounts.” Ofelia slid the ledger back into its drawer. “Nothing wrong with them, but plenty that is peculiar. What did you find?”
“The windows.” Mrs. Adler gestured at the bank of windows, their glass spotlessly clean but wavy with age, showing the grounds outside as though through a puddle of water. “There is nothing wrong with them, and that is plenty odd. They are all locked from the inside and show no signs of being tampered with.”
Ofelia came to stand next to her friend, both of them frowning at the unmistakably locked windows. “So no one could have come through there,” she said.
“I suppose someone might have come in,” Mrs. Adler said slowly, “but not gone out—not without leaving one of them unlocked.”
“And anyone who did come in that way would have needed to scale the wall straight up,” Ofelia said, craning her neck to peer out through the wavy glass. “There is no roof, or even a trellis, below.”
“So that likely rules out the windows.” Mrs. Adler let out a frustrated huff of breath. “Did you discover anything?”
“Their finances are beyond comfortable. I would even call them rich,” Ofelia said, straightening. “According to the old woman’s household accounts, they have plenty of income. And it seems she allowed almost no expenses.”
“This is getting stranger by the minute. Did you discover anything in the privy closet?”
“Deeply ordinary. And uncomfortable looking.” Ofelia glanced around the room, an exciting idea occurring to her. “Do you think there is a secret entrance somewhere? Old houses are full of such things, are they not?”
“Perhaps in novels,” Mrs. Adler said, a hint of laughter in her voice. “Though, if they were once owned by Catholics … perhaps a priest hole would not be out of the question. But I do not think this is that sort of house.”
“One can never be sure,” Ofelia pointed out, stepping eagerly toward the fireplace. Everything was scrupulously clean, with no convenient layer of dust to indicate where someone might have pulled or pressed a secret lever. Ofelia methodically moved each object on the mantlepiece. When those all proved entirely ordinary, she bent to examine the few decorative carvings that surrounded the fireplace itself. These were a little grimier, but they also failed to produce a single secret passage or bolt hole.
“Did you try the wainscotting?” Mrs. Adler suggested. “Perhaps there is a false panel there.”
Ofelia looked over her shoulder, narrowing her eyes. “Are you laughing at me?”
“Only a little,” Mrs. Adler said, coming forward to follow her own advice and beginning to nudge each panel of the wainscotting with her toe. Ofelia joined in the examination, though it also proved fruitless as they made their way around the room. “As you say, it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility that old houses might contain such things.”
“And I still do not believe that a ghost murdered someone.” Ofelia shivered a little, though she tried to hide it. “Someone had to come into this room. Somehow.”
“On that we are agreed.” Mrs. Adler fell still as her search brought her toward the bed. Ofelia, on the opposite side, stopped as well. “And I do not think we can put off the inevitable any longer. We do not know how much more time we have to poke about.”
“It is a miracle no one has yet come after us,” Ofelia agreed, steeling herself as she met her friend’s eyes. “Shall we?”
They turned as one, and Mrs. Adler, after a deep breath through her mouth, began to walk toward the bed. Ofelia wanted to hang back, but she could hear her father’s voice in her head even as she had the thought. “Once you have made up your mind, never let anyone see you hesitate or be afraid to do what must be done,” he had always said. “Do not be brash or assertive, but you must be confident. It is one of the first lessons you must learn if you wish to help me in my business. And it will be doubly true for you in all parts of life, dear one. There will always be someone looking for weakness in you. Do not show it, no matter how you truly feel.”
He had never come out and said why it would be doubly true for her. He had not needed to. Ofelia hadn’t needed anyone to explain what she had felt in unkind stares and whispers nearly every day of her young life.
She walked toward the bed only a moment after Mrs. Adler.
The curtains around the bed had been drawn back on one side, presumably by Miss Wright, as Isaiah would have hesitated to approach the old woman’s bed. Ofelia had thought she was growing accustomed to the smell, but it grew worse as they drew next to the bed and Mrs. Adler pulled the curtain farther back so there was room for both of them.
Ofelia had never seen a dead body before, not in close quarters, though she knew Mrs. Adler had. Once she looked, it was impossible to tear her eyes away.
The old woman was twisted in the bedclothes, her bulging eyes bloodshot and the skin of her face mottled blue and red. Her jaw had fallen open, and there was something in her frozen expression that spoke of terror and fury in her final moments.
Ofelia shuddered. Mrs. Wright looked frail, alone in that large bed. But there was a wiriness to her body that made Ofelia think she would have been a forceful personality in life.
“I can see why they thought she was frightened to death,” Ofelia whispered, swallowing rapidly against the sick feeling that was rising from her stomach. “It was not a peaceful end.”
“No,” Mrs. Adler calmly agreed, “and she fought against it.” She shivered a little, then shifted her shoulders, as though steeling herself for hard work. “But that does not mean there was anything supernatural involved. Does anything strike you as strange or out of place??”
The two took opposite sides of the bed. Neither of them wanted to get too close to the body, but they searched through the linens as best they could and on the floor around the bed.
“This is odd,” Ofelia said after a moment. “Look at her right hand.”
Both Mrs. Wright’s hands were locked into rigid claws, but while one of them was empty, the other was flung out from her body, the fingers still clutching at the edge of one of the pillows.
“Do you think she reached out and grabbed it in her final moments?” Mrs. Adler asked, coming over and leaning far closer to the corpse than Ofelia had any desire to get, to peer at the hand in question.
“If she did, someone flipped her arm over afterward,” Ofelia said. “Look at the way she’s positioned. Her hand is upside down but still holding on tightly. No one reaches out and grabs at something like that. Not thoughtlessly. It is too awkward.”
“Unless both things happened,” Mrs. Adler mused softly. When Ofelia gave her a puzzled look, she held her hands up on either side of her face, as though pretending to hold something. “If the pillow was on top of her, she could have grabbed at it in that position. And then whoever else was in the room moved both her hands and the pillow.”
“You mean you think someone smothered her,” said Ofelia, feeling cold all over. She took a quick step back from the bed, feeling suddenly even more disturbed, though nothing had truly changed.
“It is a possibility,” Mrs. Adler agreed. “And I never yet heard of a ghost who could do that.”
“But why not move the pillow farther away, then? Why leave it in one hand for someone to notice and wonder at?”
Mrs. Adler raised her brows. “Would you wish to touch the body of the woman you had just killed any more than you had to?”
Ofelia swallowed. “No, likely not.”
“Nor would I.” Mrs. Adler’s voice did not sound quite as calm as her serene expression might indicate, and Ofelia was glad to know she was not the only one feeling unsettled. “Especially not if she was someone I had seen every day. Perhaps even my own mother.”
“Do you mean—” Ofelia’s question was cut off by a sudden, angry voice from the hallway.
“Just what in God’s name do you think you are doing?”
Both women turned quickly, and Ofelia tried to look as innocent as possible as they found themselves confronted by the four men coming through the door. Of the four, only Mr. Spencer didn’t appear surprised to see them there. Ofelia saw the wry look he cast at Mrs. Adler, his brows raised and a slight shrug to his shoulders as if to say that he was sorry for the interruption. Ofelia wanted to glance at Mrs. Adler, to see how she responded, but she kept her attention on the other men eyeing them with varying degrees of displeasure.
Mr. Wright mostly looked tired and confused to find them there. But his concern was clearly about his mother, whom, Ofelia remembered with a sudden jolt of discomfort, he had not yet seen since learning of her death. He made as if to step toward the bed, and Ofelia would have moved respectfully out of his way, but the doctor’s arm shot out, hand up, blocking Mr. Wright’s way.
“Not yet, if you please,” he said, his voice as gruff as the look on his face. It was he who had asked what they were doing, and he now turned a ferocious gaze on the two women, his bushy eyebrows drawing into a single disapproving line. “I ask again, what are you two doing here?”
“Should we not be here?” Ofelia asked, her eyes wide and guileless.
Dr. Mills opened his mouth, then closed it again, frowning even further. “Of course not,” he said. “No one should interfere until we are done with our work.”
“We would not dream of it,” Mrs. Adler said politely, stepping away from the bed. “I assure you, we had no intention of any interference.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“We came to keep watch with poor Mrs. Wright,” Ofelia said earnestly, looping her arm through her friend’s and trying to look as young and innocent as possible. “So that she was not alone.”
“Did you know her well?” Mr. Powell asked, eyebrows rising. “I do not believe I have seen either of you in the neighborhood before.”
“We did not know her at all,” Mrs. Adler admitted. “But as she had not been attended to yet this morning, because of the tragic circumstances, we thought it best that we ensure her poor body was decently covered before you entered the room, sir.” She dropped her voice, sounding a little embarrassed. “It did not seem appropriate to have a passel of men—even gentlemen such as yourselves—traipsing into her room before we had assured ourselves that she was respectable.”
The magistrate looked as though he would bluster at them more—not unreasonably, Ofelia had to admit to herself—but Thomas Wright spoke up.
“I thank you for your care of my mother, ladies,” he said earnestly. “Even after her death, even without knowing her. Of course such womanly delicacy must be expected. My sister would thank you equally were she here. I am sure the magistrate and the doctor can have no objection.”
