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

If the Shoe Fits . . .

She drew the slipper from her cloak. Her eyes, adjusting to the thin moonlight, picked out the faintest of shapes on a path between two rows of trees. Could they be . . . footprints?

She positioned the slipper inside one of the prints. It—well, it
seemed
to fit. The problem was, it wasn’t a complete print.

“You search for something,
fräulein
?” a gruff voice said behind her.

Ophelia froze. Then, slowly, she straightened and turned.

There was a man a couple of paces off to the side in the shadow of an apple tree. He had a bushy dark beard.

And a long-barreled gun aimed straight at her noggin . . .

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SNOW WHITE RED-HANDED

A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

Copyright © 2014 by Maia Chance.

Excerpt from
Cinderella Six Feet Under
by Maia Chance copyright © 2014 by Maia Chance.

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eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-14001-1

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / November 2014

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Henry and Aesa, my beloved fairy tale elves.

The great deeps of a boundless forest have a beguiling and impressive charm in any country; but German legends and fairy tales have given these an added charm. They have peopled all that region with gnomes, and dwarfs, and all sorts of mysterious and uncanny creatures. At the time I am writing of, I had been reading so much of this literature that sometimes I was not sure but I was beginning to believe in the gnomes and fairies as realities.

—Mark Twain,
A Tramp Abroad
(1880)

SS
Leviathan

Somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean

August 1867

M
iss Ophelia Flax was neither a professional confidence trickster nor a lady’s maid, but she’d played both on the stage. In desperate circumstances like these, that would have to do.

“Who told you that our maid Marie gave notice?” Mrs. Coop said. Her diamond earrings wobbled.

Miss Amaryllis, sitting beside Mrs. Coop on the sofa, sniffed and added, “Uppity French tart.”

If ever there were two wicked stepsisters, here they were, taking tea in the SS
Leviathan
’s stuffy first-class stateroom number eighteen: thick-waisted, brassy-haired Mrs. Coop, clutching at her fading bloom in a deshabille gown of pink ribbons and Brussels lace, and her much younger sister Miss Amaryllis, a bony damsel of twenty or so with complexion spots, slumped shoulders, and a green silk gown that resembled a lampshade. They looked up at Ophelia, expectant and hostile.

Ophelia stood before them, tall and plain in the gray woolen traveling dress, black gloves, and prim buttoned boots she’d borrowed—
stolen
was such a rotten word—from the costume trunks of Howard DeLuxe’s Varieties in the ship’s hold.

“Your maid’s abandonment of her post,” Ophelia said, “came to my attention during my midday promenade on the first-class deck.”

She needn’t mention that her own cramped berth was in the bowels of third class, where it stank of sour cabbage and you felt the ship’s engines vibrating in your teeth.

“Embarrassing scene.” Mrs. Coop pitched herself forward to reach for a cream puff. “The way Marie threw her apron at me! She always did behave as though she were my—my
superior
.”

“It wasn’t your fault, ma’am,” Ophelia said. “French maids are notoriously fickle. They’re not the best for service, I’m afraid.”

“But everyone in New York’s got one. They’re simply mad for them.”

“It is my understanding, ma’am, that while a certain . . . class of society cling to the outdated notion that a French lady’s maid is the height of elegance, the Van Der Snoots and De Schmeers and”—Ophelia scanned the stateroom’s luxurious furnishings—“St. Armoire ladies have of late discovered that a Yankee lady’s maid is best.”

“Yankee?” Mrs. Coop’s bitten cream puff hovered in midair. Yellowish filling oozed from the sides.

“Yes, ma’am. Yankee girls are honest, hardworking, modest, and loyal.”

Miss Amaryllis slitted her eyes. “I suppose you’re a Yankee girl?”

“Indeed I am. Born and bred on a farmstead in New Hampshire, miss.”

That was true. She’d leave out the bits about the textile mill and the traveling circus. They didn’t have the same wholesome ring.

“I’ll find a new maid when we reach Germany,” Mrs. Coop said. “I’ve made up my mind. Why, if I had known Marie would quit in the midst of my honeymoon voyage, I’d have left her on the dock in Manhattan!”

“Another virtue of Yankee girls,” Ophelia said, “is their ability to arrange coiffures, make cosmetic preparations, and, if needed—although I’m certain ma’am has no need—apply powders and tints with a hand as subtle as nature herself.”

A lie, of course. But Ophelia was an actress—or she had been up until four hours ago, when Howard DeLuxe had given Prue the boot and Ophelia had been obliged to quit—and putting on greasepaint was one thing she knew how to do well.

“Yankee girls use face paint?” Mrs. Coop said. “Why, you said it yourself. They’re as plain as potatoes.”

“But they learned from their grandmothers, ma’am, the arts of medicinal plants. My own gran taught me to whip up an elderflower tincture that returns the skin to snowy youth—”

Another fib. But Mrs. Coop’s eyes glimmered with interest.

“—and a
Pomade Victoria
of beeswax and almond oil that makes the hair shine like gold, a salve of
Balsam Peru
that makes complexion spots vanish.” Ophelia leaned forward. “I could not help noticing Miss Amaryllis’s unfortunate condition.”

“Why, the cheek!” Mrs. Coop’s bosom heaved.

Miss Amaryllis glared up at Ophelia and bit into a biscuit with a snap.

“And,” Ophelia said, “a pleasant-tasting tonic of vinegar that slims a lady’s waist without effort.”

Mrs. Coop’s half-eaten cream puff plopped onto her plate.

Ophelia had hooked her halibut.

“Here,” Ophelia said, drawing two sealed envelopes from her pocket, “are my letters of reference. I, and my young acquaintance, Miss Prudence Bright, were traveling to England to work in the employ of Lady Cheshingham at Greyson Hall in Shropshire.”

Lady Cheshingham was, in truth, the lead character in the risqué comedy
Lady Cheshingham’s Charge
, which Howard DeLuxe’s Varieties had performed in May. The letters were forgeries Ophelia had penned an hour earlier.

Mrs. Coop fingered the envelopes. “Ah, yes, yes, Lady Cheshingham.”

“While already shipboard, I belatedly read a missive I’d received from Lord Cheshingham on the eve of our voyage, which informed me that the lady had passed away.”

“Good heavens.”

“Yes. A tragedy. She was so young.”

“I had heard so many wonderful things about her.”

“Miss Bright and I, then, are in want of employment.”

Want
of
employment
didn’t really pin down the gravity of their circumstances. With the steamship barreling towards Southampton, Ophelia and Prue, with no jobs, only a few dollars, and no acquaintances in England, were well and truly up a stump.

“There are two of you?” Mrs. Coop sounded uncertain. “I—I must ask my husband. We are staying at our castle only until the winter.”

Castle?
Hm. Surely a figure of speech.

“Of course,” Ophelia said, and made a show of tearing at the cambric handkerchief she’d plucked from her sleeve.

But she oughtn’t get too carried away in her role. Mr. DeLuxe had always complained that she, having once beguiled her audience, tended to careen towards the melodramatic.

She put the hankie away. “Have you, ma’am, tried Russian face powder?”

Mrs. Coop touched her thickly powdered cheek. “I’ve always used French.”

“Russian is the best, used first by the czarina Catherine. It’s got crushed pearls in it—pearls from the North Sea, which restore the complexion to a state of infancy. But don’t tell anyone. It’ll be our little secret.”

“Pearls for Mrs. Pearl Coop,” Miss Amaryllis said into her teacup. “How poetic.”

“It is easier, Amaryllis,” Mrs. Coop said through clenched teeth, “to catch flies with honey than with vinegar.”

“Whatever would I want with flies?”

“A figure of speech, dear. Perhaps it would be best if you married your
own
fly, rather than straggling along with Homer and me.”

“Homer a fly?” Miss Amaryllis smirked. “More of a frog, don’t you think?”

“If I may be so bold,” Ophelia interrupted, “it would be a privilege to attend to such lovely, refined ladies.”

Mrs. Coop blinked, and Miss Amaryllis leaned against the sofa arm and propped her chin sulkily on her hand.

Mrs. Coop sighed and picked up her cream puff. “It seems we’ve no choice in the matter. When can you start?”

Ophelia held in an exhalation of relief. “Immediately, ma’am,” she said.

*   *   *

“Well?” Prue flung
herself face-up on her narrow berth. Her cheeks were blotchy and wet with tears.

Ophelia shut the cabin door. “We have jobs.”

“That’s splendiferous!”

“I am to be a lady’s maid—”

Prue’s face fell.

“—and you are to be a scullery maid.”

“Scullery maid?” Prue struggled to a seated position. Golden ringlets tumbled around her flushed face and her eyes of enamel blue. She was the closest thing to a china doll that a nineteen-year-old American girl could be. Until, that is, she opened her mouth to speak. “I ain’t cut out for a scullery maid, Ophelia. I’m clumsy, for starters, but more than that, I ain’t got the
concentration
to peel carrots all day.”

Ophelia wholeheartedly agreed. “You’ll manage,” she said. She stripped off the stolen gloves. “It’s only a bit of washing pots and scrubbing vegetables.”

“Why can’t I be a lady’s maid, too?”

“Mrs. Coop and Miss Amaryllis desired but one lady’s maid between them. We are lucky they agreed to take you on at all. Don’t look so weepy. It’s only for a few months, until we save up enough to buy passage back to America. Besides, we don’t have another plan.”

The plan
had
been to perform with Howard DeLuxe’s Varieties in its limited engagement at the Pegasus Theater on the Strand. “Limited engagement” meant for however long gin-soaked London gents would pack the seats to watch the troupe’s bawdy skits and musical numbers. “The Lusty Whalers of Nantucket” had top billing, alongside a bit about cowgirls and Indians, a romantic scene in which Ophelia played Pocahontas, and “Paul Revere’s Bride,” featuring a horse that galloped offstage with a scantily clad Puritan wench.

“We could go find my Ma,” Prue said. “Nat—you know, the feller who paints the scenery—told me this afternoon he heard she was in Europe.”

“We haven’t any notion where.” Ophelia sank onto the edge of her own berth. “Europe is enormous, not to mention expensive. And she could just as easily be in New York.”

“A scullery maid.” Prue’s tears were spouting again. “What’ll become of me? I ain’t got anyone. Ma never wanted me—”

“Now you know that isn’t true.” Ophelia handed over a hankie.

“If she’d hornswoggled a millionaire into marrying her when I was a baby, she would’ve left me then.”

“Nonsense.”

Prue noisily blew her nose.

Her mother, Miss Henrietta Bright, had been the star actress in Howard DeLuxe’s Varieties, and like so many actresses, she had supplemented her income with—to mince words—additional business endeavors. Last year, she’d run off with one of her admirers. Some said he was a Wall Street tycoon, others that he was a European blue blood. Either way, Prue’s mother had abandoned a flighty girl who possessed all the common sense of a tadpole. Ophelia had no living family of her own—a missing brother and a father she’d never met hardly counted—so she’d taken Prue under her wing.

Ophelia bent to unbutton the stolen boots; they were too small, and her toes felt numb. “You know I have a little money saved up, in the bank in New York—”

“For your farm! You’ve been scrimping for ages.”

“I have.” A vision of misty green fields, a white barn, and sweet-eyed dairy cows rose up in Ophelia’s mind’s eye. It was a vision that often lulled her to sleep, that got her through slushy November afternoons and exhausting double matinee performances. “When I buy my farm someday, well, you can come and live with me there.”

Prue wrinkled her nose. “Will I have to milk the cows?”

“Certainly not.”

“Snatch it, you’re just being nice. You’re always being too nice. Just because Mr. DeLuxe sent me packing don’t mean
you
should’ve quit.”

Ophelia said nothing as she yanked off the boots. But she knew exactly what became of pretty, silly, penniless girls who didn’t have a protector, and the idea of Prue alone on the streets of London didn’t bear thinking about.

“You could’ve been a lead actress someday, Ophelia. And now you’re just a maid.”

“Fiddlesticks. Acting has merely been a way to pay for my daily bread.”

“When you filled in as Cleopatra when Flossie broke her arm, you got a standing ovation and enough roses to fill three bathtubs. You were a stunner.”

“In a wig and greasepaint,” Ophelia said. “Gospel truth, it doesn’t concern me in the least that without Cleopatra kohl-lined eyes or Marie Antoinette rouged cheeks, I blend nicely into the backdrop. I’m five and twenty years of age, plenty old enough to have made peace with myself. I’m not saying I’m some mousy thing who gets stepped on—”

“Course not. You’re a beanstalk.”

“Not as tall as that, perhaps.” In truth, Ophelia
was
tall, and she had large feet, and no corset could mold her straight figure into a fashion plate’s hourglass. But her oval face, molasses-colored eyes, and light brown hair were presentable enough. “Anyway, since I’m an actress, a knack for blending in is an asset.” She wiggled her blissfully freed toes. “Now. If we’re ever to get back home in one piece, we ought to prepare ourselves for our new roles as maids.”

*   *   *

“Where in tarnation
are they taking us?” Prue said three days later. She scrubbed at the grimy coach window with her fist. Their coach creaked and jostled up the mountainous road like a rheumatic mule. “Everything was all right until we got off at that bad railway station—”

“Baden-Baden,” Ophelia corrected from the opposite seat. “
Baden
means baths—it’s a thermal resort town.”

“That in your book?” Ophelia had had her nose stuck in some book she’d borrowed from Miss Amaryllis for the whole of their railway and boat journey between Southampton and Germany. It was called a
Baedeker
, Ophelia had told Prue. Whatever that meant. Prue hadn’t bothered to thumb through it. She considered herself a
doing
kind of person. Book learning gave her the jitters.