Snow White Red-Handed (A Fairy Tale Fatal Mystery) (5 page)

“That’s what I thought, but then he said—I remember it clear as day, because it sounded so peculiar—‘chippies posing as ladies, and daughters pretending they ain’t daughters at all.’”

“What does that mean?”

“Don’t know. But I said, ‘
I
ain’t pretending that I ain’t a daughter!’ I was thinking of Ma, see, and how I wish for the world she hadn’t left me. I said, ‘I’m perfectly willing to admit to being a daughter. Maybe it’s the parents who are pretending they ain’t got children.’”

“And?”

“He scratched his head, said something like, ‘Then you know?’ Well, I hadn’t the foggiest what he was going on about, but I was itching to make a getaway, so I said, ‘Sure I know. And if you don’t leave me alone, Mr, Coop, I’ll tell
everyone
.’ Well, that did it. He let go my arm. I made a run for it, and I didn’t stop till I reached our bedchamber.”

There was a clattering above them in the stairwell; someone was coming down. Ophelia and Prue darted to their feet and continued on their way to the kitchens.

T
he ground floor of Schloss Grunewald was a honeycomb of low, vaulted stone chambers that housed laundries, pantries, sculleries, storerooms, and even a cider-pressing room. The kitchen had arching stone supports hung with onions and herbs, a yawning fireplace on either end, and scrubbed plank tables heaped with vegetables, bowls, and pots. The kitchen was also equipped with two newfangled stoves, upon which soups and sauces now bubbled. Cook had already begun dinner.

Three servants sat at one of the tables. Freda, a tiny, bug-eyed housemaid, was munching one of Cook’s cinnamon pastries called
schnecken
, her eyes glued to a novel. Katrina, a big-boned parlor maid with the listless disposition of a Holstein cow, sipped tea. Her finger was bandaged. She was speaking with the gardener, Hansel. He was a golden youth with curls and shining brown eyes, like Little Boy Blue in Ophelia’s girlhood copy of
Mother Goose
.

As Ophelia and Prue neared the table, Prue fixed her eyes on the floor, and her cheeks went pink. When Hansel glanced up to see Prue, his own sun-browned cheeks reddened.

Ah, young love. Not that Ophelia
had ever experienced such a malady. She figured she was too practical to be stricken.

The withered, deaf old lady called Matilda hunkered on a stool in the chimney corner, peeling apples with a paring knife at an inchworm’s pace.

She glanced up. Her raisin eyes glared.

Ophelia smiled, even though there was no point. Matilda was bent on hating Prue and Ophelia, even though they’d never spoken to her—Matilda communicated by writing in German with the slate and bit of chalk that were always at her side. She was said to be skilled in the arts of herbal medicine, but Ophelia had seen no evidence of this except a dirty little closet cluttered with dried plants, next to one of the pantries.

“High time you returned,” Cook said. She cast Prue a sidelong glance while pulling a tray of cakes from the oven. “I thought Madam wanted a bowl of washing powder, not a cozy chat.”

Cook—Frau Holder—was a plump and homely lady with a mobcap and jowls. She, like all of the castle servants, spoke perfect English because Count Grunewald had been married to a British lady. The housekeeper had quit after the count sold the castle to the Coops, and until a new one was hired, Cook was acting as household overseer. She had the air of a stern fairy godmother. Maybe it was because she always smelled of nutmeg and sugar.

“Sorry, ma’am.” Prue wiped away one last tear. “I’ll just get to work on those dirty pots there.”

“A fine idea,” Cook said. She plopped the tray of cakes on a board to cool. “And you, Miss Flax? I am not accustomed to seeing you down here in the afternoon.
There
you are, Wilhelm.”

Wilhelm, the second footman, a pleasant Humpty-Dumptyish fellow of perhaps thirty years, entered the kitchen.

He must’ve been the one on the servants’ stair behind them.

“Fetching water for Madam,” Ophelia mumbled to Cook. But Cook had already forgotten her.

She had to pass Matilda’s chimney corner on her way back to the servants’ stair. The old lady paused once more in her apple paring to fix her hot eyes on Ophelia.

She fancied she felt Matilda’s gaze boring into her back all the way up the stairs.

When Ophelia brought Mrs. Coop’s glass of water to the library, everyone had gone. Professor Winkler’s bottles and instruments, the dirty piece of wood, and the cloth-covered skeleton still lay on the table.

Ophelia returned to Mrs. Coop’s boudoir to await her next summons.

*   *   *

She waited for
nearly an hour, glad for a moment’s peace and a chance to prop up her sore feet. She was still trooping around in the too-small stolen boots, and paying dearly for it.

But mostly, her head was spinning with the strange tale Prue had told her. She was relieved that Mr. Coop hadn’t harmed Prue—she’d heard what wealthy masters of households could get away with—but she was still unnerved by Mr. Coop’s curious pronouncements. Chippies pretending to be ladies? Daughters pretending they weren’t? What could it mean?

One thing was certain: she and Prue had to keep their heads low.

There was a rap on the door. The housemaid Freda poked her head in. She was, as always, eating. This time it was something crunchy. “Madam desires her rose cashmere wrap in the blue salon,” she said.

*   *   *

Ophelia heard, from
behind the blue salon’s door, the hum of chatter, the soft clink of china and teaspoons.

She pushed the door open a few inches. The Coops, Amaryllis, the two professors, Princess Verushka, and Mr. Hunt were scattered about on chairs and sofas. The tea table groaned with a silver service, a large urn of fruits, and several tiered trays of cakes and biscuits. Behind them, a row of French doors opened onto a terrace. A sunlit prospect of mountains and valleys sprawled beyond the terrace, into the distance.

“. . . . and I didn’t know
what
to say!” Mrs. Coop said to the princess and Hunt, as Amaryllis stared dismally out a window. The princess and Hunt laughed.

“. . . ten thousand miles of railroad tracks,” Mr. Coop was saying to the professors. “Course, the Irish and Chinamen who lay them down can’t be relied on . . . forever demanding higher wages, dirty rascals. . . .”

Professor Penrose lifted his eyes and looked at Ophelia.

Her breath snagged. Why did he have to look at her like he was gazing through a windowpane?

She stepped through the door. Just as she did so, she saw Mr. Coop reach out, select a green apple from the urn of fruits on the tea table, and take a juicy bite. Winkler was rambling on about something even as Mr. Coop emitted an awful retching sound. The bitten apple tumbled to the carpet.

“Mein Gott!”
Winkler lumbered to his feet. Penrose was already at Mr. Coop’s side.

Mr. Coop’s fingers scrabbled at his chest; Penrose was attempting to loosen Coop’s tie.

At last, Mrs. Coop and the others noticed the commotion.

“Homer!” Mrs. Coop screamed, dashing across the room. But by the time she reached her husband’s side, he’d toppled to the carpet.

“Homer!”
Mrs. Coop sank by his side.

Penrose crouched down, placed two fingers at Coop’s neck. Then he touched Mrs. Coop’s shoulder. “I’m afraid he’s . . . dead.”

Ophelia stood just inside the door, as though nailed to the floor. Mrs. Coop’s cashmere wrap drooped in her hand.

Penrose looked over to her. “Miss,” he said, “please send for the police.”

“The police?” Mr. Hunt said. “Surely this is a case of apoplexy—”

“No.” Penrose looked grim. “There’s a scent of bitter almond on him. He’s been poisoned with cyanide.”

*   *   *

“You saw everything,”
Inspector Schubert said to Ophelia before her rump had even hit the library chair.

Schubert was the inspector fetched from Baden-Baden, a spidery gent of fifty-odd years, with a spare, avid face and the habit of caressing his thin fingers together as he spoke. His black suit of clothes had a shell-like sheen from wear.

It was after one o’clock in the morning. Ophelia felt like a rag that had been sent through the wringer one too many times.

She had been waiting in the kitchen for her turn at police questioning, stealing a bit of shut-eye with her cheek on the tabletop. Prue had been summoned for her interview an hour earlier, and Ophelia hadn’t seen her since. Prue was probably curled up asleep somewhere like Rip Van Winkle.

“Yes,” Ophelia said to Schubert. “Mrs. Coop had sent for her wrap—I’m her maid, see—and it was only moments after I’d arrived in the salon that Mr. Coop”—she swallowed—“died.”

Schubert’s assistant, Herr Benjamin, an unkempt young man forever dabbing at his nose with a straggling handkerchief, scribbled in his notebook.

“He was murdered, you understand,” Schubert said.

“On purpose?”

“That is generally what murder means.”

“The apple?”

Schubert had been pacing, but now he leaned over the table. A hankie was spread over something. He whisked it off with a conjurer’s flourish. “Behold.”

There was the apple, with a single bite out of it. The exposed flesh was dried and brownish.

“The only apple of its kind,” Schubert said, “on the tea table. The other apples were red, perfect, shiny. This apple alone was smaller, green, even—observe—containing a worm hole.”

Ophelia studied the apple. “Mr. Coop preferred those orchard apples. He said they reminded him of the pippins from America. And he didn’t fancy those the greengrocer delivers to the castle. Said he couldn’t tell the difference between those and wax apples.”

“So I am told. What I would like to know is, Miss Flax, where is this orchard?”

“Somewhere near the castle, I’d expect. I don’t know.”

Schubert pressed his wizened face close to hers. His breath smelled of sour coffee. “Are you lying?”

“No.” She drew back. “I’ve been here only two weeks. Besides, I work inside the castle, and I haven’t been out-of-doors much.”

Schubert straightened. “And Miss Bright—Prue, she is called. She loves the fairy tales, does she not?”

“Prue?” Ophelia’s tired, cobwebby mind couldn’t piece together what Schubert was angling at. “She’s never read a fairy tale in her life.”

“Impossible.”

“If you think that, then you don’t know her.”

“And what is it I should know about Miss . . . Bright?”

Ophelia hesitated. Schubert had pronounced Prue’s surname with a shade of irony. Could he have already discovered that Prue’s mother hadn’t been married to her father, the Reverend Arthur Sewall of Brooklyn, New York? Prue didn’t confess that to
anyone
.

“It
is
Miss Bright, is it not?”

“Of course.”

“Not . . .” Schubert said, wrapping his tentacle-like fingers around the back of a chair, “Miss Coop?”

“Prue? A Coop?”

The assistant had stopped his scribbling to gawp at her.

Ophelia felt queasy. “Where is she?”

Schubert ignored the question. “A certain person informed me that they heard a most interesting exchange between Miss Bright and Mr. Coop this afternoon—”

Holy Moses.

“—an exchange that indicated that she is, in fact, the secret daughter of Mr. Homer T. Coop.”

“Go along!”

“This appears to come as a surprise to you, Miss Flax.”

“You bet it does.”

“That is all, then. You are free to go.”

“But—”

“And please,” Schubert said, “tell everyone to gather here in the library immediately. I have an announcement to make.”

*   *   *

Botheration.

Gabriel slapped the magazine shut and tossed it aside. He simply couldn’t bear to peruse another issue of
Godey’s Lady’s Book
or another three-week-old newspaper column about the American stock market. He rose from his chair in the drawing room, where he’d been waiting for the police to finish.

His own questioning had taken all of five minutes. He’d explained to Inspector Schubert that in the hour or so before tea, he’d gone back up to the cottage site alone, partly for a breath of fresh air, but also to examine the cottage more closely. Schubert had seemed satisfied.

Gabriel set off down the corridor.

The best books in the castle would be, of course, in the library, but since that was currently being used by the police, he hoped he would find something to read in the late Mr. Coop’s study. He had noticed the study in passing that afternoon.

The study door was slightly ajar. He pushed it inward.

It was dim inside, but a long, clear moonbeam stretched across the center of the room. In the middle of the moonbeam was a desk, and bending over the desk, shuffling through a stack of papers, was Princess Verushka.

Her eyes, luminous in the darkness, flared. She straightened, and a few papers floated to the carpet.

“This is not,” she said, “what it may appear to be.”

“No? I’d rather thought you were searching for a fresh deck of cards for yourself and Mr. Hunt—I noticed you were playing écarté in the drawing room.”

“Oui
,
oui.”
She patted her sleek coiffure. “Cards. Precisely. But I simply cannot find any.” She twitched up her skirts and wafted past Gabriel, out into the corridor and away, trailing civet perfume.

Gabriel paused. It was none of his affair, but . . . He went to the desk, thumbed through the stack of papers the princess had been rifling through. They appeared to be the driest of business documents.

What would a pampered princess want with those?

“Professor Penrose,” someone uttered from the doorway.

Hang it.

It was the first footman, the one who’d been tippling that morning in the wood. His eyes were bloodshot and pouched. If he was surprised to see Gabriel going through his late master’s things, he didn’t show it.

“Inspector Schubert,” the footman said, “requests that we all assemble in the library.”

*   *   *

Everyone gathered in
the library. Everyone, that is, but Inspector Schubert and Prue.

“I see you are all present.”