Mystery at the Edge of Madness: A Severine DuNoir Historical Cozy Adventure (The Mysteries of Severine DuNoir Book 1)

by Beth Byers

  When her father had purchased the globe, he had asked her what to put there, and she had suggested a good half-dozen things before he’d agreed to the keys. Next to the keys, she found a piece of folded paper which she pocketed without examining.

  To Grayson, Severine flashed the master key and his eyes widened.

  “What are those?”

  “Master keys,” Severine said easily. “Father had the locks changed when we moved. Some brilliant master keysmith. None of the locks can be opened or picked easily.”

  “And now? What do you intend?”

  “Mr. Thorne,” Severine said mischievously. “I suggest we unashamedly break into bedrooms and search through the things of my hangers-on.”

  He lifted a brow and then his head cocked. “I suppose a part of me immediately rejects such a notion, but we are talking murder here, aren’t we?”

  “The bullet hole you found in my automobile does say so.” She grimaced and then added, “My poor auto is quite new and quite the darling of dear Lisette.”

  “I suppose that bullet hole does say just that,” Grayson replied. “Who shall we start with?”

  Severine paused. Did she trust him that far? But it wasn’t as though her conclusion was so difficult. He must have already reached it. She wasn’t looking for clues. She was looking for evidence.

  “I think I might start in here. You can lock me in if your inner white knight objects. Once luncheon ends, perhaps your Mr. Oliver would distract my brother.”

  “Your brother?” It was a question, but she saw the way his gaze sharpened. She wasn’t a fool and neither was he, so he had come to the same conclusion. He just wanted her to say it. Perhaps he even felt she needed to own the conclusion as though the betrayal would break her. It wouldn’t.

  “I fear he’s the obvious choice given he’ll get the bulk of the estate,” she told Mr. Grayson. “I’ve been pondering it all day, and I don’t think it’s so much a mystery of who is trying to end me but how he intends to get away with it.”

  Mr. Grayson started to speak and then paused. “There is no sentimentality.”

  Severine paused, wishing that there was something between herself and her brother and realized that there wasn’t. “The entire time I was gone, my brother didn’t write to me once. When I found our mother dead, I went running, screaming for help, and he didn’t answer. He heard me, but he didn't answer. Do you know who scooped me up and comforted me?”

  Mr. Grayson shook his head, those green eyes fixed on her, waiting for the answer.

  “Mr. Brand. He was the brother and protector Andre should have been. There’s nothing between me and Andre but the unfortunate coincidence of birth.”

  Severine unlocked the side drawers to her father’s desk and noticed the ivory handled pistol in the bottom drawer with a bottle of old whiskey. Behind it was a matching pistol as though every man needed a pair of dueling pistols. She shook her head in disgust and pulled the bottle out, remembering him pouring himself a glass.

  “The only mystery is whether Andre is working with another and who that might be.”

  “I fear you are right, Severine. I am sorry for it.”

  “I feel like I’m in an endless fog. It matters little with this cloud around me.” She shoved the whiskey towards Grayson and added, “I can see him, my father, pouring his whiskey. I can hear her, my mother, in the parlor. Every time I am in there, I can hear her. What she would have said to me. How I would have felt. I haven’t dared to face where they died.”

  She tried not to think of the little private walled garden, the fountain, the full moon, and the image of her parents dead with a pool of blood underneath them. She shuddered, and thankfully he spoke, drawing her from the memory.

  “That sounds…” He was too kind to finish.

  Severine, however, had no such gentleness. Not even for herself. “I believe my brother would say I’m going mad, but I’m not.”

  “You aren’t?” Grayson asked and she wondered if he saw madness in her.

  “Not mad. At war with myself for loving them. Both of them to my surprise. For missing them and hating them and loving them and wishing for nothing more than to go back to that night and stop whoever killed them. “

  “Surely there was no chance of that. You would have been another victim.” Grayson looked at her with such gentle kindness, his gaze moving between her as she was now and the portrait of her then. “You were only a child, Severine. You are barely beyond childhood even now.”

  Severine nodded. Yes, she would have been murdered, but was going on alone so much worse? Perhaps it wasn’t. She knew Sister Mary Chastity would say that life was a gift. The game wasn’t over until you’re forced off the board.

  “I would have been killed certainly. Now I find myself tortured by the most unexpected of feelings. I am reliving my childhood, my feelings then, my feelings now. I walk around this place, wounded by the deathblow I never received.”

  “You do sound quite mad,” Grayson told her. “Are you doing it on purpose?”

  “Perhaps I wish to see who will stand with me and who will turn against me.” She laughed. “Perhaps I am a little mad. Or hovering near madness. At the edge of it, if you will.”

  “I won’t turn against you,” he told her. “You are not mad. There is too much clarity in your eyes. I have seen madness, and you are playing games.”

  She laughed again. “It’s all rather too morbid, isn’t it? Pretending at madness. Finding the person who killed my parents. It’s like one of those penny dreadful novels of a previous age. What’s next? Varney the vampire? The dead rising? The ape man and his Jane?”

  Grayson eyed her and cleared his throat.

  “Is it time then?”

  “Time for what?”

  “For declaring what it is you want from me.”

  He snorted, but he didn’t deny it. “You have connections here that I do not have. Even coming back after all this time, you can step into any drawing room, any exclusive club, anywhere. Severine DuNoir, you are a princess in and around New Orleans.”

  She rolled her eyes and said nothing.

  Grayson continued. “And, I am no such thing. Not here. Not even in London or Dublin. I have no connections. A few weak friendships at best. I need more than that.”

  “What do you want?” Severine asked, knowing the beginning of an argument when she heard one.

  “I want that entrée into society. I am clever, Oliver is clever. We have much to offer in return. I’ll help you find your parents’ killer if you can help me get that entrance.”

  “Why?”

  “I suppose I need to hold the reason close to my heart a little longer.”

  Severine studied him carefully. “Are you one of those men of whom his word is entirely trustworthy?”

  “How will you know if I tell the truth?”

  “I won’t,” she told him, “but if you lie later, I’ll know your nature. I must be able to trust you if I let you into all of this madness. I might be exposing my father’s wickedness, but I’m not sure I wish to share that with someone who will turn on me later. Are you trustworthy, Mr. Thorne?”

  “I am.” He said it so clearly and firmly she felt certain she could believe him. At least for a moment before doubts filtered back in, but she didn’t voice those and he continued, “You have my word. I will speak for Oliver as well, but he will tell you himself. Your secrets will not be revealed by us. We’ll stand by you and give you our help, our protection, whatever we have to offer. We’ll help you and you’ll help us.”

  Severine paused and considered. She needed friends. She might have that entrée into society, but she also had enemies that she couldn’t identify amid a crowd of barely interested onlookers. Someone at her back? That would be priceless. “Then we have an accord. Like pirates of old.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Andre had been born when Severine’s mother had been but seventeen years old. Flora had married the man her parents chose. Old, well-connected, rich.
And cruel. He was the sort of gallant Southern man that said all the pretty things and was hideous behind closed doors. Flora had left him before she was nineteen, and she’d dared to take a house of her own, and though she shared her son with the man, she struggled over the next seven years to divorce him.

  She succeeded finally and married Lukas DuNoir far too quickly. He was younger, better-connected, richer, and only occasionally cruel. That cruelty didn’t extend only to Flora. Given Andre had been a frequent recipient, perhaps there was never going to be friendship between two children who were also nine years apart and raised at different boarding schools with only occasional overlapping holidays. Andre had spent time with his father as often as he’d spent time with his mother. Given his two parents hated each other and the father and stepfather despised one another, there was never any chance for relationships to be peaceful.

  Severine rubbed her hands over her face, realized she’d streaked herself with dust, and decided she didn’t care. There was no one to impress at the moment as Grayson had left to find Oliver, locking the door behind him.

  She rose and crossed to the shelves lining the entire far wall. Father had stuffed them floor to ceiling with books. The library was for show, but these books, they were for him.

  She pulled out a book, finding Poe’s detective stories and then sneezed. The dust was thick in the air, and she dropped the book when she was hit with another round of sneezes. She leaned down to pick up the book and heard the crinkle of the paper in her pocket from her father’s globe. Severine pulled it out and then frowned.

  She had hoped for a sort of letter or clue. Something along the lines of, So-and-so came, and I saw him digging through my desk for a weapon. Instead, Severine found a sketch. It took her a moment to realize it was one of the bookshelves. She frowned and then noticed the X over a book on the second shelf up. Severine stepped to first section of shelves and pulled out the first stack of books where the X was located. She examined each individually, but they were just novels.

  She had remembered her father reading one of them, but there was nothing in the pages, no inscriptions, no sign that the cover had been cut away and re-glued. She sidled down to the next bookshelf and found the same location on that shelf. Nothing.

  Nothing and nothing again. Six shelves across the room and each were filled with a random assortment of books. She stepped back. Had her father removed whatever he’d hidden there? But…why would he need to mark the spot on a map at all? Why wouldn’t he just write the name of the book and the author. Or a clue to the book if he wanted to be more obscure.

  This note had to reference something else. What if it was a map of the house? She didn’t know it well enough to be sure one way or the other. Severine frowned. She was grasping at straws because once she proved her brother was trying to kill her, she’d have nothing. Cousins she didn’t know, aunts and uncles who had no affection for Severine, a grandmother who preferred anyone but herself. Severine sighed deeply.

  Love takes time, Sister Mary Chastity had said to Severine. No one invested that time in you, darling. That is hardly your fault.

  Nothing had changed in the last few minutes or even days. It wasn’t as if she was losing a family who had always been close. She was not having to choose honor over cherished relationships. She was choosing what was right and losing nothing in the process but the chance that she’d have something more fulfilling from them in the future.

  Severine left her father’s office after cleaning and loading both guns. One would think she wouldn’t have been taught such a thing by nuns but Sister Mary Chastity had been both a nun and spy. Being in war-torn land had taught the nun that a woman should be able to protect herself despite her calling and devotion to God. The guns weren’t small, so she dug around until she found a box on one of the shelves. She put one of the guns inside of the box and then tucked it on top of two books on a high shelf where it wasn’t easily seen. She left the office and locked the door behind her.

  “There you are,” Grandmère said, making Severine jump in her skin, despite the presence of Anubis, Kali, and Persephone. “I hear you spent the morning threatening servants and accusing them of ridiculous crimes. I am unsurprised to find you shuffling around in rooms you don’t belong in, child.”

  Severine slowly turned and faced Grandmère. Severine took a deep breath to hide the terror of being caught. Perhaps she shouldn’t have left before Mr. Thorne returned. “Grandmère, good morning. You look lovely today.”

  Grandmère laughed lightly, making the sound menacing as well. “What are you doing? Looking for the jewelry, no doubt. No one knows the combination to the safe, my dear.”

  Severine paused and then said, “Surely, Mr. Brand does.”

  “If he does, he refuses to open it.”

  Severine used the same serene but cool tone when she asked, “Why would he? Nothing in there is yours.”

  She shouldn’t have done it, she knew. The second the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them.

  Grandmère pounced. “So ready to rake through the things of the dead. So ready to put on the tiara and proclaim yourself princess. Greedy child.”

  Severine pursed her lips. “Lovely day, Grandmère. Enjoy your morning.”

  She ran up the stairs and wove her way through the ridiculous house until she found her bedroom, needing solitude to steady herself. Severine started to dig through her cases and only realized then that they’d been rifled through before her. They hadn’t even been trying to hide it.

  Her underthings had been carefully folded and in a smaller bag. Now they were strewn throughout the trunk. Her books were opened and the letter she’d placed between the pages of her current book was opened. It had been written in German and there was nothing secret in it. A comment on hopes for Severine’s safe arrival in the United States and updates on the nuns.

  Severine checked the false bottom of her case where she’d kept her important papers, a few of the more interesting things she’d brought with her from the nunnery, and her money. It was undisturbed. She closed it tightly and then rose.

  Whoever had done this hadn’t intended to be undiscovered. They had, in fact, wanted her to know that they’d been into her locked room. They’d wanted her to know she wasn’t safe. They’d wanted her to feel hunted and alone.

  They had, however, chosen the wrong target. She’d always felt alone and being hunted wasn’t so cumbersome when she was also hunting.

  Someone knocked and Severine slowly turned to examine her dogs. The girls were sleeping on the end of her bed. Anubis’s tail flopped against the carpet in front of the fireplace.

  “Who is it?”

  “Lisette and Mr. Brand,” her friend replied.

  Severine opened the door and Lisette said, “Fool. You shouldn’t be hurrying around this mausoleum alone.”

  “I can see that,” Severine said, gesturing to her once neatly packed trunk.

  Lisette muttered. “Mine too. With a colorful phrase scratched into my mirror.”

  “Insults?”

  “On the color of my skin,” Lisette finished.

  “I am worried for you,” Mr. Brand told Severine, but his gaze moved between them both.

  “So am I,” Lisette told him. “I am very much worried for myself. Her too when she isn’t being stupid and practically asking to be strangled behind a curtain.”

  “I have Anubis and my father’s gun,” Severine told them, though it was only partially true. “I won’t be run off because they have determined to scare me.”

  “We locked this room,” Lisette said. “Mine too.”

  They both glanced at Mr. Brand. “What are the chances that someone has a key?”

  He frowned and then muttered, “Not impossible. There was the key ring from your father that I gave to you. It has a key for every room. Your grandmother received your mother’s keys, though I removed the key to your father’s office. The butler also has the spare key in his office. I suppose that it would have been possibl
e to get a key for your bedroom from your grandmother or the butler. We’ll have to have someone come change the locks immediately.”

  He paused and then groaned while Lisette laughed bitterly as he recalled they were stuck until the area dried.

  “We checked on Mr. Thorne and Mr. Oliver’s story about the car,” Lisette told her. “It really does have a bullet hole. Right through the passenger window and into the back seat. My poor pretty.”

  “How did you get across the water?”

  Mr. Brand snorted. “I carried Lisette with my pants rolled up. We had to wade and change on the way back. The water is still rising. It might be days before we can leave.”

  Severine looked out at the day. The rain had fallen off, but it wasn’t gone entirely. Instead, it had changed from dumping buckets to a low drizzle. The skies were gray, and the clouds thick. Severine wouldn’t be surprised if they were assaulted by rain for days and days.

  “Being trapped here is not ideal,” Severine told them. “Depending on how murderous this person is, we may all find ourselves killed in our beds.”

  “Especially,” Mr. Brand cursed, excused himself, and then finished, “Especially if this fellow has keys.”

  “Why would he though?” Severine demanded. “He couldn’t possibly have all the keys to all the rooms. They couldn’t know where we’d be housed.”

  She gasped and then closed her eyes. “If they can’t get to Grandmère’s ring of keys, then they’re using the extra keys.”

  “What do you mean?” Lisette asked.

  “Every room has multiple keys. One for the occupant. One on the mistress’s ring that my mother had, and it seems Grandmère now keeps. One that had been on father’s ring. A final set that hung in the butler’s little office along with any guest key not in use. Those are locked up, but not by any great lock.” Severine, of course, had the master keys her father had kept for himself, but no one knew of that but her and Mr. Thorne. “If they just stole a key from that cupboard, then…”