“ROSE?” I hadn’t meant to shout. But what if—
And then, a snort.
A real, live, horsey snort!
“Belle?”
A soft whinny in response.
“Belle!” I lunged forward and bumped smack into Belle’s wet and wonderful flank.
“Dear Belle, I’ve found you!” A giddy laugh escaped. I’d got to the right place. “If only you could tell me where to find Rose!”
She must be nearby. With her captor. Tears bubbled up on top of the laughter. I was only nearly to Rose and didn’t know where to go next. The fog choked the world under a woolly blanket.
I draped an arm as high up as I could over Belle’s back and bumped my forehead against the horse’s side. Once, twice, three times. What happens next?
Leonard, where have you taken her?
Belle stood quietly, occasionally lifting and dropping a hoof.
Where would I go to scare someone silly?
Somewhere isolated. Somewhere that felt like a trap.
The killer, cornered by his own wicked deeds, imagined that he had one last chance to cast the blame elsewhere. Ignoring the girl’s frightened pleading, he forced her out of the cart and… and… prodded her down the slippery stone path to the small, protected beach at the bottom of a scary ridge of rock…
I knew exactly where they were. The Royal Victoria Hotel sat on a cliff overlooking the Ladies Bathing Cove and the sea beyond. Where better to pretend that the victim had been pushed over the edge by the son of the hotel manager? What better place to construct another crime scene?
It was a bit of a scrabble in the dark, to clamber down the slippery, pebbly slope, but my new certainty drove me to the water’s edge without hesitation. The sea rumbled steadily behind a curtain of near-white mist. Of the whole huge ocean I could see only a pearly ribbon of foam tumbling against the shoreline. I wanted desperately to call out a warning to Rose, but that would have alerted Leonard that I was stalking him.
How had he got Rose this far? Had he knocked her senseless? When Hector saw her slumped in the cart, had she been dead? I paused to wipe my face and realized how loudly my boots had been crunching on the stones. Standing still, I listened hard.
Waves scraped the stones. A seagull called. Another seagull answered. And then, a scream.
I crouched to untie my laces. I slid out of my boots and moved softly in stockinged feet, a boot on each hand like monstrous paws. Mummy would go into fits if she could see! I side-stepped a boulder and felt squishy spikes of seaweed through my stockings. I was too wet to care.
Wait, what was that noise?
I closed my eyes to hear better.
Voices. Yes, truly, voices! One low and one higher, angry—but alive! An odd blur of notes, as if the speakers had swallowed fog and their words turned to billowy mist.
Until another choked cry.
I wrenched the boots off my hands and flung them away. I skittered across the beach but lost my sense of direction at once. The fog had wrapped me inside a cloud. Very close by, someone else’s footsteps crunched on sand, scaring a whimper from my throat. Not a fine sleuthing moment. The footsteps went quiet. Could one small whimper end up killing a person?
Then oomph! A shove sent me to the ground. My shoulder and cheek hit the gravelly beach with a scraping crash. Before I could catch my breath, arms snatched me up, as my right leg buckled in pain. I stumbled forward, prodded by mean knuckles poking into my back. The assailant’s other hand clamped over my face, damp fingers squashing my nose and jamming my mouth shut. I tried to bite him, but he held on tight, pushing me roughly over several yards of the stony ground until he shook me to a stop.
“Up,” he said.
What did he mean?
“Up.”
I lifted a foot—and found a step. I lifted the other foot, and met a second step.
“Leonard,” I whispered. “Don’t hurt me.”
“If you’d just left things alone,” he muttered.
I opened my eyes and found a door two inches from my face. A wooden door, painted the color of a robin’s egg. His arm reached across to open it, hurling me through in one swift, unfriendly action.
“Leonard!” I cried. The door slammed shut. I pounced on the handle but he had managed to make it secure. Was he leaning against it? Was there a lock? I began to shriek.
“Don’t do this! Let me out!! Where is Rose? Leonard? Can you hear me?”
His answer was a hard smash against the outside handle of the door. He’d used a rock or some other heavy thing to disable the latch.
I knew now where I was. Inside a bathing hut.
I had been inside a bathing hut every week of every summer of my life. On the outside it was brightly painted, the striped roof a banner for summer pleasures. The wheels were as tall as my shoulders, built for rolling into the waves. But inside, on a foggy night in October, I was surrounded by the darkest dark I’d ever known. It was small, I knew that much. All four walls were only just beyond the reach of my stretched-wide arms.
The floor lurched. I was knocked from my feet and landed on my bottom. The hut was moving.
“Leonard, stop!” I hollered. “I don’t like this.”
Another pitching lurch. I heard the wheels grinding as I bounced over the shingle beach. Where was he taking me?
Then quite a different feeling. I knew it at once, from the many warm, delicious summer afternoons I’d spent in this cove. The moment when the bathing hut leaves the beach and rolls into the sea. Too heavy to float, but the water took some of the weight, holding the tiny house like a child in arms, rocking ever so slightly. And the water—cold seawater—swirled in through the bottom slats like the contents of a spilled bucket on the kitchen floor.
“Don’t leave me here!”
I heard splashing as he waded away. He was well past listening, no longer the Leonard I’d thought I knew. The old Leonard would never have pushed me about or stuck me in a locked box. Out there somewhere, Rose had screamed. What had he done to her? Was she drowned? In the frigid water?
The girl’s hair floated up around a face as pale as cold ashes, but no less beautiful in death…
Or was she, too, trapped in a hut? Awaiting the incoming tide.
The sea whooshed up through the cracks of the floor, subsided, and whooshed again. Bathing huts were not built to be watertight, only to ease ladies’ entry into the waves and to protect our modesty from the prying gaze of uncouth men.
I was up to my ankles in seawater, as icy as melted snow. Waves in October, especially after a rainstorm, are insistent and swollen. Several rushed in every minute, tipping the hut back and then forward as they gurgled out again. But not all gurgled out. I was standing in more water each time, though I knew the tide could not be coming in so quickly as that. The hut was rolling deeper with each wave.
I hurled myself against the door, wishing it to tear wide open like a paper screen. Alas, it was as hard as one would expect from a wooden door. My shoulder, already sore from colliding with the ground, throbbed in outrage. I sank to the floor, tears creeping into my eyes, but then dragged myself upright, wetter than ever.
Whoosh! Another wave wrapped my clothing about me like clammy seaweed. I was tilted backward, my ankles immersed and then my knees. The wave receded, and the hut tipped forward, emptying the flood back into the sea. I shifted my weight with each ebb and flow, as if learning to stand in a rowboat.
My knees bumped against the small slatted bench that was meant for sitting upon when adjusting one’s woolly swim-stockings. I climbed to stand upon it, and stretched to see whether I could reach the window. My fingers touched the lip of the opening, but even if I’d had the agility of a monkey to hoist myself up, my body could never squeeze through.
I heard Hector’s voice in my head. We are perhaps more clever than the police but we are not as strong. I could n
ever rescue Rose by myself! I could scarcely push the sopping hair from my face. If Charlotte were here, she’d smooth away my hair and wrap me in a sun-baked towel. And no doubt remind me that if she had accompanied us to town, I would not be in such a predicament. Only I could get myself out of the icy puddle I’d landed in.
Think, Aggie, think!
I squeezed my eyes shut and imagined being warm—being too warm, as often happened on a humid afternoon in July. Charlotte and I walked all the way from Groveland, through the town, around the harbor and finally to the Ladies Bathing Cove. I tried to conjure up bright heat and sticky perspiration, the tickling anticipation of arriving on the beach with the sea waiting. I imagined hopping up the wooden steps right behind Charlotte, into the dim and suffocating hut, changing into my bathing costume as speedily as ever I could. And then, as soon as slowpoke Charlotte was ready too, I would…unhook the fastener that opened the shuttered doors facing the sea!
Silly goose! Silly, shivering and waiting-to-be-drowned goose! I’d been trying to think how to get through the door, when the opposite side of the hut was designed to open up like a picture window for the very purpose of inviting bathers to enter the sea!
I smacked my hands against the middle of the wall, just above my own height. Yes! A hook was attached on one side, sunk into a metal loop on the other. My tug freed the hook. Easy as pie, as Mrs. Corner would say—though my definition of easy would certainly not be making a pie. Eating pie, perhaps?
I’d missed supper! Hunger, on top of all the other miseries! I’d think about pie to keep my strength up. As the hut pitched again, the unhooked shutter doors creaked open to reveal the night. The pulling tide, thank goodness, was still below the doorstep. I sent a small word of thanks to the Heavens. These few minutes of being trapped had seemed like hours. Outside my prison, the fog had begun to disperse, now swirling instead of merely lying over the world like thick dust. Bam! The shutters slapped shut as the hut tipped backward with another flood of water around my calves.
On a shining summer day, the shutters would be fixed in place by the sturdy and muscular Russian Betty, guardian of the lady bathers. She’d then pull the hut into the surf and assist young ladies in making a genteel entry into the waves. Charlotte took an age to edge her way down the steps, but I liked to stand on the threshold and plunge in with a splash.
A plunge would not be so fun tonight. The sky was black. The water was black—and churning and frigid. But I could not hesitate another moment. I tugged off my sodden, woolly jacket, now as heavy as the sheep it had come from. My skirt should probably come off as well, so as not to impede my motion in the water, but my fingers were too numb to succeed with buttons.
The next wave came in.
I hauled myself up to the ledge.
“Blackberry pie,” I said, a prayer.
And jumped.
CHAPTER 29
A MORBID FLOTSAM
NOTHING HAD EVER BEEN colder or wetter than the water that night.
Or harder to move through.
I felt as if I’d swallowed a tack as shock pierced my chest. My skirt knotted around my legs, not letting me kick as I knew I must. A wave flipped me all the way over, making me swallow half the sea before I fought my way back to the surface. My feet scrabbled to touch down just as the undertow dragged away the stones beneath. I was dunked again by the next swell. I tried to scream, Mummy! But salty foam filled my mouth. I clamped my teeth into my lip to keep from drinking more.
I’d be ready for the next wave, just watch. I’d be a boat, that’s what. I’d float instead of sink.
And so I did. I rode the surface of the water as it carried me toward the shore—not so very far after all—to a clumsy arrival on my hands and knees. I dragged myself across the stones, out of the churning water and finally to rest, lying flat, the warmth of my tears most welcome on my cold, cold face.
* * *
The relief was fleeting. My cheek, scraped and stinging, pressed into the rough grit of the beach. With enormous effort I turned my head, imagining the other cheek would find a feather pillow instead of bumpy gravel.
Something lay on the sand just a few feet away. Something bigger than me, dark and motionless.
Not something. Someone.
Someone’s body.
Rose.
Though barely able to turn my head a few seconds earlier, I now crawled like a beetle across the pebbled beach. She lay on her back, arms flung wide. Oh, please, not greeting angels.
“Rose!”
Not so much as a shiver.
“Rose?”
I was not gentle, pushing tangled hair from her face and roughly patting her cheeks. Bruising showed on her neck and shoulder beneath the torn collar and sleeve of her coat.
No, please, no. Could he have been so cruel?
“Please, Rose, please, open your eyes!”
I remembered Nurse Welles, the silent woman who had tended Papa, reaching for his wrist each time she approached the bedside. Would I recognize a pulse if I found one? I lifted Rose’s arm, but my hand was too numb to feel anything useful. I put two fingers in my mouth and sucked hard, willing the warmth to come.
The steady clatter of water turning over pebbles was broken by a new sound, a very faint cry. Not from the unmoving girl beside me. Could Leonard be returning to finish me off?
The frightened girl, huddled and frozen, lifted her head and strained to listen, knowing that readiness could decide her fate. She cast about for a weapon and found a stone, heavy and slick with seawater, perhaps deadly if it needed to be.
I shivered and cast it away, holding instead to Rose’s arm. “Oh, do wake up!”
Again, a cry, closer now.
“Aggie-eeee!”
My name! In more than one voice.
“Here,” I croaked.
Waves crashed, stones slid and grated. My little voice was not enough, about as noisy as a toad call. I pushed myself to standing and held my hands beside my mouth as I’d seen men do when they hollered on a cricket pitch.
“Here!” I cried. “HERE! We need HELP!” Rose did not stir. “HEL-L-L-LP!!”
“Ahoy!” someone called.
“We’re coming!” A different voice.
“Keep calling! Where are you?”
“Aggie-eeee!”
“I’m heeere! We’re heeere, near the water! HELP US PLEASE!”
Footsteps. Friendly, wonderful footsteps, crunching down the path and across the beach. Torch beams danced on the sand and several dark shapes emerged from leftover wisps of fog. Night clouds swirled, revealing suddenly the pale glow of the moon to light the dreadful scene.
Hector came first. “Ma chère amie!” he cried.
He threw his arms around me and then pulled hastily back.
“Ugh,” he said. “Wet.”
I would have laughed, because wet could not begin to describe how wet I was, but, “Rose,” I said. “I don’t know if she’s alive or dead.”
“Blankets!” Hector shouted. “We need many blankets.”
“What are you wearing?” I said. “You look ridiculous.”
“I am clothed in the cricket uniform of the Torquay police. I have many cozy layers.” He shrugged off the outermost jersey and held it out to me. I pointed to Rose, and Hector draped her still figure with his meager offering.
A man’s voice had taken up the call. “Blankets! Beck! Fetch blankets!”
“And a doctor!” cried Hector.
“And a doctor!” The voice belonged to Inspector Locke, standing suddenly right next to me.
“Yes, sir,” called someone from farther up the path.
The inspector took one look at me and removed his Ulster overcoat. He draped it across my shoulders and did up the top button. I was encased from neck to toe in a sudden warmth so welcome that I happily ignored the stench of bay r
um cologne coming from the collar.
The inspector knelt with a finger on the side of Rose’s neck and then put his head on her chest.
Hector took my hands and began vigorously to rub them with his own.
“Has Leonard been caught?” I said. “He was just here. They should be looking for him. He put me inside…”
I pointed at the bathing hut. From here, it looked to be rocking gently in the moonlight. How different a place could seem, from only a few waves away!
“He might have killed me. With Rose he really tried!”
Please, please, please let Rose be all right.
“No Leonard yet,” said Hector.
“I was wrongheaded,” I said. “I should have listened to you. He got away because it was only me.”
“Perhaps he is not so far,” said Hector.
“You rescued me,” I said.
“You rescued Rose.”
But had I? Hot pricks of pain shot through my fingers and up my arms, as the massage began to work.
“We have a pulse,” said Inspector Locke.
A pulse!
Tears flooded my eyes as I pulled away from Hector. I wanted to see her breathing, but there was such a knot of policemen crowding around that I could not get close.
“Get her off the ground,” ordered the inspector, “and into a warm bed at once.” The officers churned the sand as they turned about, wondering how to carry her.
“The medic hasn’t come yet,” one of them said. “We haven’t got a stretcher.”
“No useful footprints,” murmured Hector. “Sherlock Holmes would be most disappointed.”
“We don’t need deduction,” I said. “We already know who was on the beach.” On the beach and then gone.
“The hotel has beds,” I said, trying to get the inspector’s attention. “Take Rose up there.” I pointed to lights that earlier had not penetrated the fog, but now shone through a hundred panes of glass.
“I know you’d like to be helpful,” said the inspector, “but you’ve done enough, I think. Will someone remove these children?” he called out. “I want the guardians informed. They do not belong at a crime scene.”
The Body under the Piano Page 19
