The Missing Boy (Lady Eugenie's School for Girl Sleuths Book 1)

by V. Penley

  In her off hours, Eugenie spent time reading in the history of criminal detection. At the British library, one could see her always with volumes of Allan Pinkerton in her arms, which she carried to a desk and piled up like barricades around her. This reading had constituted her formal education in the field. She hoped that her reading, when harnessed to her instincts, would be enough for her to effectively teach detection, as well as solve her own cases on a part-time basis.

  The disappearance of Lady Laura Ashley was commonly known in detection circles as “The Case of the Missing Bride-to-be,” which was the name Detective Malveaux had given it in his handbook on detection. It had occupied ten closely packed pages near the beginning of the second volume. The Detective’s handbook was often checked out of the Library, and so Eugenie knew that she was not the only fan. It had been written twelve years after Malveaux had solved the case, when he had built up enough experience to put out a manual.

  The background had been thus: a girl, set to be married in London on a Sunday, had gone missing on Saturday in Dover. She was not in her bedroom the morning of the wedding, nor had anyone seen her since the previous afternoon, when she had been in Dover, visiting distant relations.

  They had spent a week visiting, on holiday. On Thursday, Laura Ashley’s father had left to return to London, travelling back alone to attend to urgent business. He had left behind his wife and two daughters (including Laura, the bride-to-be) who were set to travel back on Saturday, the day before the wedding. At that point, the relations whom they were visiting, the Marleys, would come up Sunday morning, just in time for the wedding.

  But the women themselves ended up travelling separately back to London as well. The wife left Dover late Thursday evening, soon after her husband, because she had been feeling ill and the Marley house had been too drafty. Transported in a public coach, she had gone straight to her bedroom upon landing home and stayed there until the morning of the wedding, when a knock on her bedroom door informed her that her eldest daughter was missing.

  Meanwhile, the family’s youngest daughter had returned home on Sunday morning with the Marleys. Both the mother and the youngest daughter had assumed that Laura, the bride-to-be, had been travelling with the other. It was not until the groom’s family arrived for the wedding that no bride-to-be could be produced. She had gone missing.

  Malveaux had been called in, on urgent plea of the father, who was familiar with the French detective’s celebrity. In reality, the pint-sized (and hunchback) Frenchman had made his name as an author of detective fiction, not as a field practitioner; he had never solved a real crime in his life. His column of detective fiction had first appeared in the London Times in 1819, where he solved hypothetical crimes for the pleasure of his readers. The short, four-hundred-word squib mysteries were nearly as small as their author—and equally as popular. All of London had Malveaux mania. The public assumed that “The Little Frenchmen,” as he was called, was a real detective, poking into the bowels of the city to solve shocking crimes.

  In 1833, Malveaux was still only a writer, though one who was comfortably well off. Yet, he also craved respectability. And the Ashleys had been an exceedingly wealthy merchant family. They straddled the very pinnacle of the society Malveaux longed to join. Invited to use his detections kills to find the missing Lady Ashley, Malveaux had not hesitated in the least. “Yes,” he had told the messenger, as he pulled on his beard. “Yes. I will come.”

  But instead of going to London, where the Ashleys had gathered for the wedding, Malveaux had gone immediately to the Marley house, in Dover, where the Ashleys had spent the prior week. In his memoirs, Malveaux had explained the reasoning behind this decision:

  “Evidence of a disappearance should come from the scene of the disappearance, which was Dover, not London. And evidence of disappearance requires immediate preservation, lest the evidence itself disappear.”

  Malveaux had had little doubt that Laura Ashley’s disappearance was an inside job. One of his fondest axioms had been: “It takes one to kill, two to disappear,” by which he meant that the most successful disappearances required the help of others. So he had raced by carriage to the Marley estate in Dover.

  At the estate, he had discovered the freshly dug pit, but had ignored that instinctively. No one disposing of a body would have left such a large mound of dirt in plain view. Nor could the young lady, had she killed herself, have covered herself back up. The pit, as he realized, was a red herring.

  Instead, he had gone directly inside by way of the servant’s entrance. Ignoring the pleas and cries of the staff, he had climbed the stairs to the bedrooms, being dogged at every step by the cook, who demanded to know who the little man was.

  At that point, he had identified himself; and Malveaux’s fame had been so great that even the uneducated cook and the charring girl, who followed the cook like a yapping dog, had heard of him. He identified himself and devised a lie: he had been called, he claimed, by the Ashleys to search for the cook’s employer, Mr. Marley, whose carriage had gone missing and who had never made it to London for the wedding.

  This story had its intended effect. The cook immediately covered her face and the charring girl burst into tears. The death of an employer was every servant’s worst fear.

  Malveaux quickly asked which bedroom was Mr. Marley’s—and, at the same time, divined which bedroom the young Lady Laura Ashley had slept in.

  In a state of shock, the cook and the silenced charring girl answered him before retreating downstairs, clinging to each other. Malveaux, left alone, went to work. He immediately found the bedrooms and, stripping off the blankets, looked at the bedsheets, holding each one up to the light of the window. About the middle of the sheet, he found the tell-tale sign—a misshapen stain, like a blob. It was faintly yellow—human sweat or sexual secretions. He was sure this was Miss Ashley’s bedroom.

  Detailing his train of thought in his handbook, Malveaux had produced the following inference chain: why would there be human secretions on the bed sheet? Only if she had been naked. And why would they have been naked? Not because it was too warm at night. Thick blankets covered the beds, necessities for cool weather.

  No; the only cause of nakedness was sex. And who would have sex on the night before her wedding? A woman who had no intention of getting married the next day and exposing her lack of a hymen!

  So Lady Ashley had run away with someone, on the eve of her wedding. A man, quite obviously. But who?

  Now that he had made his discovery, Malveaux descended once more to the kitchen and corralled the char girl. Holding her hand patiently, like a child holding the hand of his mother, he guided her back upstairs and invited her to tell him who had stayed in the house the prior evening and where they had slept.

  Malveaux had not been looking, like a lesser detective, for the gentleman to have spent the night in the house. No, that would have been too obvious. Rather, he was looking for the entrance into the house. The gentleman had come from outside. And someone had obviously let the young gentlemen in. A note must have been delivered: “Let me see you one more time.” A night of passion had ensued, and then—either before or after coition—a decision had been made to run away. The key to finding the missing couple was to find the person who had let the gentleman in.

  It would likely be a man, Malveaux thought. But then he checked himself. It could also be a female confidante.

  He then asked the young char girl to tell him who had slept in each bedroom. But she had been so discombobulated that she needed to sit down with a piece of paper and draw out a diagram. In his handbook, Malveaux reproduced it from memory:

  After the char girl identified the bedrooms, telling him who slept where, Malveaux had eliminated the bedrooms of all the adults. He could not see Mrs. Ashley perpetrating the entrance, nor Mrs. Marley, the mistress of the house. That left the rooms of the young.

  There were four rooms. Lady Ashley’s younger sister, Mary, had spent the night with the youngest daughter of the
manor, Louisa. The two older sons also shared a bedroom; and a third bedroom had been for the eldest daughter of the manor, Frances Marley. Then Lady Laura Ashley had had her own bedroom, the fourth.

  Moving about the rooms, Malveaux found it difficult to eliminate a room. Always eliminate: that was his iron clad rule. But all the rooms had windows that looked out onto either tree branches (which could be climbed) or to a cupola that could be traversed. A guest could have slipped in through any of them.

  Somewhat stumped, Malveaux had been on the verge of returning downstairs to pepper the staff with additional questions, when he saw it. The beds again. The bedroom for the two gentlemen of the manor contained two twin beds; one for each. The bed for the eldest daughter, Frances, was a double; as was the bed of Laura Ashley.

  But the bed in the room that the two young girls had slept in was a mere single.

  Why, Malveaux speculated, did the youngest Miss Ashley cram into a single bed? Why had she not spend the night with the eldest daughter of the manor or with her sister?

  He called the char girl back up to confirm that the eldest Marley daughter, Frances, had slept in the room with the double bed.

  “Yes,” the girl had said, trembling. She had been crying a good bit, and Detective Malveaux looked up into her eyes with what he hoped was compassion.

  “The two youngest girls shared a single bed?” he asked.

  The girl paused. Her forehead crinkled. Then she nodded. “That’s…that’s where they were in the morning.”

  “Merci,” he said—and kissed her hand.

  The answer was obvious: the youngest Miss Ashley was supposed to sleep with her sister, the bride-to-be, but did not, because her sister was expecting a visitor. And Miss Mary Ashley did not sleep that night with the elder Miss Marley, the owner of the other double bed, because the window to Miss Marley’s bedroom was to be the point of entry. If anyone else had been in the bedroom, the plan would have been exposed. It was the elder Miss Marely’s job to secrete the man inside and deliver him to his lover, with whom he must have run off with.

  After scouring the bedrooms for any other piece of circumstantial evidence—a train ticket stub, a scrap of paper with a destination written on it—Malveaux had gone forthwith to the wedding party in London and had interrogated the eldest Miss Marley, who had broken down and immediately revealed the scheme.

  Eugenie knew all of this, and thus knew how to solve the crime. The key would be to get to the bedrooms, precisely as Malveaux had, and to move on from there. But she couldn’t say a word to her girls. This was a competition, and she wouldn’t cheat. Maisie eventually said, out loud, “So if there’s nobody here, then she must have run away.”

  She looked at the two adults for confirmation, but they kept their faces neutral. Eugenie, however, cried out with pleasure inside her mind. Her girls would solve this! They would win the competition! The two boys, by contrast, continued to whisper between themselves, one of them shaking his head while the other attempted to convince him of something.

  Together, and without any signal passing between the four, the children all ran into the Grange at the same time. Eugenie started clapping her hands, following right behind them with the Duke.

  “It is Detective Malveaux’s famous Case of the Missing Bride-to-be!” Eugenie whispered under her breath, as she and Duke Phillip followed the children.

  Phillip laughed—and gave her a second look as they passed inside. “I see you are a fan of the Little Frenchman’s work.”

  “All detectives are,” she said. “Or at least I hope they are. It’s a pity I haven’t introduced my girls to his work yet.”

  “A pity for you,” Phillip said, “but an advantage for me. I doubt my boys understand questions of the heart yet. Somehow, they must manage to solve the mystery, in spite of their youth.”

  Inside, the children split off—with the boys heading immediately upstairs, much to Eugenie’s dismay. She hoped her girls would follow, but they didn’t.

  “Are you sure you haven’t taught them using this case?” Eugenie was annoyed that the boys immediately knew to go upstairs. If Phillip had maybe alluded to the case in front of his boys, then losing would be less painful.

  “Oh, I don’t usually teach using a case method,” he said. “We study specific skills. Interrogation. Fingerprinting. Analyzing bodies. And then we read literature to understand the psychology. Dostoevsky, that thing.”

  Eugenie tensed. She did none of those things.

  “Do you use a case method?” he whispered.

  They stood in the kitchen, which Maisie and Pippa were casing. Pippa moved methodically over the utensils, apparently counting them. Maisie had opened an icebox and surveyed everything inside.

  The clues are up in the bedroom, Eugenie wanted to scream. Why, oh why, were they spending so much time in the kitchen?

  “Sometimes,” Eugenie whispered, finally responding to his question. “The case method has its uses.”

  “Interesting. You must educate me on what those uses are. I have heard it used at other schools. Perhaps over dinner tonight?”

  Eugenie made no response. If her girls won, she’d happily return. If not, then she would have to see.

  Maisie shut the ice box and turned around with her arms crossed. “Can we ask a question?”

  “Of course,” Duke Phillip said.

  “It’s a question for the cook,” Maisie said.

  “And the cook will answer.”

  “Well…” Maisie began, but suddenly became shy, so Pippa stepped in. Her pink eyes flitted here and there, never resting on Phillip though she threw her question toward him. “How many people were eating the dinner the previous evening?”

  Good, Eugenie thought. That was an excellent question. By determining how many people had eaten a late meal, she was sure to discover—without having to explicitly ask—how many people had spent the night.

  “There were seven,” Phillip said.

  Pippa mulled that over. Maisie, anxious to move, said, “Let’s go to the dining room,” and so they all climbed a flight of stairs from the kitchen to reach the dining room. Eugenie absorbed every detail of Clarendon Grange’s dining room, but her mind immediately moved upstairs, where she heard tramping feet running around where the bedrooms must be. Undoubtedly, the boys were closing in on a solution.

  “Shall we go see them?” Phillip whispered to Eugenie. He nodded, subtly, toward the ceiling.

  “Do you think they are about to solve it?”

  “Who knows? They could be close.”

  Eugenie wanted to cry. She nodded.

  Quietly, they left Maisie and Pippa in the dining room, where they were crawling all over the floor, and climbed the stairs. When they reached the top, the boys ran out of one bedroom and into another.

  “Which is which?” Eugenie whispered.

  But before Phillip could answer, Cecil asked Phillip which room Lady Laura Ashley had slept in.

  “That one,” he said, and Eugenie was depressed to see the boys go immediately into it. Eugenie and Phillip followed, watching the two boys strip the sheets from the bed.

  They immediately held them up to the window. Then they talked between themselves, until the larger of the two boys dropped the sheet and turned.

  “I think we’ve solved it,” he said.

  “Write it down then,” Phillip said, handing the boy a slip of paper and a pencil. The boys sat at a desk and wrote out their explanation for the disappearance. For unknown reasons, after they finished, they handed the paper to Eugenie, who against her better judgment looked, hoping that they had gotten it wrong.

  The bride has run off with a lover, who was let into the building by the eldest daughter of the lord of the manor.

  Oh no, she sighed, folding it back up and handing the paper to Phillip. His face showed that he already knew his pupils had accurately solved the mystery.

  At that point, Eugenie’s girls burst into the room. Maisie ran to the window and looked out. “Yeah,”
she said. “Here it is. See.” Pippa joined her and she whispered into her ear. Pippa then began to nod vigorously.

  “I think we have solved it,” Pippa said.

  “Why don’t you tell it to us,” Eugenie said. “Since the boys have already offered their explanation.”

  “It’s like this,” Maisie said. She was huffing loudly, big girl that she was. Nevertheless, she rattled off the answer, exactly as the boys had done.

  “Well done,” Phillip said.

  “But the boys answered it first,” Eugenie said, to explain why the two boys were shaking their hands and laughing in the corner of the room.

  Maisie immediately crossed her arms and made a face. Pippa, her chin tipped down, remained silent.

  “Maisie,” Eugenie said, quickly intervening. “Congratulate your competitors, please. It was a spirited competition. Both teams handled themselves admirably.”

  “Very admirably,” Phillip said.

  Though Pippa shook hands gladly, Maisie only did so grudgingly.

  On the walk back outside, the game completed, Phillip leaned in and asked what Lady Eugenie’s plans were for the evening.

  “I have no idea,” Eugenie said. “Since there was no murder for me to solve, I should think about heading home, I suppose.”

  “To London?”

  “Yes.”

  “But there is no late train,” Phillip said. “You’ll have to catch the 7:00 o’clock tomorrow morning. Say, why don’t you eat with me? My valet has brought back a feast, I’m afraid. More than just us four men can eat.”

  Eugenie tried to stall but couldn’t think of a believable excuse. “I need to ask my mother,” she said.

  “And I think we know the answer to that.” His eyes were dancing, though the light died when Eugenie didn’t smile. “In any event,” Phillip went on. He had such fine fingers, Eugenie observed. Long and tapered. No wedding ring. She looked away, toward Mrs. Todderham’s cottage as Phillip finished his remark. “If she needs convincing—and I’m not sure she does—but tell the Marchioness that I want to show her my grounds. To see if they meet with her approval.”