“I question anyone who didn't even bother to visit her own mother in the past ten years –”
“Says the woman who killed her children,” Bernadette muttered loudly.
“I didn't kill my children!” Marjorie screamed, her face redder than her hair and the knife and fork clenched so tightly in her hands that her knuckles looked ready to burst through the flesh.
Bill grabbed me by the arm.
“Take her wine!” he ordered. “Take it!”
I stared over at Bernadette's wine glass, safely fastened in one pudgy hand, and I didn't move.
“If anyone's the killer, you are, Birdie!” Marjorie shouted. “You're the one whose husband died mysteriously after marrying you –!”
“Let's just calm down, everyone,” Rachel said ineffectively. “There's really no need to –”
“My husband was very sick,” Bernadette said, speaking before swallowing and sloshing wine all down her front. “It was lucky he had me to take care of him –”
“You were poisoning him for years –!”
“No one killed Edgar,” Rachel said. “No one killed anyone –”
“Someone killed John!” Amalia said, so outraged at the suggestion that she finally joined the conversation. “Someone killed my husband, but no one seems to care!”
“Why would we care about your husband's death when poor Cassandra here had her entire biological family slaughtered by Russian Revolutionaries –?”
“She is not the long-lost Grand Duchess Anastasia!” Bill exploded, seemingly unable to hold it in a moment longer as he threw his hands up in the air. “She – is – not! So stop egging her on!”
“Of course she is, Bill,” Marjorie continued. “Don't you remember the cold, hard evidence that she produced to prove it to us at Mother's seventieth birthday –?”
Edie flinched and knocked her knife off the table. It fell to the floor and stabbed into the wood, quivering in its spot.
“She was executed with the rest of the Romanovs!” Bill exclaimed. “Everyone knows it! For Christ's sake, there are photos of her from when she was an infant in the family album!”
“There's no need to get so upset, Bill,” Bernadette said.
“Besides,” Marjorie added, “I like this story better than the last few. Remember when she insisted she was married to King George the Sixth?”
“Or when she claimed to be the Lindbergh baby,” Bernadette agreed, “despite being thirty at the time … and the wrong gender.”
Cassandra gave a little chuckle. It sounded haunting from beneath the depths of her veil.
“You're all very silly,” she started, “to believe such guff. I've always known who I truly am –”
“Kill me!” Bill roared, jumping to his feet. “Somebody kill me! That's what happens to the men in this family, isn't it? They meet untimely ends?”
“That's because all of the Marlowe women are insane,” Amalia said, standing up as well.
“Speak for yourself, you manic-depressive wench,” Marjorie said, throwing down her napkin and rising from her chair, too. “John told us all the stories about you going off the rails – we all had plenty of good laughs over you when you were 'away on a retreat' every other year –”
“Those were – those were health retreats!” Amalia said. “I never – I'm not crazy!”
“Maybe not after all the electro-shock therapy,” Marjorie countered, “but I wouldn't bet on it!”
Edie and Bernadette stood up next, and there were so many voices ricocheting off the walls that I ducked down as though one might come down and strike me like a bullet to the head. As the screaming continued, another sound joined into mix.
“Gaaahhh! Gaaaaaaah!”
James was pounding the arms of his wheelchair. Rachel was frantically trying to calm him.
“Be quiet!” she shouted at her family members. “Be quiet! You're upsetting him! Be quiet!”
But if anything, their voices just got louder. They were overlapping and twisting together, no longer separate streams and tones but a horrible cacophony of sounds that I couldn't interpret. I shook my head desperately, trying to pick the words apart so that I could memorize each one and file it away for future reference, but it was impossible to do. And I couldn't miss what they were saying: not when Bernadette might drunkenly admit whether she had really killed her husband, or Marjorie her children, or any one of them John. I had to get them to stop shouting and go back to the usual bickering that I could understand.
I turned and exited the room, unsure of where I was going. The voices were still booming from outside and inside my head, and I had to muffle them if I hoped to work out a plan. My eyes were glued to my feet as I hurried down the hallway past the Billiard Room and Smoking Room, and it wasn't until I weaved past the Study that I realized where I ought to go: the kitchen. Maybe if I brought them their dinner they would quiet down, like angry lions being thrown large slabs of steaks.
“Ah – escaped, did you?” said a voice as I stepped into the kitchen, and I looked up to find Kneller sitting at the small table with a plate of chicken, potatoes and root vegetables smothered in gravy set before him. A beautifully placed tray of Cornish hens was on the table waiting to be brought out and Mrs. Tilly was checking on a souffle in the oven.
“You have to do something,” I said automatically, changing my mind about bringing them their food. Perhaps if he went in, he could mediate the situation – or at least shock them to their senses with the sight of him in his darned socks walking over the polished floors.
Kneller raised an eyebrow.
“About what?”
“About them screaming! They're – they're – someone's going to get hurt!”
If I had thought that might compel him to set his fork and knife down, I was terribly inaccurate. He took a large bite of chicken.
“Well, it won't be me. Smart of you to get out of there while you could, though.”
“But – someone's got to do something. I can't calm them down, and Mr. Langston's about to explode –”
“We don't have to do anything,” Mrs. Tilly said, shutting the oven door and turning to me. “You, however, will serve them the dinner I made. Mrs. Carlton won't like it if it gets cold.”
Her indifferent expression mirrored Kneller's. It was the same look they all wore, more or less: the one that said that properness overrode everything else, and that the only way forward was with routines and formalities regardless of the situation.
“But …” I started again, not willing to explain why I needed the family to stop shouting. Kneller waved me off.
“Alexandra, this isn't the end of the world. It's not even the end of the Marlowes: they get into these fights more frequently than the three of us get paid, I imagine.”
“Well, you didn't see them this time –”
“I've seen them plenty of times,” Kneller said impatiently, throwing out his arms and sending a forkful of mashed potatoes soaring across the room towards Mrs. Tilly's feet. “Every month when the kids didn't visit. Every birthday when Sylvia threatened suicide. Every Christmas for the past forty years. It's gotten old. If they're ever in there having a nice discussion, then feel free to run and get me. I'd like to see it.”
“But … I can't just …”
“Hide from them? Sure you can. It's what I do. It's what Frances does,” he said, nodding at Mrs. Tilly. “It's what any rational person would do – not that I'm convinced any of us is rational, mind you, given that we work for them.” He took another bite of food, chewing it in one side of his mouth as he added, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas …”
I crossed my arms as he slipped into his poetry. He reminded me of someone, but I couldn't place whom. Before I could dwell on it, though, a separate thought occurred to me.
“You know them all pretty well, don't you?” I asked.
“I do.”
“So which one of them do you think did it? Who killed Professor Mar
lowe?”
“Don't you go speaking of that in here!” Mrs. Tilly cried, hurriedly crossing herself, but I ignored her. Kneller made an odd face. It was something like a smile, but his mouth twitched so much that it was impossible to call it anything at all.
“They all did it. To themselves,” he said.
“Can't you just give me an honest answer?” I asked. “Instead of your roundabout, insightful, poetic ones?”
“My answers are always honest,” Kneller replied. “Except when they're lies, of course.”
“You're as bad as they are.”
Kneller's face darkened. He was bristling with a thousand unspoken horrors.
“Oh, no,” he said, pointing his knife at me, “I'm not. But maybe you'll find that out for yourself, the longer you're trapped here.”
Mrs. Tilly cut between us, brandishing her apron at me and covering me in a dusting of flour.
“My dinner is getting colder by the minute!” she said. “You're paid to serve, not chat!”
I could feel myself seething – seething from her attitude, seething from Kneller's, seething from the family's, and seething from how hypocritical they all were for their talk of formality which was juxtaposed by their complete inability to speak in anything close to a civilized way to one another.
I reached forward and snatched up the tray of Cornish hens, making an alteration to my initial plan to distract them with the food.
“There are worse things than it getting cold,” I said.
The voices got louder and louder as I walked back down the hallway towards the snippets of shouted epithets.
“Gahh! Gahhh!”
“Shut up! Shut up, you disgusting old cripple –” Amalia was screeching, her words intermixed with Rachel's pleas for her to stop. “John should have done you a favor and let you bleed to death –!”
“He would've let him bleed to death, you bitch!” Bill returned. “It was a passerby who had the decency to run for help –!”
“Decency? You call this decency?”
I reached the Dining Room and stepped inside. Amalia was leaning over James' wheelchair, her face right in his as she shouted at him, and Bill was trying to pull her back as Rachel held her husband across the chest to keep him away from her.
“Let her go, Bill!” Marjorie said. “Let her do what she will –”
“No! Stop this!” Edie's voice rang out. “Stop this! Someone will get hurt –!”
“Let them! Let them tear each other's throats out!”
“Do it yourself,” Bernadette slurred over to her sister. “Show us how you beat your children until they stopped crying out for Mummy to stop –”
“I'll kill you, Birdie!” Marjorie said, throwing herself halfway across the table at her and crushing glasses and appetizers beneath her. “I'll kill you –!”
I couldn't stand watching them for a moment longer, all dressed in their finest and acting their worst. My fingers briefly tightened on the handles of the tray. Then –
I let go. The tray struck the floor with a horrific scream that seemed to reverberate through the house like the cry of the mythical banshee and surely would have caused the overly superstitious Mrs. Tilly to run screaming from the house decrying the theft of another Marlowe soul. Chickens rolled in every direction, looking like deformed little beings coming to chase the inhabitants from the room, as the lights escaping from the crystal chandelier suddenly seemed to reflect a myriad of dancing evil sprites and malevolent fairies. Edie leaped back, so startled that she tripped over her chair and fell to the floor, and Bill and Rachel ducked down with their hands to their ears. Marjorie and Amalia, however, both abandoned their prey to snatch up their knives. Pounding footsteps came from the hallway, and from the corner of my eye I saw Kneller appearing in the doorway behind me. A panicked Mrs. Tilly stood behind him, her hand clutching her necklace to her chest and her breathing harsh and irregular. Stunned faces met me from all directions. There was a long moment of silence, then –
“You clumsy girl!” Marjorie shouted, the knife still clutched in her hand, and her blotchy face turned completely red. “What do you think you're doing?”
I only looked at her.
“My mistake, Mrs. Pickering,” I said tonelessly. “It slipped.”
“You stupid, arrogant little –”
Thwack.
Mrs. Tilly had strode forward and struck me with her apron. The thick canvas cut against my cheek as though I had been whipped.
“I'll put your hands on the burner!” she cried, cutting into Marjorie's obscenities. “I'll put 'em on the burner, you hear?”
“I think that would make her more likely to drop the tray in the future, Frances,” Kneller said, his face twisting as though he was trying hard not to smile. Mrs. Tilly let out an indignant growl and swatted me once more with her apron before storming from the room. Kneller's eyes briefly caught mine before traveling over to where Bernadette had left her chair to crawl beneath the table, her large backside sticking out as she attempted to retrieve the fallen food.
“I hope you weren't planning on keeping this job,” Marjorie spat, throwing down her silverware. “What an idiot John was to hire you –!”
“Don't you dare insult my husband!” Amalia cried.
“He hired an imbecile!”
“He would have controlled her if he hadn't have been murdered!”
“I'm sure even John couldn't prevent inevitable mistakes from happening,” came Lennox's voice from the door, and I turned to see him standing behind Kneller. He was watching us carefully. “Perhaps Mrs. Tilly should make the trays a bit lighter next time.”
“Perhaps you should mind your own business, Lennox!” Marjorie said. “And as for you, Frank, you can go back to your squalor of a house and wipe that smile off of your face!”
Lennox's expression didn't change, though Kneller's darkened. He gave Marjorie a glowering stare.
“I think we'll go to bed,” Rachel said hurriedly, only then seeming to realize that James had stopped shouting. She grasped the handles of his wheelchair and pushed him from the room.
Bernadette grabbed the edge of the table to haul herself back up, huffing from the endeavor of retrieving the chicken. She put it on her plate, oblivious to the argument, and began to eat. Marjorie threw her an appalled look.
“I think I'll go to bed, too,” Bill muttered, hurrying after Rachel and James. Edie gave him an irritated look as he left.
“Well, don't just stand there!” Marjorie said to me. “Clean up this mess!”
“Of course, Mrs. Pickering,” I said, my tone still as bland as ever. “Shall I get the souffle first?”
Marjorie fumed; Kneller chuckled. I saw Lennox make a movement as though he was going to step forward, but on second glance he was still again.
“Just get out! Out!” Marjorie screamed. “You're a complete waste –!”
I turned and left the room before she could finish, sliding between Kneller and Lennox to make my escape. As I turned down the hallway to go to the Foyer, Lennox's footsteps sounded behind me.
“Alexandra.”
I paused and turned back to him. Kneller was watching us from his spot outside the Dining Room.
“Yes?” I inquired.
Lennox glanced back at Kneller. The older man crossed his arms, his angular face looking more skeletal than ever in the shadows of the house.
“Let the girl go, Isidore,” he said. “She was dismissed. Unless you're giving orders now?”
“It was a request,” Lennox corrected, though he looked a bit abashed. He stood sideways as he looked between the two of us, then added in a firmer tone, “which I believe I'm still allowed to ask. Unless you're giving orders now, that is.”
Kneller gave a soft laugh, though he certainly didn't look like he found the response funny. He nodded his head at me before turning back down the hall to retreat to the servants' door. Lennox faced me once again.
“May I speak with you?”
Though I nodded, h
e waited until we had reached the Foyer. As I took one step up the staircase, he reached out and put his hand on my arm to stop me. It was the lightest of touches, and yet it held me in place as though he had grabbed me – but not, I realized, in a bad way.
“You need to be careful.”
He was staring at me intently. It was the same look that he had used the first time I had met him that made me feel as though I was being examined rather than observed, and I still didn't know what to make of it.
“So you've said,” I replied.
“And you're evidently not heeding my advice.”
“I'm trying to figure out what's going on here: I can't do that by standing in the corner, waiting for someone to ask for a drink refill.”
“What if you could?”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that I know the Marlowes better than you do,” he said. “So if we were to – as you've suggested – work through this together, then perhaps we could do it in a different way. A safer way.”
I simply looked at him. His tone made it sound as though he was only doing it out of concern for me rather than concern for the situation we were in.
“I thought you didn't want to get involved,” I said.
“I don't. But I also don't want to see you get hurt.”
“Why would that matter? You don't know me.”
“I'm not of the belief that you need to know someone to care about them, Alexandra.”
I brought my arms up to my chest to cross, breaking from his touch.
“While I appreciate your valor, Dr. Lennox, it's not necessary. I would welcome your help if you were interested in solving John's murder, but if you're only offering it to be chivalrous, then I decline.”
“Why?”
“I just said why,” I told him, readying to repeat my statement word for word.
“No, why would it matter what my reasoning is?” he asked. “Either way you're getting help.”
“Yes, but –” I faltered, unsure of why I was truly turning him down. There was something about him that made me nervous, though not in the sense that I didn't trust him. It was the idea that he was as genuine as he seemed, and that, for a reason I didn't want to explore, I couldn't be the recipient of his kindness. “It's the principle of the matter.”
The Marlowe Murders Page 13
