The Marlowe Murders

by Laura Giebfried

  I didn't know where I was going until black, jagged lines came into view on the white horizon. My mind was reeling and my thoughts wouldn't slow, and I was more desperate than ever to know the truth, but it was impossible.

  I stumbled up the freshly shoveled path, my eyes stinging from cold, stopping only briefly when I hit the frozen cemetery gate before throwing my leg over it to get inside. The tombs were all covered in snow, looking like nothing more than huge mounds coming out from the earth as though giants had laid down to slumber beneath starched blankets. I clutched my arms as I walked in front of them, somehow freezing and numb all at once, and followed the overlapping footsteps to the end of the line. The last tomb in the row had only a dusting of fresh snow upon it, and beneath it I could see the statue of a woman holding a child gently in her arms. The sight of it made me shake harder. I hastily brushed off the plaque with my sleeve, revealing the words etched into the stone underneath.

  Mary Elizabeth Lennox 1916 – 1939

  Oliver Winston Lennox 1939

  “Too warm out here for a coat?” called a voice, and I wiped at my eyes and turned around. Kneller was leaning over the fence, a toothy smile on his face as he surveyed me. He forced the frozen gate open with one strong push and made his way over to me, noting the grave that I had stopped by. “Ah – quite the tragic death of his wife and child, wasn't it?”

  “Yes.” I paused. “They said I look just like her.”

  “You do. I imagine it's rather jarring to discover you look like the dead wife of the man you fancy.”

  He came to stand next to me. I crossed my arms.

  “It doesn't matter,” I said.

  “Ah, that's where you'd be wrong,” he said, not understanding what I meant. “Contrary to what women like to believe, Alexandra, it always matters what you look like.”

  He cocked his head at me when I didn't respond, his smile turning crooked.

  “What? You don't believe me?”

  “No – I just don't care,” I snapped. “Not when – not when there's a house full of crazed maniacs waiting for me –”

  “Oh, that's rather harsh: they're not all bad. You must like Rachel, at least.”

  I opened my mouth and then closed it, faltering as I realized that he didn't know what had happened.

  “I – well, I –”

  “Did you give her my message?” he asked, cutting into my stammering.

  “I – I – I didn't get the – the chance –”

  “You're shivering, Alexandra. You're going to catch your death if you stay out here.”

  “I – I – I should – I should –”

  “Should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas?” he chuckled, repeating the line from the poem for the third time to me. “Believe me, you already are. I am, too. We're both bottom-dwellers. The lowest of the low. That's why people like them –” he nodded back toward the house, “– will never see us.”

  The image of Rachel's body bobbing up and down on the waves flashed across my mind and made my legs weak. I grabbed onto the statue of the woman and child to keep upright, then – realizing what I'd done – immediately let it go again.

  “I – I need to tell you something,” I said shakily, though I didn't feel capable of doing it. My palms were sweating and my heart was beating frantically, and though I knew I was physically capable of speaking the words, I also knew that they would come out jumbled and wrong, and there were so many thoughts in my head about what had happened between the time Rachel had fled the Dining Room and wound up on the Foyer floor that I could barely speak.

  “Well, go ahead. I'm listening.”

  I shut my eyes, once again seeing Rachel's lifeless body imprinted against the back of my eyelids, and all I could see was her flailing as she was pulled beneath the waves of the ocean until the water filled her lungs, and yet for all of the bluntness that normally plagued me, I couldn't tell him, though I didn't know why. Because I thought that he might still love her? It wasn't like me to care. Perhaps everything that had happened between me and Lennox had shifted something inside of me, or perhaps I was just didn't want him to hurt the way that I was hurting.

  “No, I – I can't. I – I need to think.”

  “Oh? What about? Whether or not you're still in love with Lennox?”

  A gust of wind circled through the statues and stones and leaped up upon me, making my teeth clatter together. I imagined instead that it was me who was floating face down to stare through the blue-green water, and then my body became heavy and I sank down and down until I was sitting cross-legged on the sandy floor, staring through the nothingness and trying to discern if anything was waiting in the darkness. And no one was coming for me, I knew, letting the idea of Lennox slip away as the realization that perhaps all he had seen in me was the wife he had lost. And that was where I belonged: with the seaweed and the sand, away from the voices up above.

  “N-no,” I said, stuttering from the chill.

  “I should hope not,” he said, taking his coat off and draping it over my shoulders, either in an act of chivalry or simply because he couldn't stand hearing my teeth chatter any longer. “Because you don't seem to know who he is.”

  “He – he told me everything.”

  “Oh, I very much doubt that.”

  “He – he told me in front of the whole family. So – so they would've –”

  “They barely knew Mary – she was born fifteen years after Cassandra, so they were grown up.”

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that Sylvia was too old to be having children. Malcolm dropped dead of a heart-attack within the year. And there was Mary, all alone in a big, empty house with no one but her mother for company – unless you count Frances, Tilda and me. She used to come down to see me and read poetry – she appreciated it, at least. All of the other children had been sent off to boarding schools when they were that age, but not Mary: Sylvia had realized that she was the last thing she had to hold onto, and she held her very, very tightly. Keep in mind that Sylvia was severely agoraphobic by this point – so when Mary was eighteen and ready to leave … Sylvia was devastated.”

  “And then?”

  “And then she went off and came home a few years later with Lennox. Sylvia was in a craze: I could hear her screaming from my kitchen. Apparently she felt that Mary's abandonment of her had ruined the last bit of her health. The siblings weren't too happy, either, because Sylvia was hoarding her money when she ought to have been, by their standards, giving them proper allowances. But Sylvia was paranoid and insisted that no one loved her, and refused to give anyone a nickel for fear that once they got her money, they would abandon her completely.”

  “So what's this got to do with Lennox?”

  “I'm getting there: be patient,” he chided. “So when Mary returned home with Lennox and saw how broken up her mother was, she didn't want to leave her again. She insisted to Lennox that they stay here on the island. You can imagine how well he took it: what newly wedded man wants to live with his crazed mother-in-law? But for whatever reason he agreed, and then Mary got pregnant, and then –”

  “She jumped out the nursery window,” I finished, still not understanding why I needed the dead woman's backstory to understand it all.

  Kneller watched me. His eyes were just slits in their narrowed state, and the toothy grin was gone from his face.

  “She didn't jump out of that window,” he said. “Lennox pushed her.”

  Chapter 14

  “What're you talking about?”

  My heart was thumping painfully in my chest, though I didn't quite register what Kneller had said. Lennox hadn't pushed her: she had jumped. He had just told me.

  “Why do you think the family hates him?” Kneller asked. “He killed his wife and got off scot-free, claiming some bullshit that she had depression even though there wasn't a single sign!”

  “Just because there weren't signs didn't mean she wasn't depressed
–”

  “She wasn't depressed! She was happy – the happiest she'd ever been! She had a beautiful son and a full life awaiting her!”

  “But that doesn't mean –”

  “She went backwards through the glass,” Kneller cut in, and his words were in timing with another gust of wind that rattled me off balance. “Backwards. Who jumps through a window backwards?”

  “Maybe – maybe she twisted mid-air –”

  “Not according to the cuts all over the back of her arms and head!”

  “Well – well, she might've – might've just –”

  “Alexandra, listen to yourself!” he exclaimed, grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me so hard that the coat fell from to the ground. “You're blinded by infatuation! You see a man who's promising to sweep you off your feet, but you know nothing about him!”

  I stared at him for a long, steady moment. He was wrong. I knew he was wrong. I had seen Lennox when he spoke of his wife – had seen the way his expression crumpled and heard how his voice wavered – and it wasn't the look of a man who didn't feel anything but the utmost guilt for what had happened to the woman and child he had loved.

  I pulled myself away from him, then hurried from the cemetery and back down the path, knowing that I had to go back to the house before I got any colder, but my thoughts were pulling me in every direction and I was getting disoriented. I staggered on and off the path, half-blinded by tears and sick to my stomach.

  When I finally returned to the house, it was as though I had been anesthetized. My limbs were barely working and my brain was even worse, and I trudged through the now-empty Foyer, barely registering that Rachel's body had been moved because I was too lost between half-composed thoughts and fractured sentences that had tangled in my head. With each footstep that hit the black-and-white tiled floors, Kneller's words pounded against my head. Lennox pushed her. Yet the further that I walked, the more the words became interspersed with murmuring voices that filled up my ears. I shook my head, trying to pull the thoughts apart again, when it occurred to me that the voices weren't in my head at all: the Marlowes were talking in the Parlor.

  My ears perked up as I tried to discern who was inside.

  “– it's the only way –!” Amalia's voice rang out, followed by Marjorie's.

  “– mind blood on my hands –!”

  I crept closer, putting my hand over my mouth so that they wouldn't hear my labored breathing, but –

  Footsteps creaked on the stairs. I jumped back from the Parlor door, looking for a place to hide, but then a low gurgling alerted me to who was there. I hurried up the stairs two at a time.

  “Mr. Langston – hold on,” I said.

  James had one hand grasping the banister as he tried to move his shaking leg down upon the topmost step, but he was far too unsteady to do so. I couldn't imagine he had gotten all the way up there without help, but there was no one else in sight. I grasped his arm to steady him. I hadn't realized he could walk.

  “How did you get upstairs, Mr. Langston?” He only gurgled in response, and I heaved his weight onto me as I helped him slowly descend the stairs. It took us several minutes to reach the Foyer, and I paused instead of leading him over to the Drawing Room, unsure if Bill was in there or with Amalia and Marjorie in the Parlor.

  “Can you get back to your room alright?” I whispered, though I didn't know what response I'd hoped to receive. He gurgled again and shuffled forward, clutching something tightly in his hand. The hint of gold glinted from beneath his fingers, catching my eye.

  “What do you have there?”

  I tried to pry it away from him, but his grip was unyielding.

  “Raaah, Raah,” he said angrily, holding his arm rigidly to his abdomen to keep me from discovering what he had. “Raa Raah –!”

  “Okay – okay,” I said quickly, trying to shush him before he alerted anyone that I was there. I glanced over at the Parlor door, but my heart was beating so loud that I could no longer hear the family's voices. “Just – just go back to your room –”

  I darted up the stairs away from him. As I threw one last look at him standing all alone in the empty room, the reality of Rachel's death finally hit me, breaking through the barrier of shock I had felt since seeing her lifeless body. I pulled myself away and hurried up the stairs to the third floor, then locked myself inside the bathroom. Perching on the edge of the tub, I peeled off my stockings. The material was sticking to my shins, which each had a gash in them from where I had banged them against the porch steps. I turned on the faucet and waited for the water to turn warm, then dabbed at the injury. The soapy water barely stung. I couldn't feel much at all.

  Rachel was dead.

  I couldn't quite process it. It wasn't like the emptiness I had felt when John had died. For Rachel was something else: kind when she needn't be, graceful where most would be bitter, and sorrowful in a way that I thought I understood. She had been kind to me, and yet all I had done in return was degrade her for choosing to stay with her husband. The sound of James's cries came back to me and I shut my eyes. What would happen to him now? Or did it matter, since he would still be trapped regardless of what went on around him?

  And as I realized it, I finally understood what bothered me so much about seeing him there in his wheelchair, the saliva dripping down his chin and his sunken, hollow face: it was my own fear, reflected in his form, that despite all of my efforts, my memories would start to slip away just as my mother's had, slowly at first and then faster and faster until I couldn't grasp them, and then I wouldn't know who I was or what I had been, just as he had no sense of the man who had lived before he had been confined to his chair.

  I ran my hands over my thighs. The money John had left for me was still safely strapped there, sticking out like a tumor beneath my skirt. And what had it all been for? Had he hired me solely because I looked like his sister – and Lennox's wife – and he wanted to toy with the other man's emotions? Or had he known how Lennox would stare at me, and known that Lennox wouldn't tell me the truth about who he was, and he surmised how uncomfortable it would make me – the girl who didn't feel anything, being cared about for once?

  I hit my palms against my skull, willing myself to think about the situation at hand. I needed the pills on my bedside table. My brain was no longer functioning: the words were too jumbled and quick now, too persistent and crazed. I hurried to my room, turned on the light, went to the bedside table, but –

  The pills weren't there. The neat white stacks had been cleared away, leaving the nightstand bare. I stared in disbelief. They had just been there that morning. I had had a month's supply left – they couldn't be gone.

  I dropped to my knees and checked to see if they had fallen on the floor, then tore off the wool blanket on the bed and opened the drawer to the nightstand to search for them, but they were gone. I laid my hand on top of the bureau, trying to calm myself before I became overwrought, but as my palm brushed over the wood, I realized that something else was missing: the sheath for the letter opener.

  I jumped back from the spot and clutched my arms across my chest. I was being ridiculous, I told myself. There was no reason for anyone to take the medication or the sheath. I had just misplaced them and couldn't remember.

  I snapped the rubber band against my wrist but nothing came. I must have put them somewhere, perhaps after taking the extra pills last night. I grabbed my uniform from the floor and shook it, convinced that the missing items would spill from the pockets, but only the key to my room clattered out and onto the floor. I snapped the rubber band again, certain that I was forgetting what I had done and would remember at any second –

  I halted. A memory was clawing at my mind, frantically trying to escape the jumble of thoughts. It slipped and skirted around the mess I had made of my brain, moving closer and closer to the forefront. But rather than explain what had happened to my medication and the sheath, it focused on the key in front of me. I reached down and picked it up, opening my fingers and
staring down at the worn metal, finally understanding what the problem was. Mrs. Tilly had taken the key to the nanny's room back days ago: the one in my hand was the one Lennox had given me that supposedly went to the Augustus Suite … so how had I locked my door with it last night?

  I crossed the room and shoved the key into the lock, turned it to hear the click, then twisted the knob. The door was firmly locked shut. I turned around and went to the nursery door and did the same. The door locked, as well. I unlocked it again, then stared down at the key in utter disbelief before tossing it onto my bed as though if I held it a moment longer it would burn my hands. It had been a lie when he had said he'd taken Amalia's key to get into the Augustus Suite: he had a skeleton key. No, I corrected myself, searching for the word in my memories: a master key. A master key that, as Bernadette had said, went missing ages ago, and that she had assumed Lennox hadn't stolen and kept for all those years, but evidently had. Which meant …

  That Lennox could have gone out on the night that John had been killed. I thought back to the morning I had woken up, unable to explain why the floor was wet and my shoes were strewn around, and then to the look of certainty on Bill's face when he had told us that he'd seen Lennox locking the front door. But what did that mean? That Lennox had been the one to murder John? Had he killed his wife and child, too? Had he tricked me, seeing how lonely and desperate I was for companionship, into believing that it was anyone but him? And now that his facade was falling apart, he had stolen my pills because he knew that I wouldn't be able to think straight without them?

  Snap. Snap. Snap. Snap. My thoughts bounced in time with the rubber band smacking against my wrist, but both were useless to me. I needed the pills. The house, the island, the deaths, the uncertainty – it was all too much to deal with on my own, and now that I was truly on my own, more so than ever, I needed something that would help me.