The Mysterious Point of Deceit

by Beth Byers

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So, when she rushed past me last night, she disappeared to the corner she’d taken for herself.”

  “Very possibly.” Mr. Oliver glanced around the property and then asked, “What did the couple say?”

  “The servant who had been drugged fled. She expects Mrs. Grantley to hold her responsible, so she packed her bags and walked away from the house this morning. The couple thinks the same will happen to them, but they didn’t leave.”

  “I spied on them for a few minutes,” Oliver replied. “The woman limps. I saw the car had been disabled.”

  “The phone line cut too,” Severine added. “They’re trapped if they can’t walk away.”

  Mr. Oliver rubbed the back of his neck. “We need to notify the local authorities. Given that one of the criminals is in the house, I think we had better leave. We’re at risk if we split up, and we have no idea what they’re looking for.”

  Severine stepped in front of him, so she was facing away from the house. She met his gaze and mouthed, “I found it, I think.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I think I found what they need, and I think we should take the couple, leave, and tell the authorities. Mrs. Grantley can hire a guard if she likes.”

  “We certainly aren’t doing it,” Mr. Oliver told Severine. “I know you want to find out more about your father, but she’s either going to answer your questions or she isn’t. We can’t put ourselves at risk. They might have left to get sledgehammers and guns.”

  “Agreed,” Severine said. “Are you all right? If Mrs. Grantley truly knows something about your wife—”

  “Her long-term servants are afraid of her, Severine,” Mr. Oliver said with an almost broken exhaustion. “We can’t trust her. We just can’t.”

  “Why don’t we help the butler and his wife leave and get resettled and then visit with Mrs. Grantley?”

  Mr. Oliver’s eyes crinkled. “I’ll let you do that part, shall I?”

  Severine laughed even though it wasn’t all that funny. Mrs. Grantley, even asking for help, was proving difficult to handle. Telling the woman they’d bullied out of her house that it had been tossed? Severine winced for herself and then muttered something about a very nice glass of wine that evening along with several aspirin.

  Mr. Oliver laughed. “I see why Gray likes you.”

  Severine didn’t know what to say to that. She knew she blushed, so she shrugged to cover it and said, “Let’s gather everyone up before gangsters or whoever is behind this madness return.”

  She looked up at the house. From the outside, it was lovely. It had wide porches, big windows, beautiful lines. There were pillars that drew the eye to the double front doors that were works of art in and of themselves.

  “Did you grow up in a place like this?” she asked Mr. Oliver.

  He shook his head. “We weren’t poor, but I wasn’t rich like Grayson’s family. We had a townhouse in London. My father worked daily. I met Grayson at school and through him, I met Jane. They’re higher class than me. Jane never cared. Her parents didn’t care. Gray didn’t. I was always family and even though I wasn’t—” He shook his head. “I wasn’t rich. It never mattered.”

  Severine reached out and took his arm, squeezing the crook of his elbow as though she could somehow provide comfort. They weren’t things you could just comfort away. ‘It’ll be all right’ was often a lie. Sometimes, the pain became easier to bear through familiarity and that was the best that could be hoped for.

  She dared to ask, “Is she dead?”

  Mr. Oliver looked surprised that Severine didn’t know. Slowly, painfully, he said, “I don’t know.”

  Chapter 17

  Severine met Mrs. Grantley’s gaze after the woman wound down from screeching.

  “This is all your fault,” the old woman accused.

  “The discovery that you had someone living in your home? Yes, I suppose we were able to discover that for you.”

  Mrs. Grantley’s eyes narrowed and she hissed, “Get out.”

  Severine rose. They were in the dining room of the hotel, and she thought that this was a moment that needed to end in beignets, café au lait, and possibly wine as well. Her head was pounding but before she left she said, “We’ve made steps to help you. If you want more help, you’ll need to give us something far more concrete than a woman’s name who may or may not be bribable.”

  When Severine stepped back into the lobby, Mr. Brand rose. He lifted a brow in inquiry, but Severine had reached the point of paranoia where she feared eavesdroppers. A man brought their car around and as Mr. Brand seated her in it, she caught the sight of the tall man with the scar, Landon Gentry.

  When Mr. Brand sat next to her, Severine nodded towards the man and Mr. Brand cursed. He started to leave the car, but she grabbed his arm. “Don’t. He’s letting us see him on purpose.”

  As Mr. Brand pulled onto the street, Severine caught a glimpse of familiar faces. Her cousin Florette, Grandmère, and Severine’s half-brother, Andre. Severine kept her eyes on them, but only Andre noticed her going by in the vehicle. He nodded with a smirk. He had wanted to be seen, too.

  Florette was chatting animatedly and Andre leaned towards her. Was she imagining the connection between the two? Or was her paranoia just growing? Severine pressed her hands to her temples and then asked Mr. Brand, “Did you see them?”

  “I did.”

  “And I told you about my suggestion to Flora?”

  “You did,” Mr. Brand agreed. “You wonder if she can be trusted now?”

  Severine nodded, rubbing her chest. She would never have wondered this at the nunnery. It was her family that had driven her to this level of suspicion. She couldn’t be more grateful to have been given over to the nuns. Severine shook her head and then leaned back, letting her head rest against the seat.

  “Don’t make her your most trusted confidant.” Mr. Brand glanced at her and then tried, “But she’s also young and far less free than yourself. She can’t just do whatever she wants like you can.”

  Severine admitted that she had already concluded that Florette would never be a close confidant. She just hadn’t expected to see Florette flirting with Andre.

  “We need beignets,” Severine declared.

  Mr. Brand turned right and parked in front of a beignet shop moments later. She stayed in the car while he ran in and got enough beignets for all of them. The paper bags he brought back to the car smelled like oil and powdered sugar, and her mouth was watering the entire way back to her house.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said as they found themselves once again around the table.

  No one said anything as they fiddled with their beignets, coffee, and red wine.

  Severine took a bite of the lovely pastry, unapologetically showering herself with powdered sugar. Then she grinned, closing her eyes to savor it, before continuing. “My father’s big house had a secret office and the Grantley house has a secret also, locked by that same master locksmith.”

  “Yes.” Grayson’s pained look had increased since they’d left him earlier that day, and if the way he squinted at the lights were any indication, his headache matched her own.

  “What if this mansion has the same?”

  Mr. Brand cleared his throat and Lisette breathed, “Cher—”

  Severine popped two aspirin into her mouth and drank them down with her sip of wine. She handed her bottle of aspirin to Grayson and he took it with an expression of relief.

  “Where would it be?” Lisette asked.

  Severine shook her head and confessed, “I don’t want to look for it yet. I just want to eat too many beignets, have a second glass of wine, take a second bath, and then curl up in front of a fire and fall asleep re-reading the scene where Mr. Rochester confesses his love for Jane Eyre and everything is happy. I want to fall asleep before things go awry and dream about a happily ever after instead.”

  Lisette’s mouth dropped open. �
��Have you just had those few sips of wine?”

  “It’s the exhaustion speaking,” Severine admitted without an ounce of shame. “I’m useless when I’m extremely tired. It hits me out of the blue and then I get giddy, which is followed by weepy. The key to life,” Severine confessed as though she were conveying a great secret, “is to never get caught out when you cross the line to weepy.”

  Mr. Brand snorted on laughter and Severine grinned at him unrepentantly, finished her beignet, and took both her wine and the nearly empty bottle. “Good night, dear loves. Mr. Rochester and I have an appointment.”

  She left to the sound of their subdued laughter and found her way to her room. Her bath was just long enough to relax her hips again and then she crawled out of the water and into her bed. As much as she wanted to curl up with her book, she was asleep before she even picked it up.

  The problem with falling asleep so late that it was already morning, meant getting up without enough sleep, and then collapsing into your bed mid-evening. Then, having gone to bed so early, waking before the sun had risen, and the entire house still sleeping.

  Even the dogs refused to leave her bedroom. Anubis lifted his head and then dropped it again, as if to say she needed to get back into bed herself, and he would set the right example. She yawned deeply and then took herself down to the kitchens to make coffee.

  She almost dozed off making the coffee and then cursed her betraying body that had just earlier refused to go back to sleep. Once she finished making the coffee, she filled a larger farmer’s-type mug. It was one like the workmen used and not something normally found in the cupboard of a spoiled heiress. She took her milky coffee and escaped into the library. She paused at the library doorway and found that all of the books had been slipped from the shelves.

  She lifted a brow, guessing that her friends had searched without her the previous night. It hadn’t been destroyed like Mrs. Grantley’s home, and the dogs had rested easy, so they hadn’t been invaded. Severine checked each shelf of the library and found that they’d been unsuccessful thus far.

  The two hidden locks had been in bookshelves, and it had informed their search the previous evening while she had slept. What about her father’s actual office? The hidden locks had also been in the offices of the house. Severine left the library and found her way down the hall, opening the door to her father’s old office. Her friends hadn’t forgotten where the locks had been found, judging by the piles of books to either side of the shelves just inside the doorway.

  Severine sat in her father’s seat and looked up. A part of her remembered sitting just there, across the desk. Her father had read the letter from the headmistress at her school while she watched, nibbling her bottom lip. She had known that it wouldn’t be bad; she wasn’t a problematic child. And yet, she’d shifted and squirmed waiting for the look of disappointment on his face.

  Had he seen that in her? He must have, she thought. He, an experienced man. Her, a child. Of course he’d seen her worry. How had he reacted? She couldn’t quite remember. Hadn’t there been something about her being too quiet in the letter? Well-behaved, but awkward? She felt certain there had been, but she couldn’t remember how he’d reacted.

  She closed her eyes on the memory so strong, it played out before her like a silent film that cut off too soon. Had he scolded her? Had he disregarded the comments and made a joke? Had he asked a question or two and saved his thoughts? Had he felt as helpless in his pursuits as she did in this one?

  Severine would have done much to find Sister Mary Chastity in that moment and talk to her. Her eyes would crinkle with a soft blue edge. She’d say something wise and understanding and Severine would feel that whatever had happened, it would be all right.

  She swallowed back the rising emotions and dark thoughts. This is what became of someone who slept odd hours and was pursuing a murderer. Why did what she was doing matter now? She frowned and reached for her coffee.

  Severine put her feet up on her father’s desk to remind herself she was grown and in charge of her own future and continued to sip from the cup while the sun rose. She pondered recent events and realized that something had changed. More than her returning home. Those hidden offices had been around since before her father died. They had existed in all the years between her father’s death and that morning.

  “What has changed?”

  If she was speaking to her father’s ghost, she didn’t feel as though she had gone mad. She would have given much to speak to him again. Where had it all gone wrong for him? Had his journey to the suspected villainy been a slow journey of compromises or a decision that said wealth and power mattered more than anything else?

  She shook off that thought. It was always followed by the far more haunting question. How did she avoid it? How did she create a better life when she must have the same tendency in her? How did she reconcile the fact that of her two parents, she preferred to identify with the harsh Lukas DuNoir rather than her spoilt, useless, and cruel mother?

  Severine stood suddenly and determinedly crossed to the shelves that framed either side of the door. There was nothing on the empty shelves. No hidden lock, no secret passage. Severine examined each of the wooden panels of her father’s office. She unlocked the hidden safe and looked again at the contents. There had been jewelry in there when she’d opened it. There had even been a gift purchased by her father for Severine at some future date. There had been a stack of currency. There had been two guns. There had been the deeds to several properties. But there hadn’t been an explanation of why he had been murdered.

  She shut the safe after taking out the master key that had been made for the big mansion in the country. She sat again, this time opposite her father’s seat but a moment later, she moved. The memories were fast, thick, and weighty enough to be ghosts. She closed her eyes and wondered again. How had he reacted to that letter?

  She wanted to believe that he’d snorted and muttered about the hysterical ramblings of girls’ school mistress, but she was certain that was wrong. Had she hidden in the curtains? She’d done that sometimes. Slipped behind them and stood ever so still. Father would see her disappear and let her do it without a word.

  How many times had she heard a snappish comment to Flora because Severine had been hiding and Father hadn’t cared that his harsh words affected more than Flora?

  Severine rose and traced the unseen path of her younger self to those curtains. She slipped behind them as easily as she had then. Thin and tall, it wasn’t so hard for her to hide herself in the thick velvet folds.

  She leaned back, pressing the back of her head against the wall.

  Don’t let it bother you, Sevie.

  Severine flinched at the words. The memory was so strong, so clear. And, she thought, so false.

  Miss Mannigan, is she the one with the hair slicked back against her head? The painful looking bun and the brown dress?

  Yes, Severine thought. Yes, that bit was real. She could hear it again. She felt it again. As though her younger self had made her way out of her soul and possessed her body once again. The years of love from the sisters were gone in that moment. The pain of losing her parents. The fear of being an orphan and unloved. The terrifying journey to a country where she didn’t speak the language. All of that fell away and all that was left was her younger self. The simple Severine who wanted her father to tell her everything would be all right.

  Yes, Papa. Severine had answered his question without a delay. Yes, Miss Mannigan was the severe one. The other girls had teased Severine often that she already looked like the pinched-mouth spinster.

  Do you want to be like her when you grow up, Sevie?

  No, Papa.

  A grunt next, she thought. A grunt and nothing. Severine closed her eyes. How she’d ached over that sound. What had it meant? Did he hate her too? Did he think it was too late? Did he see her in her schoolteacher?

  Mama had entered then, Severine remembered.

  Lukas, did you read it?

&
nbsp; Of course I did.

  What are we supposed to do with her? She’s a hobgoblin.

  Severine closed her eyes then and she did now too. She rubbed her chest and she remembered Father’s answer.

  As long as she isn’t like you, Flora. Get out.

  Severine had remained unmoving then. This time she stepped out of the curtains, eyes still closed. Her hand was on her chest as she crossed to the mirror and examined her face. She’d slept with her hair tied up with rags to provide the loose curls. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her mouth was tight. Her eyes were too big, too dark, too wide, and too filled with old pain. She could image Flora over her shoulder, looking with dissatisfaction at her daughter in the mirror.

  Before another memory attacked Severine, she fled the office, chased by the truth: she hadn’t mourned Flora DuNoir. Severine hadn’t been sad when her mother died. And, she hadn’t forgiven Flora for the years between Severine’s birth and Flora’s death.

  Chapter 18

  She ran up the stairs and dressed, chased by the ghost of her mother. To block the sound of her voice, she harassed the dogs out of their beds and out to the garden. The fresh air didn’t help. Another cup of coffee along with aspirin didn’t help. Stretching her muscles tightened by bruises and horrible memories didn’t help.

  Severine ran back up the stairs and examined her closet. How dour was she when every dress was black, gray, wine red, and dark blue? Severine dug through it all, rejected it all, found the boxes from Meline and found a rose dress. When Severine put the pale pink dress on, she looked in the mirror. She didn’t look like anything other than the child she had been, dressed up in frills that never made her pretty. Severine stripped the dress off and threw it to the side.

  She leaned over, hands on her knees and took deep breaths. Kali licked Severine’s leg and Persephone whined. Anubis, however, watched Severine with dark, loving eyes.