Cold-Blooded Myrtle

by Elizabeth C. Bunce

  Dr. Belden’s hawklike eyes narrowed, and the constable grumbled, while Dr. Munjal just stood freezing and frozen in the threshold.

  “Awright,” Constable Carstairs said. “Ever’one out, then. Mrs. Leighton, is there somewhere—else—we can talk?” When Mrs. Leighton indicated a room above the shop, the constable instructed Miss Judson to take her up there, and clomped up the stairs behind them. Miss Judson’s glance plainly indicated that she expected me to accompany them—but I pretended not to notice.

  “I’ll take over now, Doctor, if you don’t mind,” Dr. Munjal said, with a deferential nod.

  “I most certainly do mind. I’m this man’s personal physician, and there’s nothing here to suggest this is a criminal matter.”

  What about the cryptic note in his hand? Or the strange items in the Display, which had so upset Mrs. Munjal? It was safer having Dr. Munjal double-check things, just to be sure.

  “I’ll be the judge of that.” Dr. Munjal was a small, neat man, several inches shorter than Dr. Belden, but he stood politely, still in his overcoat, until Dr. Belden stepped aside. I bit my lip and wondered if Dr. Munjal often had to deal with obstructive colleagues.

  I wanted to watch Dr. Munjal examine the body, but Dr. Belden was still hovering—and besides, he’d been right. Mr. Leighton did deserve his privacy. Dr. Munjal’s poking at him clinically, here in his cozy shop where he’d spent so many intimate years, felt like an intrusion.

  I backed away, behind the counter, and studied the Display instead. At first it was just to stay out of the way while still listening to what was happening— but the curious tableau drew my attention now. What were the wishing well and the olives doing there among all the Christmas carolers and bell ringers? Perhaps Mr. Leighton had been meaning to set them up somewhere when he’d felt unwell, and simply dropped them before he went to sit down.

  But that didn’t explain Mrs. Munjal’s reaction—or why Dr. Munjal had dashed right over here afterward. I hadn’t called for him, and I was sure the police hadn’t, either. They’d only do that for an obvious crime scene. So how had Dr. Munjal known someone here was dead?

  “Hey, now—what are you doing there, man?”

  Dr. Belden was understandably startled. Dr. Munjal was bent low, face close to the dead man’s mouth and nose, sniffing with tremendous concentration. My interest spiked, and I hastened toward him. Was he checking for toxins? Many had distinct odors (as did several diseases, evident on the patient’s breath or skin, like diabetes and kidney failure), and a doctor’s nose was a significant diagnostic and Investigative tool.

  Something on the floor behind the counter distracted me—another object out of place, perhaps something else that had fallen from the Display. A pale, gold-edged corner of paper peeked out from beneath the cabinets, and I had to wriggle it loose with my toe.

  It was an old photograph, a cabinet card showing several young men and women dressed for an expedition, posing on a windswept hill. In the center of the group stood a younger Mr. Leighton in a Norfolk jacket and hunting tweeds. I recognized his lean weathered face and sharp curious eyes. I flipped it over, where someone had scrawled Cornwall, 1873. I turned it back, and my heart thumped, one hard cold bang right in my throat.

  Next to Mr. Leighton was a young woman holding a pickaxe and smiling jauntily for the camera. Her dark eyes stared back at me, for the first time in five years.

  It was my mother.

  3

  In Camera

  Time-honored English tradition requires pickling a perfectly good pudding in liquor then setting it afire like a flaming cannonball as the centerpiece of Christmas dinner, no doubt as a sign of intimidation to the Empire’s enemies. —H. M. Hardcastle, A Modern Yuletide

  All afternoon I kept stealing glances at the photograph of Mum and Mr. Leighton, which I had collected as evidence. Very well, Dear Reader—I’d swiped it. What else could I do? One doesn’t find a photograph of one’s mother next to a dead man every day, after all. And the feeling in my chest, deep and painful, told me it was not something I should simply wave in the face of Constable Carstairs. Nor could I leave it behind and pretend I’d never seen it. So instead I had carefully tucked it away in my bag, feeling pinched and fluttery, while the doctors and the constable finished their work and took Mr. Leighton’s body away.

  I’d come home alone. Miss Judson had stayed in town to help Mrs. Leighton get settled. It had been hard walking out of the shop, leaving her looking so alone and lost, and knowing there was nothing I could do to help. Dr. Munjal had concurred with Dr. Belden’s diagnosis of a stroke, and had bustled away again without stopping to talk with me and Miss Judson. There was no mystery to solve, no criminal to bring to justice. There was just the sad abrupt finality that Mr. Leighton was there one night, and gone again the next morning. I hated it.

  Now Peony and I sat on the stairs, studying the picture. Cook was in the kitchen, making gingersnaps, and Father was at his morris dancing practice, so we had most of the house to ourselves. How had Mum known Mr. Leighton, and who were the other people in the picture with them? Cornwall, 1873. That was years before I was born, a part of her life I knew nothing about—but I was surprised that the Leightons had never mentioned knowing her, before she was Mum. Come to think of it, though, I couldn’t remember Mum frequenting Leighton’s Mercantile when she was alive. I fingered the edge of the photograph, the layers brittle and starting to separate, and wondered what it all meant—the photograph, the olives and the wishing well, Mrs. Munjal’s strange reaction to the Display, and the cryptic note in Mr. Leighton’s hand.

  “Mrrr?” Peony’s grave green eyes held a question.

  “You’re right. Mr. Leighton might have died of natural causes—but there are still questions here.” Maybe answering one of them, at least, would make me feel better. If I could give Mrs. Leighton some kind of reason, perhaps it would help her, too.

  But whatever I sought would not be found among the books and laboratory equipment in my schoolroom. I wasn’t sure anything of Father’s could help, either. But his study was snug and orderly and comforting, and being there always helped me make a little more sense of the world.

  It was dim and chilly within, so I lit the gas and turned up the radiator. The room smelled lemony and leathery, a combination of furniture polish, moustache wax, and bookbinding, and I inhaled deeply. Across from Father’s desk hung a framed photograph of Mum, from before they married. She didn’t look much like the Mum I remembered, with her mischievous grin, chasing me about the nursery in her nightgown, long black hair loose and flying down her back. This young woman was prim and straight, in a stiff frock with a silly bustle, and gazing frankly at the camera, as if daring it to prove her wrong.

  I stood a little straighter, looking at that picture. I always did. It had been taken when she was studying to be a doctor. I’d seen others that were more like I remembered her: wearing a cap and gown, in a comical pose with anatomical skeletons. Or on a hill in Cornwall with a pickaxe.

  But the woman Father chose to look at every day was her serious side, the one brave and determined enough to defy convention and pick up a bone saw, right next to all those men saying she couldn’t do it.

  I walked closer to the picture—and noticed something I hadn’t seen before. Or perhaps something that I’d always seen, but never Observed.

  I touched the glass over the impressed letters on the oval mat. “Schofield Student Union.”

  “Dear old Schofield,” said a soft, cheerful voice behind me, letting in a breath of warm air and an even stronger scent of lemon wax. Father strolled in and put an arm around my shoulders. “Dear Schofield, how we adored thee, our studious hours in your ivory towers . . .” he sang, and I turned to gape at him. Father didn’t sing.

  Peony leaped onto the desk and stretched luxuriantly, knocking Father’s letter knife to the floor, where it buried, point-down, in the rug. She paused threateningly before the inkwell, until Father deigned to pick h
er up so she could attend to his whiskers. He was still in his dancing costume of white trousers, bracers, and beribboned bells strapped to his legs. How had he sneaked up on us?

  I ought to have taken the chance to slip out of the room, before Father could lecture me about getting involved in another suspicious death—could I help it if I kept stumbling into them whilst doing perfectly innocent and Ordinary things? The Christmas Display Unveiling was exactly the sort of activity he was always urging me to do more—“What?”

  He shifted back against the desk. “I was just thinking how much you look like your mother.”

  I let out my breath in a wistful sigh and tugged at my hair. “I do?”

  I’d been told I took after Father’s aunt Helena,* whom the Reader may recall from my previous adventures. But now I searched the portrait hopefully, looking not for the Mum I remembered but for signs of my own countenance. Maybe I did have a bit of that determined set to my jaw. Most people called it stubborn. (Aunt Helena called it impertinent.)

  “She used to bite her lip, just like that.”

  I pressed my lips together neatly and looked at my hands.

  “Professor Leighton was one of her favorites,” Father said, and I jerked my head up warily.

  “Professor Leighton?” I said, trying to sound innocent. “Mum knew him?”

  “Oh, yes. He taught Classics.” Father strolled to the bookcase and withdrew an unfamiliar booklet. Schofield Yearbook, 1874. Mum’s signature was on the overleaf, swoopy and elegant: Jemima M. Bell, along with tiny sketches of a bird and a bell. Mum used to leave me notes signed just like this, for Jemima, a name from the Bible that meant “dove.”

  I sat down and flipped through it, eager for more, but it was all in Latin, no pictures, just boring lists of classes, professors, and students’ names.

  “Professor Leighton was a great supporter of the female students,” Father said.

  “I thought Schofield College always took women.” Unlike many institutions of higher learning in England. And everywhere.

  “They did,” he said. “And Basil Leighton was right there from the beginning, helping found the school. He believed that women and men—that all people—deserved a quality education if they were to advance in the world. He knew your mum quite well.”

  I didn’t know what I should say to that. It certainly wasn’t what came out. “Now they’re both dead.”

  Father sighed. Peony—who had known neither of them, but who was racking up more than her own share of deceased acquaintances—sighed, too. “I’m sorry you saw that,” Father said.

  “I’m not—” I tried to say, but he held up a hand.

  “I know. I know you’re not. But someday you might have a daughter of your own, and you’ll understand what I mean.”

  This made me fidget even more. “I’m sorry it happened, too.” I was sorry, of course—sorry for Mr. Leighton, and Mrs. Leighton, and all the other people who’d known him. Which reminded me of something. “The Munjals were there. The Display upset Mrs. Munjal for some reason, and Dr. Munjal acted strangely, too.” Dr. Munjal had been at medical school with Mum, so perhaps he’d also been acquainted with Mr. Leighton back then. But that still didn’t explain how he’d known to come examine the body.

  Father listened, arms crossed and head tilted to the side. “Go on,” he said—startling the whole story right out of me. He never wanted to discuss cases with me! I described the Display, the belltower and the cluster of people gathered round it, concluding with the odd, out-of-place olives and the wishing well.

  “What color was the well?”

  That was his question? “It was painted all black. Why?”

  “Olive, black well.” He ran the words together like a name. “Olive Blackwell? Why would he put that on display?”

  I scooted to the edge of my seat. “That means something to you, too?”

  “Not to me personally, no. It happened long before I met your mum. But it’s the reason Professor Leighton wasn’t a professor anymore.” He pushed a hand through his ginger hair. “This would be a prime moment for me to dramatically unfurl a faded news­paper so you could read the sordid details yourself. Olive Blackwell was a student at Schofield, in your mother’s class. She disappeared one night. Rumor had it that she fell from the belltower—”

  “Like in the Display!” The villagers clustered round the Campanile, as if to witness a spectacle. Except something had been conspicuously missing from that tableau, if Miss Blackwell had fallen. “But—”

  Father finished the thought for me. “Her body was never found. As far as anyone could tell, she simply vanished into thin air, never to be heard from again.”

  Now I well and truly felt a chill, and not the draft from Father’s window. “Professor Leighton was involved?”

  “I’m not really privy to all the details,” Father said. “I don’t think your mum even knew exactly what happened. But it caused a scandal, and Professor Leighton was forced to retire.”

  I nodded slowly. “And Dr. Munjal—well, Mr. Munjal, back then—was there, too.”

  “I suppose he might have been. I’m not sure.”

  But I was. Mrs. Munjal wouldn’t have reacted the way she did about the olives and the well if she hadn’t known all about the scandal. Was Dr. Munjal involved somehow? What about Mum? I didn’t like that idea much at all. The sharp edges of the photograph I’d taken from the Leightons poked me through my skirt pocket. I squeezed my fingers together to keep from pulling it out and showing it to Father, before I knew more about what had happened and what it meant.

  “What else do you know about Professor Leighton?” I asked. “And before you tell me not to get involved in this, I’m not. But somebody Mum knew has died.”

  Father perched on the edge of the desk. “I know. I can’t imagine how she’d react to this news.”

  “I can,” I said. “She’d do something about it. She’d bring a hot dish to his wife.”

  He smiled. “And knit a muffler for her.”

  “And organize a vigil.”

  “And take up a collection for his widow and children.”

  By then we were both smiling. “That was your mum, all right,” he said. “You couldn’t stop her, once she set her mind to something.” He gave me a fond look that made me feel warm and melty inside. “Remind you of anyone else we know?”

  He scratched Peony’s back thoughtfully. “Describe everything to me again,” he urged.

  Careful, not wanting to omit a single detail, I laid out the entire scene: Mr. Leighton in his chair, the cup in his hand, the note in Greek beside him. “Mrs. Leighton couldn’t say whether it was his handwriting or not. He probably wrote it, but it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “What did it say?”

  I had copied it faithfully into my notebook, but I gave Father my own translation. “We owe Asclepius a chicken.”

  He turned round. “What? Are you sure? Sorry, yes, of course you’re sure.”

  “Does it mean something?”

  “It sounds familiar, somehow. May I see it?”

  Since I couldn’t possibly have the evidence itself at hand, I felt a flush of pride that he’d known I would have recorded it. I handed him my notebook, then held my tongue and barely fidgeted.

  “I know this,” he said finally, and spun toward the bookcase with a jingle, long fingers sliding down the rows. “I know this, where was it . . .” His hand came to a stop on the spine of an old schoolbook, the leather binding cracked from wear. He flipped through, faster and faster, then came to a stop and jammed his finger down, like he was pointing out particularly egregious evidence to an uncooperative witness.

  “Haha! Crito!”

  “What?”

  He handed me the book, and I read down the Greek text until I found the same letters I’d written out myself. It was a collection of works by Plato, and there indeed, in a passage thousands of years old, the strange, strange words again: “Crito, we owe
a cockerel to Asclepius. Pay it and do not forget.”

  “Those were the last words of Socrates.” Father’s voice rang with intellectual triumph. The air in his study hung with excitement and meaning, like he’d just handed me a puzzle and challenged me to solve it.

  I scrunched my nose. “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t either!” Father sounded almost gleeful. “What an odd note to write before you die! I hope I have the presence of mind to leave behind such a mysterious document—have you all puzzled for decades. Like Fermat.”†

  “Father!”

  He pulled his attention back to me. “Sorry. Got a bit carried away, there.”

  “What does Socrates have to do with Mr. Leighton?”

  Father took down another book from the shelf and leafed through it absently (it was upside down). “Well,” he said slowly, “Socrates was charged with impiety, and with corrupting the youth of Athens.”

  Shocked, I blurted out, “What does that mean?”

  Father made it worse by turning pink, but hastily said, “Encouraging them to think for themselves.” After a pause he added, with a smile, “You might relate to that.”

  I did indeed. Girls, especially, were actively discouraged from thinking for ourselves; whole magazines were devoted to the practice, and people like LaRue Spence-Hastings adhered to it like a law.

  I swung my feet and considered this. “Why would Mr. Leighton leave that note behind?”

  Father looked thoughtful. “Perhaps he was reminiscing about the past. But it does seem strange for him to depict Olive Blackwell’s disappearance in his Christmas village.”

  I thought back to what I knew of the Greek philosopher, and realization stole slowly over me, cold and heavy, creeping toward my heart. “Socrates was executed,” I said. “Sentenced to drink poison hemlock.”