Chapter Thirteen #2
Selena bit her lip in shock and dismay. This felt like an eerie reprise of the morning when Jack Clarke had been found on the half-landing.
Could that really have only been two days ago?
Last night, Selena had been so certain that Mrs. Whitlock had written those threatening notes and had killed Jack Clarke.
But now that seemed most unlikely, for she was dead.
“How did this happen? And when?” Selena asked.
“I’ll have to examine her more closely to make that determination.” The doctor turned to Miss Thompson. “Did you find Mrs. Whitlock like this?”
“Yes.” A sob escaped Miss Thompson’s throat. “It’s my job to help her undress for bed, but when she’s in one of her moods, as she was last night, she doesn’t allow it.”
It was the second time that Miss Thompson had brought up her excuse as to why Mrs. Whitlock was still fully dressed. Selena’s suspicions were aroused. Did the young woman feel guilty about the circumstance? Or was she trying to cover up something?
“At 7:30 A.M.,” Miss Thompson continued, “I brought in Mrs. Whitlock’s cup of tea as usual and opened the drapes. But I couldn’t get her to stir.”
Selena noticed a tray atop the dresser, holding a teapot and cup. Dr. Scott, however, was eyeing the bedside table, where a glass medicine bottle and spoon stood next to an empty crystal glass.
From where she stood, Selena could read the label on the bottle. In bold letters it read, LAUDANUM. POISON. It was half full. Selena’s pulse skittered. She knew that laudanum could be a dangerous drug. One of the women she had worked for as a governess had suffered from a laudanum addiction.
Dr. Scott studied the bottle and gestured to the tumbler beside it. “What’s this?”
“It was her hot toddy, I’d imagine.” Miss Thompson wiped a tear from her eye. “She had one every night before she went to bed.”
Dr. Scott picked up the glass, swiped his index finger against the slight residue of dark-brown liquid at the bottom, and touched it to his tongue.
Darkly, he said, “This drink was laced with laudanum. Alcohol and laudanum can be a deadly combination.” He set down the glass and turned back to Miss Thompson.
“Was Mrs. Whitlock in the habit of putting laudanum in her nightcap?”
“No.” Miss Thompson’s voice caught. “That is, I don’t think so. She does—she did take laudanum quite regularly, for headaches and whenever her stomach was bothering her. She sometimes took a few drops on a spoon, and sometimes from a vial she carried in her handbag.”
Selena remembered that Mrs. Whitlock had stealthily returned a small vial to her knitting bag on Christmas Eve, when they’d been singing carols, and soon after had fallen asleep in her chair. Had that been laudanum? “Mrs. Whitlock complained of a headache last night,” she pointed out.
“I remember.” Dr. Scott leaned over the bed and gently opened Mrs. Whitlock’s eyes with his fingertips.
Selena noticed that Mrs. Whitlock’s pupils were as tiny as pinpoints.
“That confirms it.” The doctor stood back with a heavy sigh.
“I wish I’d known she’d had laudanum with her.
I would have warned her not to take it with her hot toddy.
But even if Mrs. Whitlock hadn’t had that nightcap, two or three teaspoons of laudanum in an otherwise-healthy adult can depress the respiratory system so severely that they stop breathing entirely.
The blue lips, and the constriction of the pupils—they’re both signs of a laudanum overdose. ”
“You mean she accidentally killed herself?” Miss Thompson sounded dismayed.
“It would seem so,” Dr. Scott replied.
“Unless,” Selena blurted out, “someone else added laudanum to her beverage.”
“‘Someone else’?” Mrs. Thompson’s brow furrowed. “But how could that be? Are you suggesting that Mrs. Whitlock might have been deliberately poisoned?”
Selena wanted to bite her tongue. She shouldn’t have said that in front of Miss Thompson.
Selena didn’t want anyone to know that she and the doctor suspected that murder had been afoot at Darkmoor Park.
And it still seemed suspicious that Miss Thompson hadn’t helped Mrs. Whitlock get ready for bed.
“I’m … just thinking out loud,” she said quickly.
“Anything is possible at this point,” Dr. Scott interjected, arching his scarred eyebrow at Selena as if to say, Let’s keep mum on that subject. “Miss Thompson,” he added, “did your mistress come straight up to her chamber last night after we all left the drawing room?”
Miss Thompson shook her head. “No. She wanted a foot massage—she sometimes liked one before retiring, and she preferred the chair in my room. So, she demanded to go there first. And while I was giving her a foot massage, she …” Miss Thompson hesitated, her cheeks coloring.
“She started berating me. She said I had made a spectacle of myself during charades and should not have been so gregarious. She insisted that I should have made a shorter list during the Memory Game so that her own list wouldn’t have looked so bad.
She was so angry, I started to cry. I was still crying when we returned to her room, where I was supposed to help her get ready for bed.
But she said, ‘If you’re going to cry at every little thing, I have no use for you. I’ll undress myself. Get out!’”
“And did you go back to your room?” Selena asked.
Miss Thompson nodded. “I did. I was so miserable, I sank down on my bed and cried.”
Despite herself, Selena’s heart went out to the young woman, whose story seemed entirely credible.
“Getting back to the moment or two when you entered this room, did you notice if the hot toddy was on the bedside table?” Dr. Scott asked.
“Yes, it was,” Miss Thompson replied.
Dr. Scott’s mouth set. “Which means it had been brought up in the meantime.”
“Oh, this is all my fault!” Miss Thompson’s face crumpled.
“Your fault?” Selena looked at her. “How so?”
“I should have ignored Mrs. Whitlock’s order to leave her room.
I should have stayed and helped her to undress.
If I had, I could have warned her not to take laudanum.
” Miss Thompson’s lips trembled. “Her doctor was always telling her to be careful how much she took. I kept warning her to keep the dose to a minimum, but she didn’t always listen.
I have found her too many times to count so deeply under the influence of that drug that it was difficult to rouse her.
This was the first time, though, that she wouldn’t wake up at all. ” Her voice broke.
“Please don’t blame yourself, Miss Thompson.” Dr. Scott hesitated, then added, “If anyone is at fault, it is I. I knew she had a headache and had ordered a hot toddy. I had also noted that she’d consumed rum punch earlier in the evening. I should have warned her not to take any pain medication.”
“She wasn’t your responsibility, Doctor.
” The tragic circumstances filled Selena with sorrow, but at the same time, her mind was buzzing with an alternate theory—a theory that involved a deliberate poisoning.
Which she didn’t want to discuss in front of Miss Thompson.
“How could you have known that she had laudanum with her?”
“Even so, I blame myself.” He heaved a sigh.
“In any case, it appears that sometime after you left this room, Miss Thompson, your employer ingested a dose of laudanum as well as her hot toddy. The combination proved lethal. My guess is that she fell asleep fully dressed, and sometime during the next hour or two, she stopped breathing and died.”
“Oh! It’s too, too awful.” Miss Thompson retrieved a handkerchief from her skirt pocket and wiped her eyes.
“Please accept my condolences, Miss Thompson.” Dr. Scott’s tone was gentle and kind. “We can talk later to discuss whom we might notify about Mrs. Whitlock’s passing. For now, you may return to your room. Miss Taylor and I can take over from here.”
“Thank you.” Miss Thompson left the room, still sniffling.
The moment the door had closed, Dr. Scott turned to Selena with a hard look. “There was an interval, when Mrs. Whitlock was getting a foot massage, when this room, and that drink, were left unattended.”
“Which means anyone could have slipped in and added a lethal dose of laudanum to Mrs. Whitlock’s hot toddy.”
“Possibly.”
“But wait,” Selena said, with sudden doubt. “I was prescribed laudanum once for a headache and I never took it again. It has a distinctive color and a bitter taste. Wouldn’t Mrs. Whitlock have noticed?”
“A hot toddy contains whiskey, honey, lemon juice, and spices, potent flavors that would have masked the taste of the laudanum,” Dr. Scott explained.
“I detected a trace of it, but I am trained in the matter and was looking for it. As for color, both whiskey and laudanum are reddish brown. A dose of laudanum wouldn’t have changed the color of her drink. ”
“I see,” Selena replied. They turned to the bed, where Mrs. Whitlock lay, grey-faced and still. “What do you think happened, Doctor? Did she accidentally poison herself? Or did someone do her in?”
“An excellent question. Although for the second theory to hold water, we’d need to find a motive.”
Selena took a breath, an idea spinning in her brain.
“We know Mrs. Whitlock coveted that expensive estate sale jewelry. We thought she may have risen early and tried to threaten or persuade Mr. Clarke into revealing the hiding place of his five thousand pounds and then killed him. But what if someone else got there first, and Mrs. Whitlock was merely a witness to the man’s death? ”
Dr. Scott went quiet. “And, later, Mrs. Whitlock threatened to turn in Mr. Clarke’s killer if they didn’t pay her a particular sum?”
“Exactly.”
“That could be.” Dr. Scott nodded. “Even if she wasn’t a killer, I believe her unscrupulous enough to have tried to blackmail the actual villain. But the perpetrator didn’t want to pay up, so they silenced her forever.”
“It’s possible, isn’t it?”