Chapter 7
Cookie is pacing when I enter our room, her thick flannel robe tied tight around her solid form. She takes in my haggard appearance, shirt untucked, hair loose. “What happened?” she asks in her grumbly, clipped way of speaking.
“They asked about me having words with Mr. Sanders.”
The zesty scent of fir drifts from a plaited basket on the dresser. Cookie often fills the basket with clippings to freshen the air, and tonight it is crammed with bottlebrush-shaped branchlets. Perhaps she knew I’d be stinking up the room with my distress.
“What words?” Her eyebrows become sharp points, her pupils constricting. She helps me into a flannel nightgown, tugging it over me in the brisk way she dresses a chicken.
The story pours out with more emotion than when I explained it to the sheriff. “You should’ve seen how Sveyn was staring at me. Like I’d done it.”
She snorts loudly and hands me a damp towel she’s heated over our cast-iron radiator. “He’s staring because he sees you as lower than him. And in this house, you are. Anyway, if anyone killed him, it was Shimmelfen. That one was no good. I just hope he isn’t still hiding about.”
I shiver, despite the hot towel. I played a part in condemning the valet, though not willingly. Maybe he’s licking his chops to get a swipe at me.
The coroner arrives the next morning, along with Mr. Sanders’s lawyer.
Boots forbids anyone from leaving the island and orders us to carry on as before.
The ban only makes my feet grow itchier, especially with a murderer on the loose.
At least at university I won’t be jumping at shadows.
Even braiding my hair takes twice as long; my muscles seize at every sound.
With my illustrations no longer needed for a book that won’t be completed, I drag myself up to Mr. Sanders’s office in case I must fill in for Miss Jack.
But the secretary is at a writing desk, scribbling.
Though barely twenty, a worried crease mars her otherwise comely face, and a thick white bow holds back her long hair—I’ve never seen her without it.
Her black dress, as dark as her hair, makes her skin appear pale, chalky as a moth’s wing.
She isn’t required to wear a uniform, yet she rarely chooses color.
With her dusky skin and high cheekbones, I’ve guessed she has Indian blood, as do many people on Orcas Island, though I’ve never asked her personal questions.
She glances up, chilly as a January morning. Did the sheriff interview her? I wonder what secrets does she keep?
Leaving her to her work, I retreat, nearly bumping into a figure behind me.
“Pardon me. I didn’t mean to scare you.” Mr. Sanders’s lawyer, Mr. Alexy Cosmos, steadies me with a solid arm. I’ve seen the man many times, though I doubt he has ever seen me. A shock of prematurely white hair punctuates an olive complexion with sunken eyes that have consumed many a treatise.
“Mr. Cosmos,” I murmur, dipping a curtsy as I edge away. Did he see me spying on Miss Jack?
“Lucy, isn’t it?”
“Er, yes, sir.” I rub at my thumbs, a nervous habit.
“I am sure you must be in great shock, and I am sorry for your loss.” He takes his time with his words, squeezing the juice out of each syllable. “You are eighteen now, yes?”
I stiffen. “Yes.” You’re only eighteen. Same age as he was when he began to understand, Mr. Sanders said of my father. What does Mr. Cosmos know about my parents? Of course, a lawyer knows his client’s secrets. But does he know all of them? His face betrays nothing beyond a dusting of sympathy.
“Mr. Sanders spoke highly of your work on his book.” He glances beyond me toward the library, where a wall of windows gives a sweeping view of our comb-shaped marina at the bottom of a gentle slope. At the foot of the marina lies the infirmary, where Mr. Sanders’s head rests.
“That was kind of him.”
“He was a man with great verve,” he says with gravity. “A passion for doing. We can only hope heaven has some mountains that need moving.”
“Yes, sir,” I murmur.
His mouth parts as if to pry further, but he only bows and slips into the office.
Waves of restless energy move through me. I don’t want to be alone. With new mouths to feed and many who feed them paralyzed in shock and fear, Cookie will need extra hands. Helping out is the least I can do for Mr. Sanders. Without him, the world feels impossibly large.
In the kitchen, a stone fireplace devours up most of one wall.
Cookie, in her customary mobcap and calico dress, bends over the stewpot, which is constantly fed through the week.
“Time to send this one to the chickens,” she mutters, meaning the stew has gotten too murky.
Pots and pans hang from the ceiling over a long center table busy with workers—half a dozen maids hacking meat and onions, and one towheaded fetch-boy scooping fat into a bowl.
I quietly tie on an apron.
“I still think Shimmelfen is far too refined to do something so revolting,” Dora says, delicately picking a feather from a mostly plucked chicken. “I just hope the killer’s not waiting to take another soul.”
“The yard boys said the killer whales did it,” squeaks the fetch-boy. “They said to stay off Mount Consternation unless you want to be—kk!” He makes a slicing motion across his skinny neck with his spatula.
Flossie, freckled and fluttery, jumps like a drop of water hitting a frying pan. She spends her free hours buried in Vogue or McCall’s, her kerchief puffed as though hiding some fancy coiffure. “Not the Or—” She bites back the demon’s name.
Dora glances up and flicks back her hair with a chicken-greased arm. “Enough with that sniveling. I could barely sleep last night because of your pitching and yawing. There’s no mysterious demon, though it still could be hungry sea wolves.”
I tie my strings too tightly and dig a nail into the knot to loosen it. “Sea wolves eat salmon, not people.”
“But they aren’t getting their fill of salmon, are they now?” she retorts. “Gilly only brought us five today, worse than yesterday.”
Cookie selects a wooden spoon from a ceramic holder at the middle of our worktable. “Salmon comes when the salmon wants and it’s not up to us.” According to her, salmon is the island’s lifeblood, and we cannot get by for too long without it. Not just Lummi, but all humans, plants, and animals.
Dora tosses her gaze to the ceiling beam. “All I’m saying is maybe the sea wolves have turned to munching on people.”
Cookie thumps Dora with the back of her spoon before returning to the stove. “The only salt I want coming out of you is from that shaker.” Cookie catches my eyes and ticks her head toward the far counter, where the bucket of salmon has been placed.
A measure of pride bubbles up in me. She prefers to prep the fish herself, not trusting us to give the task the solemnity and skill such an important job requires, but sometimes I am given the honor when she is too busy.
Dora trains her sights on me as I move through our well-stocked kitchen, past an extra-large icebox from Ohio and a newfangled toast turner.
Mr. Sanders liked his gadgets. I remove a large knife from the chopping block, trying hard not to think about poor Mr. Sanders. What wickedness severed his neck?
My hand shakes and I set down the knife.
The fish have become a panel of jurors, bulging eyes challenging me. You’re the one who found him. Maybe his death has something to do with you.
Get ahold of yourself, you jellyfish. Do not let whatever evil has fallen here take a bite of you, too.
I say a prayer of thanksgiving. Then with two hands, I lift out a salmon measuring nearly three feet long and place it on a cutting board. I take up the knife again.
Crack! The salmon’s head skates across the counter. Cookie frowns at me, maybe thinking her confidence in me was misplaced.
The door closest to me opens.
Nash stumbles in, hat in hand, dark blond hair sticking out in different directions, as if recently pulled.
In the years he’s been away at university, the roundness has left his cheeks, leaving bones that draw the eye toward an unexpectedly soft mouth.
A pencil-dot mole lies forward of his earlobe, another tracing the clean line of his jaw.
Stools scrape the linoleum floor as everyone snaps to attention. Nash’s eyes rake over me, and a scowl pinches his unshaven face. Is he angry at me for revealing his argument with Mr. Sanders? Or just disgusted that I am holding a bloody fish?
I lower my gaze, bracing myself.
“Mr. Sanders-Byre.” Cookie straightens her apron as she approaches, not bothering to hide her surprise. The kitchen is no place for the heir apparent. “May we help you, sir?”
“You may, Mrs. Lincoln.” Only a shadow of his usual charm ghosts his words. “I need something for dyspepsia.” He clutches for his tie before realizing he isn’t wearing one. The top button of his collared shirt is open, the hem mostly untucked from his casual trousers.
“The nurse will have something at the infirmary. I’ll send one of the—”
“Not the infirmary,” he insists. “I just came from there.”
No wonder he feels sick. The coroner must have had him identify his uncle’s remains as next of kin.
“Just give me something,” he implores, glancing behind him, as if worrying about being followed. “A remedy, see? Like what the Skansies had at Daniel’s funeral.”
The Skansie brothers had wept openly while digging his grave. I wasn’t the only one who had loved Daniel, who, despite a weakness for a good prank, didn’t have a mean bone in his body.
Cookie glances at me. “Lucy, go fetch some yarrow. Dora, take over the fish before they flop away.”
Dora is not pleased but fixes up a pretty smile for Nash. Even disheveled, he has a superior bearing that draws the eye. If that is one’s taste.
I am glad for the excuse to get out. After washing, I fetch a plain coiled basket from the pot rack and a pair of shears, then follow Nash past the butler’s pantry into the hall.
I expect him to veer back to the main house. Instead, he stalks after me toward a narrow door hidden behind the vestibule of the main entrance. The big house is riddled with these passages, built to keep servants unseen. “I’m coming with you.”
“But I’ll be quick,” I assure him.
“I have been hoping to talk to you,” he says in a voice that’s suddenly lost its infirmity.
Was his nausea a ploy to get me out of the kitchen? Alone in the woods?
My basket squeaks under my grip. Don’t be foolish, I think. Nash may be a peacock, but he is no killer. Then again, he is the heir apparent…
He holds the vestibule door wide, eyes on me, waiting.
“Very well.” I step out into the gray daylight, though the way ahead doesn’t seem clear at all.