Murder Made Her Wicked (Marigold Manners Mysteries #2)

Prologue

“It does not do to trust people too much.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

What was it about hats that always seemed to catch Marigold Manners’s eye?

This hat was outlandish—judged by Marigold’s decidedly less flamboyant taste—an oversized, sodden, blue velvet tam-o’-shanter with an elaborate spray of pheasant feathers bristling out of a shining brooch.

Had she seen it before? No matter, someone had likely paid a very pretty penny for the chapeau and brooch and would want it back, even if it were dripping from its dousing in the lake.

Let that be a lesson to young ladies to secure their fashionable headpieces with sturdy hatpins, especially while broaching the decidedly brisk fall winds coursing along the shore of Lake Waban.

Marigold shaded her eyes to look back up the hill, judging the distance to the gothic pile of College Hall, where she would need to return the hat if it were to be reunited with whichever young collegian had been so careless as to lose it.

Or perhaps she would just take the hat with her, so as not to be late for her appointment at the boathouse.

But as she stepped off the path, careful of her footing in the soft, marshy ground along the edge of the dock, her gaze went beyond the hat, to the trailing skein of dark hair tangled in the reeds, rippling with the motion of the waves.

And to the unmistakable shape of a hand, pale and shimmering white like the belly of a fish, below the surface of the clear, cold water.

Recognition screamed through her in the same instant panic propelled her forward, sloshing deeper, reaching frantically into the icy water, hoping against hope that this time she would not be too late.