Chapter 14
“Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.”
Mark Twain
The next day was more of a return—or perhaps for Marigold, an establishment—of blessed routine.
She put aside her investigation and did nothing but act as a college girl and future archaeologist. First, she tended to the chloride content of her experiment in artifact conservation before attending her classes.
After that, she retreated to the intellectual fortress of the library, where she spent several hours preparing an essay for History of the Hellenes as well as getting into the nitty-gritty of Lucretius’s Epicurean philosophy.
It was difficult and exhausting and sublime all at the same time. The work made her, dare she say it, happy. Or at least as happy as she might be with an unidentified girl and an unsolved murder tumbling in the back of her mind.
From that worry, there was no respite.
But toward that end, she was presently stymied. No one seemed to be missing a girl.
“Oh, Miss Manners?” Miss Burke was only marginally annoyed at her this afternoon, waving from the doorway of the reception room as she passed. “Telegram for you.”
Marigold wondered idly if she ought to be tipping Miss Burke the way she might a hotel bellhop who might bring her a wire, but her funds were too closely budgeted to permit such a thing.
She settled for effusive politeness. “Thank you, Miss Burke. Oh, it is from my friend, who is my half-brother’s half-sister,” she added with a delighted smile just to confuse the poor little woman, “who is now become a famous cookbook author. Her book is being published in New York.”
“Is it now?” Miss Burke looked suitably impressed enough to allay Marigold’s feelings.
She tore open the waxy envelope with alacrity. “Oh, she’s coming on the train this afternoon.” She consulted the watch pinned to her sweater. “I’ve just enough time to change into my cycling boots, pin on my hat, and meet her train. Thank you, Miss Burke. You have no idea how happy you’ve made me.”
“My pleasure.” The little woman beamed with her own subdued happiness.
But not nearly as much happiness as Marigold. After a long day of single-minded academic endeavor, there was nothing, simply nothing, half as liberating and invigorating as a brisk bicycle ride. Marigold felt her mood lighten and her mind clear through the simple pleasure of physical exertion.
What she needed was a fresh approach—a fresh perspective. She must be concentrating on the wrong thing or have taken the wrong approach. And yet it nagged at the back of her mind that no one seemed to be missing such a well-cared-for young woman. It boggled her imagination.
And worried her—if she were to go missing, would no one look for her?
Her newfound family were sprawled across the region—Wilburt had sold Great Misery back to the Endicotts to be developed for a hotel and was happy making a new life for himself and their mother, Sophronia, on a tidy farm on the Rhode Island coast, far away from the North Shore of Massachusetts and the notoriety of the murders.
Daisy and her husband, Tad Endicott, had relocated to a brownstone in New York, where Tad was establishing his publishing career.
Seviah was traveling the world over, filling theater seats as a matinee idol for the Keith Vaudeville Reviews. And Lucy—
Marigold’s smile returned. Lucy was here, come to help Marigold—who reached the depot just as the train was steaming into the station.
Lucy was one of the first people off the train, exiting from a car at the far end of the platform with her valises in hand.
She was just as tall and forthright and beautiful as Marigold remembered, with her dark skin gleaming in the morning sun, but she carried herself with a newly acquired elegance along with her usual quiet assurance and understated panache.
Marigold ran down the platform and immediately embraced her friend, which seemed to fluster Lucy as her arms were filled with bags. “Well, hello to you too, Miss College Manners.”
But the last time they had parted, Lucy had been the one to hug her, so Marigold wanted to return the affection.
“Hello to you too, Miss Published Author. I can’t thank you enough for coming.
You’re looking marvelous. I love your hat.
Very chic.” The dark felt chapeau complemented Lucy’s very continental ensemble of a plaid suit embellished with passementerie.
“It’s French, from Paris, France,” Lucy enthused.
“Naturally. Very sophisticated.” Marigold felt comparatively dowdy in her plain, dark straw boater.
“Got it in New York City as a special present to myself when Collier bought my book. My momma says I wasted good money, but I told her I need to look like I’m a successful authoress and chef. And besides, it’s just pretty.”
Marigold knew the feeling. “I think you made a wise investment in your image. A hat is like the punctuation mark of one’s look—no ensemble is complete without it.
You look every inch the accomplished authoress and discerning chef.
Which is why I fear I may be wasting your time, sending you on a fool’s errand here.
But I do thank you profoundly for coming. ”
“It’s all right. I like how we’ve managed to look out for each other, in our way,” Lucy said as Marigold linked arms with her.
“You helping me with the introduction to Mr. Endicott, and him taking me on at Collier. And his wife, your sister, Mrs. Endicott, why, she had me to dinner at their place, sweet as you please—right through the front door. And she invited their cook to come out and take tea and coffee with us after dinner and discuss recipes, and she was just as comfortable and nice as you please. And I know it was down to your influence. Kindness like that needs to be repaid any way it can be.”
Marigold felt her heart swell with fellow-feeling—both for Lucy and for her half-sister, Daisy. “All I asked was for Tad Endicott to give you a fair shot—which your work had already earned you and which, clearly, he did. But Daisy’s kindness was all her own.”
Maybe Daisy felt she had some repayment of past support, albeit secretive, from Lucy to make up for. Whatever the reason, all that really mattered was, as Lucy so aptly said, that their strange, assorted family kept managing to look out for one another.
“So, what’s gone on?” Lucy asked. “I understand that you need me to try out for a cook, but I figure you’ve got some deeper play going on here.”
“Well …” Marigold wanted to stall her until they were safely out of the station where no one from the town might hear her theories. “I’m really not sure—” She took her time retrieving her bicycle.
“Don’t try to bluff me, Marigold. I remember how you were about all those drowned girls up in Pride’s Crossing—like a dog who can smell a fox in the henhouse. I know you must be digging into something.”
“I am trying—discreetly,” she admitted as they passed down the sidewalk. “Because there is another girl dead here—you may have seen it in the Boston tabloids?”
“I don’t read those rags.”
“Good for you,” Marigold shared Lucy’s disdain for the kind of irresponsible stretching of the truth that the tabloid engaged in on a daily basis.
“Because true to form, they got the facts wrong.” Marigold felt secure in telling Lucy the truth without compromising her promise to President Irvine.
“While the Boston Evening Journal published that she was a suicide, she was in actuality strangled before she was put in the water so she would appear drowned.”
Lucy’s expression was shocked but, sadly, not surprised. “Who is she?”
“That is one of the particular difficulties—we don’t even know her name. Yet. But someone must know her.”
“And you think that someone is at this boardinghouse?”
“Yes.” It was a wonderful thing to find herself with such an intuitive person.
“Something is potentially amiss with one of the boarders, Professor Imogen Currier. She is a professor of rhetoric at my college, very well respected by the faculty and equally admired by her students—I liked her very much when I took her class two years ago. But I do feel there is something she is trying to hide.” There was too much out of character in her recent behavior to make her seem entirely innocent.
“And you want me working on the inside of this boardinghouse so I can find out what it is she’s hiding?” Lucy shook her head. “I’m no snoop.”
“I am not asking you to snoop. I’m just asking you to keep your ears open.
People tend to be more unguarded in domestic situations than they might be in professional ones,” she said, thinking of President Irvine’s observation regarding Professor Currier.
“She might talk to her landlady or the woman who makes her beautiful breakfast differently than she might talk to say, the president of the college. She might mention her protégée who allegedly eloped with some rotter, or her dear friends the Thayers and their friends in Transcendentalist circles in passing. Just keep your eyes and ears open—within your professional context.”
“And this is that important?”
“It is. A girl has been murdered—strangled to death. And no one seems to care or want to do anything about it.” Marigold heaved out a sigh of frustration. “Well, I care. A great damn deal.”
“Oh, I can see that, Miss College Manners.” Lucy patted Margold’s arm. “No getting away from that. You always do. I’ll bet you got everything figured out, just like you did last time, don’t you?”
“No.” Marigold felt another sigh push its way out of her lungs. “To be honest, I have very little figured out. And to be even more honest, I don’t know if the landlady will hire you. She’s a mite bit crotchety. May Barnacle is her name.”