Chapter 22
“This is quite a three-pipe problem.”
Arthur Conan Doyle
Which meant Marigold needed to get in touch with Cab immediately. “Miss Burke, may I again trouble you to use your phone to call Mr. Cox?”
“Oh, but I thought he was meant to be here presently? Mr. Breyer just called to admit him at the lodge gate.”
“Excellent.” Marigold felt herself breathe for the first time since Miss Burke had shared her surprising information.
And then she checked her watch, consulted her class schedule, and decided she had just enough time to change her clothing into something a tad more flattering—not that anything Isabella had made for her could possibly be unflattering, but there was a time to raise one’s standards to meet the occasion.
It never hurt to look one’s best.
Isabella had included all sorts of evening wear that was still packed in tissue to preserve the delicate fabrics, but Marigold passed by the elaborate tea gowns in favor of a beautiful autumnal sateen skirt and double-breasted jacket ensemble that fit her like a glove.
And instead of her usual white, well pressed shirtwaist, she chose a darker, paisley-patterned blouse with a black silk tie.
Yes, something out of her usual but still precisely tailored. And the wonderful wide puffed sleeves gave her consequence—not that she lacked any, but it never hurt to be prepared where Cab Cox was involved.
Marigold didn’t have to wait long—she was about to descend to the reception room when Aggie came pelting up the stairs to bring her the news. “Marigold!”
“Where you coming from in such a pother?” Ethyl asked from her doorway as the girl all but skidded to a stop in the corridor. “You’re as all aflutter as a moth in a mitten!”
“I came to tell Marigold that Miss Burke has sent for her, but that awful Sarah Appleton went and made herself at home in the reception area with Marigold’s beau.”
“Thank you, Aggie,” Marigold could only smile, even as she said, “Mr. Cox is not my beau.”
“He’s not?” Ethyl lifted a brow in sly skepticism. “Then how did you know it would be Mr. Cox down in the reception room being romanced by old Sarah?”
“Because Mr. Cox, who is helping me with some particulars related to Olivia Thayer’s death, wired that he would be arriving. That’s how I know.”
“Which explains the very elegant togs. Well played, Marigold.” Ethyl waggled her eyebrows in teasing approval. “Now, off you go to give Appleton a run for her terribly old money. My only comfort is that she’s got her nose so high in the air she’ll surely drown herself in a rainstorm someday.”
Marigold kept that cheering thought in her mind as she swept down into the reception room like a bright, brisk gale. “Sarah! How kind of you to entertain Mr. Cox. I do appreciate your being so welcoming.” She beamed crocodilian warmth at the girl.
While Cab immediately stepped back from Sarah to turn to greet Marigold, Sarah sidled herself closer, sliding her hand through the crook of Cab’s arm. “Why, Marigold, what an unexpected surprise. Whatever are you doing here?” Sarah was all wide-eyed astonishment.
“Keeping my appointment with Mr. Cox,” Marigold answered simply, keeping in mind that she needn’t make a greater enemy out of someone who was merely an academic rival.
But Sarah had her own version of reptilian chill and was not to be outmaneuvered. “Why, Cab and I are such dear old friends, aren’t we, Cab?”
“Sure, I suppose we are,” said Cab easily.
“Families have known each other for ages. And as I was saying, Miss Manners and I are dear friends, as well.” And to put paid to any more unseemly pettiness between herself and Sarah, Cab very wisely, and very smoothly, turned and shook Sarah’s hand.
“Awfully nice to see you, Miss Appleton, but I hope you will forgive us—Miss Manners and I have some urgent business to attend to.”
Sarah was not about to take her dismissal with anything like good grace. “Don’t tell me—you’re here on behalf of a client to whom the Manners still owe money?” Sarah asked with a maliciously bright smile. “Is that why you brought a bailiff?”
Marigold noticed for the first time a fourth party present—a upright, mustachioed young man in a blue frock coat uniform, emblazoned with the badge of the District Police.
“Not at all,” Cab answered flatly. “And I would never discuss confidential client matters, in any circumstance. But allow me to introduce Detective Pratt, who has come at President Irvine’s request in the delicate matter of the murder on campus.”
“Murder?” Sarah said the word with the same disinterested intonation one might reserve for tenement diseases—unfortunate, but nothing to do with her.
“How do you do, Detective.” Marigold offered her hand. “I am Marigold Manners, and I am the one who found Olivia Thayer’s body.”
“Yes, so like Marigold to concern herself with such tawdry goings-on,” Sarah put in.
“Yes,” Cab said pleasantly. “How very like her to concern herself with justice—especially on behalf of the college. It is something I always admire in people, that kind of altruism and sense of right. Don’t you?”
Which left the poor girl with nothing to say except, “Well, I suppose I’ll leave you to it.”
“Thank you, Sarah,” Marigold responded with all the equanimity she might spare the young woman—for whom she still had unmet suspicions. “But before you go—are you at all familiar with the Société des Belles Lettres?”
“I am the president of the association this year.”
“Naturally.”
“Is that all?” Sarah asked.
“For now,” was all the answer Marigold was prepared to give her.
Once Sarah had made her sweeping exit—did the girl know any other kind?
—Marigold turned her attention back to Cab and the blue-coated officer.
“My apologies for that display of schoolgirl pettiness, gentlemen, especially when we have more important matters to attend to. Now, where were we, Detective?”
“Officer George Pratt, Miss Manners.” The policeman introduced himself. “Pleased to meet you. Mr. Cox has brought me abreast of all your findings to date, and I must say, I am glad to have your assistance—and experience, so Mr. Cox has also told me. This is only my second murder case.”
Marigold had decided not to count anymore. But she was pleased that the young detective seemed to be the opposite of Officer Parker in Pride’s Crossing, who had done everything he could to bar her participation in the Great Misery Island murders, and whose every utterance had been a condescension.
“I am more than happy to share my information, Detective. But what news have you come to tell me?”
Cab made an unhappy face. “As I hope I made clear in my wire, there was no listing for Valentine on White Star.”
“The telegram was an obvious effort to confuse,” Marigold concluded.
“And confound the chase,” Detective Pratt agreed. “If the Thayers were in Boston, searching the White Star dock, they could not be in Wellesley, searching for their missing daughter.”
“That’s another thing,” Cab said. “Before I had the information that the wire actually came from South Natick, I took a chance and visited the Western Union office directly across from the Cunard docks in East Boston.”
“You went all the way to East Boston on a hunch?”
“Oh, you know me,” he demurred, brushing his hair off his perfect brow in a familiar gesture of chagrin. “Much like you, I don’t like to do anything by halves.”
“Naturally.” It was one of the things she admired about Cab—his brand of well-bred intelligence seemed to come with a large share of well-camouflaged, steely determination.
“The passenger rolls show he embarked on the eleventh—and that he did not do so alone. There was a Mrs. Valentine listed as sailing as well.”
“So …” Marigold could hardly keep up with her thoughts. “Was he already married to someone else? Was his purported proposal to Olivia entirely spurious and he never meant to marry her in the first place? Why, he certainly was an out and out rotter!”
Her fury for poor Olivia Thayer grew exponentially.
But at the same time, something in her bones had told her that Olivia Thayer was a like-minded young woman to herself—that however much she might have been attracted to this Valentine fellow, she never would have been taken in by such a double-dealing bounder.
“There’s more,” Cab warned.
“How much more iniquity can there be?”
“A vast deal more. After I ascertained that Valentine had bought two third-class tickets for passage on the Cunard liner Ultonia—”
“Utopia? Ultonia? How confusing!” Marigold complained. “But do you think he chose the ships on purpose to be confusing?”
“Sailing schedules are set months in advance,” Pratt answered. “Probably just coincidence.”
“There are no coincidences,” Marigold averred.
“And on that theory,” Cab said, “I went to talk with the stevedores at the Cunard dock, to see if anyone remembered anything about Mr. and Mrs. Valentine.”
“Did they?”
“Considering I had no description of him, it was a difficult thing—”
Where was Eliza Anthony and her patented detective camera when Wilkie Valentine had been escorting Olivia Thayer to the doors outside the reception room?
“—but one of the dock hands did remember Mrs. Valentine, because she, while she was out of earshot of her husband, asked nervously if there might be some difficulty with her passport, as she hadn’t had time, she said, to change it to Valentine after her recent marriage.”
“Recent?” Marigold’s outrage soared to new heights. “Valentine was romancing two young women at once? The bounder! I hope I never get my hands on him or I, I’ll—”
Murder no longer made her just see wickedness in every shadow—it made her feel as hard and wicked as a murderer herself.
“You are not alone in your feelings, Marigold,” Cab added, “I assure you. But the stevedore,” Cab consulted a note he pulled from his pocket, “Mr. Ames, said that the ticket he copied—so he could make sure he had the right information to stow the couple’s luggage—indicated that Mr. Valentine was from Richmond, Virginia, but that his accent was all wrong.
Mr. Ames said he would have recognized a southern accent since he formerly hailed from that part of the world.
He said Valentine’s was pure South Boston. ”
“What …” Marigold was stumped. “What does that mean?”
“That is a question I asked myself and Detective Pratt. But to be thorough, I checked—or to be more honest, I had my law clerks check, but they’re bright, curious young fellows, who know their way around a records office.
And they could find no record of a Valentine marriage in any of the past four weeks in either Norfolk County or the city of Boston. ”
“So … was he already married the whole time he was wooing Olivia?”
“Perhaps.” Cab shrugged. “Or perhaps this ostensible Mrs. Valentine is simply a modern woman who has no interest in the social convention of marriage. Or—”
Perhaps Cab was letting his own personal experience with Marigold color his thinking. “Or … what?”
“Or perhaps this couple who has no marriage license, no updated passports in the name Valentine, and no indication that they were from Richmond, Virginia—Mr. Ames said she sounded as if she were from Dorchester—are just another ruse to throw us off the chase.”
“Damnation,” was all Marigold could think to say in the face of so many lies.
A strange unease crept back under her skin—probably just the idea that Valentine might have done all of those confusing things and still be on a ship somewhere escaping justice.
“But if we don’t treat his embarkation as a fact, then we have absolutely no hope of having him arrested on suspicion of murder once he disembarks in Liverpool. ”
“Indeed,” the detective agreed. “It would certainly help our inquiries to have a better description of this Wilkie Valentine, to see if he matches the description of the man at the dock. We also need physical evidence connecting him to the murder.”
“There are at least two people who might be able to give some description.” If not Miss Burke, then they ought to be able to press Aggie, who had seen the man who had mistaken her for another.
A wild thought occurred. “Do you think there is more than one man? That this Valentine had a twin brother or cousin who has taken his place?”
Cab shook his head even as he smiled. “Now that sounds like a made-up story in one of the tabloids. But speaking of tabloids, I’m sure you won’t be surprised that I called in some favors from some rather shady characters I know in the press—”
“Is there any other kind of person in the press?” Marigold asked, thinking of the fast-talking, slow-acting Wilkerson, who had not yet managed to get any article published in his paper—not even the one she had written for him.
Cab chuckled. “Probably not. But I thought you ought to know that I got no purchase trying to track your Mr. James Wilkerson down—no one at the Boston Evening Journal will claim to know him.”
Marigold was taken aback. “He is not my Mr. Wilkerson—especially if he proves not to be the Boston Evening Journal’s Wilkerson.”
Cab relented a little in the face of her obvious objection. “I suppose it’s not that surprising—the tabloids generally hire on only a few full-time writers and string the rest along on a speculative basis. Still, you’d think someone would have heard of him.”
“Indeed.” Someone was keeping him in camel hair coats and fashionable homburg hats.
“But Mr. Wilkerson does not matter.” Marigold tried to rein in her frustration and force herself to be rational and logical in sorting out the known facts.
“Wilkie Valentine does. I do have some physical evidence—I found her glove and a button on the path halfway between the lodge gate and the boathouse, where they must have originally fought.”
Officer Pratt gestured toward the door. “I should like to see exactly where that was. And the boathouse, as well. The scene of the crime.”
“Naturally. Let us go there at once, before the light goes from the afternoon.” Even as she said it, Marigold chastised herself for not revisiting the boathouse before—for letting her own feeble fears keep her from pursuing the truth.
If she were honest—and she was trying to be both scrupulously honest and unfailingly logical—since the day she found Oliva Thayer’s body, she had not yet had the courage to go back.
Now they would need more than courage—they would need luck. Because time was running out.