Chapter 23
“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.”
Mark Twain
“We’ll start with where you found the body, if you don’t mind, Miss Manners,” Detective Pratt said.
“Yes. It was just this side of the boathouse.” She pointed down the lawns toward the building. “At the closest corner of the floating dock.”
The detective paused at the crest of the hill to survey the scene. “You said you found the article of Miss Thayer’s clothing where?”
Marigold pointed east along the well-trodden path toward the lodge gate. “At the crest of that next knoll, just past the Music Hall, there on the right.”
“They came from that direction? Walking this way?” He narrowed his eyes to gauge the distance. “It’s half a mile from there to the boathouse. He might have killed her anywhere along that path and carried her. The shore there is closer. Perhaps her body floated by chance to the boathouse?”
“I don’t think so,” Marigold countered. “It’s marshy there so the shore is difficult to access. And there was something about the way her skirts were tangled under the pier that made me think she had been purposefully stuffed under there where she might potentially not be found.”
“And I have learned not to go against your instincts, Marigold,” Cab added. “You have a singular way of imagining what happened that ought to be given full rein.”
Marigold was not entirely sure that this was a gift that ought to be complimented. “Thank you, I think. If it is an instinct, it is not exactly a comfortable one.”
“Perhaps not, but it is useful.”
They walked in silence the rest of the way down the path, taking exactly the same way she had come that fateful afternoon exactly one week ago. “I saw the hat first, from here.” She pointed. “Just there.”
“That looks to be about four feet deep,” the detective assayed. “You went in there?”
“Off the side.” She led the way to the floating dock. “Here.”
Cab reached down to test the water. “Damnation, it’s cold.”
“It was then too,” she assured him. Just the thought of the cold water sluicing down her back had her rubbing her arms for warmth.
Cab didn’t miss much. He reached out a casual hand to touch her ever so briefly just on the inside of her elbow in that way he had. “Brave girl.”
“I wish people would stop saying that,” she said to stave off the feeling of disappointment that the touch had not been longer.
Or more comprehensively personal. “I didn’t feel brave,” she went on.
“I felt desperate. And awful. And it’s been awful since, first not being able to identify her properly and now not being able to identify her killer or bring him—assuming it is him—to justice.
” She led the way onward. “You’ll want a look at the boat bay where we brought her out,” she continued.
“This first stair leads down to the water level.”
“Are there boats available we might use should the need arise?” Detective Pratt asked. “Although I’m not much of a waterman.”
“My days on a crew shell are over,” Cab answered, “But I think I can still row one of these skiffs anywhere you might want to go.”
Even though the relatively crisp fall weather had Cab’s forearms covered in sleeves, the memory of the way the sun had glistened off the tanned skin as he had taken the tiller on Salem Sound last spring on one of their many sails back and forth to Great Misery Island never failed to raise a frisson of delight within Marigold.
“What are we looking for?”
Cab’s question brought Marigold back to the chilly present.
“Something that would tie the strangulation to this place?” She looked to Detective Pratt for the answer.
“Some piece of physical evidence—like the tonic bottle or the Bible,” she said, referencing some of the clues she and Cab had found on Great Misery, “that might point us to the identity of our killer, or confirm that Wilkie Valentine is, in fact, the young man we seek?”
“Just so,” the detective confirmed. “Lead on.”
Marigold preceded the men down the bare wooden stairs leading down to the open bay, where the various rowing barges and skiffs were tied up, ready for use.
She had thought the gentlemen’s company would banish the sinister shadows, but even with Cab at her side, it was eerie—echoing with sounds that ought to have been familiar but were now exaggerated and made frightening by her ridiculous fear.
The short hairs at the top of her nape seemed to stand on uncomfortable end. “It was likely here, wasn’t it?”
Cab paused and took a considered look. “Perhaps,” he agreed.
“Just so,” the detective said more unequivocally.
“Here, their struggle would have been concealed, out of sight of College Hall and any passersby. So, if they first had some form of altercation on the path half a mile away, he might have begun to think of killing her there, but likely thought he was too exposed.”
“Yes,” Marigold agreed with his line of reasoning.
“Once they were out of sight,” Cab mused, “he might have strangled her at any point from the rotunda on and then just brought her body down here to put into the water.”
“Perhaps.” Marigold felt that eerie, fearful anger roil through her, chilling her to the bone. “The way her skirt hems were tangled with the post in the far corner, I felt as if he might have purposefully stuffed her beneath the dock, so she would not be seen.”
Cab walked around the U-shaped dock to where the skiff was tied up. “That seems plausible.” He stared down at the dark water. “How about a lantern?”
“Yes,” Marigold agreed quickly. “I know just where they’re stored. I won’t be a minute.”
She was more than a minute going back upstairs to the storeroom, taking her time in an effort to dispel the strange uneasiness that had come over her, but in that time, Cab had stripped off his overcoat and houndstooth tweed jacket and tossed them into the skiff.
And in another moment, he was rolling up his shirtsleeves to expose those well-remembered forearms.
All traces of internal tumult subsided at the sight. And the scent—when had the homey aroma of starch become so welcome and pleasing?
Marigold fumbled to light the lantern.
“Let me,” Cab offered, retrieving a box of safety matches from his coat pocket. He struck the match and the smell of sulfur and heat mixed momentarily with the scent of starch and lake water.
Normally, Marigold would have been thrilled to find herself in a conveniently shadowed boathouse with Cab Cox. Normally, she would have been thinking of gripping those beautifully laundered and starched shirtsleeves and pulling him close to kiss. Of breaking through his usual puritan reserve.
But there was nothing normal about what they were doing.
And the thought of a kiss in the place where a young woman might have been strangled to death was unappealing in the extreme. And there was also an upright young detective, who was searching for evidence of that strangling, along with them.
Marigold forced her brain back to the task at hand, organizing her thoughts as if she were an archaeologist making sense of finds or patterns on an archaeological site.
“So, Olivia had already lost her glove and had buttons missing from her jacket and the waist of her skirt from some physical altercation on the path.” She pushed past her own discomfort to put herself in Olivia’s place, so imagine the scene through Olivia’s eyes.
“Judging from the way her skirt was ripped, he likely had her around the waist, from behind?” Marigold could see it in her mind’s eye like a flickering nickelodeon reel.
“He picked her up and was forcing her down the stairs, to here?” She could all but feel the steely band of the stronger man’s arms pulling at her waist as she kicked and tried to stop his progress, scraping her half-boots against the rough plank walls.
No. At Olivia’s torn waist. Olivia’s scraped boots.
Cab moved beside her, nodded. “So, he brought her to the edge there, and—” He broke off.
“He strangled her,” Marigold finished for him. “And then he carried her over there, where it was darkest, and purposefully pushed her into the water under the corner of the dock.”
“By God,” Detective Pratt muttered, staring at her with a deep, concerned frown etched between his brows.
“Yes,” Cab assured him. “I’ve seen her do it before, but it still gives me the willies. Just keep going, Marigold. Don’t let us delicate men slow you down. Keep going.”
She ignored Cab’s ironic tone and did just that, gauging the distance between where they stood at the edge of the dock, to the far pillar, where Olivia Thayer’s skirts became tangled with the dock post. “Yes. I don’t see how she could have become entangled in the corner post,” Marigold walked around the large, U-shaped bay, “on the outside edge of the dock, behind this wall, without her murderer’s direct action or interference. ”
“Simple motion of the water and waves?” Pratt posited. “Does this small lake get that stormy.”
“There wasn’t a storm that night.” Marigold had a clear memory of her first night back at the college.
“I had opened my dormitory room windows in College Hall just before I went down to dinner. The coroner, Dr. Prescott, had put Olivia’s time of death at seven o’clock that Sunday evening a week ago, the exact time that the Japanese bell had rung the dinner hour, and sent hundreds of collegians heading toward the dining hall, at the far opposite end of the building away from the boathouse.
” She drew in a steadying breath. “If Olivia had called out for help, there would have been no one to hear her.”
“Just so,” the detective said quietly.