Chapter 26
“Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.”
Mark Twain
The darkroom portion of the Student Laboratory and Apparatus Room proved empty of Eliza Anthony’s pernicious—at least according to Marigold’s feelings—presence. Which gave them free rein to look around. Marigold began poking into cabinets and drawers.
“Just what are we looking for?” asked Ethyl.
“The picture from the tabloid.”
Although Eliza Anthony had stated clearly that Professor Currier had not sat for her portrait, Marigold had the evidence before her own eyes. Had the young photographer simply lied outright? She wouldn’t be the first liar involved in this murder, but Marigold hoped to perdition she was the last.
Ethyl had begun opening drawers from the other end of the long oak cabinet, so Marigold continued from her end. On the bottom shelf of the next cabinet was a large accordion-pleated leather file—with a promising small brass lock.
“Miss Anthony is trying to keep secrets.” And Marigold was just the person to reveal them. She laid the file on the cabinet top and tried to force the lock—with no result.
“Wait,” Ethyl hustled back to the far end of the counter. “I thought I saw—yes!” She held up a small string of brass keys. “Sometimes,” she said with a smile, “the oven cleans itself. We’ll try them one at a time.”
“Excellent plan,” Marigold enthused, as if there was some other way of fitting keys into locks.
But Ethyl was as efficient as she was logical, and the third key obediently popped open the lock. “Q.E.D.,” she enthused. “Thus, it is demonstrated.”
Marigold, whose working knowledge of Latin had not needed the translation, was equally enthusiastic. “Now, let us see what our slippery Miss Anthony is hiding in here.”
Each of the file tabs was hand-labeled. Marigold flicked through Portrait, Candid, Landscape, and most interesting, Occasional. “Let’s start with the portraits.” She pulled out the small stack of photographic prints and handed Ethyl half.
Marigold leafed through the sheets, not finding anything of particular value—or potential—that caught her eye. She moved on to “occasional,” which seemed to be various artistic shots of furniture, including several of the corridors and rooms of College Hall and other buildings.
Nothing that might be interpreted as useful—nothing out of the ordinary.
She might have given up, but Ethyl took out the stack of landscapes, and Marigold’s eye was immediately drawn to an artistic shot of the boathouse—almost from the same angle as the one Eliza Anthony had taken of Marigold and Dr. Barker with the body.
But this one, Marigold thought, must have been taken earlier in the semester—more leaves were upon the trees, as if they had not yet begun to fall. And in the foreground was a couple—at least it was a man and a woman—that drew Marigold’s eye.
Ethyl took a sharp intake of breath.
“What?” Marigold peered harder at the grainy photograph. “What do you see?”
“Looks like Aggie Newton,” Ethyl said finally. “I recognize that hat. Wears it every chance she gets.”
“No!” Marigold immediately contradicted.
The silhouette of the young woman—and she was a young woman, with her hair in a braid down her back—was smaller, more petite, and altogether neater than lanky, athletic Aggie.
But the hat should have been seared upon Marigold’s brain. “I think that is Olivia Thayer.”
“The dead girl?” Ethyl crowded in closer, but immediately came to the salient point. “Then who is that man? I know they say ‘cherchez la femme,’ but I think we should cherchez le gent.”
Ethyl’s paraphrase of Alexandre Dumas was apt. In the murky graininess of the photograph, the tall, almost looming man was certainly the very sinister picture of a murderer.
“Cab and Detective Pratt are already looking for him—presumably on an ocean liner docking imminently at Liverpool. But it would help if they had a description of the man.” Marigold peered hard at the photograph, trying to glean any other details that might help identify him.
“Do you think there’s a magnifying glass anywhere? ”
“What are you doing here?” an outraged voice intruded.
Eliza Anthony stood in the archway at the top of the stair, dressed in a smart traveling ensemble of velvet trimmed broadcloth, and carrying what Marigold could only assume was her small, portable detective camera.
“Looking for evidence,” Marigold refused to be cowed for prying. “As well as you. What can you tell me about this photograph?”
“When did you take it?” chimed in Ethyl.
“What do you remember of this couple?” Marigold kept up the rapid-fire questions. “Did you not recognize Olivia Thayer from your other photographs? Especially the one you sold to the Morning Standard of Professor Currier and the girl?” Marigold held out Ethyl’s copy of the tabloid.
Eliza flicked a glance at it. “I didn’t sell anything to the Morning Standard,” she insisted sourly.
“And yet, here is a photo only you could have taken, with your acute eye for personality.” Marigold thrust the tabloid paper at her as if it were a lance.
But Eliza Anthony remained stubbornly uninjured by Marigold’s attempt at physical irony. Instead, she was pleased. “Do you really think so? I mean I’ve tried to cultivate a singular style, but—”
“It was evidence,” Marigold scolded, shaking the paper at her. “Not a compliment.”
Eliza Anthony rearranged herself into a defensive posture, crossing her arms over her chest. “I don’t care.”
“I do. Tell me about this photograph. Please,” Marigold added. One might be forceful in one’s approach, but rudeness was unnecessary and probably unhelpful with a girl like Eliza Anthony, who had little conscience to counteract what was obviously a great deal of ambition.
Not that Marigold was against ambition—she championed it, especially in other young women. The entirety of their college was a support for ambition.
But never at the expense of others. Never.
Eliza Anthony took the print, walked to the cabinet, and reintegrated it into the stack of landscape pictures. “It was of the boathouse—specifically the rotunda entranceway. I was trying to capture the soaring height of the columns, the way the shadows fell—”
“When was it taken—specifically? Date and time?”
Eliza turned the print over. “October fifth.”
“Two days before she was killed.” Marigold felt as if someone had walked over her grave—her skin felt tight and clammy under her shirtwaist. “Please, Eliza. Please try to remember everything you can about this moment.”
Eliza looked at the photo more critically. “I was concerned about the aperture—about getting the right amount of light and keeping a high depth of field.”
“What does that mean?” Marigold’s frustration at the young woman’s apparent lack of understanding at the gravity of the situation began to rise.
“I was trying to capture the architecture of the columns and the way the light slanted through the rotunda. It was for an independent study I’ve undertaken in Studio Art—even though the professor doesn’t consider photography to be an art.
She’s a painter,” Eliza explained. “Very superior in her attitude.”
Marigold tried to get the information she needed out of Eliza’s preoccupation. “So, the figures were not intended to be part of the composition?”
“No,” Eliza looked askance, wrinkling her nose in distaste.
“The focus was on the rotunda. I waited for them to move out of the way. But they didn’t, though they moved back and forth—that’s what makes their images fuzzy like that.
They just wouldn’t keep still. But I set the exposure anyway because I was going to lose the effect of the light.
I might have even said something—I don’t remember.
But they still didn’t move. They were engaged in some deep discussion or something. ”
“Were they arguing? Could you hear them?”
“Not really.” Eliza shrugged. “The wind was from the west, blowing down the lake. You can see that from the trees in the background.”
“And her hair, I suppose. Perhaps that’s why her elbow is up like that—brushing her hair out of her eyes?” That lovely auburn hair that had floated on the surface like algae and had wrapped itself around Marigold’s hands like a vine.
“Maybe.” Eliza was noncommittal, clearly still not interested in the figures that marred her composition.
“And you didn’t recognize her? Or think that this might be the same girl who was found beneath the boathouse? You clearly recognized her enough to find that portrait you took of her and Professor Currier?”
“Oh, I recognized the name, once it was out who it was—the Thayer girl, who was supposed to come talk? But I never took her portrait.”
“Then how did a portrait that you claim not to have taken, and not to have sold to the tabloids, end up in a photogravure on the front page of the Morning Standard ?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t sell it to them.”
“And yet, here it is, on the front page.” Marigold fixed her with what she hoped was a no-nonsense, gimlet stare. “So perhaps the better question is—to whom did you sell it?” For certainly the mercenary photographer would never have given away such a prize for free.
Eliza looked acutely belligerent. “I didn’t sell it at all. I haven’t seen so much as a dime, not that it’s any business of yours.”
Marigold crossed her arms over her chest. “Care to prove it?”
“No,” she said staunchly. “I would not. But I can see that you’re set on being an everlasting pain in the backside if I don’t, so …
” Eliza snatched the tabloid from Marigold’s hand and took a long moment to study it.
“This was taken in the Boston studio of Mr. Charles Hearn, who used to have the concession for portraits, as I told you before.” She thrust the newspaper back at Marigold.
“His background is entirely different from my studio here.”
Marigold could immediately see that she was right. “Damnation.”