Chapter 26 #2
“Indeed,” Eliza sniffed. “But now that you’ve found this other picture of Olivia Thayer in my files, I think I just may dig out the negative plate and see what can be done to sell it.”
Marigold did not hide her disapprobation. “How exceptionally mercenary of you.”
“How eminently practical,” the young woman countered once again. “As was Hearn. For once.”
Marigold worked to curb her frustration—it was getting her nowhere. Still. “Leave it to a man to put them in such a pose.”
“Who said he did?” Eliza’s mouth twisted into a little snicker of a smile. “Who’s to say if Professor Currier or Miss Olivia Thayer didn’t pose herself?”
“And what does that mean?” Marigold asked.
Eliza tossed up a shoulder in sophisticated unconcern. “None of my business if a young girl has a crush on a professor. If I may say so, it’s not the first time anyone has had a crush on dear Professor Currier. Nor, I daresay, the last.” She chuckled. “She has that effect.”
Marigold wanted to say something cutting, but now that she thought back upon it, there had been at least two girls who had sighed and hung on Professor Currier’s every word two years ago, during her junior year.
And she herself had had something of a crush on her own favorite professor, Julia Irvine, when she had been an impressionable freshwoman.
Marigold chose her words carefully, working to untie the knot that was the murder and revisit her own feeling that Professor Currier was still hiding something.
“And did you think the professor … reciprocated that infatuation?” Marigold had formed—and reformed—her own opinion regarding Professor Currier’s relationship with her niece, but she was curious as to other people’s.
Eliza Anthony shrugged. “Not particularly …” She trailed off, then shook her head. “Do you know what—no. She treated those girls in her rhetoric classes with an amused, even affectionate tolerance, not …”
“Amorous in any way?”
“No. Not amorous,” Eliza confirmed. “Not that—” She broke off.
“Not that …?” Marigold repeated.
Eliza tossed up her shoulder in indifference again. “Not that I didn’t think she might be inclined that way, if you know what I mean.”
“If you mean like a ‘Boston Marriage’ of convenience and companionship between consenting ladies—”
Eliza’s smile turned back to amused. “Is that what we’re calling it now—companionship and not attraction?
” Her tone was arch and knowing. “But as you said, not my business.” Eliza Anthony pulled that purposefully sophisticated pose.
“I’ve got maiden aunties who lost their sweethearts and beaux in the last war.
Never married and lived with each other in a brownstone in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.
People always said they had a ‘Boston Marriage,’ and it used to make them as angry as magpies. ”
“Yes, it is none of our business,” Marigold agreed, “until one of the people involved is murdered.”
“Murdered? You mean Olivia Thayer? The paper said she drowned—a suicide.”
“And this one says Professor Currier was in love with her. The papers are wrong, Eliza. And now that you know that, don’t you think you would want to know you had done everything you could to find the killer?”
“Me?” The girl looked more than astonished—she looked petrified at the very thought. “What do I know?”
“That picture you took of the couple in front of the boathouse likely shows Olivia Thayer with her killer.”
Eliza stared at her. And then took her chance. “So don’t you think it would be a good thing to show that killer to the public? To warn people so they might be on the lookout for just such a fellow?”
Marigold did not like the answer she had to give. “Yes. I suppose.” Hadn’t she come to the conclusion that quiet discretion had already done them a great disservice? “Go ahead. Publish and be damned.”
“I’d rather publish and be paid,” Eliza said, before some of her defiance seemed to fade. “Just like Mr. Hearn. For what it’s worth, if he sold that photo to the Morning Standard, I’m sure he didn’t do so knowing what the article said. He was a nice man. He wasn’t that sort of fellow.”
Who was? Someone out there? Or someone in here?
Her mind went to the photo missing from Professor Currier’s rooms. Had that photo ever been recovered? Or was that missing photo the one that found its way to the front page of the Morning Standard?
Then who at Professor Currier’s boardinghouse might have had the opportunity to steal the photo from their fellow lodger?
Was May Barnacle either more mercenary or more wicked than she seemed?
Was there another lodger—perhaps a fellow professor—that Marigold had overlooked?
Or were there other parties involving themselves?
“When you approach the Morning Standard to sell your photo, ask them where they got this one.”
“I may,” was Eliza’s defiant answer. “Not that it’s any business of yours how I conduct my business.”
Marigold’s patience was near the bitter end. “But it is my business, Eliza, not only when a young woman has turned up murdered, but when you have key evidence you may or may not have deliberately concealed. Not to mention the fact that you are using college facilities to turn a personal profit.”
“Unethical,” Ethyl decreed.
“Unauthorized,” Marigold added.
“Nosy Parker,” Eliza grumbled.
“Naturally,” Marigold countered. “Olivia Thayer is dead—strangled at the boathouse where you took a picture of her, Eliza—and here you are with all these photographs of the dead girl.”
“And what about you?” Eliza shot back. “You’re the one who thinks she knows everything. What makes you so sure this really is Olivia Thayer? The figures are entirely out of focus. It could have been anyone.”
“Anyone with that hat? Anyone standing in front of the place where a girl wearing that hat was found murdered?”
“Why do you keep saying that?” Eliza grew petulant in her defense. “The paper says she threw herself into the lake because she was heartbroken.”
“The paper has made that up out of whole cloth.” Marigold didn’t care that her tone was scathing.
“And we, if we have any heart or brains at all, must ask ourselves the question you seem so fond of asking—who profits? As educated, logical, thinking creatures, it is incumbent upon us to do as the great Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero urged us to and ask, ‘Cui bono?’ To whose benefit?”
“Certainly not to Olivia Thayer’s,” said Ethyl.
“Nor to Professor Currier’s. Nor to the college,” Marigold continued.
Ethyl sighed. “To the benefit of the murderer.”
“Naturally,” Marigold agreed. “But the murderer is still unknown to us. So, logically, we must examine each person and the benefit they receive for their involvement in this unfortunate affair to find out who benefits the most?”
“Not I,” Eliza Anthony averred. “I haven’t made hardly any profit on these photographs you’re so set about.”
Marigold returned her gaze to the newest one—the one with the couple facing each other in front of the boathouse and rephrased her earlier question. “Do you remember anything more about this man in the photo—about what he did, or how he acted while he was in your frame? Any description?”
Eliza’s expression grew only slightly less annoyed. “He was a man,” was all she would admit. “Couldn’t see much more than that. He was just tall and … in my way.”
Marigold tried another tack. “What was he wearing?”
Eliza shrugged again. “What any man wears.” She looked around absently, then gestured to the photographic print. “As you see—a coat and hat.”
“Not every man wears a coat and hat,” Marigold contradicted. “Mr. Duckett downstairs is in overalls or coveralls and a cap every day. Mr. Griffin drives the Barge in dark blue livery. Professor Hemmings in the Music Hall is in his black morning coat and dove-gray vest every day.”
“Which needs laundering something fierce,” Ethyl added with characteristic candor.
“I suppose I meant like a professional man.” Eliza tried again, without much effect. “A gentleman.”
“The color of the coat? The style of the hat?” Marigold pressed, trying to glean any advantage from the grainy black-and-white image.
“Can you not recall some distinguishing mark or piece of apparel? Can you not call to mind some hint of color—eyes, hair, clothing? You, who strive to capture those same details in your photographs? Surely you remember something?”
“What, and you do notice such things?” Eliza’s response was surprisingly defensive. “Can you describe every person you see on the street?”
Marigold shifted her mind’s eye to picture the last person she had met on the street—her charming, if obvious, journalistic friend, although friend was too strong an association.
Perhaps she might call him a journalist acquaintance, with his dapper camel hair coat and creased homburg hat with the spotted guinea and hackle feather tucked into the dark brown hatband.
“Yes. That is what archaeologists do—describe things in detail. As someone who aspires to be a professional photographer, I am deeply surprised that you cannot.”
Eliza shook her head in disagreement. “My eye is for the shot,” she explained. “I tend to remember details only after I’ve photographed them—when I’m looking at the print, you see? The details show up in the printing. And that’s how I remember them. Call it a professional hazard. Or handicap.”
“Are all photographers like that?”
Eliza pursed her lips and shrugged. “I have no idea. I don’t really know any other professional photographers. Which is why I’m trying to sell my photographs, like I told you, to establish myself.”
Marigold steeled herself against this plea—for she’d been thoroughly bamboozled by the girl’s appeal before.
“Will you at least think about it, please? This man in your photograph is probably the man who killed her, and anything—absolutely anything—you can recall about this fellow would be of grave importance. Will you promise to tell me?”
Eliza’s agreement was reluctant. “I suppose I could try.”
“Thank you.” As unsatisfactory as it was, it was the best Marigold could hope for.
But at least, unlike Eliza, she did not feel as if she were entirely on her own—she had friends helping her. President Irvine, Dr. Barker, Isabella, Lucy, Cab, Detective Pratt, Aggie, and Ethyl.
If nothing else, Marigold might take strength in their numbers.