Must the Maiden Die (20 page)

"What reason did you think Tamar had for
crying?" Glynis asked, watching the pieces of trimmed dough
falling away with Addie's deft strokes.

"Told you, I didn't think."

The second pie was undergoing the knife when
Glynis ventured, "I suppose anyone in the house would have access
to those knives in the drawer. Or are you, as you indicated
earlier, the only one—the only one other than Tamar—who is allowed
here in the kitchen?"

Addie quickly set down the pie and looked at
Glynis with a startled expression. "No. Anybody could come in here
and get a knife," she hastily replied.

"Anybody, including the girl Tamar?"

Again, Addie seemed about to say something,
and stopped herself. Instead she simply nodded.

"I'd like to hear what you were about to
say, Addie. If there's something Constable Stuart should know—"

"She took a knife," Addie broke in. "The
girl, she pinched a carving knife a couple days ago. She thought I
wasn't watching, but I saw her take it to her room."

"Did you tell her that you'd seen her take
the knife?"

"Why should I tell her? She must have needed
it for...for something."

"For what?"

"I don't know."

"Addie—"

"I told you I don't know! Maybe to protect
herself or something!" Addie had begun to look alarmed.

Since that would get them nowhere, Glynis
changed course. "Why don't you show me Tamar's room?" she said,
hope of the girl's innocence fading.

Addie nodded at this request with surprising
cooperation—perhaps relieved that she was not to take the sole
brunt of suspicion—and led Glynis to a small room across from the
kitchen.

The room seemed to contain little that would
tell much about the girl: a rough commode cabinet, a blanketed
mattress on an immaculately clean, bare wood floor, and several
hooks on the door, from which hung a nightdress and wool sweater, a
towel and washcloth. High up in the wall, a small amount of gray
light struggled through a square of grimy window glass.

Glynis went to the cabinet and opened its
door to find an unused chamber pot. The one drawer held a pair of
cotton stockings, several undergarments, and two carefully folded
cotton dresses, all clean and neatly mended. On top of the cabinet
sat a half-melted candle in a crude, sheet metal holder, a small
Bible, a hairbrush, and the wood carving of a butterfly with its
wings spread in flight. Flight like the girl's, Glynis thought. But
where had she flown?

She recalled then what Helga Brant had said
about her son's butterfly collection, and Tamar's reaction to it,
but could see no link between that and this carving. Other than
Tamar's apparent fondness for butterflies. Glynis started to push
the drawer closed and felt it catch as if something were jamming
it. She ran her fingers along the back of the drawer until they
encountered an object, and she pulled out a slim volume of poetry.
With a librarian's eye she saw that the book was well thumbed even
though the title page indicated a fairly recent printing date. A
handwritten inscription on the flyleaf read:
For yon far and
silent maid.
"

The signature was a scrawl, impossible to
decipher except for the unique lettering of a
B.
It was like the one monogramed on the gold belt buckle of every
male Brant Glynis had encountered. She balanced the spine of the
book on her palm, letting the pages fall open to those likely to
have been most often read. It wasn't an infallible system, but it
was the best available.

The poem was Byron's
Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage
,
the pages opened to the first
canto, and Glynis saw faint pencil markings under several lines:
Maidens, like moths, are ever caught by glare. / And Mammon wins
his way where Seraphs might despair.

What an odd passage to be singled out,
Glynis puzzled. To her the meaning of the lines conveyed a scorn
for those young women who were blinded by some men's wealth, thus
casting aside others more deserving. But the maiden Tamar did not
seem to have profited, if she had indeed been attracted to wealth
like a moth to light. It didn't fit.

Unless the passage had meant something quite
different to the reader who had wielded the pencil. Who might not
have been Tamar at all, but the giver of the book. The girl's
mother? No, wrong initial. One of the Brants? Konrad seemed the
most obvious, although his brother or father, or even his mother,
might have suggested to Tamar that here was a lesson to be learned.
But would any of them take such pains with someone all seemed to
think of as just a kitchen maid?

As she put the book back into the drawer,
Glynis considered the likelihood that what she had taken to be a
carved butterfly could, instead, be a moth.

Noticing that Addie had left her, having
probably gone back to reclaim her kitchen, Glynis went to look
again at the muslin nightdress. On closer examination, it appeared
to be a new garment, edged in lace and possibly never worn, as out
of place in this austere room as the gaudy rose paperweight had
been in Roland Brant's library. The paperweight—strange that it
should come to mind, Glynis thought, trying to recall if she had
seen it today amidst the clutter on his library desk. She didn't
think so, but could look again before she and Cullen left.

She stood in the doorway to take one last
survey of the room, and her gaze fell on the Bible. She went to
pick it up, again letting the book fall open:
Lamentations.
This certainly seemed more appropriate to an indentured servant
girl than Byron's footloose pilgrim.

So what more did she now know of the girl? mused
Glynis, as she closed the door of the room behind her and started
again for the kitchen. The first thing that she, or any librarian,
would note was that Tamar presumably could read. While the Bible
was in plain view, possibly placed there by someone who felt she
should have it, whether or not she could read it, the volume of
poetry appeared to have been purposely concealed. The girl was neat
and obviously clean, as the wood floor looked to have been well
scrubbed. The window, though, was dirty, which might mean only that
the girl was not tall enough to reach it. Tamar had very few
clothes, unless they were kept somewhere else, which seemed
improbable. She had nothing in the way of unessential personal
belongings except the carving and the book of poetry. And while
Glynis might consider poetry to be an essential, undoubtedly few
else would.

When she stepped into the kitchen, Addie was
taking a glazed, roasted chicken from the stove, and she greeted
Glynis's return with a look of stoic resignation. The smell of the
chicken and roasted potatoes made Glynis yearn for Harriet
Peartree's homey kitchen.

"Addie, when did you last see Tamar?"

"Don't remember exactly."

"Try."

There was a pause as Addie closed the stove
door. "After Sunday supper. When I left, the girl was in here
washing dishes."

"Can you think of any reason that Tamar
would want to harm Mr. Brant?"

Addie gave her a long look, then turned away
and began to scrape flour and dough from the table top. Glynis
again had a feeling the woman had been about to say something but
bridled herself.

"This is very important, Addie," she coaxed.
"I give you my word that whatever you say to me will not be
repeated to your employers. If you're worried about that."

Addie whirled round to say, " 'Course I'm
worried about that! I need this job, Missy. Got three young 'uns
and no man to help. You think I'm goin' to open my mouth about what
goes on around here? And I sure got no reason to trust your
word."

Glynis shook her head. "No, I guess not,"
she sighed, "and I can understand that. It's just that everything
seems to point to this girl as being Roland Brant's murderer. But
if she wanted to rob his safe she had plenty of opportunity to do
it when he wasn't around. And there appears to be no other motive
for her to kill him."

Addie stood there staring up at the ceiling
for some length of time, and Glynis began to wonder what was
overhead. Surely the upstairs bedrooms.

Unexpectedly, Addie offered, "Things, they
aren't always what they look like, Missy. Houses large as this one
can hide a lot."

Glynis leaned over the table toward her.
"What kind of things, Addie?"

"That's all I'm goin' to say! That's
all!"

From her determined look, Glynis believed
it. But obviously Addie knew something she was reluctant, or
afraid, to voice.

From the corner of her eye, Glynis caught a
sudden shift of light and she turned toward the windows. The rain
had stopped, the sky had begun to clear, and from a lowering sun
the kitchen was becoming suffused with an amber glow.

A squeal of metal hinges made her turn back
to see that Addie had opened the stove and was inserting her fist
inside it. She held it there for a short time, and then yanked it
out. "Hot enough," she pronounced, placing her pies on a rack. Then
she closed the door with a clang, looked directly at Glynis and,
emphasizing each word, said, "The men in this house have big
appetites."

Addie turned on her heel and walked quickly
out of the kitchen.

Glynis, stunned into silence, stared after
the woman, while a flurry of thoughts crowded her mind, along with
the unpleasant sensation of something crawling up and down her
spine.

Addie couldn't have intended what she'd said
to come across as it did, she told herself. Glynis almost
dismissed it before remembering Phoebe's remark about Tamar being
in bed with the devil. Because the woman was unstable, Glynis's
first reaction had been that the maid was simply jealous of Tamar's
prettiness and the extra attention it might have brought the girl.
But perhaps in that disturbed mind there was a twisted strand of
truth.

No; it couldn't be, Glynis told herself.
This speculation was just her imagination fueling what had to be a
particularly dreadful possibility. Still, what if Roland Brant had
caught one of his sons molesting the girl in her room? And in
appalled rage, had attacked his son, only to be felled himself. His
library was next to Tamar's room, and it would have been a simple
matter for either Erich or Konrad to drag his body in there. The
floor of the girl's room had been immaculate, but the blood could
have been scrubbed away, which would explain why there was so
little of it in Brant's library.

And Tamar, if she witnessed the murder,
could have run away because she was terrified she would be
next.

No, Glynis again told herself. Her
speculation rested on nothing solid. Addie had been referring to
her pies. And about them feeding hungry, craving, desiring ...the
synonyms for
appetite
rushed through her head. The plague
of a librarian who read too much! Could she be as fixated with
young females led astray as was her assistant Jonathan? When the
lurid dustcover of
A Lady in Distress
rose before her,
Glynis shook off the image with disgust.

If she were to suggest this to Cullen... She
couldn't suggest this to Cullen. She turned again to look through
the window, if only to free her mind of thoughts that clung with
the tenacity of leeches.

The sun was throwing light over the grassy
track and she saw again, more distinctly now, the stable boy and
the horse with a white wrapping around its....
A dapple gray
horse!

She rushed out of the kitchen to find
Cullen. The shadows clouding her memory had all at once cleared. A
cloaked girl on a galloping, dapple gray horse had passed Glynis on
her last trek to the rail station to meet the afternoon train. She
had probably seen Tamar in town on occasion, which is why the
girl's frightened, pale face had looked vaguely familiar—and why
Elise Jager a short time later had also looked familiar. Yet the
gray horse was here, its foreleg injured in some way. Had it found
its way back alone? If so, what had become of its rider?

Glynis remembered the girl had been heading
north. North, toward the vast swampland of the Montezuma Marsh.

—Book of Lamentations

The girl sat on the end of a fallen birch
log some yards from the cabin. On the ground beside her lay the
sheepherding dog, his white-frosted chin resting on the toe of her
boot. Although the dog looked asleep, every so often his ears
twitched and his muzzle rose, his black nose searching the
moisture-laden air. Then the girl would put down the fish she was
cleaning and look toward the water.

She stroked the dog's head as she glanced
west toward the dipping sun. The earlier rain had stopped, and the
clouds slowly drifted away, leaving wide patches of blue, the color
so clear and clean the sky looked as if it had been scoured.
Overhead, a large crow came into view, circling once before it
swooped down to perch on the woodpile near the cabin. As the crow
landed, the dog's nose quivered; otherwise he didn't move. But the
girl found the friendliness of the big, chunky bird to be a
wondrous thing. She reached into her pocket, as she had done a
number of times that day, and held out a handful of corn
kernels.

The first time the crow had come
,
she
had been sweeping the cabin floor with rushes bundled together with
twine. There was nothing else for her to do, not while it was so
wet outside. The crow had suddenly appeared, hopping into the
doorway on its spindly legs, just beyond where she was standing. It
cocked its head to fix her with a dark glinting eye, its look
saying:
Do
something
.
When she did
nothing but stare back at it, wondering why the dog was not
chasing it, was not even barking, the crow sidled up to the barrel
placed under a porch-like overhang outside the doorway. It looked
at her again as if waiting for something.