“Doubtful, if she’s not ready. Can’t you send her packing?”
“You’d think I’d be able to, wouldn’t you? There are limits to my authority. You heard Fedora. She doesn’t want to press charges. She doesn’t want any fuss at all. If she knew we were here, she’d be trying to stop us.”
They reached the third floor and came to Victorine’s room almost immediately. Roen wasted no time inserting the key. He turned it and turned the knob. The door opened soundlessly.
There was sufficient light in the room thanks to the parted curtains to see that Victorine was indeed in bed. She was lying on her back with a heavy quilt pulled up to her shoulders. Her flaxen hair was like a halo around her head, arranged there as if by an artist who wanted to capture her purity.
Roen shook his head. It was an illusion.
Ben shook his head for a different reason. Something was wrong. He nudged Roen with an elbow. “Light a lamp.”
Roen found matches in a side table in the sitting area and lit the oil lamp on top of it. He held it up to throw more lighton the bed. Victorine didn’t stir. He carried it over to where Ben was standing beside the bed and looked down at her. He saw her differently now, probably the way Ben had seen her from the first. The request for a lamp made sense to him.
Roen thought he should feel something, and maybe he would later, but at the moment what he was, was empty. “She’s dead.”
“Yes,” said Ben. “Here. Let me take the lamp. I’ll stay with her while you get my wife. I want Ridley to examine her. It’s better if you go. That way I know there’s been no tampering of evidence.”
“I would not—”
“It’s a precaution, not an accusation.”
Roen nodded and handed over the lamp.
“And don’t say anything to Abe or my mother if you see her. One or both of them will have questions when you return with Ridley. Just ignore them.”
Roen’s dark humor asserted itself. “You’ve met your mother, haven’t you?”
Ben answered with a faintly appreciative smile. “Well, do the best that you can.”
Roen left, and Ben looked around to see if he could see any obvious clues that would explain Victorine Headley’s death. His gut told him natural causes were not to blame. All appearances had indicated a healthy woman. Ridley’s only remark regarding the pregnancy was that Victorine was likely to have a difficult delivery. Ben had stopped her from giving him more information so he didn’t know what prompted her to say it. After being present at the birth of his niece, there were things he simply didn’t want to know.
He put that out of his mind as he walked around the bed and then moved to the sitting area. The suite was tidy. There was a neat stack of women’s fashion magazines on the settee. He wondered if she had brought them with her or got them from Mrs. Fish. There were pots of creams and scented oils on the vanity. The highboy had nothing on top. He walked into the bathing room. Except for tiny pools of water in the grout between the black and white floor tiles, there was no other evidence that she had taken a bath before lying down. The porcelain tub was dry. A bar of soap lay in a tray beside thetub. He touched it. It was dry on top but a little spongy on the underside.
What had she done with the towels, then? Rang for someone to take them away? That didn’t seem likely. In fact, he would have guessed that Victorine was used to having someone pick up after her. The towels should have been on the bathroom floor and perhaps a washcloth as well. He looked in the cupboard under the sink and in the narrow closet beside it. There were none there.
He returned to the bedroom area. He wanted to pull back the quilt on Victorine’s body, and if his wife had not been so readily available, he would have, but he had been reading lately about new forensic techniques in criminal investigation. Ridley’s medical journals were a surprising source of information in that regard. He did not want to be clumsy about this. Victorine was, after all, the daughter of Victor Headley. The man’s name was as well known to him as were the names “Jay Mac Worth” and “Cornelius Vanderbilt,” both of them early founders of railroad empires. Jay Mac and the Commodore were gone now but their legacy remained. Victor Headley inherited his kingdom and then grew it ten times over. The fact that he’d started with a leg up did not win him respect. He had had to earn that.
Ben wondered how Victor Headley would take the news of his daughter’s death. And if it was murder, what then? Would he send Pinkertons to scour Frost Falls? He stopped. He was getting ahead of himself. First, he needed to find the goddamn towels.
Never expecting to find them in the wardrobe, it was the only place left after he’d eliminated under the bed and the trunk at the foot of it. He found the towels bunched together at the bottom, partially hidden by two pairs of shoes and a folded blanket that he could assume came from the bed. He pulled them out—there were three, and one washcloth—and dropped everything on the floor. The towels had been wrung out but they were still damp and heavy. It wasn’t long before a water stain appeared around them.
Ben had just seated himself in the chair beside the cold fireplace when he heard footsteps in the hallway. No one wasspeaking, which meant that neither his mother nor Abe was with his wife and Roen.
“Ridley showed me the back stairs,” said Roen, closing the door and locking it. “We avoided the kitchen help and everyone else.”
Ben stood. Ridley was already at the bedside. She placed her medical bag on the nightstand.
“Have you touched her?” she asked.
“Waiting for you.”
She nodded and placed two fingers against Victorine’s neck. “I’m getting a sense of temperature, not looking for a pulse,” she told them.
Roen stood at the foot of the bed. “Does her death have something to do with the baby?”
“I don’t know yet. I would think if she had a miscarriage, there would still be evidence of blood on the blankets, on the floor...” Ridley folded back the quilt to uncover Victorine’s shoulders. She reached beneath and drew out a limp, lifeless hand and examined it. “And under her nails. They’re clean, at least to my naked eye.” She opened her bag and took out a pair of small surgical scissors and clipped her nails. Ben passed her one of the envelopes she had placed in her bag for just this purpose. “This is largely to satisfy my curiosity,” she said to Roen. “There is not a great deal to be learned from it yet. I read an article in a German journal about blood typing in goats that piqued my interest. It may have applications for improved success with transfusions, but someday it might also have applications for narrowing a field of suspects.”
“Ridley.” Ben said her name quietly with a hint of admonishment. He pointed to Roen standing at the end of the bed.
