Agatha answers my rhetorical question. “Oh, yes, I believe it is.”
“What are you talking about?” Louis yells.
“I’ll let Miss Daniels tell the story herself.”
I slide out a copy of May’s letter from my pocket. “She left behind a letter?” Louis asks.
“Thankfully for us, yes. The day Miss Daniels died, in Boulogne, she had a sense that something might happen to her, and she dashed out a letter in a little park in the Old Town and then hid it. In that letter, she describes it this way: ‘I confronted the father. I wasn’tcertain what I wanted to do about the baby quite yet, but I knew that if I decided to keep it, I would need financial help… ‘Get rid of it.’ That was the first thing he said. The second thing? ‘I can find someone to take care of it.’”
“This makes no sense.” He is screaming now.
“We know you tried to get her that abortion, perhaps even forced it upon her. In that same letter—written on the last day of her life—she wrote, ‘When we landed here in Boulogne, I did my level best to enjoy the day with Celia. But when I begged off a visit to a dress shop on rue de Lille and rested in a little park—praying for my nausea to pass—a strange man approached me. He sidled up to me on the bench and told me that ‘arrangements’ had been made for me with a local doctor. All I had to do was follow him.’”
“I made no such arrangements,” Louis says slowly, his eyes wide and his tone horrified. “I have no idea who came up to her in that park. How would I send a man to France? Why would I?”
We stare at him. Waiting for him to dig his own grave.
But then he cries, “I can’t be ‘the father’ May mentioned because I was never intimate with her!”
The Queens and I shoot one another quizzical looks. Of all the wild statements, why would he land on that? He seems in earnest. Either Louis is a supremely gifted actor or he’s genuinely perplexed. Because if he wasn’t the father, who was?
“Are you trying to frame me for an act I didn’t commit?” he shrieks.
“You cannot dispute that Miss Daniels was murdered. Strangulation marks were found around her neck, and underneath her dead body, the French police found evidence of massive hemorrhaging,” I say. It requires effort to keep my voice strong and steady.
He is quiet. Unnervingly so.
I pull out the letter again. “Perhaps I should refresh your recollection. ‘In the late summer, my innocence was taken from me in an act that brought me great shame. A surprise assault. Against my will.’”
“That wasn’t me.” Tears well up in his eyes. Louis reaches his hand out to the wall to steady himself. “I didn’t know. She never told me.”
This smug, entitled young man breaks down in racking sobs. Is he lamenting his imminent incarceration and lack of freedom? Does some dusty corner of his soul experience guilt? Could he possibly have had feelings for May? Could all these things be true at once?
It doesn’t matter. What matters is that he confesses or inadvertently offers some hard-and-fast clue we can use. And that he doesn’t think to ask why we haven’t gone to the police with our so-called conclusive evidence and have waylaid him instead.
“I swear to you that I never had sexual relations with May. In fact, starting around August, she grew distant, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I was fine with her disinterest. It was convenient, in fact. I’d grown tired of her resisting my overtures.”
“So you admit you tried?” Ngaio tries to box him in.
“I do admit that, although I was never successful. I’m not proud of the fact. I’m a married man, after all. But I would never force myself on any woman. And so I let things sputter and eventually die out.”
Agatha makes a leading statement. “Yet you reached out to her in October.”
“My situation at home had grown somewhat”—he pauses, as if he’s searching for the right word—“unsteady. I was lonely, and I’d started going to nightclubs with some of the fellows from Mathers. But I disliked the seediness of the club scene.”
“Didn’t find Leonora Denning to your liking?” Ngaio cannot resist the barb, and it is, admittedly, well timed.
His flushed cheeks go white. “You read about that?”
“We read that you were questioned in her disappearance. Two missing young women with ties to you.” Ngaio smirks. “Not a good situation for you.”
Louis looks as though he may be sick. “I understand how itmight appear. But I promise you I had precisely one five-minute conversation with Leonora Denning that evening. And then I never saw her again.”
“Funnily enough, no one else did, either.” Ngaio keeps the pressure on.
“You saw Miss Daniels in October. What happened?” I ask, returning to May now that we have unnerved him.
“We met at Rules restaurant and had a perfectly normal chat about a trip she was taking. She then excused herself to go to the lavatory and—poof—disappeared into thin air. When I read the newspaper articles about her disappearance, I was confused. Because as far as I was concerned, she’d already vanished.”
