Turner. She said, “But you didn’t find anything?”
“Not at first.”
Mrs. Corneille arched her eyebrows and dropped the match into the ashtray.
She looked everywhere, Miss Turner said. In the wardrobe, in the bookcase, in drawers of the cabinet. She had no idea what she was looking for-but whatever it was, she didn’t find it. After a while she gave up. She had closed the door before she turned on the overhead light. Then she walked over to the entrance, turned off the light, and opened the door a crack to peek out.
She saw candlelight moving toward her in the darkness, through the parlor.
“Who was holding the candle?” I asked her.
“I don’t know. I couldn’t tell. All I could see was the light, coming closer.”
“What happened?”
“I closed the door,” said Miss Turner, “and I fumbled about in the darkness until I found the bed. And then I crawled beneath it.
She waited there, lying on the hard wooden floor amid the dust and the bits of fluff. The door opened and the thin wobbling light of the candle moved through the room. Miss Turner tried not to breathe.
From beneath the bed, in the dimness, she could just make out the feet of the person holding the candle. It was a woman.
I said, “What kind of shoes was she wearing?”
“Boots,” said Miss Turner. “A woman’s boots. And a long dress or skirt. Black. It came down to her ankles.”
Mrs. Corneille took a drag from her cigarette.
“Okay,” I said to Miss Turner. “Then what happened?”
The woman sat down on the bed, said Miss Turner. Just sat there. Said nothing. Did nothing. Miss Turner kept herself frozen in position. Pale yellow light trembled around the room.
And then she realized that the woman was crying.
“Not loudly,” she said. “Not sobbing or wailing. Just a small, quiet sort of private weeping. The way people sometimes do when they’re alone, remembering someone.”
Mrs. Corneille pursed her lips and sighed out two small silent streamers of smoke.
Miss Turner turned to her. “I felt badly for her,” she said. “Isn’t that absurd? I was lying there under the bed like a spy, and I had virtually no idea who she was or why she was crying, and I felt badly for her.”
Mrs. Corneille smiled. “It isn’t absurd at all, Jane.”
“How long was she there?” I asked her.
“Five minutes,” she said. “Perhaps longer. I don’t know, really. It seemed like years.”
Finally the woman got up from the bed and walked out, closing the door behind her. Miss Turner waited a few moments, and then began to move out from beneath the bed. As she did, her hand plunged through the floorboards, down into a kind of hole. She felt something inside there.
“At first,” she said, “I thought it was a rat, something alive, and I nearly screamed.”
But whatever it was, it didn’t move. Miss Turner slid away from the bed, turned on the end table’s electric lamp, and looked more closely.
One rectangular section of planking had been sawed free and made into a kind of lid for a box built under the floorboards.
“And it wasn’t a rat I’d found,” she said, and there was a small light of triumph in her blue eyes. Miss Turner was coming to her proof. Holding the brandy snifter in her right hand, she reached into the left-hand pocket of her bathrobe and pulled something out. “It was this.”
It looked pretty much like a dead white rat. About eight inches long, dense and furry. Then Miss Turner bent forward, set down her brandy, and spread the thing out along the coffee table.
It had scraggly white sideburns and, in its middle, an opening for a mouth.
A false beard.
“There was a wig in there as well,” said Miss Turner. “Made of the same material. And these.” She shifted the snifter to her left hand and reached into the right pocket of her robe and pulled out a handful of small items. She dumped them onto the table.
“Jane!” said Mrs. Corneille, sounding surprised. “You took them from the Earl’s room?”
“He took them first,” she said. She set down the brandy snifter and she picked up one of the items. “This is my comb. Here on the back, you can see where I’ve scratched my initials into the tortoise shell. It went missing sometime today. I didn’t think much about it-so much else has happened. But it was taken from my room. And it was taken by the Earl.”
Mrs. Corneille stubbed her cigarette into the ashtray and looked up at me.
I looked at the knickknacks scattered across the table.
An inexpensive metal watch fob. A pencil stub. A copper button. A metal nail file with an ebony handle. A shaving brush. A small key.
“My goodness,” said Mrs. Corneille. She reached forward, picked up the file, examined it. “But this is mine, ” she told me. I hadn’t even realized it was gone.”
I leaned forward and lifted the key from the table. A simple key, base metal. I could just make out, stamped along its shaft, tiny letters that spelled out Mueller and Kohl.
“Is it yours?” asked Miss Turner.
“No,” I said. “But I know what it opens.”
“And what’s that?” asked Mrs. Corneille.
“A pair of handcuffs.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
“The handcuffs belong to Mr. Houdini?” Mrs. Corneille asked me.
“In a way,” I said. I slipped the key into the pocket of my dinner jacket. I said to Miss Turner, “Tell me about the knife.”
She sat back. She was a bit breathless again, as though she had just physically relived the whole thing. She drank some brandy.
“Well,” she said, and she inhaled deeply once more. “I wanted to tell someone. Show someone what I’d found.” She looked over at Mrs. Corneille. “I thought about coming to you, to discuss it. But it was late, and there didn’t seem to be any real urgency. I told myself that it could wait until tomorrow morning. So I returned to my room.”
She paused to sip her brandy. “Mrs. Allardyce was still asleep, and she didn’t wake when I tiptoed past her. She’s a very sound sleeper.” She blinked. “But I’ve said that.” She turned to me. “Haven’t I?” I think she was beginning to feel the brandy.
I nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “Well. I’d put a bolster on the bed, under the blanket, when I left, and I’d arranged it to look like someone sleeping. To look like me sleeping, on my side. I didn’t really expect Mrs. Allardyce to come into my room, but I wanted to make certain that if she did, she’d think I was still asleep. When I came back and switched on the light, the bolster and the blanket were just as I’d left them. But the knife was… sticking out. I stood there and I went through one of those incredibly stupid moments, telling myself, But I didn’t leave that there. It seemed so strange-the knife, I mean-so bizarrely out of place. And then I understood what must’ve happened, and I started to shake. The knife was in exactly the spot where my chest would've been.”
She turned to Mrs. Corneille. “It was extraordinary, really. You read about people shaking when they’re frightened, and you think it’s a figure of speech. But I was literally quaking.” Her voice was level, but she used both hands again when she lifted her brandy to her lips.
Mrs. Corneille touched her knee. “But it’s all over now, Jane. And you removed the knife and you brought it here.”
“Yes. And I apologize for-”
