Murder On Waverly Place

“Who was it he was trying to contact?” Malloy asked, as if he couldn’t remember, although Sarah was sure he did.

“His father. He did not know what to do without his father.”

“And what did his father tell him to do?” Malloy asked.

“He… Mrs. Gittings made me tell him to invest money in a… I do not know. Something her friend was doing.”

“Some phony investment scheme,” Malloy guessed.

“Why would Mr. Cunningham do that?” Sarah asked.

“Because he needed more money,” Serafina said, her cheeks crimson with fury. “Mrs. Gittings told him if he offered more money, he could… he could have me.”

“That’s unspeakable!” Mrs. Decker declared.

“But he lost his money, didn’t he?” Malloy asked relentlessly.

“Yes, and then I was supposed to tell him to invest more. Mrs. Gittings kept telling him he needed more and more…” Her voice broke, and she covered her mouth, fighting tears.

“What a horrible woman,” Mrs. Decker said as Sarah put an arm around Serafina. “I’m not sure whoever killed her did such a bad thing.”

“Wait a minute,” Malloy said. “I thought Cunningham was rich. Why would he need this phony investment scheme to get the money Mrs. Gittings wanted?”

“His family is rich,” Serafina said. “But he only gets an allowance. He does not inherit his father’s fortune until he is twenty-five, in three more years.”

“Where did he get the money to invest then?” Malloy asked.

“From his mother. She… He is her only child. She is very generous, but she would not give him money for a mistress,” Serafina said, spitting out the last word.

“Thank heaven for that, at least,” Mrs. Decker murmured.

“How much money did Cunningham lose to Mrs. Gittings’s friend?” Malloy asked.

“I do not know.”

“If he was going to use the money to get Serafina away from Mrs. Gittings and then he lost it,” Sarah said, “he might have been desperate enough to kill her.”

“But we were both holding his hands,” Mrs. Decker reminded her.

“Serafina,” Malloy said, startling her. “If you can keep one hand free when everybody is holding hands around the table, can you keep both hands free?”

“I do not know,” she said in surprise. “I have never tried it.”

“Let’s try it now,” he said, offering Mrs. Decker his wrist. They all joined hands again.

“Now Serafina is getting up, and I’m going to start coughing and let go.” Malloy and Serafina freed both of their hands. “Then Serafina comes back, but I don’t put my hands on the table this time.” He pulled his hands back and put them in his lap. “Mrs. Decker, you’d be looking for my hand in the dark.”

“And Serafina would be looking for your other hand,” Sarah said, understanding how it could work.

Mrs. Decker took Serafina’s wrist in her left hand, but then she shook her head. “No, no. I might take her wrist by mistake in the dark, but I would never believe it was yours, Mr. Malloy.”

“Could you have mistaken it for Cunningham’s, though?” he challenged her. “He’s a much thinner man.”

“Yes, he is,” Serafina said in surprise. “I had not thought of it before.”

“Could that have happened, Mother?” Sarah asked.

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Decker said with a frown, “but it’s possible, I suppose.”

“Even if he could get free, he’d still have to find Mrs. Gittings in the dark, though,” Sarah pointed out.

“And how would he know where to stab her?” Mrs. Decker added. “He would have had to feel around in the dark, and she would have noticed if someone touched her. Surely, she would have cried out in surprise, if nothing else.”

“I don’t think it would be too hard,” Malloy mused. “He didn’t have to walk far, and he’d hear people talking, so he could get his bearings that way.”

“He could touch the chairs,” Serafina offered.

They all looked at her in surprise.

“You touch the backs of the chairs,” she repeated. “That is how you know where you are.”

“So he could just walk around the table until he came to the third chair, where he knew Mrs. Gittings was sitting,” Malloy said. “The chair back would tell him where her body was, so all he had to do was-”

“That’s enough,” Sarah said quickly. “We understand. But could he have gotten up quietly enough so no one noticed?”

“Everybody was shouting,” Malloy reminded them. “Were you paying attention to the people around you, Mrs. Decker?”

“Not at all,” she said in surprise. “I would have known if someone let go of my hand, but if Mr. Cunningham had slid his chair back and gotten up, I doubt I would have noticed.”

“But shouldn’t someone have noticed when Mrs. Gittings got stabbed?” Sarah asked. “Wouldn’t she have screamed or something?”

“I asked the medical examiner the same thing, and he said no,” Malloy said. “The knife went straight into her heart, and she died quickly.”

“But surely she felt some pain when the knife went in,” Sarah said.

“She might’ve felt a pain, but since she wasn’t expecting to be stabbed, she probably wouldn’t have thought it was anything really bad,” Malloy explained. “Everybody has unexpected pains from time to time. They usually just pass, and we forget about them.”

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Decker exclaimed. “I think we’ve proven that any one of the three of them could be the killer.”

“And don’t forget the Professor,” Malloy said.

“But he wasn’t even in the room,” Sarah reminded him.

Malloy turned to Serafina. “Could he have gotten in without anybody knowing it?”

She frowned. “He could have come in through the cabinet, but Nicola was in there. He would have seen him, and he would have told me.”

“Is there any other way to sneak in?”

“No,” Serafina said.

Malloy gave her one of his glares.

The girl blinked but held her ground. “I would tell you,” she insisted. “I want to help.”

“Of course you do, dear,” Mrs. Decker soothed her and gave Malloy a reproving glance.

He ignored it. “Supposing he could have gotten into the room somehow, did he have any reason to want Mrs. Gittings dead?”

Serafina considered the question for a long moment. “I do not know.”

“You said they were lovers,” Sarah reminded her, thinking that was a strange word to use for middle-aged people but unable to think of another. “Did they get along well?”

The girl shook her head. “Mrs. Gittings was mean to him. She said he was stupid.”

“Did they argue?” Sarah asked.

“No, no, the Professor, he is very quiet. He would say nothing when she said mean things to him.”

“But she trusted him with the money,” Malloy remembered. “He knew the combination to the safe. He could have taken it and disappeared.”

“No, they were saving for something,” Serafina said. “At least…” She stopped, remembering.

“What is it?” Sarah prodded.

The girl pursed her lips as she tried to recall. “At first, the Professor and Mrs. Gittings would talk about what they were going to do when they had enough money. They were going to bankroll something, they said. I did not understand what it was, but they would get very excited when they talked about it because they would get very rich. The Professor, he had done it before, but he was just a steerer then and did not earn much money.”

“A what?” Malloy asked sharply.

“A steerer,” Serafina repeated uncertainly. “I think that is the word.”

“What else did they say about it?” Malloy asked urgently.