A Murder in Time(45)
Alec eyed her curiously. “We need to . . . what?”
“Nothing,” she mumbled and rubbed her hands over her face, trying to organize her thoughts.
“What happened? Did she fall in?” A man stepped to the edge of the lake so he could get a better look.
“Most likely she was bathing, slipped, and drowned,” suggested another man.
Kendra shot him an incredulous look. Would they write this off as a drowning? She couldn’t let that happen. “Not unless she walked naked through the forest to get here. You don’t see any clothes, do you?”
Alec frowned as he did a narrow-eyed scan. “This area is a watershed, with a network of tributaries, one of which feeds this lake. The main river flows toward the ocean, but her body could’ve been swept downstream and carried here.”
“That may be how her body got here, but that’s not how she died.” Kendra stood up abruptly. “She was murdered.”
For the space of about three seconds, there was a shocked silence.
Then someone denounced shrilly, “That’s outrageous!”
Kendra glanced around. The rebuke had come from the woman in the vivid blue dress who the Duke had escorted to the nuncheon. She glared at Kendra like she was responsible for the dead woman. “Who is this creature, Bertie?”
That seemed to rouse Aldridge. He still looked deathly pale, and his hands shook visibly as he brought up a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his brow. But he made an effort to pull himself together. “Caro, you and the other ladies must return to the castle. Harding? Mrs. Danbury? Please be so good as to escort the ladies home.”
The butler moved forward. “Of course, Your Grace.”
“I’ll be happy to lend my assistance to the ladies, sir.” The offer came from the young man who was still holding the whimpering, red-eyed Georgina. Sarah had raced to her friend’s side, and was now casting curious glances at the lake. She didn’t look eager to leave. In fact, Kendra thought several of the ladies looked undecided, wanting to display the proper horror even as they strained to get a glimpse of the body. As they were standing several yards away from the lip of the lake, Kendra doubted whether anyone could see anything. Georgina was probably the only woman who’d gotten a good view of the corpse.
Kendra caught the hard look Mrs. Danbury shot her. The housekeeper’s expression would’ve been understood even in the twenty-first century: Get your ass over here, now!
Her heart sank. This was outside her jurisdiction. Way outside her jurisdiction. Like, two hundred years outside her jurisdiction. But she couldn’t force her feet to move.
They’d probably shrug the girl’s death off as an accident. And why should she care? She didn’t belong here. Her only concern was to get back to her own time line.
But what if the two incidents were connected? Like most people in law enforcement, Kendra wasn’t a big fan of coincidences. She’d been thrown back in time, and now she was presented with a murder victim. And, God help her, the violence that had been done to this poor girl piqued every one of Kendra’s instincts.
She’d probably pay for her insubordination, but she ignored the housekeeper. “The Duke’s right. We need to clear the area, secure the scene,” she said in a low voice to Alec.
He gave her an odd look, but before he could respond, the woman with the pockmarked face separated herself from the group of ladies that Mr. Harding and Mrs. Danbury were trying to hustle out of the area.
“Bloody hell,” Alec muttered under his breath, and moved forward to intercept her. Kendra couldn’t hear what was being said, but from the woman’s body language she was making an appeal to stay while Alec was ordering her to go. The woman gestured to the lake, even stomped her foot, but Alec won the argument. The woman shot Kendra a disgruntled look, then whirled around, skirts belling out as she rejoined the departing procession.
“Now, Miss Donovan,” Alec said, returning to Kendra’s side. There was a tic along the clean line of his jaw; impatience deepening the green of his eyes. “You need to explain yourself.”
Kendra had the oddest sense of déjà vu. A handful of men had stayed behind and were now staring at her. Once again, as in her life in the twenty-first century, she was the only woman . . . and a freak.
“No.” Aldridge stepped forward. “Alec, we need to get that poor girl out of the water. Now.”
Alec exchanged a look with the Duke, and nodded. “Yes, you are correct, Your Grace. I trust you have no objections, Miss Donovan?”
He was being snide, she knew, but she answered anyway. “She wasn’t killed here, so you won’t be destroying any trace evidence.” Not that it would matter if there was trace evidence, she thought bleakly. She wouldn’t be able to examine it, anyway.
Again she felt a wave of helplessness. What could she do here? Christ, even something as simple as fingerprinting was beyond the scope of these people. Fingerprints had been used as a source of identification as early as the T’ang Dynasty in China, and there’d even been a murder case solved in ancient Rome by identifying a bloody handprint, but that was an anomaly. The distinctive ridges in fingerprints, she knew, wouldn’t be accepted as a crime-solving tool for another fifty years.
She stepped back while Alec took charge, ordering two footmen to wade into the water to disentangle the body from the weeds. During the grim process, the younger footman began to look so green that Kendra feared he was going to throw up on the corpse at any moment. Thankfully, they managed to get her limbs free and carry her to the shore before anyone got sick. Alec was already stripping off his coat to cover her in a belated attempt at modesty.