An Unexpected Peril (Veronica Speedwell #6)(61)
I shook my head. “I examined them carefully first thing this morning. There is no sign they have been adulterated—no discoloration, no peculiar odors. No marks of hypodermic syringes or seams where the chocolates may have been opened and put back together.”
“Very well, we will assume the chocolates and the squib were meant to frighten, but nothing more. To what end?”
“To force her to leave?” I guessed.
“Which she has.”
“But she never saw them,” I pointed out.
“Perhaps they were not the first.” He shook his head. “It’s a damnable puzzle. The only thing we can be certain of is that they are being perpetrated by someone who does not know Gisela has vanished.”
“Because otherwise, why carry them out?” I agreed. “So, someone outside the Alpenwalder entourage. And that might be anyone—including our favorite investigative journalist.”
He grunted his agreement and pushed his chair back, slapping his thighs for Nut to jump onto his lap before giving me a searching look. “You do not really believe J. J. would do such a thing?”
“I do not know what to believe,” I said evenly.
“Veronica, I know she is a difficult person to like at times, but I find it hard to believe she would stoop to such depths.”
“Do you? I wonder. She is ambitious and intelligent and her career has been thwarted by the mediocrity of lesser men. What if she felt pressed to produce a story so gripping that her editors were forced to take her back? It mightn’t feel like much of a crime to introduce a small card with a few words into a box of chocolates. She must know any number of miscreants willing to hurl a small explosive, particularly if she stressed that the thing was to be harmless. And she is on hand.”
He sighed, rubbing Nut’s ears gently until the dog gave a little sigh of contentment. “You are correct in that it is a good theory, but I cannot believe it.”
I rose and dropped a kiss to his head. “Your trouble, Revelstoke Templeton-Vane, is that you are too sweetly na?ve where women are concerned.”
His laughter was still ringing in my ears when I left him.
* * *
? ? ?
As soon as I had finished my toast and dealt with the most pressing of our correspondence, I turned my attention to Alice Baker-Greene’s notebook. I might have had to fight Stoker for the privilege, but he had been the delighted recipient of a gift. His brother Tiberius, taking his leisure in Paris, had paid a visit to Deyrolle, the temple of natural history on the Left Bank, where he encountered a rare trophy of a roseate spoonbill—“Platalea ajaja,” Stoker happily informed me. “I have not seen one of these beauties since I was in South America.” He fell at once to studying the quality of the mount and would likely not have noticed had I divested myself of all my garments and done a dance to shame Salome. So I quietly collected the notebook and retired to my desk with a good reading lamp and a quantity of paper for taking notes.
The notebook was far denser than I had realized, the leaves being the thinnest vellum imaginable, and each page written in a tiny hand quite unlike Alice’s usual bold style. She had devised a sort of shorthand for herself that took many pages to decipher, and even then much of it was unintelligible to anyone not familiar with the intricacies of alpinism. There were coordinates and materials lists, sketches of routes and notes on traverses and conditions. It was as thorough a record as I had ever seen, both scientific and personal, and I vowed to see it returned to the Curiosity Club in perfect condition so that others might benefit from its contents. (I also roundly cursed the hide of Douglas Norton for very nearly making off with it, no doubt ensuring it would be lost to mountaineering history if he had been successful.)
Most of this material I skimmed past, recognizing my own limitations in interpreting the data she had recorded. But I paused to read more closely her paragraphs on the people she encountered on her travels. She was unflinching in her assessments, detailing flaws and foibles as fluently as she did favors and virtues. From the dates inside the cover I deduced this was not the notebook she had carried during the expedition in which she made such an enemy of Douglas Norton—much to my irritation. I should have thoroughly enjoyed reading her acerbic comments about him. But it began some year and a half before, just about the time she had decided to settle in the Alpenwald. There were frequent mentions of trips from Hochstadt to various mountain towns in the vicinity in Switzerland and Italy, short climbing expeditions in small, out-of-the-way villages, often accompanied by the notation Climbing with D. or Lazy day with D. These mentions were always finished with a tiny sketch of a flower. I peered through my magnifying glass at the distinctive little petals and realized they were meant to be St. Otthild’s wort.
“D. is an Alpenwalder,” I murmured to Vespertine. My hound had taken up his post next to my chair, laying the broad weight of his head upon my feet as I worked. Whenever I spoke to him, he raised his shaggy brows before subsiding again into a deep slumber.
“But who?” I wondered. “Durand? Possible, but he is meant to marry Yelena. Unless he found his attentions wandering. And surely she does not mean Douglas Norton,” I said with a snort. Vespertine snuffled in his sleep as if to agree. I reached for the Rosemorran copy of Twistleton’s Continental, a compendium of European nobility that ran to some forty volumes. The Alpenwald was in the first, and it took only a moment to find the entry for Duke Maximilian.