What Moves the Dead (28)

I had no idea what I’d say if anyone did. Plead grief, I suppose. Say that I had to come see her one last time. Remind Roderick of the superstition that the dead must be watched for three days. I was not that worried about it. People in mourning are allowed to do odd things. This was absolutely a strange thing to be doing. Maddy was dead, I did not doubt it. It was astonishing that she had still been alive when I saw her. She could not have lasted more than a few days. I knew that.

I also knew that I had to see her. Every sense I had honed over years on the battlefield was screaming that something was not as it appeared. I could feel it. The dead don’t walk.

I picked up the candle and opened the door. A wave of tinnitus rose in my ears and I waited it out, seeing the light flicker on the shrouded form on the slab, the high ringing note pulsing inside my skull.

When it finally faded, I went forward. I stood over the shrouded form of Madeline Usher and set my hand to the cloth … and hesitated.

Part of me wanted to abandon this fool quest. Why was I here? Why was I skulking around Roderick’s manor like a thief, disturbing his sister’s rest? I was an old friend, yes, but I was violating all laws of hospitality and friendship. It was not my place.

But something was still very, very wrong.

I pulled back the shroud and froze.

It was Maddy. She did not seem to have deteriorated at all in two days. The cool air of the crypt might have saved her, though I did not think it was so cold as that. Or perhaps she had simply looked so shocking before she died that mere decay could not worsen it. Her hair clung to the shroud and shed fine white hairs across the stone surface of the slab where I had moved it.

That was not what stunned me.

Her neck had been broken. She had been very carefully arranged, the shroud draped to hide the terrible angle of her throat. And though she had died before they had time to bruise, there were livid finger marks splayed across her throat.

I stood so long that the candle dripped wax past the guard and spilled onto my hand. The sharp burn brought me back to myself, and I tilted it so that none fell on the shroud or the slab or the dead woman’s skin.

And then I carefully replaced the shroud and took my candle and crept back up the stairs, moving as silently as a scout on patrol. I was now in enemy territory, and my life and Angus’s might very well hang in the balance.





CHAPTER 9


It is very unpleasant to sit down to a meal when you are trying to determine which one of your breakfast companions is a murderer. I drank my tea and met no one’s eyes, while my thoughts raced and rattled about my skull.

Denton was the obvious choice. Denton was a doctor. He could not possibly have examined Maddy and not noticed the broken neck. But at the same time, as a doctor, he should have had a hundred and one ways to kill someone without resorting to such a crude method of murder.

Still, that was not enough to rule him out. Men panicked sometimes. Perhaps it had been a crime of passion, an unrequited lust for Madeline. I had seen no such indication, but men have hidden such things before. It had to be Denton.

Didn’t it?

But just when I had convinced myself thoroughly of Denton’s guilt, I would glance at Roderick out of the corner of my eye. If there was ever a man wracked by a guilty conscience, it was Roderick Usher. He startled at every sound, turning his head constantly as if expecting that someone was creeping up on him. One of the servants brought in more tea and he yelped and dropped his fork with a clatter. And there was the way he had reacted when I called him Lady Macbeth. Even if we ignored all that, surely he had helped to lay his sister out on the slab. Surely he would have noticed the broken neck.

No, the most logical answer was that they were both in on it, that whichever one of them had killed her, the other had helped to cover up.

Would Roderick really cover up his sister’s murder? And why murder her at all? She was nearly dead already. What possible gain could there be in hastening her death along?

I found that I could believe that Denton would cover for Roderick, but not that Roderick would cover for Denton. I had seen Usher under fire, in the trenches. I knew what sort of man he was. He had plenty of courage but little nerve, and he had loved his sister dearly. I could think of no hold that Denton might have over him that would cause him to cover such a thing. The doctor could hardly be blackmailing Usher, who had nothing worth taking any longer, and Usher’s sins, whatever they might be, were not the sort that would cause a man to stand by while his sister’s neck was snapped like a … like a …

Like a hare, I thought, seeing again the staring eye of the witch-hare. I jammed my fork into my eggs and the tines scraped across the plate. Roderick shrieked.

“I’m sorry,” he said, covering his face. “I’m sorry. It’s this damned problem with my nerves. I hear … I think I hear…”

“It’s all right,” I said automatically. I pushed back from the table, no longer hungry. “I think I’ll go for a ride.”



* * *



The weather had not cleared at all. It was still drizzling and the sky was turning an unpleasant shade of greenish gray. I was barely over the causeway when I saw movement in the grass and found a hare staring at me.

I cursed at it and spurred Hob. He didn’t deserve that and he bounced a few times to let me know that he knew he didn’t deserve that. I didn’t look over my shoulder but I could feel the hare behind me, like an enemy sentry watching to see if I strayed into disputed territory. I fancied that as soon as I was out of sight, it would go crawling along to alert the other hares to my presence.