Cinderella Six Feet Under(14)

“Keeps the rain off,” she said.

“Would it be terribly bothersome if I inquired what, precisely, you are doing backstage at the Paris Opera?”

She compressed her lips.

Miss Bright. Dead. Something to do with that.

“I beg your pardon,” Gabriel said. “I quite—”

“Tell me what you’re doing here, Professor. I thought I’d seen the last of you back in Germany. I was glad of it.”

“Oh? I thought I spied a tear or two when we parted.”

“Wishful thinking.”

“Mm. Perhaps a trick of the light.”

“Precisely.”

“I must admit, I felt a pang when we parted.”

“Did you?”

“Well, I thought I did. But perhaps it was only a touch of dyspepsia.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You’re meddling in my affairs. Again.”

“And you’re spitting fire, Miss Flax. I’d have expected to find you in a more”—Gabriel scratched his temple—“well, in a state of mourning, I suppose.”

“Mourning! Why, the cheek! To think I’d be mourning you? Like some schoolgirl who’d lost her—her pet kitten?”

“I fail to grasp your meaning.”

Miss Flax deflated. “Not . . . you didn’t mean mourning . . . you?”

“Not at all. Though I must admit the notion is intriguing.”

She shook raindrops off her umbrella with unwarranted vigor. “Oh, you believe Prue’s bit it. Read it in the papers, came scurrying down from your ivory tower to see what all the fuss was about?”

“Miss Bright has not perished?”

“She’s perishing from boredom in her mother’s moldy old mansion, but other than that, alive and kicking.”

“I seem to have quite missed the boat on this one.”

“Sounds more like you missed the entire fleet.”

*

They stood on the stair landing. Miss Flax told Gabriel how she and Prue had come to Paris looking for Henrietta and had stumbled upon the corpse of, evidently, Prue’s long-lost sister. How Henrietta was missing, and how no one in the marquis’s household seemed to mind. Miss Flax railed against the laziness of the Marais commissaire’s office and fretted over the weird coincidence of a daughter dead in her own estranged mother’s garden. She wondered aloud why the carriageway gate’s lock had been changed and described the dead girl’s mangled foot.

“So you see,” Miss Flax said, “something’s fishy. And I’m here because Prue’s sister wasn’t a fallen woman. I suspect that she was a ballerina, and I mean to confirm it.”

“Mightn’t she have been both a ballerina and”—Gabriel cleared his throat—“a fallen woman?”

“You needn’t look so grimacey, Professor. I’m an actress.”

He studied her crepey face. “How could I forget?”

“Certainly I know that ballerinas—and lots of actresses, too—supplement their incomes with”—she glanced away—“the attentions of admirers. But the police made Prue’s sister out to be some kind of common strumpet. They simply left it at that.”

“So you came to the opera house in an attempt to learn her true identity.”

“The police didn’t even care about her name. Like she was just a—a nothing. Something chucked onto the rubbish heap. It’s not right. Maybe they’re even searching for the wrong murderer.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

“Just as high-handed as ever, aren’t you?” Miss Flax started up the stairs.

Gabriel scratched his head. In the past month or so, he had indulged in picturing what it might be like to meet Miss Flax again. But he had never pictured her so annoyed at him. Women were confounding. He gained her side. “I shall assist you. That is why I am here.”

“You expect me to swallow that horse pill?” At the top of the stairs, Miss Flax looked left, then right. The piano music and rhythmic yelling was coming from somewhere to the left. She went left.

Gabriel went, too.

“You reckon I’ll believe that you journeyed all the way from England only to assist me?” she asked. “And for no other reason?”

“I believed Miss Bright was murdered. I was concerned for your safety.”

“And you followed me here from H?tel Malbert.”