Cinderella Six Feet Under(4)

“Duck!” Prue whispered.

There was a clatter above, voices coming closer; someone pushed a window open.

Ophelia and Prue stumbled off to the side until they were safely in shadow once more. They’d come to the second wing of the mansion. All of the windows were black except for two on the main floor.

“Let’s look,” Ophelia whispered. “Could be your ma.”

They picked their way towards the windows, into what seemed to be a marshy vegetable patch.

Ophelia stepped around some sort of half-rotten squash, and wedged the toe of her boot between two building stones. She gripped the sill to pull herself up, and her waterlogged rump padding threatened to pull her backwards. She squinted through the glass. “Most peculiar,” she whispered. “Looks like some sort of workshop. Tables heaped with knickknacks.”

“A tinker’s shop?” Prue clambered up. “Oh. Look at all them gears and cogs and things.”

“Why would there be a tinker’s shop in this grand house? Your ma married a nobleman. Yet it’s on the main floor of the house, not down where the servants’ workplaces must be.” A fire burned in a carved fireplace and piles of metal things glimmered.

“Crackers,” Prue whispered. “Someone’s in there.”

Sure enough, a round, bald man hunched over a table. One of his hands held a cube-shaped box. The other twisted a screwdriver. Ophelia couldn’t see his face because he wore brass jeweler’s goggles.

“What in tarnation is he doing?” Prue spoke too emphatically, and her bonnet brim hit the windowpane.

The man glanced up. The lenses of his goggles shone.

Holy Moses. He looked like something that had crawled out of a nightmare.

The man stood so abruptly that his chair collapsed behind him. He lurched towards them.

Ophelia hopped down into the vegetable patch.

Prue recoiled. For a few seconds she seemed suspended, twirling her arms in the air like a graceless hummingbird. Then she pitched backwards and thumped into the garden a few steps from Ophelia.

“Hurry!” Ophelia whispered. “Get up! He’s opening the window!”

Prue didn’t get up. She screamed. The kind of long, shrill scream you’d use when, say, falling off a cliff.

The man flung open the window. He yelled down at them in French.

“Get me off of it!” Prue yelled. “Oh golly, get me off of it!”

Ophelia crouched, hooked her hands under Prue’s arms, and dragged her to her feet. They both stared, speechless, down into the dark vegetation. Raindrops smacked Ophelia’s cheeks. Prue panted and whimpered at the same time

Then—the man must’ve turned on a lamp—light flared.

A gorgeous gown of ivory tulle and silk sprawled at Ophelia’s and Prue’s feet, embroidered with gold and silver thread.

A gown. That was all. That had to be all.

But there was a foot—mercy, a foot—protruding from the hem of the gown. Bare, white, slick with rainwater. Toes bruised and blood-raw, the big toenail purple.

Ophelia’s tongue went sour.

Hair. Long, wet, curled hair, tangled with a leaf and clotted with blood. A face. Eyes stretched open. Dead as a doornail.

Ophelia stopped breathing.

The thing was, the dead girl was the spitting image of . . . Prue.





2




The goggled man’s yelling stopped, and he vanished.

He’d be summoning the law. Or maybe unleashing a pack of drooling hounds.

Ophelia managed to stagger away with Prue from that horrible . . . thing. Prue’s whimpers inched into a hysterical register.

Ophelia lowered them both to a seat on the edge of a fountain. The fountain’s black water mirrored the lights of the party still going full-steam ahead inside. Those fancy folk hadn’t heard Prue’s screams through the piano music.

“Calm yourself. It will be all right.” Ophelia stroked Prue’s hunched back. These were hypocritical words, since Ophelia was feeling about as calm as a nor’easter herself. But what else could you say to a girl who’d just laid eyes on her dead double? “We’ll leave this place, Prue, just as soon as you’re able to walk. How would that be?”

Prue panted through her teeth.

“And that girl,” Ophelia said, “well, there must be some horrible mistake, or maybe—”

“How could it be a mistake? Them holes in her. The blood. The—”