Cinderella Six Feet Under(6)

“Only heard stories. Well, just one story. Ma only kept her long enough for the one story, see.”

“What was her name?”

“Don’t know. She is—was—a year or two older than me. Her pa took her off when she was only a new baby. I never got to meet her, Ophelia, I—”

“What else did your ma say?”

“That’s all. That her pa was some hoity-toity French feller, and he hired a wet nurse and took the baby off to give her a better life. Didn’t want his child raised by an actress. Do you think . . . maybe Ma married him, all these years later? Maybe this here’s his house? But then, why is my sister lying dead out there in the weeds with those fine folks inside laughing and listening to piano songs and—”

“Shush, now. Don’t work yourself up.”

Prue patted her bodice. From beneath damp layers of wool and cotton came the comforting crackle of paper.

The letter. Her treasured secret. Proof that somebody in this wide world wanted her. Maybe.

*

Ophelia and Prue hunkered on stools at the kitchen hearth. They kept their wet cloaks and bonnets on. Their soaked boots steamed. Mice nibbled food scraps under the table.

From the rooms above came muffled voices, foot thuds, door slams. Outside in the garden, men’s voices rose and fell behind the spatter of rain on the windows. Lights shone and turned away like unsteady lighthouses.

More than an hour passed.

“Oh!” Prue’s head bobbed up. “Someone’s coming down the stairs.”

Ophelia straightened her wig and stood. “Let me do the talking.”

A person ought never show up to a murder wearing a disguise. Ophelia had realized that nugget of wisdom too late. The problem was that if one whipped off a wig and padded hips, say, shortly after a dead body was discovered, well, suspicions were sure to kindle.

Which meant there was no choice but to blunder forward in this absurd disguise.

Three men piled into the kitchen: the bald, egg-shaped fellow they’d seen tinkering with the screwdriver, and two young men in brass-buttoned blue uniforms. Police.

“Precisely what is the meaning of this?” Ophelia asked in her best Outraged Chaperone voice. “Locking us up like common criminals? I’ll have you know this is the marquise’s daughter, Miss Prudence Bright. Where is the marquise—where is Henrietta?”

The men gawked at Prue.

“I presume that your extremely rude staring,” Ophelia said, “is due to the simple fact that the dead girl in the garden is—was—also Henrietta’s daughter, and thus Miss Bright’s sister. The resemblance is indeed uncanny, but that is not an excuse to gape at this poor girl as though she were a circus sideshow.”

“Sister?” the egg-shaped man said. “Oh. Sisters. I see. I beg your pardon, madame. I have forgotten my manners. I am Renouart Malbert, the Marquis de la Roque-Fabliau. The master of this house.”

Malbert wore an elegant suit of evening clothes that was fifteen years out of mode and frayed about the cuffs and collar. He was so short he had to tip his custard-soft chins up to look into Ophelia’s face. His jeweler’s goggles had been replaced with round, gold spectacles. His eyes blinked like a clever piglet’s.

“Et oui, oh yes, mon Dieu,” Malbert said, “Mademoiselle Bright does indeed resemble the girl—her sister, you say—in the garden, and also my dear, darling, precious Henrietta.”

Henrietta was lots of things, but dear, darling, and precious were not at the top of the list.

“The girl in the garden, you say?” Ophelia frowned. “Then you do not know her name?”

“Why, no,” Malbert said. “She is a stranger to me.”

“A stranger!”

“Yet now that I see this daughter—Prudence, you say?—of my darling wife, well, now I begin to discern a family resemblance. Oh dear me.” Malbert dabbed his clammy-looking pate with a hankie. “A most perplexing matter, troubling, macabre, even.”

“I should say so,” Ophelia said. “Perhaps the girl was searching, too, for her mother at this house.”

“Are you a relation of dear Henrietta’s, as well?”

“No, I am . . .” Ophelia cleared her throat. “I am Mrs. Brand. Of Boston, Massachusetts. Miss Bright could not, of course, travel without a chaperone. She is young, and quite alone. I encountered her by chance, degraded to the role of maid by an appalling series of events, in the scullery of an American family residing in Germany. I agreed to escort her, out of a sense of national duty and womanly propriety, to her mother here in Paris.” Half-truths, and a couple of whoppers. But Ophelia couldn’t very well say she was an actress, too, because that would mean revealing she was in disguise. Besides, she’d already had a mix-up with the police in Germany.