Murder in the Shadows Read online

  Lady Eleanor gasped and reached back to slap Violet, but Vi caught her stepmother’s arm.

  “Do you think that we didn’t see how you favored Geoffrey even while Isolde was young? No one could know what a wart you’d turn him into. Not then, but still he was your star. Please stop trying to persuade me to see you as a sacrificing mother.”

  “Fine,” Lady Eleanor said, dropping the matter with such quickness that Violet was startled into silence. “Your father can’t know about this.” She stood and smoothed her dress.

  “I am not the repository of your lies. I won’t keep your secrets for you. I owe you a favor. Finding out who is blackmailing you is it. Father is your own concern, but I suggest you keep this in mind.”

  Lady Eleanor glared.

  “A significant amount of the cleverness of your children and stepchildren comes from him,” Violet warned. “He is no cipher and if he turns his attention to your crimes—”

  Lady Eleanor paled, hands shaking. Finally, she demanded, “Well?”

  Violet had stood to pace again. She had to let loose her energy so she didn’t strangle her stepmother. “Well?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “What can be done to discover the blackmailer.”

  “Yes. How are you going to do that?”

  Violet blinked as she turned on her stepmother. “I don’t know yet. You’ve hardly done anything more than tell us what you’d tell one of your friends. Vague asides, half-apologies, and ridiculous excuses.”

  “I want updates. I’ll see you every other morning for tea to approve your next course of action. Here is a list of people who don’t like me. It’s possible that they would have helped Danvers.”

  Violet took the list, opened it, and then closed it without reading the names or scoffing rudely. “No.”

  “No?”

  “I’m not reporting to you.”

  “You owe me a favor.”

  “The favor is helping you at all. I am not yours to command. I will be ruled by caring for the people I love and looking out for them, not by your demands. Victor and I both. Jack as well, should his case ever end.”

  “You love me?” Lady Eleanor scoffed. “Lies don’t become us.”

  “I don’t like you. You don’t like me. But I love Isolde and Geoffrey, and they would be hurt by this. Isolde most of all, though I suspect it could be the making or breaking of Geoffrey. I wonder. If he knew that you’d have sacrificed Isolde, would he rise up and become the man he has the potential of becoming or would he cement himself as a wart?”

  “I’m a terrible brother,” Victor said as he flopped down onto a chair in the parlor. “I’ve telephoned Gerald so you can have the one good brother around.”

  “You are the worst.” Violet had continued to pace until Victor arrived. “I suspect either Peter or Lionel were the good brother. I wish they’d survived.”

  The two of them shared a look. The pain of having lost a pair of siblings before they’d known them resurfaced too often around Lady Eleanor. It wasn’t just her fault that Vi and Victor had been sent to Aunt Agatha. Father had let them go because he’d thought it would give them a chance at happiness. They’d thrived with Aunt Agatha and found their happiness again after the loss of their mother.

  “I shouldn’t have left you alone with her, but my hands were begging to wring her neck.” Victor sounded more smug than anything else.

  “You should have left,” Violet countered. “Who knows if Lady Eleanor would have succeeded in getting Isolde and Tomas to come back to England. However, you should also have come back. After you sent the telegram and made your telephone call. Leaving me with her has earned you several black marks. You, sir, are on a very rocky road.”

  “I’m a terrible brother,” he repeated lazily and without remorse. “Want to go dancing tonight? Algie has sent by a note. It was on the table there in the hall. Must’ve come after Lady Eleanor. He says he saw we’d come home and wants to have a bit of a gossip. I invited Gerald to join us. He also wants to speak with us. Everyone we know wants to have a gossip.”

  “I thought Algie was in America. And how would he know we’d returned when we haven’t been out?”

  “I’m guessing that either he’s back or he didn’t go. Apparently he witnessed Hargreaves’s arrival. He says he’s taken to stopping by our houses and make sure they look all right when we aren’t around.”

  “What a pet!” Violet laughed. “Doesn’t he realize we’ve hired a few blokes to do just that?”

  “Clearly not,” Victor grinned.

  Violet reopened the list of ‘people who don’t like me’ from Lady Eleanor and with a twist to her lips, added Violet Wakefield, Jack Wakefield, and Victor Carlyle to the list. Vi folded the list up and tossed it to her brother.

  He opened it, read the list and then lifted a brow.

  “We do need Gerald,” Victor told Violet. “He might be lazy.”

  “He is.”

  “He might be spoilt.”

  “He is.”

  “He might be our brother.”

  “He is.”

  “If I say that he might be—”

  “He is,” Violet said, grinning as Victor groaned.

  “Your jokes are terrible, but he does live in the same house as Lady Eleanor. If anyone has an idea of what she’s been up to, or how the notes are coming in—”

  Violet gasped. “I once more prove that I’m a valuable beyond rubies.”

  “Not that again,” Victor snapped even though she could tell he was half-amused. “How long until Tomas replies? I’m worried. What if they were already coming? You know what we need?”

  “The ability to tell Isolde everything without feeling like we’re destroying her personally? The answer to the question for what this will do to Geoffrey?” Violet frowned deeply and then said, “Father wouldn’t have let Isolde marry Danvers if he’d known that his wife was blackmailed into pushing for the wedding. But does he know now? If he does, do you think he really loves her? Would whatever she’s hiding destroy him?”

  “Yes, we need all that,” Victor agreed, “and John Smith.”

  “I think we might need more than Smith,” Violet countered.

  “Do we?”

  “He is clever when it comes to finding out secrets, but we need to know how Harry Mathers got out of jail. We need to know who could possibly be aware of Lady Eleanor’s secrets. We need to know what her secrets are, so we can handle the fact that they’ll eventually come out.”

  “I don’t know,” Victor mused, taking the last of the coffee. “I’m not sure I can handle her secrets.”

  Violet ignored him. “We need to also know who both knows her well and is also unscrupulous enough to blackmail her.”

  “Surely everyone Lady Eleanor actually likes,” Victor suggested helpfully and then ignored Violet’s exasperated look.

  “She gave us nothing but orders and, well—we can’t even call them half-truths. She gave us shreds of nothing mixed with scraps of truth. ”

  Victor shifted and then rubbed his hands over his face and his expression changed. The teasing dropped and seriousness returned. “She did give us nothing. We need the details about how she was blackmailed. She’s decided it is Harry Mathers blackmailing her—”

  “He must be involved,” Violet groaned. “It’s not like you can walk out of prison. There must have been outside help, and who would help him willingly?”

  “If it isn’t Mathers who is engineering things—”

  “He could be a patsy.” Violet grinned at her brother. “He could have been freed in order to provide cover for someone else.”

  “Or,” Victor said, “he could have been freed because he’s providing us such an excellent distraction.”

  Violet rolled her eyes at her brother with a solid smack on his shoulder for repeating what she said. He grinned, so delighted at his teasing that Violet knew instantly he was going to carry on with it.

  “What about Jack and Ham? Can we c
all them home?”

  Violet shook her head. “Victor, whatever we’re working on is nothing compared to what they’re working on. We can’t distract them.”

  “What is happening up there?”

  “Jack isn’t going to tell me if it’s bad. I can hardly sleep with the cases we’ve come across as it is and I haven’t even seen half the bodies we’ve been involved with. Jack has been carefully silent.”

  Victor winced as Violet went back to pacing. She didn’t want to think about Jack’s case. If she let her mind linger too long on it, her imagination would start filling in holes with the grisly and horrific.

  “Having an imagination is a curse,” Violet told Victor. “I don’t understand why you don't also suffer.”

  Victor said, “I do now.”

  “Now?”

  “Being a father is—” Victor shook his head. “Terrifying.”

  “So you didn’t love me enough to suffer before now.”

  “I was just assured of our mutual immortality. Do you know how many ways a baby can die? Bad sniffles, dead. The influenza, dead. A bad fall, dead. They’re so delicate. They can crawl into a fire. They could so easily be taken away from me.”

  “They won’t be.”

  “We both know that you can’t promise that, Vi.”

  Their gazes met and no more words were necessary.

  Chapter 4

  “So, Algie?” Violet changed the subject for both of their peace of mind.

  “Algie,” Victor nodded, voice tremulous.

  “Dinner?” Vi asked. “Tonight? Do we have reservations?”

  “He said he’d take care of it,” Victor answered vaguely. At her dark look he added, “Reservations at 9:00 p.m., drinks and dancing after. You’ll have to dance with me, old girl. He’s bringing that rich wife of his.”

  Violet smacked her brother again. “Pretty demon, pretty devil, darling Vi are all acceptable. Old girl? No.”

  “All right, all right, old girl,” he said, dodging her next smack. “I worked from 2:00 to 4:00 a.m. and wrote a large number of likely unintelligible pages since I am a delicate flower who requires my wife to sleep. It’ll take me a bit to adjust and be able to churn out something readable.”

  “Agreed,” Violet said. “I also wrote during that time. Shall we shuffle our pages and just see if we can pull out something worthwhile?”

  “As good a plan as anything else.”

  She grinned at him, rang the bell, and called for fresh coffee and fresh sandwiches, along with an excess of chocolates. She felt as though she needed a chocolate treat with her favorite drink to recover from the visit with her stepmother. Together the twins worked on their story rather than pursue inquiries into the blackmailing, mostly out of spite and the necessity of a break after dealing with Lady Eleanor. Something of a palette cleanser.

  “Well,” Victor asked, “should we stop with the continuing story of young Isla, our married ingénue?’

  Violet grinned. “Funny how we’ve returned to a story that was based off of Isolde now that we’re dealing with the same issues once again. I have to admit, I look forward to her reaction.”

  “Hilarious,” Victor said sourly. He left the room and returned with Hargreaves and a chalkboard.

  “Must we?” Vi demanded.

  “Don’t,” he said as Violet stood to help, “it’s my turn.” She frowned, and he eyed her harshly. “Violet, it’s hard for me to say this, but you’re greedy with the chalk and the chalkboard. An intellectual glutton, if you will.”

  She stared at him for a long moment and then crossed her legs and leaned back, waving at him to proceed.

  “By all means,” she said dryly, “accept my deepest apologies.”

  “Indeed,” he told her, “as if you were the only one capable of operating a chalkboard.”

  They looked at each other with the corner of his mouth twitching as he fought back his reaction.

  “You forgot how to be a brother without a baby in your arms or a wife saying, Victor. Who will idly scold you now that you’re free?”

  “How dare you, madam?” he scolded. “Feels like I’m putting on an old suit, to be honest. One that doesn’t quite fit the same anymore.”

  Violet shook her head at him and then took out Lady Eleanor’s list of names to read it over again. “You know we can’t trust this.”

  “Oh, I know,” Victor agreed. He lifted his brow and eyed her quizzically. “Our names weren’t on it. It wasn’t complete until you added them. Honestly, I can think of a good half-dozen folks who should be at the top of this list that aren’t on it at all.”

  “She’s so difficult.” Violet sighed, stretching her neck as Victor copied the list onto the chalkboard.

  Harry Mathers

  Genevieve Bromley

  Lisa Van Lyden

  Charlotte Wilder

  George Terrance

  “This tells us nothing,” Victor said after transcribing the list to the chalkboard. “In fact, the only thing I realize as I write this is that I don’t believe it. Who are these people?”

  “Well,” Violet told him as she considered, “Harry Mathers is the partner of Isolde’s once-intended who was murdered on their wedding day.”

  “Be quiet,” Victor replied idly.

  “Mathers’s daughter was in a relationship with his partner, though poor Mathers was unaware. His grandchild has been put up for adoption. He got arrested, despite the care he used in keeping himself separate from Danvers’s crimes, because Jack and Ham kept looking for evidence, found it, and then testified against him.”

  “Yes, thank you,” Victor said dryly. “Thank you for telling me all of the things I already knew. Isn’t Genevieve Bromley the daughter of that rich man? What’s his name?”

  “Noah Bromley. He’s quite powerful, I believe. And certainly rich. Epically so. Why would his daughter be Lady Eleanor’s enemy?”

  “I don’t know,” Victor said, rolling her eyes at him. “Who is this Lisa woman? Or this Charlotte Wilder? They could be friends or girls or children of friends or random names she created to disguise whatever she was doing that she’s being blackmailed over.”

  “What about George Terrace? Does that seem familiar?”

  “I think he’s a crony of Father’s. Though—I really don’t know. For all I know, he’s the fellow who delivers the fish.”

  “Very helpful,” Violet said. “Perhaps Gerald will know.”

  In her opinion, writing was a way to discover her thoughts. It was why her journal and the chalkboards worked so well for her. They helped her digest what she already knew in a way that allowed her to consider it from different angles. Even in recapping what was happening in her life, she found new ideas and caught holes in her thought process, but Victor wasn’t trying to discover anything. He was trying to lighten Violet’s mood.

  Violet rose and left him to his teasing, crossing to the stacks of pages of their manuscript. She skimmed her own again to see what she’d done the night before and then read his with careful attention. As she worked through the two sets of circumstances, it occurred to her that they should have been a little more focused on laying out a plan to write this book.

  They were out of practice in writing in the same manner when they were in each other’s pockets. They needed to re-organize their process. She glanced over and saw him pacing in front of the chalkboard and snorted softly. He’d been caught by his own teasing.

  “I can’t make heads or tails of it.”

  “We aren’t going to on our own, I don’t think,” Vi told him as she crossed to stand next to him. “She’s clearly lying. We need to find out the real truth, but I don’t know how we do that. Even if we pin her down with one truth, she’ll lie about another.”

  “The most important thing to Lady Eleanor is her image and her status,” Victor said. “Possibly young Geoffrey takes a slight precedence, but Isolde doesn’t. The rest of us don’t. Father certainly doesn’t.”

  Gerald arrived just as Violet poured
herself another cup of Turkish coffee. Gerald was older than Violet and Victor by about a decade, putting him well into his 30s. The twins got their coloring, the sharpness of their features, and their slenderness from their mother. Unlike them, Gerald was bluff, blonde, ruddy-cheeked, and given to just a little extra weight. He was a large and strong man, but he was covered in a layer of fat.

  He glanced between them as he entered. “I feel as though I’ve flashed back in time. What are you doing here? Where is Jack? Is Kate still helping her mother?”

  “Yes,” Victor answered and Violet said, “Jack is in Leeds working on something dark and terrible if the tone of his letters is of any indication.”

  “So you two decided to flashback in time.” Gerald crossed and dropped a kiss on Violet’s head and then shook Victor’s hand. Gerald grinned at Victor with delight and then his gaze landed on the chalkboard. The frown started before he’d even started reading, but it deepened as he read over the list of names. “What’s all this? Why are you two meddling with Lottie? How do you even know her?”

  “Who’s Lottie? Charlotte Wilder?”

  Gerald’s mouth was down-turned, showing lines that Violet had never noticed before on her brother’s face. “She’s the woman I’ve asked to be my wife.” He scowled deeply, eyes agonized. “She hasn’t answered me. She won’t talk to me at all.”

  Violet cursed as Victor groaned. The twins met each other’s eyes and they both jumped to the terrible conclusion that Lady Eleanor was meddling again. What if she’d stepped beyond meddling with a step—like she had with Violet—to the future stepchild’s spouse? Lady Eleanor had tried with Jack, but with Gerald, the heir, what wouldn’t Lady Eleanor do?

  “Why is my Lottie on a list with Harry Mathers? I assure you that Lottie does not know Mathers.”

  “She’s not,” Violet told him. “She’s on a list of Lady Eleanor’s enemies.”

  Gerald paled. “Bloody hell.” The following cursing streak was enough to give the twins the impression of where Lady Eleanor stood on the matter.