Louisa and the Crystal Gazer Read online

“She were a nervous person,” explained Suzie. “I heard her quarreling with Mrs. Percy the day before.”

  That seemed only half an explanation. Judging from the gleaming pots suspended from the ceiling, the sparkling cleanliness of the windows, and the scrubbed whiteness of the plank floor, the cook had been a tidy woman, proud of her work, yet she had left the kitchen in this state. Why? My uneasiness grew.

  “Well, there’ll be no tea in the front parlor today,” I agreed with Suzie. I returned to the others, certain that other strange events were to follow.

  Another half hour passed in desultory fashion. It was growing dark outside, as dark as it can grow on a late-winter afternoon when snow falls in great white sheets. Mrs. Deeds rose from her comfortable chair and began to pace in front of a window that overlooked the street.

  “Isn’t that Miss Snodgrass?” she exclaimed with some surprise, pausing and drawing the curtain farther back.

  It was. Even from my chair she was quite visible over Mrs. Deeds’s shoulder, her height, her slenderness, that strange brown costume and extremely old-fashioned bonnet she had worn the week before identifying her. I thought she would come up the sidewalk and ring the bell, but she passed by the house. She kept walking, never once looking over her shoulder. She seemed in a hurry.

  How strange. From whence had she appeared?

  Fifteen more minutes passed.

  “Unacceptable,” said Mr. Barnum, rising. He reached for the bell rope next to the hearth. Suzie returned five minutes later, her hair disarranged. She was breathing with difficulty, as if she had been running.

  “Tell your mistress we await her,” said Mr. Barnum in a clipped, impatient tone of voice.

  “Yes, sir,” said Suzie, bobbing another curtsy. But she stayed in the doorway.

  “Well?” roared Mr. Barnum.

  “She ain’t feeling well, I suspect is why she’s delayed,” Suzie said. “Perhaps you all should just go home. She’ll send your money back to you, I’m sure.”

  “How not well?” I asked, standing.

  “She didn’t eat no dinner. Least, she didn’t put the tray back in the hall for me to take away,” Suzie said. “It were a good dinner, too, mashy potatoes and beef.”

  “I will go see her,” I said.

  “Can’t,” said Suzie Dear, gulping. “Her door is locked. Bolted, as well.”

  “Is there a window?” asked Mr. Barnum.

  “Yes, but never used and painted shut for all I know,” said Suzie.

  “Oh! Oh! I sense an evil presence!” shrieked Mrs. Deeds. She swooned to the floor in a heap of purple velvet and black lace.

  “Suzie, fetch water and smelling salts,” I instructed, much put out with Mrs. Deeds. Swooning is such a dreadful distraction, and I felt a tremendous urgency to see what was inside Mrs. Percy’s preparation room. After Mrs. Deeds had been revived and propped up against the red-striped paper of the hall wall, where she fanned herself vigorously and moaned repeatedly, Mr. Barnum, Mr. Phips, and I had a whispered conversation on how to proceed.

  Even as we talked, I took note of where everyone was at that moment: Mrs. Deeds sitting on the floor, her husband next to her, Lizzie standing at the end of the hall, watching us, Sylvia standing next to Lizzie, her arm about her. And Amelia Snodgrass, missing. The hall was dark, illumined only by dim gas lamps turned low, and our shadows played eerily against the red wallpaper.

  “Which room is it?” asked Mr. Phips of Suzie, who leaned against a wall, her hand playing nervously with a little ribbon tied around her throat.

  “Last down the hall, sir,” she said, “the far corner room.”

  “I will go outside and climb in through the window,” said Mr. Phips. “If it does not open, I will break the glass.” He held up his hand and explained that the glove was thickly padded. “It will take but a moment.”

  “Call us as soon as you are inside,” I said. “Unshoot the bolt of the door.”

  Mr. Phips went out the front door and all was quiet for a long while, except for the heavy, snorting breathing of Mrs. Deeds. There was a trellis on the west side, I remembered, where that far corner room and its window would be. Perhaps Mr. Phips had to pull away rose canes. Mrs. Deeds, still fanning herself with great energy despite the swooning fit, tried to rise to her feet but could not. Perhaps, I thought with little sympathy, it was the weight of all those jewels and heavy chains.

  Eventually we heard glass shatter and heavy footsteps. The bolt shot back and Mr. Phips opened the door and we beheld Mrs. Percy’s red-wallpapered sitting room. It was stuffed with vases of peacock feathers and stands of ferns.

  Mr. Phips stood ashen-faced and trembling next to the shattered glass panes of the French door, for in his nervousness he had broken several to find the one opposite the lock.

  Behind a bamboo-and-velvet screen we found Mrs. Percy, prostrate on her chaise longue, her right arm hanging limply over the side so that her hand grazed the patterned carpet. One pillow was bunched up under her head; a second, which proclaimed in bright embroidered letters SCENIC NIAGARA FALLS, had fallen to the floor. Her face was turned away from us, and there was a sickly sweet odor in the room.

  “Opium!” exclaimed Mr. Barnum in outrage. For all his showmanship and eccentricity he was, underneath it all, quite a conservative person.

  “Opium, indeed,” said Mr. Phips. “It smells like one of the Canton dens in here. Evil habit.”

  I walked to the other side of the chaise longue, so that I might see Mrs. Percy’s face. The use of opium was said to cause strange dreams, and I wished to see if those exotic fantasies played on her features.

  It was a face I would not soon forget. Her eyes were open, staring at the ceiling, and never had I seen eyes so bloodshot. They were painful to behold. There was a strange set to her thin mouth, as if she wished to speak. But no hint of breath made her chest rise or fall; no sigh or mumble stirred her lips. What she saw was not the plaster molds of roses and painted vines overhead, but a vision of eternity. Mrs. Percy was dead. It is so shocking, mortal reader, to expect an amusing hour with a personage and instead to discover them dead on a chaise longue, the smell of opium heavy in the air—

  “Damn, damn, damn!” exclaimed Suzie Dear. I hoped, for the eternal life of Mrs. Percy, that her maid wasn’t correct.

  “Louy, what is it?” called Lizzie from where she still stood next to Sylvia, in the hall.

  “Stay there,” I called back. “Do not come in here.”

  Of course, I had forgotten what it is like to be a younger sister always receiving commands from an elder. Lizzie was in the room before I finished my sentence.

  “Oh! What a strange odor!” Then she saw Mrs. Percy. Her long-fingered, artistic hands shot to her face in horror. I feared that she, like Mrs. Deeds, might swoon, but no, Marmee steeled her daughters better, and Lizzie regained her composure. Instead, Sylvia swooned.

  “Suzie, more water and smelling salts,” I said somewhat impatiently. But Suzie Dear had disappeared.

  “Miss Dear!” I shouted, running into the hall. The maid was nowhere to be seen, and the front door, which had just been opened, fell shut with a groan.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Heart Proves Staunch

  I DO NOT mean this harshly, understanding reader, but I experienced a kind of exasperation with poor Mrs. Percy, that she had not found the means to resist death. She had become an interesting character study, and now here she was, dead, and only just recently.

  “Another one,” said young Constable Cobban, bending over to check the wrist of the prone Mrs. Percy for a pulse, which we all knew he would not find. “Corpses tend to accumulate in your immediate vicinity, Miss Alcott.”

  Constable Cobban of the new Boston Watch and Police, whom we had notified immediately after Suzie Dear’s departure, was, as you may have suspected from that above comment, no stranger to me. We had met the winter before, during the investigation of another untimely death.

  “People will die,” spoke up Sylvia in m
y defense.

  Constable Cobban grinned. He was a young man with orangish red hair, freckles, and a deplorable taste in suits, which tended to be store-made from bolts of large plaid or bold-striped stuff. He tweaked the pillow under Mrs. Percy’s head as if trying to awaken her, but she remained unmoving, growing colder each moment. Next he examined an empty bottle of gin, the glass fallen on the floor under her hand.

  “What’s this?” he said, his voice deepening with curiosity. He had turned to face a little table next to the chaise longue upon which a box of lucifers rested, and next to them a small pot of dark paste.

  “Opium,” he confirmed, his mouth puckering from the bitterness of the taste, as he had stuck the tip of his little finger into that intriguing pot.

  “That seems to complete the explanation of how she came to be dead in a locked room, doesn’t it?” I said. “She used the drug too freely.”

  “Exactly,” said Cobban, smiling at me once again. “Opium can be a tricky business, especially if a weak heart is involved. Someday I imagine they will declare its use illegal and protect the citizenry.”

  “Weak heart?” I asked.

  “Look at her lips, her fingernails, the black shadows under her eyes. Our mutual friend, Dr. Roder, would say that not even the changes caused by death would erase the signs of a weak heart in life.”

  “You have continued a relationship with Dr. Roder?” I asked, interested. The doctor had helped us last winter, when my friend Dot was murdered.

  Cobban blushed as only a red-haired man can, turning almost purple with sudden embarrassment. “I visit his dissecting theater and lectures, yes.”

  “Have you decided to train as a physician?” This young man never ceased to surprise me.

  “No. At least, not yet. But I think a knowledge of the body would assist my work in the Boston Watch and Police.” He walked once more around the chaise where lay the body of Mrs. Percy, touching this, peering at that.

  “It seems a straightforward enough situation,” he said after several more minutes. “But where is the pipe? I wonder.”

  “Pipe?” asked Mr. Phips.

  “Mrs. Percy’s opium pipe. I don’t see it,” said Constable Cobban.

  “It must be here somewhere,” said Mr. Phips. “Shall I look for it?”

  “No. I’ll have one of my men examine the room. For now, shall we go back to the waiting room, and the others? A few more questions and we can all go home.”

  Seated once again in Mrs. Percy’s waiting room, I watched silently as Mr. Barnum tended to the fire and Lizzie served tea. Mrs. Deeds’s teeth were chattering from horror as well as the cold, Mr. Phips had descended into a stony silence, and Mr. Barnum poked at the fire too energetically, sending bursts of sparks into the room and all over Mrs. Percy’s new carpet. The door to Mrs. Percy’s preparation room had been shut once again.

  “Tell me one more time, please, why you were all here waiting?” Cobban demanded, wetting his pencil on his tongue and preparing to write in a little notebook. He was enjoying this; indeed, when I had first admitted I was there to attend a séance, his red eyebrows had shot all the way up his forehead to his hairline. Miss Alcott, sensible, frugal, daughter-of-a-philosopher Miss Alcott. Attending séances!

  “You already know,” I said patiently.

  “Sé-ance,” repeated Cobban, writing slowly. His grin widened.

  “Obviously you have had no experience with the spiritual world or you would not be quite so lighthearted,” muttered Sylvia.

  “I know spirits as well as the next fellow. Judging from the smell in there, Mrs. Percy was no stranger to spirits either—at least not the kind that can be poured,” said Cobban.

  “Oh!” Sylvia stamped her foot. Constable Cobban gave her a long, cool glance and then returned to his notes.

  “Young man, I’ve business to attend to,” protested Mr. Phips, rising. “We’ve told you everything there is to tell.”

  “Please return to your chair,” Cobban said in the same tone of voice with which I have instructed schoolchildren to sit and open their books.

  Mr. Phips sat back down.

  We had gone over the events of the afternoon several times, each time discovering some minutes later that Cobban wished us to tell them one more time. And each time another detail had been recalled. Cobban, despite that foolish grin and mocking manner, was a young man of fine intelligence and cunning.

  “You say that when Miss Amelia Snodgrass walked by, she was wearing the exact same costume as she had worn the week before?” Cobban addressed this question to Mrs. Deeds, who had watched from the window.

  “Exact.” She sniffed. Mr. Deeds, sitting next to her on the settee, patted her arm.

  “Now, the ladies present must inform me, for I am out of my depth here. But do the fair sex like to repeat their wardrobes so exactly?” He addressed this question to Sylvia.

  “Usually not, if they can afford variety,” said my friend, frowning. “She did seem to wear it more as a kind of livery or uniform, I thought.”

  Mr. Barnum poked the fire again. “Too much costume,” he said. “That’s what I think.”

  “Too much costume?” repeated Cobban, turning his attention to the showman.

  “Yes. Mrs. Percy, for instance. Dressed up like a Gypsy, with veils and sequins and heavy bracelets. Totally unnecessary. If you’re going to humbug a crowd you don’t announce it with a flashy costume. Blend in; that’s the key. And that vanished maid of hers, Suzie Dear. Dressed like an opera dancer. Sets the wrong tone for a sober enterprise.”

  Cobban was writing furiously, his plaid sleeves a throbbing red in the gaslight.

  Mr. Phips cleared his throat. “I did notice something else, I just now recalled,” he said. “The maid was wearing heavy bracelets, and I would swear they were the same ones her mistress wore last week.”

  “Theft,” said Cobban, frowning. “Theft, and then she skedaddled. I’ll have her picked up. Shouldn’t be too difficult to find a newly homeless and unemployed working girl down in the stews near the harbor. That’s where she’ll head.”

  “How do you know Mrs. Percy didn’t give her the bracelets?” I asked. Suzie Dear seemed a young woman in need of guidance, but Mrs. Percy no longer needed the jewelry, and I disliked the thought of a young woman going to prison for such a frivolous crime. The bracelets were most likely brass, not gold.

  “We’ll ask a few questions and find out,” Cobban said. “That’s it, ladies and gentlemen. Leave me your cards, please, in case there are other questions. And now, go back to your homes and find more sensible pastimes.” This last remark did not endear him to Mr. Phips, whose mouth, under his gray mustachios, grew thin with dislike. Dressed now in our heavy coats, we filed out one by one through the front door, back into the winter night. I gave him one of Auntie Bond’s calling cards with my name written in under hers.

  “Did Walpole suit you?” the constable asked me in a voice low and private, taking the card. “I, for one, am pleased you have returned to Boston. You, as well, Miss Shattuck.” He gave Sylvia a little nod of the head, turned on his heel, and strode off down the sidewalk.

  Lizzie put her arm through mine and sighed.

  “Louy, what a terrible afternoon!” she said.

  “It started out with such promise.” Mr. Barnum stood beside us, swinging his walking cane to and fro, as if batting at snowflakes. “Ah, well. She has gone to meet her Maker. Let us hope she returns to Him with a clear conscience, though her parlor tricks argue against that event.”

  “Any sin was as much ours as hers, for we paid for the entertainment and so encouraged it,” I said.

  “I do feel a fool,” said Sylvia. “How will I ever communicate with Father now? Patiently, through prayer and reflection,” she whispered.

  “What did you say, Sylvia?” I asked.

  “Why, I’m not certain! Something about reflection. Do you think the words I just said might have been guidance from poor Mrs. Percy?”

  “Sylvia, you n
eed to rest,” I told her.

  And so my friend returned to her mansion and her mother, probably for another long evening of conversations about marriage and who was betrothed to whom, which heirs were still “on the market.” Lizzie and I returned to Auntie Bond’s, where my sister practiced her études on the parlor piano and I took a candle up to my attic writing room. Mrs. Percy’s face floated before me, pale and round as a moon, with that strange grimace upon it, as if she had just received bad news. This vision entangled itself into my story, now named “Agatha’s Confession,” and the story became the tale of a woman, once loved, not yet suspecting she has been cast aside in favor of another—her own friend Clara. Character must be accounted for within the plot, and Agatha Percy’s character suggested to me a great betrayal. Women happy in their destiny do not turn to crystal gazing. And so I heard her say to me,

  I had one friend (or thought I had, may God forgive her the sin and misery she caused me) who possessed all that I lacked: youth, beauty, wealth, and those fresh charms that make a woman lovely in the eyes of men. I had not known her long, but loved and trusted her entirely, grateful that she turned from her gayer friends to sympathize with me. Philip admired her; and I was glad to see it, for thinking his heart all my own, I neither feared nor envied Clara’s beauty.

  Horror. A knowledge of premature death by another’s hand. That was what I had seen in Mrs. Percy’s painted face.

  The next morning, at breakfast, I had a letter from Father waiting beside my porridge bowl.

  Walpole, New Hampshire, December 8

  Dear Daughter,

  Make no more inquiries about Mr. Phineas Barnum. Your uncle Benjamin says he is on the verge of bankruptcy and no man of business will have dealings with him just now. For the custom of speaking without pay, I’ve no trouble finding engagements and seek no others just now, being busily occupied with other matters. I have exhausted my supply of writing paper for my diaries; if you might send me more from Mr. Dee’s shop. Your mother is well, and is knitting a new shawl for Lizzie for Christmas. We will send it to your rooms, with our love. Remember to control your temper and to read often from Pilgrim’s Progress. Know that I embrace you fondly and am your loving guide.