In a Gilded Cage (Molly Murphy, #8)

“She was my Vassar sister,” Emily said.

“Very well.” Mrs. Hochstetter smoothed down her black skirt before ringing a little bell on the side table. “Soames. These young women wish to say their farewells to Mrs. Hochstetter Junior,” she said. “Please escort them to her room.”

“Very well, madam.” The butler indicated we should follow him. Up the stairs we went, along a hallway that was bathed in gloom and made the statues in niches look like disembodied heads glaring down at us. He opened the door to Dorcas’s bedroom with obvious reluctance.

“Mrs. Hochstetter Junior is at repose in here.”

We stepped into a room that was as dark as the hallway had been. The odor of death came to greet us and we both recoiled a little, Emily giving me an alarmed glance.

“Are you young ladies sure you wish to go inside?” he asked.

“Vassar would expect it of me,” Emily said. “May we turn on an electric light?”

“Certainly not. This house is in mourning,” Soames said.

“I really would like to take one last look at my friend,” Emily said. I was impressed she could be so persistent. Soames was quite an intimidating figure. “May I then open the drapes just a little?”

I thought he was going to say no to that too, but he sighed. “I will open them a crack for you, if you really insist, but it is highly improper.”

He held open the curtains just an inch or two, sending a thin stripe of bright sunlight across the darkness.

“Thank you.” Emily went to stand by Dorcas’s bed. The body was covered in a white sheet. Emily pulled back the sheets and let out an audible gasp. “Poor Dorcas,” she whispered. “Poor, dear Dorcas. She was the brightest of us all.”

She bent down and kissed the dead cheek before pulling up the sheet again.

While she had been occupied at the bed, I had tried to observe everything in the room. Given the almost complete darkness and the clutter of stuffed birds, artificial flowers, and every other kind of knickknack, it was hard to see anything. I didn’t know what I should be looking for anyway. There was hardly likely to be a bottle of poison sitting on the bedside table. But as my eye moved over Dorcas’s dressing table I felt I was looking at something I had seen somewhere else before. I looked again and couldn’t for the life of me decide what that was.

“I think you should depart now,” Soames said, letting the drapes fall into place again and plunging us into complete darkness.

We did as he requested and walked in silence down the stairs. We encountered nobody in the front hall and stood blinking in the blinding light of the street.

“Well?” Emily said. “What do you think?”

“I don’t see how she could have been poisoned,” I said. “Her mother-in-law guarded her fiercely. You heard her yourself. She was allowed no visitors during the last days and she took no food apart from barley water and broth.”

“Well, I have some strands of her hair, just in case,” Emily said.

“Emily!”

“It was easy enough. It came out in my hand. I didn’t even have to yank it hard.”

“We’ll see if Ned turns up anything.”

“Emily, what is he likely to turn up?” I found myself getting a trifle annoyed. “It was quite obvious that Anson Poindexter had not been near the place. Bella came and brought grapes but they were not touched.”

“Bella? What has she to do with it?” Emily asked sharply.

I realized that I had not told her what I had observed at the funeral—that intimate look that had passed between Bella and Anson when they thought that no one was looking. I decided to stay mum.

“Nothing at all,” I said. No good could come of yet another complication, but I resolved to pay Bella a visit, just in case. If she had wanted to assist Anson in getting rid of a rich wife he didn’t love, as well as a friend who had been told too much, then it would have been easy enough to tamper with something in the room—the glass of barley water, for example.

“I tell you what, if you’d like to give me that hair sample, my friend Captain Sullivan can have it tested in the real police laboratory—just to make sure.”

“Oh, but Ned can test it for us,” she said. “He’s able to do this kind of thing, in fact he loves a challenge like this. He told me so.”

“Then how about we divide the sample,” I said. “You give half to Ned and I’ll give half to Captain Sullivan and we’ll compare results. That is what any good scientists would do and I’m sure Ned would not object.”

“Of course not,” she said. “I’ll tell him about it today.”

“I thought he went to visit his mother on Sundays.”

“He does.” She blushed bright red. “But today he wants to take me with him. Isn’t that wonderful? I’m now the girl that a young man brings home to meet his mother.”