Good.
“Look what I’ve got.” Allene held out a loosely balled handkerchief, then carefully unwrapped it in her palm. Inside, a triangle of broken glass shone under the lamplight. “It’s from Florence’s drinking glass. Evidence!” She pulled Birdie’s hand, and they skipped down the hall to Allene’s frilled bedroom. “We’ll hide it in here,” she announced, pulling open the vanity drawer. She placed the parcel inside and locked it, pocketing the brass key. “I’ll be back in a bit. I’m going to have a word with Father.” Her eyes blazed. “It’s all so exciting, really. We have a mystery in our midst, don’t we?”
“Shall I come with you?” Birdie asked, though she was terrified at the prospect of speaking to Mr. Cutter again.
“No. You go to sleep.”
Birdie at first turned toward the guest room, Allene’s slippered feet padding away, but she couldn’t resist following Allene to Mr. Cutter’s bedroom. Her heart pounded. She hated the very walls of this house, and her body reminded her of that truth. She hid behind the half-opened door, hovering in the shadows of the hallway that had been dimmed for the night.
Mr. Cutter, his beard slightly disheveled, sat on the edge of his enormous four-poster bed. Swathes of satin lashed the bed curtains to the carved bedposts, and Allene fiddled with tying and untying them. Mr. Cutter had changed into a striped robe of gray and white that was too small to wrap about his stately belly, and the room smelled of warm tobacco. It used to smell of Mrs. Cutter’s jasmine perfume, but that scent was long since gone.
“What a terrible, terrible evening. It will be in all the papers tomorrow, whether we like it or not. I’m so sorry your party should end in such a way, my dear.” When he looked up at his daughter, his face seemed weary. Life ought to have been easy for him. Inheriting money from the railroads and making sure that people turned that money into more money was his only job, if that could be called a job. But for that well-fed stomach, he looked as if he’d just come off laying down railroad ties himself. Shadows magnified the sagging skin beneath his eyes. The past few years had made him ancient.
Allene took a deep breath. “Father.” She tied the bed-curtain sash tightly, as if attempting to strangle the bedpost. “I believe that Florence may have been . . . murdered.”
His face darkened. “Do not say such things, Allene.”
“But we smelled a chemical on her. It might be poison.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Mr. Cutter’s forehead went lobster red. “You have far too fanciful an imagination when it comes to chemicals. I should have thrown those old books of yours out. They aren’t healthy for the female mind. In any case, the officer himself said she broke her neck in the fall.”
“But we think she fell because she’d been poisoned.”
“We? We? And who is this we?”
“Jasper said—”
“It was a mistake to invite him. I never should have permitted it.”
Allene opened her mouth to argue, but Mr. Cutter stood up. He was immense next to his daughter, a bear overshadowing a fawn.
“I told the police to close the case, for your sake. For everyone’s sake. There’s no good that will come about from an investigation.”
“But Father!”
Mr. Cutter grabbed her upper arms and squeezed so tightly that she gasped with pain.
“The Waxworths have always spoken ill of our family and our circle of friends, always looking for a reason to bring us down. I’ve heard Florence was as ruthless as her mother. If you and those . . . guests of yours hadn’t disappeared upstairs, then Florence would never have had a reason to follow, digging for gossip. She wouldn’t have tripped on the stairs, and she wouldn’t have died. This was your doing, and I am making this go away for you and for us. Do you understand?” He shook her so hard, a loose hairpin fell from Allene’s knot and clinked to the floor. “It ends here, Allene. I’ll hear no more of this, never again.”
He released her, and Allene stumbled. Birdie hastily backed away, padding silently back to the guest room. She switched off the light and dove under the covers, thinking, I should have never been allowed to come either, but here I am.
One silent minute passed, then another. The door quietly opened and Allene’s dark figure entered, sniffling. She paused before the little table by the door and plucked out the rest of her hairpins, dropping them into a china dish. She shed her slippers and robe before climbing into bed. Birdie moved over to make room, but Allene didn’t let her get far; she captured Birdie’s thin torso in her arms and snuggled close until their foreheads were almost touching.
Birdie didn’t ask how the conversation went. She knew better.
“This is like old times, isn’t it?” Allene whispered. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“Of course not.” Birdie’s bones betrayed her with a deep ache, but she ignored it.
After a few minutes, Allene sagged into the mattress. Birdie thought she’d fallen asleep, when Allene sharply inhaled.
“Why, Birdie Dreyer. You’re glowing like a lamp!”
Birdie looked down at herself. Indeed, her hands and forearms possessed a faint greenish, yellowy glow. She had taken her hair down and braided it, and the braid running over her shoulder held a halo of light that illuminated the space about it.
“It’s the radium dust,” Birdie whispered. “We paint it onto the watch dials at the clock factory, so our boys can see them in the dark trenches. I get covered with it after a day’s work.”
Allene went slack jawed for a moment. “You . . . work in a clock factory?”
Birdie could have said, Yes, and it’s your family’s fault. But she didn’t. She was in the Cutter house again with Allene, and wasn’t that all that mattered? “Yes.”
Allene’s expression of surprise softened. “Radium, huh? Lovely element. I hear that Madame Curie used to carry radium around in her pocket, like a glowing little pet of hers. I have a copy of her doctoral thesis. It’s wonderful reading.”
“You do?”
“Yes. It’s under my bed.” Allene yawned. She was so peculiar sometimes. Birdie remembered the time she ignited some elements in the garden in a spectacular fireworks display that set an expensive ornamental maple tree on fire. Mr. Cutter had been far from happy about that. “Well, don’t let the boys see you in the dark. They’ll try to catch you and never let you go.” She hugged Birdie closer. “You don’t belong here on earth with the rest of us, Birdie Dreyer.”
Birdie watched her fall asleep, fighting to keep her eyes open as long as possible.
She saw unwanted fiancés, and Mr. Cutter shaking Allene like a rat. She saw her mother undulating beneath the shadows of countless men, and Holly covering her ears. She saw terrible things that should never, ever happen.
And she saw her own death approaching with a momentum that terrified her.
Tomorrow, she and Allene would deal with pleasanter things in life.
Like finding Florence’s killer.
CHAPTER 4