SIXTEEN
“YOU’RE IN MY LIGHT,” Daffy said.
I had intentionally planted myself between her book and the window.
It was not going to be easy to ask my sister for assistance. I took a deep breath.
“I need some help.”
“Poor Flavia!”
“Please, Daff,” I said, despising myself for begging. “It’s about that man whose body I found at the fountain.”
Daffy threw down her book in exasperation. “Why drag me into your sordid little games? You know perfectly well how much they upset me.”
Upset her? Daff? Games?
“I thought you loved crime!” I said, pointing to her book. It was a collection of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries.
“I do,” she said, “but not in real life. The antics you get up to turn my stomach.”
This was news to me. I’d file it away for later use.
“And Father’s almost as bad,” she added. “Do you know what he said at breakfast yesterday, before you came down? ‘Flavia’s found another body.’ Almost as if he was proud of you.”
Father said that? I could hardly believe it.
The revelations were coming thick and fast! I should have thought of talking to Daffy sooner.
“It’s true,” I said. “I did. But I’ll spare you the details.”
“Thank you,” Daffy said quietly, and I thought she might actually have meant it.
“Poseidon,” I said, taking advantage of the partial thaw. “What do you know about Poseidon?”
This was throwing down the gauntlet. Daffy knew everything about everything, and I knew she couldn’t resist showing off her uncanny power of recall.
“Poseidon? He was a cad,” she said. “A bully and a cad. He was also a womanizer.”
“How can a god be a cad?”
Daffy ignored my question. “He was what we would call nowadays the patron saint of sailors, and with jolly good reason.”
“Which means?”
“That he was no better than he ought to be. Now run along.”
Ordinarily I might have taken umbrage at being dismissed so high-handedly (I love that word, “umbrage”—it’s in David Copperfield, where David’s aunt, Betsey Trotwood, takes umbrage at his being born), but I didn’t—instead, I felt rather an odd sense of gratitude towards my sister.
“Thanks, Daff!” I said. “I knew I could count on you.”
This was shoveling it on, but I was honestly pleased. And so, I think, was Daffy. As she picked up her book, I saw that the corners of her mouth were turned up by about the thickness of one of its pages.
I was half expecting to find Porcelain in my room, but of course she was gone. I had almost forgotten that she’d accused me of attempted murder.
I’d begin with her.
PORCELAIN (I wrote in my notebook)—Can’t possibly be her grandmother’s attacker since she was in London at the time. Or was she? I have only her word for it. But why did she feel compelled to wash out her clothing?
BROOKIE HAREWOOD—Was likely killed by the same person who attacked Fenella. Or was he? Did Brookie attack Fenella? He was on the scene at the time.
VANETTA HAREWOOD—Why would she kill her own son? She paid him to keep away from her.
URSULA ?—I don’t know her surname. She mucks about with bleaches and willow branches, and Vanetta Harewood said she was fiercely protective. Motive?
COLIN PROUT—was bullied by Brookie, but what could Colin have had against Fenella?
MRS. BULL—threatened Fenella with an ax—claimed she’d been seen in the neighborhood when the Bull baby vanished years ago.
HILDA MUIR—whoever she may be. Fenella had mentioned her name twice: once when we saw the Bull child perched in a tree in the Gully, and again when I cut the elder branches in the Palings. “Now we are all dead!” Fenella had cried. Was Hilda Muir her attacker?
MISS MOUNTJOY—was Brookie’s landlady. But why would she want to kill him? The theft of an antique plate seems hardly a sufficient reason.
I drew a line and under it wrote:
FAMILY
FATHER—very unlikely (although he once drove Fenella and Johnny Faa off the Buckshaw estate).
FEELY, DAFFY, DOGGER, and MRS. MULLET—no motive for either crime.
But wait! What about that mysterious person whose fortune Fenella had told at the church fête? What was it she had said about her?
“A regular thundercloud, she was.” I could almost hear her voice. “Told her there was something buried in her past … told her it wanted digging out … wanted setting right.”
Had Fenella seen something in the crystal ball that had sealed her fate? Although I remembered that Daffy scoffed at fortune-tellers (“Mountebanks,” she called them), not everyone shared her opinion. Hadn’t Porcelain, for instance, claimed that her own mother, Lunita, had such great gifts of second sight that the War Office had funded her crystal-gazing?
If Lunita had actually possessed such great powers, it wasn’t too great a stretch of the imagination to guess that she had inherited them from Fenella, her mother.
But wait!
If Fenella and Lunita both had the power of second sight, would it be unreasonable to assume that Porcelain, too, might be able to see beyond the present?
Was that the real reason she was afraid of me? She had admitted that she was.
Could it be that Porcelain saw things in my past that I could not see myself?
Or was it that she could see into my future?
Too many questions and not enough facts.
My shoulders were seized by a shudder, but I shook it off and went on with my notes.
THE PALINGS
There is a feeling about this place that cannot be easily explained. To my ancestor, Lucius de Luce, it must have seemed like the Great Flood when the river was diverted to form the ornamental lake. Before that time, it had been no more than a quiet, isolated grove where Nicodemus Flitch and the Hobblers came for baptisms and beanfests. Later, the Gypsies had adopted it as a stopping-place in their travels. Harriet had encouraged this but after her death, Father had forbidden it. Why?