The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place Read online

  “I found a statement of accounts,” Kitty began, “including copies of the bills she sends monthly to our families. Now, I’m a fair hand at penmanship, and Elinor does splendid work imitating others’ hands. Between us two I believe we can continue producing the monthly statements, mailing them to our families, and collecting tuition on which to support ourselves. So that solves the money problem for the time being.”

  Mary Jane, Alice, Louise, and Elinor nodded, but Dear Roberta looked aghast. “You mean we shall deceive our parents and rob from them in order to live?”

  Smooth Kitty had not anticipated this objection. Her mouth, it must be said, dropped open in a most un-Kittylike way.

  “Nonsense, Roberta,” Disgraceful Mary Jane replied. “Our parents support us financially regardless of where we are. It’s their moral duty. Kitty is merely proposing that we take on the management ourselves.”

  Dear Roberta’s conscience would not be so easily dismissed. “But they believe they’re paying for us to receive an education,” she said. “We will be taking their money under false pretenses.”

  “Nothing of the kind,” Smooth Kitty replied. “We shall continue our studies on an independent basis and help each other according to our individual strengths. You can teach music, Martha. Mary Jane was always a better dancer than Mrs. Plackett. Elinor, you can teach French, from those years you lived in Paris as a child …”

  “We shall read Victor Hugo,” Elinor said, and Mary Jane groaned.

  “That’s the idea.” Kitty nodded approvingly. “Louise, of course, will teach science, I can take math, and you, Roberta, needlework. See? We shall continue to be educated. Are you content, dear?”

  Roberta looked anything but content, but she nodded.

  “Very good. Now I must return once more to the matter of money. As I said, I’ve been reviewing Mrs. Plackett’s papers, and her ledger has some mysteries of its own. I see line items for the grocer, for coal, for Doctor Snelling, for the dry goods shop, for the chemist, for Farmer Butts for milk and for pasturing her pony, for Amanda Barnes’s salary, and so on. All the school’s basic expenses. The tuition money she receives ought to be enough to cover everything. But it isn’t. I see several substantial checks drawn on her accounts which are labeled simply, ‘Cash.’ No explanation is given for these withdrawals. I can’t account for it. But together, the withdrawals exceed the income.”

  Pocked Louise lured little Aldous back from Dull Martha with a biscuit. “Then why is Mrs. Plackett not bankrupt?”

  “Because she has a trunk full of Spanish doubloons buried in her cellar,” announced Disgraceful Mary Jane.

  “Really?” Dull Martha’s eyes were wide.

  Mary Jane laughed. “No, silly. I’m making a joke. Remember the coins Kitty found in their pockets? They were probably fakes anyhow.”

  “Yes, but didn’t Doctor Snelling say Captain Plackett was said to have left his wife a fortune?” asked Dear Roberta.

  Smooth Kitty nodded slowly. “So he did, Roberta,” she said. “But remember what Miss Fringle said. If Mrs. Plackett possessed a fortune, others would be sure to know. And Mrs. Plackett would likely never have opened her school if she were rich, nor live on such spare economy.”

  Pocked Louise tickled Aldous’s belly. “Then how does she get by with all these deficits?”

  “I’m not certain,” replied Smooth Kitty, “but here’s a clue.” She held up a folded piece of paper and opened it to reveal several five-pound notes. “This is the note that Henry Butts delivered this morning. It’s from Admiral Lockwood.”

  The girls gazed at each other in astonishment.

  Kitty began:

  Dear C.,

  Hoping this finds you recovering smoothly. Was sorry to be deprived of your company yesternight. Enclosed are the results of an exchange merely for one. Better rates are likely in town.

  “That’s cryptic, to say the least!” said Kitty. She continued:

  I hope you enjoyed the little trinket I left Sunday night. Its use will become clear before long. I cherish the hope that your entrusting me with these matters suggests you may, in time, come to entrust more to my care. I await our next visit with keen pleasure. Please allow me to be of service in any way that I can.

  Yours sincerely,

  Paris Lockwood, Admiral.

  Kitty looked at her schoolmates. “What do you suppose it means?”

  “It means theirs is no ordinary friendship,” Disgraceful Mary Jane said.

  “‘An exchange’ … what did he say … ‘merely for one’ … ‘better rates’?” Pocked Louise repeated. “What can that mean?”

  “Is he doing some shopping for her?” wondered Dull Martha. “Exchanging merchandise?”

  “If so, why would he send money?” Dour Elinor asked.

  “It sounds to me like he’s selling something for her,” Stout Alice said. “Pawning off old bits of jewelry or furniture, do you think?”

  “Possibly.” Smooth Kitty frowned. This was a knotty puzzle to unravel.

  “What was that bit about a trinket he left yesterday?” asked Dear Roberta. “Does he mean the wine?”

  “I was wondering that myself … oh!” Kitty suddenly remembered. “Wait here, girls.”

  She raced to the hallway and pulled open the drawer to the hutch where she’d stowed Admiral Lockwood’s package. She brought it back into the parlor and slipped off its string. “He said it was a present for Mrs. Plackett, just before he left,” she explained. “I stuck it in a drawer and forgot all about it.”

  Disgraceful Mary Jane chided her. “How is it possible to forget a present?”

  Kitty made a face at her. “If you’ll recall, we had cooling corpses on our minds at the time.” By now she had the paper off, and the other girls had gathered around for a better look.

  It was a wooden box, cherry-stained and lustrous in its finish, but smooth and unadorned by carvings or embellishments. Kitty fingered the latch and opened the top. A black object lay upon a field of black velvet. She held it up to the light.

  “An elephant?” Dull Martha asked.

  “An elephant,” Pocked Louise affirmed.

  “Such a curious elephant!” said Dear Roberta.

  “Why an elephant?” Smooth Kitty mused.

  “The man has strange ideas about how to woo women,” said Disgraceful Mary Jane.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Dour Elinor. “I’m no expert. But that’s ebony wood. Very rare and beautiful.” She took the elephant from Kitty and studied it more closely. “The toenails—or whatever you call them on an elephant—are gold, and so are the tusks, and this necklace it has. That’s a sapphire stone on the necklace. And the eyes, if I’m not mistaken, are rubies.”

  “Rather a lot of jewelry for an elephant,” observed Pocked Louise.

  “Perhaps it’s a royal elephant,” offered Dour Elinor.

  Mary Jane took the elephant from Elinor. “Let me see that one more time.” She peered at the admiral’s gift. “Is the trunk gold, too?”

  Pocked Louise shook her head. “Brass, I think. Much harder than gold. It’s got grooves along the side, here, I suppose like a real elephant’s trunk. Nostrils, too.”

  “How strange.” Smooth Kitty reread the admiral’s note. “Such an odd little trinket. ‘Its use will become clear before long.’ What use could an ebony elephant possibly have?”

  “That’s like asking, ‘What’s the point of earrings and bracelets?’” Mary Jane’s righteous scorn took in Kitty and any who dared to agree with her. “‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever.’ Keats.”

  “You’ve changed your tone a good deal,” observed Stout Alice. “What happened to ‘strange ideas about how to woo women’?”

  “Precious metals and gemstones happened, that’s what,” muttered Dour Elinor.

  “But what does it all mean?” Smooth Kitty felt more frustrated than she cared to let on. “We already have one mystery to solve: who killed Mrs. Plackett and her brother? And now here’s another: w
hat’s the story behind this elephant and the money in Admiral Lockwood’s letter?”

  “Mrs. Plackett’s finances are a mystery in themselves,” said Pocked Louise.

  “Kitty, would you read us the bit again from the admiral’s letter about the money?” Dear Roberta said. “It reminds me of something.”

  Smooth Kitty obliged her. “‘Enclosed are the results of an exchange merely for one. Better rates are likely in town.’ Any theories?”

  Roberta nodded over the strawberry she was stitching. “Exchanges and rates sound like financial terms,” she said. “I hear my uncle use those words when he talks to Papa. Exchanging money from different countries and whatnot. Apparently it’s quite complicated.”

  Kitty paused, then scanned once more the admiral’s note. “By gum, you’re a marvel, Roberta dear,” she exclaimed. “How do you do it?”

  “Do what, exchange money?” Dear Roberta looked shocked. “I don’t know. Ask my uncle.”

  Kitty laughed. “No, I mean, how do you keep unraveling mysteries for us?”

  Dear Roberta’s eyebrows rose. “Do I?”

  “I think so,” Kitty said. “Think of the coins we found. What if there are more of them? Perhaps the admiral exchanged one of the coins for Mrs. Plackett, and that’s where the money came from.”

  “One coin couldn’t be worth so many pounds,” Dull Martha declared.

  “It could if it’s old and rare,” said Pocked Louise.

  “I think it’s all a sham,” Disgraceful Mary Jane announced. “The real point is, he’s giving her money and gifts because he fancies her, and she lets him do it out of necessity. He’s probably been bailing her out for some time. ‘Dear C.’ ‘Deprived of your company.’ ‘Keen pleasure!’ Our crosspatch of a headmistress was having an affair with the elderly admiral. The naughty old girl.”

  Dull Martha was aghast. “Surely not!”

  “But he sent her twenty pounds,” Smooth Kitty said. “Twenty pounds! He’s rich. He must be near eighty, and she was sixty-two. I suppose to him, she was fresh as a daisy.”

  “How revolting.” Pocked Louise shuddered. “Men are bad enough, but he’s so horrid and old.”

  Disgraceful Mary Jane began to laugh. The other girls stared at her. She only laughed harder and clutched her sides. “Imagine his thrill when he gets a kiss from our Alice!”

  Stout Alice heaved a couch cushion at Mary Jane. “Eugh, don’t even joke about it!”

  Mary Jane wiped tears from her cheeks. “We may need you to, mightn’t we, Kitty? Alice must sacrifice herself for the cause, no?” She pantomimed a kiss. “Ooh, Admiral, you look dashing with that cane. Your brass buttons send my heart a-flutter.”

  Stout Alice rose to her feet. “I’m already sacrificing plenty for this endeavor,” she said, then bit her lip. A vision of Leland Murphy flashed before her eyes. “More than you’ll know. And it can’t last forever. We need a plan to put a stop to it, or else I shall spend the rest of my life as Mrs. Plackett, with Alice nowhere in sight. I’m to disappear, apparently. It amounts to you covering up her death by killing me, and I’m not volunteering to die just yet.”

  “Oh, come, now, Alice,” Smooth Kitty protested. “Let’s not be melodramatic. We’re just asking our Alice to stay home now and then with a headache. No one’s asking you to die.”

  “We might be, though,” Dour Elinor said softly.

  The room went silent. All eyes turned to Elinor. She went on sketching as though nothing had happened.

  Stout Alice’s voice cracked as she spoke. “What did you mean by that, Elinor?”

  Dour Elinor held up her still life to examine it at arm’s length. An angel tombstone spread her wings over a slumbering churchyard beneath a waning crescent moon. “We seem to forget that someone tried to murder Mrs. Plackett. That someone must now believe they failed. What’s to stop them from trying again?”

  CHAPTER 11

  Dear Roberta began to quietly cry.

  Stout Alice rocked in Mrs. Plackett’s chair. Anyone watching her closely might have noticed her face grow pale beneath her fading makeup.

  Dull Martha seized Aldous and stroked his soft curly ear against her cheek. Aldous bit her nose lovingly in reply.

  Disgraceful Mary Jane met Smooth Kitty’s gaze. It was the first time Mary Jane had seen her roommate look afraid. She sidled next to her on the sofa and spoke in a low voice so the others couldn’t hear.

  “Have we waded in deeper than we can swim?” she whispered into Smooth Kitty’s hair. “We can still back out, love. It’s not too late.”

  Smooth Kitty stiffened. The hand holding Admiral Lockwood’s letter curled in on itself tightly. How dare Mary Jane voice aloud all her own thoughts?

  “It’s all right, dear heart,” Mary Jane whispered. “We have nothing we need to prove. Independence was a lovely dream.”

  Mary Jane was trying to reassure her, Kitty knew, but her words fell like icicles. Kitty shivered. She would not, she would not submit to fear and lose heart now! She imagined herself returning home to Father and felt protest welling up inside. The isolation of a desert island would be preferable to evenings in the drawing room with Mr. Maximilian Heaton, Lord of All He Surveyed.

  No, Kitty would not go back home. She’d worked too hard and risked too much to surrender now. But to put poor Alice in harm’s way? Kitty felt sick. She couldn’t. If only she were the one who could pretend to be Mrs. Plackett.

  “We shall find the murderer before he has a chance to hurt Alice,” said Pocked Louise. “We must.”

  “And do what with him?” asked Dour Elinor. “Tell the police he killed Mrs. Plackett, and we’re all living here alone, we scandalous maidens? That would end the game.”

  “We’re trapped,” moaned Dear Roberta. “This is the price of our deceit. Our wages for dishonesty! We never should have buried Mrs. Plackett in the vegetable garden.”

  “We’ll find a solution.” Pocked Louise was resolute. “If it’s to be a battle of wits, we shall win!”

  “In the meantime,” Stout Alice said, speaking for the first time, “I’ll be careful. But somehow, we need a plan to kill Mrs. Plackett off a second time—a plan that allows us to stay here—so I don’t have to be her for the rest of my life. It’s a cruel fate to be a widow before I’ve even been married.”

  “Alice is right,” Louise said. “This is a rotten deal for her if she has to remain in disguise forever, anytime we leave the house.”

  “We could go on a journey,” Disgraceful Mary Jane said. “To Egypt, perhaps. Or Turkey. And we could say that Mrs. Plackett contracted an illness there and died. No one would be the wiser.”

  “That could work.” Stout Alice nodded her approval.

  Smooth Kitty poured water on this suggestion. “If we could afford it. Which we can’t.” She paced the room, thinking furiously. There must be a way to set them all free and rid themselves forever of the burden of Mrs. Plackett, may she rest in peace in the vegetable garden.

  “A school can’t exist without a headmistress, so we need a Mrs. Plackett,” Pocked Louise mused aloud. “At the same time, we need to get rid of her so Alice need not keep on pretending.”

  “And so as not to have a murderer on our heels,” added Stout Alice.

  “If we pretend she dies in Egypt, would that satisfy the murderer?” Disgraceful Mary Jane asked. “Or mightn’t he travel to Egypt to investigate? If he wants her dead badly enough, he might.”

  “It would depend on his reasons,” Alice said.

  “That’s a mystery in itself,” Mary Jane said. “Why would anyone want Mrs. Plackett dead? She was a pompous, crabby old bird, but that’s scarcely cause for the battle-ax.”

  “You’re forgetting something,” Dour Elinor replied. “We have two murders here, not one. Someone wanted Mr. Godding dead, too.”

  “Well, that’s no mystery in the slightest,” Disgraceful Mary Jane said with a shudder. “He was revolting and rude. He smoked vile cigars, and his whiskers were diabolical. He
gave men a very bad name.”

  “Never mind his whiskers,” Pocked Louise said. “Men don’t need Aldous Godding to give them a bad name. The question is, who would benefit by the death of Mrs. Plackett and her brother? Whose interests were served by their absence?”

  “Besides ours, you mean,” Dull Martha said. She tugged her needle up high above her head.

  Dear Roberta paused to admire the ripe red strawberry she’d just finished stitching. “Do you suppose Mrs. Plackett left a will? That would tell us who inherits her property after she’s gone.”

  Mary Jane threw up her hands. “What property?” she cried.

  “This house is a valuable piece of property,” Pocked Louise said.

  Smooth Kitty shook her head. “I’ve gone through all her papers. I never saw a will.”

  “Her solicitor would have it on file, if there was one,” Pocked Louise said. “That’s what my father said when Grandfather died.”

  “The solicitor would never let us see it,” Smooth Kitty said, “unless Alice fooled him into thinking she was Mrs. Plackett.”

  Stout Alice clapped her hands. “Oh! Her solicitor!”

  “Mr. Wilkins, isn’t it?” Mary Jane said. “He employs that pathetic milkweed, Leland Murphy. Why are you so excited?”

  Stout Alice bristled. “He’s no milkweed. And I’m not excited. But he—Mr. Murphy—brought by some papers this morning. Let me go and find them.”

  Alice returned shortly with the papers Leland Murphy had brought. She had shoved them behind the coffee jar on a kitchen shelf when Dr. Snelling arrived, and there they might have stayed forever. She handed the papers to Kitty, who riffled through them.

  Kitty smiled at the other girls. “It is a will! Imagine the luck. We’re genuine sleuths now, aren’t we, girls?” She scanned the lines rapidly, searching for meaning. The language was formal and Latinate, and unraveling the meaning wasn’t easy. Finally she looked up.