The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place Read online

  He tipped the brim of his hat toward her. “My apologies, then,” he said. “A very good day to you.” And he headed off in the direction of town.

  Louise watched him leave. Mary Jane and Kitty, she knew, would have fits if they knew such a well-dressed young man had come a-calling. All the more satisfaction, then, Louise thought with a private smile, she would take in forgetting she ever saw him.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, Dull Martha and Dear Roberta had volunteered to cook supper, but Disgraceful Mary Jane insisted on doing so herself. Mary Jane, who had never cooked a thing in her life, was certain that with the aid of Mrs. Lea’s famous cookery volume she would be perfectly able to conjure up something edible.

  “She’s acting like she doesn’t trust me,” Dull Martha whispered to Dear Roberta.

  “Do you think so?” Roberta whispered back with deep concern.

  “Ever since … what happened at Sunday dinner, I’ve wondered,” Martha said. “I cooked, you know.”

  “But surely!” remonstrated Dear Roberta, who couldn’t imagine anyone suspecting ill of her dear roommate, Martha.

  Martha tugged Roberta up the stairwell and into their bedroom. “Do you want to know what I think?”

  “Of course!”

  Martha lowered her voice to a hushed whisper. “With all this talk of murders, I think it’s curious that Mary Jane…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Yes? Go on!”

  Dull Martha removed her spectacles and polished them on her skirt. “Oh, I don’t know. I feel awful even thinking it.”

  Dear Roberta was practically beside herself. “Thinking what?”

  “Well,” Martha said, “I don’t know. But she is so very risqué in her behavior, wouldn’t you agree? She’s an absolute flirt! And I can’t help but wonder whether she mightn’t … Now that I speak it out loud it seems shocking, but I just wonder if she couldn’t have conceived the idea of poisoning Mrs. Plackett as a means of setting herself free.”

  Dear Roberta’s jaw dropped. “No more chaperones, you mean?”

  Dull Martha glanced from side to side as if fearing the walls might be listening. “It’s probably just another one of my foolish ideas, isn’t it? I should know better than to go guessing. She wouldn’t kill Mrs. Plackett just so she could go chasing boys, would she?”

  Roberta thought of the many lurid crimes mentioned in the London newspapers, and shook her head. “Stranger things have happened,” she said. “Of course, you might well be wrong. The scriptures say it’s a sin to judge.”

  Dull Martha hung her guilty head.

  “However,” Roberta continued, “we can’t overlook the fact that she’s shown a shocking lack of reverence for decency and respect for the dead. She’s been absolutely flippant about it.”

  Dull Martha sat on her bedspread and twisted the tail of her braid nervously between her fingers. “Ohhh, dear,” she said. “I feel terrible now. I feel so disloyal for thinking these things. And speaking them aloud, too.”

  “Never mind, Martha.” Roberta slipped an arm around her friend. “I won’t tell a soul. We’ll forget it ever happened. But we’d both be wise to keep our eyes wide open. Just in case. We can’t forget we’ve been witness to murder.”

  * * *

  Disgraceful Mary Jane grew bored in midafternoon and went hunting for Smooth Kitty. She found her poring over papers at Mrs. Plackett’s writing desk, scratching figures on a blotter, and frowning.

  Mary Jane sprawled upon Mrs. Plackett’s bed. “What’s the matter, Kit?” she said. “Why the long face? These murders got you down?”

  “Murders? Pah,” Kitty replied. “I can’t make head nor tail of these books. Mrs. Plackett’s finances are a mess. My father would burst a blood vessel if he saw them.”

  Disgraceful Mary Jane would not be put off from her chosen subject by something so mundane as bookkeeping. “Tell me, pet,” she said, “which of us do you think polished the old duffers off for good?”

  Kitty’s eyebrow rose. “Which of us? Why do you think it was one of us?”

  “Oh, I want it to be, desperately,” Mary Jane said. “A nice private, domestic vendetta, and then we can all just go on happily. Someone else, someone out there makes matters a frightful nuisance. One of us? Cozy as anything.”

  Smooth Kitty laughed. “You really have no morals at all, do you?”

  “Not a brass farthing’s worth.” Disgraceful Mary Jane lolled around on the bed, then propped herself up luxuriantly with pillows and bolsters. “Want to hear my choice for our little murderess?”

  Kitty, whose mind was more occupied by totting up numbers, nodded. “Why not?”

  “Elinor, obviously!”

  Kitty paused to picture this. “Oh?”

  “Of course, can’t you see? The girl was born in a mausoleum. Or ought to have been. Death is all she thinks about. Why, in her warped world, there’s probably nothing at all wrong with killing someone. She might have thought she was doing them a favor. You know … Mrs. Plackett’s liver complaints—just end it all, as a merciful gesture.”

  Kitty found this theory amusing. “And Mr. Godding?”

  Mary Jane wrinkled her nose. “What difference does it make? Perhaps she thought she’d spare him the trouble of grieving.”

  Kitty tried to picture Elinor tiptoeing into the kitchen and pouring cyanide over the veal cutlets. She couldn’t. “If I were to picture Elinor in the role of murderess,” she said thoughtfully, “I wouldn’t think poison. Battle-ax, perhaps, or a scythe.”

  Mary Jane laughed. “I see your point.”

  Kitty returned to her arithmetic. “Seventeen … twenty-three. I don’t like thinking it was one of us, so I’m not going to,” she said firmly. “Carry the two, makes fourteen. But if I did, I wouldn’t picture Elinor. I’d picture…”

  “Me?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  Mary Jane pretended to pout.

  “It couldn’t be one of the younger girls,” Kitty went on, now forgetting her accounting entirely. “Out of the question. I wonder … you know, I do. I wonder about someone like Alice.”

  Mary Jane sat bolt upright. “Not our Alice! She’s so doggedly decent. And far too sensible. She doesn’t fly off in rages. She’d be the last person ever to think of such a thing.”

  Kitty nodded. “I know. And that’s why I do think of it.”

  “But…!”

  “Still waters run deep, don’t they say?”

  Disgraceful Mary Jane shook her head. “Alice! I never. You know, sometimes you surprise me, Kitty Heaton.”

  Kitty grinned. “If so, I learned it from you. It’s one of your gifts.”

  Mary Jane preened like a cat. “One of many.”

  * * *

  Pocked Louise’s trip to the chemist’s shop that morning had equipped her with all the chemicals she needed to perform tests upon the veal. Now that she and her puppy— for she privately thought of Aldous as her puppy—were refreshed by their walk, she decided it was time someone took this crime more seriously. She set about transforming the schoolroom into a science laboratory. She had to use drinking glasses as beakers, which distressed her scientific mind, but the pursuit of truth allowed her to overlook shoddy equipment.

  She soaked the two remnants of veal in two different jars, each with just enough water to submerge the meat. She then removed the meat and proceeded to swirl granules of potash into the water in each jar.

  Dour Elinor watched her work.

  “Where did you learn to do this?” she asked Pocked Louise.

  “My uncle is a physician in London,” Louise explained, peering at the water level in one of the jars. “He knows I want to be one myself someday, and he’s not shocked by that. He lets me help myself to books and journals he no longer needs. I keep them in my footlocker upstairs. One is about medical research used in criminal cases. Fascinating reading. It lists symptoms of various poisons and methods for ascertaining their presence. Hmm, I hope this isn’t too much potas
h. It didn’t say … but this amount seems sufficiently dissolved, I think.” She glanced at Elinor. “Time for the iron sulfate.” She wiggled a thin glass in which she’d mixed green crystals with water to produce a greenish liquid, then carefully dropped a bit of the green mixture off the end of a spoon into each jar. Dirty-looking granules began to settle to the bottom of both jars. “Ah! Just as I thought … See these brown precipitates? Time for the oil of vitriol.” She mixed drops from a small dark bottle into yet another glass containing water, then tipped a small quantity into both jars.

  “Miss Dudley!” Stout Alice entered the room and addressed Louise in Mrs. Plackett’s voice. “Let me hear no more of this indecent folly! Science? Young ladies, studying the body? What next? If you must devote yourself to studies, content yourself to become a respectable governess.”

  “I like you better dead,” Louise replied cheerfully. “It’s ironic, isn’t it? Mrs. Plackett, who was so dead-set against me studying science…”

  Stout Alice giggled. “Dead set.”

  Louise grinned. “Very funny. She who opposed my scientific interests so strenuously is now the subject of my experiment.” She shook her jars slightly, then held them both up to Dour Elinor and Stout Alice. “Now, girls, what do you see?”

  The other girls had all entered the room at the sound of Alice’s headmistress impersonation.

  Dour Elinor peered into the jars. “Blue,” she said with some surprise. “Shocking blue.”

  “Prussian blue,” Pocked Louise said. “Signifying crystalline prussic acid.”

  The other girls looked at one another. Louise’s manner suggested this was a significant announcement.

  “Meaning?” Disgraceful Mary Jane asked. “What is prussic acid?”

  Pocked Louise folded her arms across her chest. “Cyanide,” she said. “One form of cyanide is used for blue dye. Cyanide salts are one of the most potent and deadly poisons known to man. They kill almost instantly. And they’re relatively easy to purchase at the chemist’s shop. A common use is rat killer.”

  “But what does it all mean?” asked Dull Martha. “What has cyanide to do with us?”

  Pocked Louise looked to Dour Elinor to translate. Elinor explained in her low, spectral voice.

  “Poison,” she told Dull Martha, “in the veal. Louise has just tested it and found cyanide in the meat.”

  The color drained from Dull Martha’s cheeks. “The veal was poisoned?”

  Elinor nodded. “It was the only thing both Mrs. Plackett and Mr. Godding ate that we did not. And, last night, after you’d gone to bed, we found a dead stoat at the compost pile that had eaten a bite of leftover veal.”

  Martha wrenched off her glasses and hid her face in her hands. Loud sobs escaped her throat. “The veal!” she cried. “The veal killed them, and I cooked the veal!”

  Smooth Kitty flew to Martha’s side and placed her arm around Martha’s shoulders. “We don’t think you did it, dear,” she said.

  Dull Martha’s hysterics could not be assuaged. “Did I use the wrong pan?” she wailed. “Is veal something that … reacts with iron … like tomatoes?” She snuffled loudly. “Did I use the wrong recipe in the book? Barnes said Mrs. Plackett wanted fried cutlets. She left the marker in the book. I fried them in lard with salt and ground pepper. Was … the pepper actually … rat killer?” She removed her hands from her face, revealing shockingly red eyes and tear tracks streaming down her cheeks. “I-I-I always do things stupidly! It’s why everyone thinks I’m so dull. My brothers called me The Dunce. Father and Mother always said it’s a pity I’m so unintelligent.” Her sobs racked her whole body. “But … I’m sure … they always thought … I was h-harmless, and now I’ve gone and murdered two people!” She made no more attempt to hold back her tears.

  Aldous ran to her and licked her face frantically, his bobbed tail wagging at a furious clip.

  “Hush, sweetheart,” Disgraceful Mary Jane ordered, scooping Martha up onto the couch and placing her head in her lap, where she could smooth Martha’s wayward hair from her face. “It wasn’t the pan or the recipe. Louise has just shown us it was poison. Hush! No one thinks you murdered those two old wretches. Someone else must have poisoned the veal before you ever got to it.”

  “That’s right,” Alice said stoutly. “You’d no more murder a headmistress than…”

  “Conjugate a Latin verb,” Dour Elinor offered.

  “Hush, Elinor!” Smooth Kitty hissed.

  “… than fly to the moon.” Alice glared at Dour Elinor.

  “But who else could have poisoned the meat?” Dear Roberta asked. “Meaning no offense, Martha. But the meat came straight from the grocer’s delivery boy, Saturday night. I remember the little packages, all wrapped in paper and string, along with the potatoes and beans and the other things Mrs. Plackett had ordered.”

  “We were at church all morning,” Pocked Louise said. “Half the town knows the larder door is never locked. Anyone could have slipped inside during church and poisoned the meat.”

  Dull Martha’s eyes were wide. “You mean, anyone could have done it?”

  “So it seems.”

  Martha drew a long, ragged breath. “If anyone could have done it, there’s little reason to suppose I did, isn’t there?”

  “Not a smidgeon,” Disgraceful Mary Jane replied. “Put it right out of your pretty head.”

  Martha sat up straight at these words. “Oh, I’m not pretty,” she said, and an objective observer noting her disheveled hair, red eyes, and puffiness might have, at that moment, agreed. “Not like you. You’re a great beauty.”

  “Perhaps,” Mary Jane conceded, “but that doesn’t mean you can’t be as sweet as an angel yourself. Without your glasses on—and when your nose isn’t running—you’re simply charming.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Louise dumped her noxious cyanide samples in the rhododendrons and opened the window to clear out any vapors. The other girls abandoned the schoolroom for the parlor, and Louise joined them there. Dull Martha sat curled in a ball on the sofa, heaping coals of guilt on her head for ever suspecting Disgraceful Mary Jane after she’d been so kind to her. She hoped Dear Roberta would never divulge it to a living soul. Stout Alice sat in the rocking chair, lost in thought. Smooth Kitty browsed through a stack of papers on her lap. Dear Roberta dangled a bit of yarn for little Aldous, who cavorted and leaped about delightfully in his lust to snap it.

  “Louise,” Dear Roberta said, “why was one jar of liquid more blue than the other one?”

  Pocked Louise frowned and considered. “That’s to be expected, I think,” she said after some thought. “Different specimen sizes, inexact measurements.”

  Smooth Kitty laid down her papers. “Everyone, I think we need to hold a meeting. If we are to remain here as independent young women, we need a source of funds on which to live. I have spent the afternoon looking through Mrs. Plackett’s papers, and—”

  “Mrs. Plackett’s papers!”

  The girls all turned in astonishment toward Pocked Louise, the source of this outburst.

  “Funds!” that agitated young lady continued. She fixed each of them with a look of pure incredulity.

  “Yes, Louise?” Kitty was clearly miffed. “Is something the matter?”

  Pocked Louise threw up her hands. “Here we sit holding meetings, and discussing funds and papers, when I’ve just proven conclusively that there’s a poisoner on the loose, who killed two people right here in this house. Who’s to say he won’t strike again and murder us all? Our time for dillydallying is past. This isn’t a game of playing house. We have to solve this crime!”

  Stout Alice smiled to herself. That Louise had pluck. Not many twelve-year-old girls could stand up to so many older girls like that. And clearly, she’d rattled Kitty.

  But Smooth Kitty was not one to let anyone, much less a younger girl, discompose her for long. “No one is suggesting that we ignore the mystery, Louise,” she said stiffly. “But if we don’t attend to funds an
d papers, our attempt to remain here will fall to pieces, and we’ll soon run out of food.”

  “If we ignore our poisoner, we’ll end up choking on our food and sharing Mrs. Plackett’s fate,” retorted Pocked Louise.

  Dull Martha and Dear Roberta seized one another’s hands and held on tight.

  Disgraceful Mary Jane stretched and rose languidly to her feet. “There, there,” she said, “let’s not quarrel. You’re both right. I propose that Kitty be placed in charge of funds and paperwork, and Louise be appointed our resident Sherlock Holmes. All in favor …”

  “Our resident who?” inquired Dull Martha.

  “Sherlock Holmes,” repeated Mary Jane. “He’s the detective from A Study in Scarlet by A. Conan Doyle. Elinor, you’ve read it, haven’t you? I thought you read everything.”

  Dour Elinor waved a dismissive hand. “That was popular a few years ago, but I was too deep into my Russian author phase to pay much attention to it.”

  Stout Alice had no wish for another of Mary Jane and Elinor’s literary squabbles. Both were avid readers, but Elinor thought Mary Jane’s romance novels were frivolous tripe. Alice coughed to gain the floor. “All in favor of Mary Jane’s motion that we appoint Kitty as our chief financier and Louise as sleuth, say aye.”

  The room aye-d without delay. Kitty and Louise, seeing the consensus, aye-d also. Louise was inwardly thrilled at this vote of confidence from her friends, and if her rib cage swelled with a new sense of importance, she can be forgiven for that. She felt much more inclined to be magnanimous, so much so that she forgave Mary Jane for accusing her of over-thinking.

  “I shall devise a plan of attack for my criminal investigation,” she announced. “Meanwhile, Kitty, please proceed with the financial matters you wished to share with us.”

  Kitty had to hide her smile.

  Dear Roberta, thinking a distraction might help keep moods tranquil, retrieved the linen Barnes had brought, and spread it out for everyone to begin working on the strawberry social tablecloth. She armed each girl with a skein of red or green or gold silk thread and a small paper of needles. They began to embroider strawberries around the edge of the cloth, as promised for the strawberry social. All the girls, that is, except Dour Elinor, who was much engrossed in her sketching, and Smooth Kitty, who was preoccupied by a lap full of ledgers and documents.