Death Brings a Shadow Read online

  They stayed on the beach until well past sunset, walking slowly through the crunching sand, the conversation twisting and turning its way through the events of the past ten days, but always returning to the central, unanswered questions. Was Eleanor Dickson’s death a tragic accident or a deliberate murder? Who lured her into the live oaks? And why?

  “We’ll be leaving soon,” Geoffrey said, handing a perfect, unbroken sand dollar to Prudence. It was rare to find one without at least part of its delicate rim worn away by the tumbling action of the waves.

  “I thought Eleanor’s father was set on remaining until we learned more about the circumstances of her death. And if it was murder, until we could name the killer.”

  “That was his first reaction. But he’s had time to rethink it. The longer Eleanor’s body lies unburied in that lead-lined coffin in the chapel, the worse it is for her mother. She begged a key from Philip so she could keep a vigil beside it whenever she wanted. The housekeeper says she talks to her daughter as though Eleanor were still alive.”

  “I thought Abigail was doing so much better.” Prudence twirled the sand dollar between her fingertips.

  “She is,” Geoffrey confirmed. “But her progress is precarious at best. Philip feels there won’t be a lasting resolution to Eleanor’s death until she can be interred properly in the family vault. I agree with him.”

  “What will he do?”

  “He’s decided to send the yacht to the closest mainland port to have it readied for the return voyage to New York. The captain has told him that one of the sails needs reinforcing, and the stores have to be replenished. He’s a cautious sailor, and the cargo will be a precious one.”

  “I wondered how he would manage it. I think I just assumed the coffin would be sent by rail.”

  “It would have to be shipped in a baggage car. He believes Abigail would balk at that. She needs to be able to accompany her daughter on her final journey.”

  “How long do we have?”

  “Not more than another week. The yacht will weigh anchor tomorrow or the next day, and should be back at the Seapoint dock three or four days after that.”

  “It seems hopeless, Geoffrey.”

  “We can’t stay on here by ourselves,” he said, certain that was what she was going to propose.

  “I know.”

  “You may have to let Eleanor go without ever knowing what really happened.”

  “We gave our word. She’s gone, but we swore to her and to ourselves that we’d discover why. We’ve never failed before.” Prudence let the sand dollar fall. Broken promises always made her angry. “I thought you were determined to get at the truth, no matter how difficult the process or how long it took.”

  When he didn’t answer, she tried to find the reason behind his silence in the set of his jaw and the lines of his face. But the stony bleakness she read in his eyes told her that he believed she wouldn’t understand, and that she would reject whatever justification he gave for abandoning the investigation.

  More than anything else, Prudence needed a window into Geoffrey’s mind. Not the law school and Pinkerton-trained years that formed his professional identity, but the hidden places of the private Geoffrey, where blood and family and conflicting loyalties warred for control of who and what he was. She’d been wrestling with this dilemma ever since they’d set foot on Bradford Island.

  Several times now, they’d come perilously close to a more serious disagreement than they’d ever had before. Prudence feared that a calamitous quarrel might be inevitable, and she dreaded the consequences. A difference of opinion so profound it would destroy the relationship that had lately begun to seem strong and stable could mean a future without Geoffrey. People did terrible things to themselves and others without meaning to. And suffered the aftermath for the rest of their lives.

  “I wish I could have told you better news,” Geoffrey said, “but it wouldn’t have done any good to gloss over what Philip is planning.”

  “A week, you said?”

  “Perhaps a day or two more or less. But not much longer than that.”

  “Then I think what we have to do is dig in our heels and refuse to allow these people to continue to lie to us.”

  “Which people do you mean?”

  “All of them. The entire Bennett family and every other inhabitant of this confounded island. The questions we ask are never fully answered and I keep picking up hints that there are secrets no one will reveal. It’s been obvious from the first moment we arrived that they’d all be glad to see us go.”

  Prudence was so infuriated she found it hard to breathe. She wanted to explode in a spectacular show of unladylike emotion, but her whalebone stays wouldn’t allow it. The most she could manage was gasps of frustrated rage.

  “Where do you want to start?” Geoffrey asked. He’d never intended to hold out against her, but he’d had to test again how committed she was. If he was right about what he had begun to suspect, Prudence would have to face an ugliness he’d hoped she would never have to encounter. “I’ll leave it up to you.”

  She wanted to snap at him that he was the trained detective, he was the one who had the experience to know how best to spend the brief time remaining to them. But she didn’t. It was enough that she’d snatched the case from the brink of collapse. Despite his reservations, she knew Geoffrey would hold nothing back. It was always all or nothing with him.

  “Let’s plan out what we need to do over breakfast tomorrow,” she suggested, turning back toward the house. “I need time to think it through again.”

  His steady steps beside her were the reassurance she needed. They might argue and spar, but they always ended up making peace with one another.

  * * *

  Through the not-quite-closed drapes Prudence could see the pearl-gray predawn sky lit by the palest tinge of peach. The sun hadn’t risen over the horizon yet, which meant no one, not even the servants, would be stirring.

  Another night of restless, interrupted sleep. And she was no closer to the plan she’d intended to formulate than she had been last night. Sighing heavily, she slipped out of bed, shrugged into a dressing gown, found her slippers, and stepped through the French doors onto the veranda.

  The early morning air was clean and fresh, the lawn sparkling with a heavy ocean dew. Drops of salty moisture peppered the veranda railing. It would be at least an hour before she could ring for the maid to bring up her early morning coffee. She played with Aunt Jessa’s amulet, trying unsuccessfully to slip it off her wrist and over her hand. Maybe, despite what Geoffrey had told her, now was the time to cut it off. Declare her independence from the juju superstitions that seemed to be everywhere she went.

  A flash of white in the peach-streaked grayness caught Prudence’s attention as she turned to go back inside. She paused. And there it was again. There, by the darker gray bulk of the chapel where Eleanor lay in her casket.

  “Mr. Teddy sends someone every morning with fresh white roses,” the housekeeper had told her. “Mrs. Dickson told Mr. Dickson it would break her heart if he refused to allow it. So far he hasn’t.”

  The roses filled the narrow chapel porch, and were banked around her friend’s coffin like drifts of new-fallen snow. On the one occasion she had briefly accompanied Abigail to visit her daughter, the fragrance had been overwhelming.

  She thought what she was seeing was the hat or white shirt of one of Wildacre’s gardeners, but as she peered through the gray dawn mist Prudence saw the wide swing of pale skirts as a young woman bent over the white roses to pluck out fading blooms. Then Prudence stiffened with shock and stepped back into the concealment of the open bedroom door.

  The young woman had turned around as if half aware that someone was watching her. She raised a hand to shade her eyes against the first rays of the rising sun and looked directly toward where Prudence had retreated into the shadows.

  It couldn’t be. She was imagining something or someone who wasn’t really there. But as the figure lowered he
r hand and revealed her face before turning away, Prudence knew without a doubt that Eleanor had somehow managed to cross over the great divide that separated the dead from the living. If only for the briefest of moments.

  She stepped outside again and stood clutching the veranda railing, not feeling the coldness of the metal against her fingers or the wetness of the dew. Holding on to reality, to common sense, to the lawyerly reasoning that told her there were no such beings as ghosts, phantoms, spiritualist manifestations from the other side. What she was seeing wasn’t there. Her imagination and her sorrow at Eleanor’s loss had combined to play a trick on her sore heart and tired brain, and the sooner she acknowledged that fact, the sooner the apparition would disappear.

  But it didn’t.

  The slender figure dressed in filmy white moved gracefully among the tall earthenware vases filled with white roses that flanked the chapel doors, plucking a bloom here and there, reaching into the basket slung over one arm to find a fresh flower to take the place of a discarded one. When the apparition approached the chapel door with an outstretched hand in which glinted something metal, Prudence came back to herself with a start of recognition. A key. The ghost who obviously wasn’t a ghost was opening the chapel door with a large metal key like the one Prudence had seen Abigail take from her pocket.

  No time to lose.

  Prudence closed and fastened the French door, then sped along the veranda to the steps that led down to the lawn. Her slippers were soaked through and her feet were wet and chilled before she reached her destination, but she never hesitated. She had to get to the chapel before whoever was rearranging the white roses left. As she ran she tried to remember what Abigail had told her about Teddy’s daily homage to his beloved fiancée.

  “He won’t come himself,” Abigail had said. “He knows that might lead to an open confrontation with Eleanor’s father.”

  But the flowers arrived every morning. Prudence supposed that a small cart pulled by one of the island ponies made the trek from Wildacre to Seapoint when everyone in the two big houses was still asleep. She’d never heard of a female gardener, but the young woman she’d mistaken for Eleanor’s ghost might be a gardener’s daughter, entrusted with the delivery and arrangement of the white roses. A woman’s eye was thought to be superior to a man’s when it came to the precise angle at which to place each flower in a bouquet.

  Whoever she was, Prudence decided as she came to a panting halt before the chapel, she must surely know some of the Bennett family secrets that Queen Lula had hinted about to Geoffrey. And she wasn’t leaving Seapoint until Prudence had had a chance to question her.

  The door creaked when Prudence pushed it open, a small sound that nonetheless startled the young woman standing by Eleanor’s coffin. Her arms were full of fresh white roses from which she’d been stripping some of the leaves so the stems wouldn’t crowd each other in the water-filled vases arranged on either side of the small altar. A cloth had been spread at her feet to catch the falling leaves and faded blossoms.

  A ray of the rising sun shone through one of the stained-glass windows, catching the young woman’s face in a beam of jeweled light. One hand rose to shade her eyes, then dropped again to the roses she held as she stepped forward into pale grayness.

  “Eleanor?” Prudence called out the name without thinking.

  “My name Minda, miss.”

  It was a younger Eleanor’s face that looked back at her, albeit wearing a timid, frightened expression that would have been foreign to Prudence’s daring and confident friend. This girl could not be more than eighteen or nineteen years old; Eleanor had been twenty-eight.

  But the black hair was the same, twined around Minda’s head in two luxuriously thick braids that shone like an ebony coronet. The eyes, too, were the identical shape and rich brown color as Eleanor’s, and in the center of the young woman’s chin was a double of the dimple Eleanor had hated and tried to disguise with face cream and powder.

  The skin was slightly darker, as though Eleanor had stayed out in the sun without her hat, but it was the way she spoke that most puzzled Prudence. The young woman standing before her looked white, but she sounded like Aunt Jessa and Queen Lula, like the maids who brought Prudence’s morning coffee, made her bed, and helped her dress. How could that be?

  “You all right, miss?”

  “I’ll just sit down for a moment,” Prudence said, lowering herself slowly onto one of the elaborately carved pews. She folded her hands in her lap, accidentally fingering the juju amulet she’d been about to remove, following the girl’s glance as it found and recognized what Prudence wore on her wrist. “I’m Prudence MacKenzie. I was Eleanor’s friend and was to have been her bridesmaid.”

  “Yes, miss. I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Mister Teddy. He tole us all about Miss Eleanor’s life in New York City and how she was comin’ back to the island to marry him. Bringin’ her best friend to stand up with her. He was right proud of Miss Eleanor.” Minda shook her head sadly and laid a white rose atop the coffin. “She never should’ve gone into the swamp like she did. Didn’t nobody warn her?”

  “She warned me,” Prudence said, so stunned by what she was seeing and hearing that she couldn’t remember the questions she had planned to ask.

  “Mister Teddy say her favorite flower be white roses. We must’ve cut near ever’ white rose on Wildacre to bring fresh ones over here every day.”

  How can Teddy bear to look at this girl who so closely resembles Eleanor?

  “Will you come sit by me, Minda?”

  “You gonna faint, miss?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’d just feel better if you were closer.”

  Minda laid down the sheaf of flowers she was holding, then tiptoed across the leaf-strewn cloth on the stone floor and sat down gingerly beside Prudence. This close, Prudence could see that the likeness to Eleanor was not as striking as it had appeared at first glance. But close. Very close.

  Wasn’t there a theory that each person had a nearly identical double somewhere in the world? Her father had talked about it in relation to eye-witness testimony and suspect identifications. He’d used a German word. Doppelgänger, that was it.

  Don’t make a fool of yourself, Prudence chided. You’re tired and wrung dry by everything that’s happened here.

  Somewhere outside a horse whinnied.

  Minda sprang up from the bench and began gathering the wilted flowers she would take away with her. She moved quickly and neatly, leaving no trace of herself behind. “I best be going, miss. Horse whinny like that mean they’s folk movin’ around in the house and down at the stables.”

  “I wanted to ask you some questions. Can’t you stay?”

  “No, ma’am. I gotta get back.”

  Prudence didn’t dare insist. If she frightened the girl, she might disappear into the live oaks where Prudence would never find her again. “I know you said your name was Minda. Will you tell me your last name, please?”

  “Don’t need no last names on this island, miss,” Minda chuckled. “We all know who we is.”

  When she closed the oak door, Minda left behind a pervasive fragrance of roses and a thoroughly puzzled Prudence.

  What on earth does all of this mean?

  CHAPTER 17

  “I want to start with Queen Lula,” Prudence began, pouring herself a second cup of coffee.

  “I spoke to her yesterday,” Geoffrey said. “Other than to repeat the warnings we already heard about, she didn’t have much to add to what we already know.” He stirred a lump of butter into the bowl of grits he hadn’t been able to persuade Prudence to sample.

  “You may have talked to her, but I haven’t,” she insisted. “With time as tight as it is before Philip will force us to leave, we need to split up. Why don’t you go to Wildacre today and I’ll ride to Queen Lula’s?”

  “You know that’s not going to happen.”

  “I don’t see why not.” Prudence took the derring
er out of her skirt pocket and laid it on the table.

  “The best you can do with that in the woods is accidentally shoot yourself in the foot,” Geoffrey said. “You need a rifle.”

  “I’ll use the one I carried when we searched for Eleanor.”

  “I will not let you go alone,” Geoffrey said, “and that’s final. Rifle or no rifle, I come with you. There’s no point arguing, Prudence.” He poured another cup of coffee, then settled back in his chair. “I think you’d better tell me whatever it is you’re hiding,” he said quietly.

  “I’m not sure where to begin, Geoffrey,” she said, relieved that he’d brought up what she’d hesitated to talk about. “I didn’t handle the situation very well.” She told him about waking up before dawn, walking out onto the veranda, seeing what she at first thought was the ghost of Eleanor at the chapel door. “That sounds ridiculous now, but for just a moment I was willing to believe she’d come back from the dead.”

  “You were probably half asleep.”

  “That’s kind of you. I still feel foolish. But I swear to you, Geoffrey, I never expected what I found in the chapel.”

  “Which was—?”

  “A young woman was there arranging the white roses Teddy sends every morning. I blurted out Eleanor’s name. I couldn’t stop myself.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “She told me she was called Minda.” Prudence’s face flushed bright red. “Geoffrey, she looks so much like Eleanor she could be her twin, but as soon as she opened her mouth I knew how wrong I was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She speaks the way the Seapoint maids do.”

  “I think you met one of the unacknowledged Bennetts Preacher Solomon hinted at,” Geoffrey said. “If she’s not the only one on the island, I suspect they were given the word to stay out of sight of the Yankee wedding party.”

  “So embarrassing questions wouldn’t be asked?”

  “That would be my guess.”

  “I want to find out what Queen Lula knows about her and anything else she can tell us about the Bennetts. Queen Lula is the best link we have to Aunt Jessa, and Aunt Jessa leads directly to Eleanor.”