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  “Hush, darling,” she said, and sealed my lips with a kiss.

  For once I wasn’t going to argue with her.

  Clorinda is willowy, stronger than she looks, and wears her dark brown hair bobbed. She is not quite a beauty—if forced to name her best feature, I suppose I would mention her large, dark eyes. Or perhaps her slightly husky voice. Or the curve of her lips—something about them always makes her look as if she has a delightful secret you want to know, without making her look smug about it. But it is the sum total of her Clorinda-ness that draws me to her. If I were blind, I would still love her.

  She is intelligent, independent, and strong-willed. She has her own private investigations agency and is an avid suffragist. She does not suffer fools, which is why what I thought of as a romance and she thought of as experimentation went awry three months ago.

  We had slept together, I had offered marriage, and she had told me she never wanted to speak to me again. And proved she meant it.

  But she had just now said, “Hush, darling.” I told myself not to be a fool. And made mad if not quite silent love to her.

  I know what you are thinking, some of you. You are thinking that this was disrespectful of my aunt. In the interest of proving you wrong, I will continue my tale.

  When we had caught our breath, I humiliated myself by weeping again, although I had not wanted to do so in front of her. She didn’t ridicule me for it, merely held me until I quieted. “I’m so sorry, Marcus.”

  I couldn’t speak for some time, but finally managed to say, “How did you get in?”

  “Lockpicks. It has taken me months to get the hang of it.”

  “I would have let you in.”

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  Clorinda, unsure? A new experience. I decided this was not the moment to say so.

  “I know you weren’t expecting me,” she went on, demonstrating a mastery of understatement, “but I loved Edith, and her death has made me reconsider a number of things. I thought you might need a friend.”

  That last, distancing word might have been crushing under other circumstances, but I was too wrung out to worry about my failed love life. I merely nodded.

  “I hurried over as soon as I read the newspaper,” she said.

  “Oh God. The newspaper. Reporters. Gaaagh!” I pulled the covers over my head. Clorinda had bribed someone at the paper to ensure that she received one of the first copies off the press, but it was only a matter of time before its later readers would demand sordid details that could not have made the morning edition.

  “Don’t worry, Irons is distracting them with a lot of nonsense about hobos.”

  I emerged from my bed-linen lair. “Hobos?”

  “Marcus, of course a stranger will be blamed! No one in Jenksville will want to believe that the murderer of a respected and beloved elderly lady might be living next door, shopping at the same shops they do, sitting next to them in the pew at church. Chief Irons has already sent officers down to the hobo camp just outside of town, near the railroad tracks.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “Yes. It’s a pity. The men there are already facing hard times.”

  “I hope no one suffers too much in the chief’s quest to find a suspect.”

  “He knows he needs to make some sort of arrest soon or face an angry citizenry, but perhaps he’ll do so without using the very tactics your aunt tried to persuade him are ineffective.”

  “I suppose it will now be my job to keep bribing him into better behavior.”

  “One of the best possible uses of your money,” she agreed, rising and beginning to dress.

  I couldn’t help myself. “You aren’t leaving?”

  “Of course not. But I think it would be best if we wore clothing downstairs. You’re bound to have loads of callers.”

  I groaned.

  “Irons can put that idiot nephew of his out front to turn them away. It would be a better use of his time than his so-called investigating. Ring him up and ask him to do it.”

  “It seems cruel to turn away those who want to grieve for her.”

  “You’ll see them later. You don’t want a lot of rubbernecking buzzards poking their beaks in here.”

  “True.”

  “Get dressed. I’ll make breakfast.”

  “You are giving a lot of orders this morning.”

  She smiled. “So I am. You can take a turn at it later if you’d like, but just now you probably need a little help to get going.”

  I couldn’t deny it.

  We eventually ended up exactly where I knew she most wanted to be, and if asked, I would have readily included my bed among the places that ranked much lower in interest to her. She observed the study and I observed her doing so. She moved slowly, stood at different places in the room, even climbed onto a chair at one point to get something like a bird’s-eye view of the scene of the crime. There was one brief moment when I saw sadness cross her face as she looked down at the bloodstain on the carpet—then she shocked me by lowering herself next to it and asking me to position her as my aunt had been found. I complied.

  She rose to her feet again and studied the mantel. My great-grandfather had commissioned the work of a master woodcarver to cover the columns, front piece, and sides with lions in various poses—some roaring, some springing upon prey, some in stately repose. The mantel had terrified me when I was a child.

  Clorinda asked a few questions—most of them quite different in nature from the ones Osburn had asked.

  “The intruder searched this room after he or she struck Edith down. Do you agree?”

  “Yes. Aunt Edith wouldn’t have allowed someone to search while she was here, and there was no sign that she had been anywhere else in the house after the meeting.”

  “And you agree she was given no opportunity to struggle? That this disarray was the result of the search, not a fight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  I frowned. “The way things are left. The lamp is not knocked over. Nothing breakable is smashed, the desk is the only piece of furniture out of place. She… she had no marks on her, other than the single blow, so all that adds up to a surprise attack rather than a fight.”

  “Excellent. I agree.”

  “And even the search—the desk is a mess, and things have been pulled forward on shelves, books tossed down, and so on, but the cushions are on the chairs, and not ripped open. Perhaps it’s because I know the box was taken, but I think the intruder found what he was looking for.”

  “Perhaps so. The grate is clean—no fire last night?”

  “No. It was too warm for a fire.”

  “For you or me, but older women sometimes experience temperature differently.”

  “Yes, I understand,” I said, “but there was no fire.”

  “So why was your aunt staring at the fireplace?”

  “I don’t know that she was. She was just—No, wait. The clock!” I said, suddenly seeing what Clorinda was trying to determine.

  She frowned at it. “It stopped at eleven-fourteen.”

  “I noticed last night that it had run down. Even the clock couldn’t outlast Osburn. Aunt Edith always wound them on Wednesday.”

  “Winding, Wednesday. All right. Does she—did she do that in the morning?”

  “No, in the evening, usually after dinner. But she would have put it off last night until after the meeting.”

  “Hmm. Would she have locked the front door after her guests left?”

  “No. I don’t think half the people in town do.”

  “They will now. Fearing hobos, I’m sure.” She opened the slender pocket watch I had given her to commemorate the day New York fully enfranchised women, a milestone reached, in part, because of her work.

  I moved to the clock and opened the ornately painted glass door of its case. I was surprised to see not one but two brass clock keys, then decided that Aunt Edith might have kept the clock keys together as she made her rounds.

  Clorinda dis
tracted me by saying, “I detest people who disguise their nosiness as sympathy, and I believe you will soon be inundated by such. Make the call to the chief, please.”

  “Right.” I put the clock keys in my vest pocket and moved toward the telephone on the desk.

  “Ah, the telephone! Another sign that she was away from the desk and probably never saw the intruder,” Clorinda said. “She might have used the telephone otherwise.”

  “Unless he threatened her with a pistol.”

  “A possibility, but I think he would have forced her to reveal the location of the wooden box to him, then, and spared himself the effort of searching for it.”

  “True.”

  I asked the operator to connect me with the police, and within minutes a patrol officer was dispatched to my aunt’s home. Although the chief had not sent his nephew, Clorinda agreed with me that this was for the best—satisfying her thirst for petty revenge on Osburn was not worth dealing with his paranoia about her investigative abilities. “Besides, I know Duffy. He’s the best of that lot over there. The chief wants you to be pleased.”

  Officer Duffy was equally gratified to see her. “Now we’ll get somewhere, sir,” he confided to me. “Miss Ainsbury’s worth a hundred of Osburn. Smart of you to call her in.”

  He then seated himself in the foyer. As Clorinda had predicted, a steady flow of visitors began to arrive on the doorstep soon after. I overheard Duffy saying that they must not disturb the master of the house and that he was sure an announcement of arrangements would be made before long.

  Master of the house. Arrangements. I resolutely turned back to the study and Clorinda. The master of the house didn’t want to be such and had no stomach for arrangements.

  I was brought up short by the sight of Clorinda standing on a chair, looking down on the mantel clock.

  She heard me enter, and when she turned toward me I saw that her eyes were bright with excitement. “Close the door, please,” she said just above a whisper. “And lock it, in case someone should get past Duffy.”

  “Unlikely, I would think.” But I locked it. “What are you doing?”

  “Come here, Marcus!”

  “All right, but I don’t think that chair will support our combined weight.”

  “Don’t be silly. And please keep your voice low. I’d prefer not to be overheard.” She stepped down and pointed to the still-open clock case.

  “Have you ever tried to move this clock?”

  “No, why should I?”

  “Try it now.”

  I did. It wouldn’t budge. “What in blazes—?”

  “It’s attached to the wall. It has a door—”

  “What? Into the flue?”

  “No. Look,” she said, stooping before the fireplace. “The fireplace is deep, and the chimney is set back.”

  She was right. “Yes, I see what you mean, but what does that have to do with that clock being there?”

  “Take the pendulum off.”

  “I assume you have already done this once?”

  She nodded, not looking the least bit guilty. “I was going to try to move the clock. One should never move a pendulum clock with the pendulum attached.”

  I removed it and saw that the back panel, behind the pendulum, had a keyhole in it.

  “You found two keys,” she said. “Will one of them fit that slot?”

  I tried the larger of the two keys. “I hope this won’t cause some harm to the works.” But as I turned it, we heard the muffled sound of a gear turning, and then something sliding. To our left, one of the lion’s heads now stood out a good six inches away from the rest of his body, at the end of a smooth metal cylinder.

  “Looks as if your great-grandfather the inventor included a few innovations when he built the place.”

  She encouraged me to try turning the lion’s head, which I did, and was nearly knocked flat by a bookcase swinging out from the wall.

  We stared at each other in wide-eyed amazement. I peered inside the opening and saw a small room lined with shelves. I brought the chair over to block the door open—my first concern was that we not be trapped inside. Clorinda approved but said she was certain there would be a mechanism to get out from the other side. First she found a flashlight on a small table just inside the door, and turned it on.

  “The batteries seem fresh. The room doesn’t smell musty. I’d say your aunt has been in here quite recently.”

  Next she found the lever that worked from this side.

  “All the years I’ve lived here, I never imagined such a place.”

  We explored the shelves. Most appeared to hold treasures from Great-grandfather Montague’s day. Some items were sentimental—a sword he carried in the Civil War, an embroidered handkerchief, and a miniature of his wife, who had died giving birth to Aunt Edith. Others were less so—a tray of jewelry, another of gold coins, a stack of stock certificates.

  A final set of shelves held nine large boxes, each identical to the one stolen from my aunt’s desk. They were made of black walnut and polished to a dark sheen. Five were open and empty. Four were closed and locked.

  “I’ll bet her father made these for her,” Clorinda said. “Or had them made for her.”

  I lifted one. It wasn’t heavy.

  “Try the passage key again,” Clorinda said.

  I did, and it worked. I heard the lock turn, and hesitated. “Let’s do this where there’s more light.”

  I carried the newly unlocked box out to the study and placed it on the desk.

  “Would you like me to leave?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “I’ll sit on the sofa,” she said. “You can have a little privacy, and I’ll be near if you need me.”

  I felt ill at ease. Aunt Edith and I had always respected each other. She had never opened the cigar box full of boy’s treasures I had kept as a child, nor rummaged through my belongings when I became an adult. I had extended the same courtesy to her—I had as much curiosity as the next child, but at first because I did not want to be sent back to Billingsfield Academy and later because I never wanted to betray her trust in me, I did not snoop through her possessions.

  Clorinda, watching me, said, “She is dead, Marcus, and you were more important to her than anyone on this earth. Don’t be afraid—she had faith in you.”

  I opened the box.

  It was half-full of slips of paper of varying sizes. The handwriting, I knew at a glance, was Aunt Edith’s own. Her handwriting and hers only on every note. I picked up a small stack of them and began to read.

  If Phineas Carmichael believes that no one can identify the deadliest farter in the congregation, he is the biggest self-deceiver on earth. I am convinced the church is vermin-free because he gasses it once a week.

  I burst out laughing, startling Clorinda.

  What cruel devil is telling Maud Blemsey she looks good in pink?

  Caught Mr. Diggs placing his thumb on the scale—again! Very difficult to be diplomatic about it. Shall drive to the market in Kerrick Corners for the next few weeks.

  Thought I heard Hortense Wainwright in a duet with Ulysses Dillon. It was only two cats fornicating in the alley. Is there anyone so deluded as an amateur musician?

  Herbert Rushworth asked me to read his poetry. I believe I have found the answer to my question about amateur musicians.

  “So this was her secret,” I said, which Clorinda rightly took to be permission to come closer. “This box is loaded with undelivered insults. She told me that one day she would let me know the secret of her amiability. This must be it.”

  “Public amiability, anyway. My, my.”

  “Go ahead—read some of them. You know I can’t keep secrets from you.”

  “Do you wish you could?”

  I thought before answering, and said, “No.”

  She smiled. “Perhaps we can figure out why her murderer wanted to get his hands on these.” She chose a slip of paper and laughed. “Obidiah Pilsy.”

  “Picks hi
s nose.”

  “Observant man.”

  “Not really. Obie is quite blatant about it.”

  As we looked through the notes together, we soon saw that some were not simply a way for Aunt Edith to express anger or loathing. Though never one to carry tittle-tattle among the townspeople, when confiding to the box of secrets, she had much to say about her neighbors. Many of her notes were full of gossip and innuendo.

  Stella Osburn’s second and third sons bear a striking resemblance to George Horvath’s boy. Am I the only one who sees it? I wonder if the chief would continue to blindly support his incompetent “nephew” if he knew?

  “Is she saying Detective Osburn and his brother are—”

  Clorinda ruffled my hair. “You know that’s exactly what she’s saying.”

  Estelle Freedman would like us to believe she came here from Boston, yet has not the least trace of a Boston accent. I would swear I hear a bit of the South in her vowels when she’s not paying attention.

  I’ve discovered what happened to my stolen bracelet, I’m glad I didn’t report it missing. Lizzy Conrad took it, and frankly, now that I’ve figured that out, I don’t care. It wasn’t worth much to me, and it will help her to get her youngest daughter away from Lizzy’s horrible second husband. Lizzy’s secret is safe with me.

  It was then that I came across the first note that mentioned my own name.

  Marcus has still not figured out that I am “Uncle Gilbert.” Marcus is so dear to me, and I am afraid that if—no, when—I reveal to him that his aunt is the one who has been sending him all these naughty items, he won’t forgive me for deceiving him so. What a fix!

  “You know, Clorinda, I’m beginning to wonder if I knew Aunt Edith at all.”

  When I didn’t hear a reply, I looked over to see that she was biting down on one of the sofa cushions, trying to restrain her laughter. Tears were streaming down her face. I realized then that I had been a bit too open with Clorinda about some matters—before we slept together, I had bashfully confided to her that my uncle Gilbert had sent me condoms.

  “It’s not funny!” I said, then saw that it was.