TWENTY FIVE, YOU SAY?
Lydia Cross’s nose twitched as she rounded the staircase and into the upstairs hall. She paused, hand on the railing, and sniffed like a dog, her eyebrows bouncing on her forehead.
“Rotten meat,” she muttered. “Someone’s been smuggling food.”
She struck forward, thrusting her nose at each door, left, right, left, right, starting at 2D and making her way down to the end of the hall. She stopped at 2B, Mr. Grimsby’s room, noticing, as if for the first time, the broken bottom half of the B, which made the room look like 2P—a ridiculous number, in her esteem, for though Epler’s Boarding House and Inn (or The Epler House, as the locals referred to it) was large enough to board twenty-four guests, two to a room, from 1A to 3D, it did not have rooms up to the letter P.
Mrs. Cross sniffed the jamb from the door plate up to the corner and back down again, frowning at the sour smell.
Thus offended, she rapped on the door.
“Mr. Grimsby?” she said. “Mr. Grimsby, are you cooking something in there?”
She turned her ear to the door. No answer came from the other side. She rapped again, harder now, bordering on pounding, with all the force befitting a woman such as herself, which was to say, a woman of intent, a woman who did not suffer insubordination or disrespect, her hardened knuckles suffering the brunt of the assault.
“Mr. Grimsby? Have you been drinking? I’ll remind you that there’s no tippling in my house.”
Still nothing.
“Mr. Grimsby!” Pound, pound, pound! “I demand you open this door immediately!”
She pressed her ear to the wooden panes and listened, but for the third time, no sound came from within. She slapped her side pocket for her keys, a pocket she’d sewn into her skirts herself, and feeling nothing, suddenly remembered she’d given her ring to Jeannie, and Jeannie, that stupid girl, was in the basement with the wash. With a huff and a deeper frown than before (seemingly impossible, we know, but evinced by the deep ridges on either side of her mouth), she bustled toward the stairs.
“Jeannie!” Mrs. Cross bellowed as she descended. “Oh, where is that lazy girl? Jeannie!”
A groan from below, followed by footsteps clomping up the stairs. Both women arrived at the basement door at the same time: Mrs. Cross, full, substantial, broad of shoulder, her gray hair tied back in a bun, and Jeannie, slimmer, mousier, but stoutly built, a future Mrs. Cross in the making.
“What is it, ma’am?” Jeannie asked, wiping her forehead with the back of one calloused hand. “I’ve got washing to manage.”
Mrs. Cross wagged her considerable chins in disapproval.
“Where have you been? I called for you.”
“You told me to do the laundry.”
“Do you have the keys?”
“Of course I do, ma’am.” Jeannie patted her skirt, where the keys hung from a string she had tied around her waist.
“Give those to me,” she ordered.
Jeannie unclipped the ring from the string and held them out, and Mrs. Cross snatched them away.
“When’s the last time you stripped Mr. Grimsby’s bed? It smells like something died in there.”
“Mr. Grimsby? The writer?”
Mrs. Cross couldn’t help the sour expression that formed on her face
“Is he?” she sniffed, squinting at the ceiling.
“He writes the most fantastic stories, filled with haunted castles and ghosts and murderers.”
“Murderers? He doesn’t write for The End Times?”
“Maybe. He says he sells his work to a magazine in France.”
“He’s French?” Mrs. Cross said, her lip curling. “Did I know that?”
“He’s American, missus. Just speaks French. Or writes it.”
Mrs. Cross sniffed again.
“Don’t the Eplers have a rule about… writers?”
“No, ma’am. Irish and actors, but not writers.”
“Well, perhaps they should.”
“I’ll fetch the sheets,” Jeannie said, and started back for the basement.
“No, not now, girl. I suspect he’s storing meat from the tang. He’s not in, I’m afraid, so I need you find whatever’s making the stench and get rid of it.”
“Meat? Are you sure?”
“Of course, I’m sure!”
“If it’s so bad, why didn’t you do it when you were up there?”
“You have the keys! Now do as you’re told before I swat you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jeannie grumbled.
Mrs. Cross stepped aside as the girl scooted by and hurried up the stairs to the second floor.
“Hurry up now,” she called after her. “That wash won’t wash itself.”
With a satisfied humph, Mrs. Cross started for her office. She wanted to check the books, make sure her fancy French writer had paid that week’s rent on time. Harboring food was bad enough, but it hardly warranted eviction. But if he was in arrears…
Jeannie’s high-pitched scream shattered her thoughts.
“My heavens, what’s gotten into her now?” she asked the ceiling.
She followed Jeannie’s footsteps as they pounded down the hall overhead, then watched as the girl, still screaming, charged down the stairs like a horse crossing an open field, ran through the parlor to the door, ripped it open, and shot out of the house.
Constable Thomas held a handkerchief over his nose as he leaned over to inspect the corpse. It was sprawled out in a leather wingback, waisted legs stiff as stakes, head resting against one of the wings. Its tongue, or what should have passed for one, poked out from between desiccated lips. It was dry and shrunken and twisted, as if all the moisture had been wrung free. One hand lay in its lap, clutching an interesting-looking pen. Constable Thomas leaned in for a better look.
“Is that bone?” he asked aloud.
“Bone?” Mrs. Cross repeated. “Heavens me!”
The constable noted the dark stains on the stylus, red and clotted. The grip wrapped in hair. On the rug beneath, a dark, dry stain. He leaned over the inkpot sitting on the side table to sniff it and drew back, frowning.
“What is it?” Mrs. Cross asked.
“I can tell you what it’s not,” Thomas said. “It’s not ink.”
He peered around the chair.
“Where’s the book?” he asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You said he was a writer. I see the pen. Where’s the writing?”
Mrs. Cross sent her own startled look around, hand clutching imaginary pearls. Thomas refocused on the scene at hand. Judging by the smell, poor Mr. Grimsby had been dead for at least two days. Maybe three.
Thomas took a pencil out of his breast pocket and pushed one of the withered lips up. The teeth were brown and rotten. He wiped the pencil off on his jacket.
“Sucked dry,” he whispered.
“Oh, that poor young man,” Mrs. Cross said.
“Young man?” Thomas stood erect and gave her a withering look. “Madam, I have seen many dead people. Dead from disease. The pox. Consumption. Cholera. Drink. Hollows ‘em out, it does. Like a leech. But even the young ones somewhat maintain their youth.” He nodded at the corpse, chuckling. “This one here, though, he was no young man.”
“Oh, certainly he was, sir,” Mrs. Cross said. “Why, I saw him with my own two eyes not a month ago when he first came here. Ripe as a peach, him.”
Thomas snorted.
“Bah.”
“It’s true.” Mrs. Cross's voice hardened. “Mr. Grimsby was twenty-five years old. No more than thirty.”
The constable ignored her.
“I’ll not have you questioning my honesty,” Mrs. Cross said. “I might be a lot of things, but I am not a liar.”
Thomas considered the discrepancy between the woman’s conviction and the thing reposing before him, the shell that used to be Solomon Grimsby. A writer, whatever that meant. Fantastic French fiction. Now nothing more than a husk, empty orbs staring forever into the abyss, rictus grin belying the horror of the end.
As he pondered, one of the arms slipped off the armrest, swung back, and struck the side table. The bones shattered upon impact, dusting the air and dropping splinters on the rug. Mrs. Cross gasped and held a hand to her mouth.
Thomas squatted and poked one of the shards with his pencil. It crumbled.
“Twenty-five, you say?” he asked.
Sale
Sale
Sale
Sale
