Page 75 of Evil at the Essex House
“The cab is gone!”
“But these nice young people are here with their car.” She gestured to us. “They’ll give us a ride back to the hotel.”
“Capital idea,” I said enthusiastically, and had both Christopher and Crispin goggle at me as if they suspected that I had lost my marbles. “We should take you back to the hotel right now.”
I looked at Christopher and Crispin, one after the other, significantly, and tried to convey the thought that we should try to get the Schlomskys out of here before they saw what—or rather who—was lying dead on the soiled mattress in the other room.
It took a second, but then they both caught on.
“Yes,” Crispin said, turning to beam at both Schlomskys, “of course. I’d be happy to drive you both back to the Savoy. I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Lord St George.”
He stuck out a hand in the direction of Hiram, who stopped his rant mid-sentence to eye it with all the enthusiasm of a dead fish.
Sarah, meanwhile, stepped in to grab it and pump it up and down, heartily. Crispin, who had looked ready to lift her hand to his mouth in the proper upper crust manner, appeared taken aback.
“See, Hiram,” Sarah said triumphantly, “this young man will see us home.”
“You would let a criminal drive you home?”
“I’m not a criminal,” Crispin protested, just as I said, indignantly, “We’re not criminals!”
“What makes you think that?” Christopher wanted to know. He’s the least reactive of us, and the most prone to thinking things through before flying off the handle. I’m quite easily riled, and so is Crispin, at least by me.
“I saw you!” Hiram said, eyes moving between me and both the boys. “Upstairs in the church tower, waiting for me to leave the ransom. Where’s my money? Where’s our daughter?”
I didn’t want to answer the second question—I took care that my eyes shouldn’t flicker to the door in the far wall—so I tackled the first one instead. “We don’t have your money. We waited for you to put it inside the tower, and for the kidnapper to pick it up, and then we followed him here.”
“No, you didn’t!” Hiram was practically apoplectic with rage. “We watched you. You waited up there, smoking and talking, for twenty minutes, and then you went downstairs, were picked up, and drove directly here!”
Well, yes. It was easy to see how that might look damning to someone who didn’t know us, and didn’t know how things had actually happened.
“Christopher stayed with the motorcar,” I explained, “while St George… while Lord St George and I went to the upper level of the tower. We saw you drive by, and then come back. And then we watched one of the kidnappers go inside and come out with the valise, and when he drove away, Christopher followed him. He came here.”
I gestured to the room we were standing in. “Once Christopher knew where they were hiding, he came back and fetched us. But by the time we got here, the house was empty and the kidnappers—and their motorcar—were gone.”
Hiram glanced around. “Empty, you say?”
“Not a living soul,” I told him, and was happy to hear that my voice was steady.
It’s not that I have a problem lying with a straight face. I’m quite good at fibbing when it doesn’t matter. But knowing that the man’s daughter was lying dead—and not just dead, but brutally murdered—behind the closed door behind us, made it a bit more difficult than usual to keep my composure.
And I wasn’t the one who cracked. To this day, I’m not sure whether it was Christopher’s eyes, or Crispin’s, that drifted towards the door. (If I had to guess, I’d say it was Christopher’s. He’s more soft-hearted than Crispin. On the other hand, Crispin was the one with the relationship—if one could call it that—with Flossie, so it was a toss-up, really, who had given the game away.)
Someone did something, at any rate, and Sarah Schlomsky gasped, and then darted around her husband and made for the door to the other room. I took a sideways step to stop her?—
“No!”
—but since I didn’t move fast enough to actually get in her way, she circumvented me, and made it to the door, and flung it open. And plunged inside.
“Florence! Hiram, bring the light!”
“No,” I cried again, “don’t!” but neither of them listened to me. Hiram brought his torch to the now-open door, and then we heart a horrible soul-sucking gurgle from Hiram and a high-pitched shriek from the bereaved mother.
“Florence!”
No question who was dead inside, then. I had only gotten a brief glimpse in the unsteady beam of the torch before Christopher moved it away, and I had identified the dress more than the woman inside it. But if Sarah Schlomsky recognized her daughter, I guess there was no doubt that the dead woman in the next room was Florence Schlomsky.
Sarah devolved into wracking sobs—she had fallen to her knees next to the mattress with her daughter’s body—and Hiram came back through the door like a bull at a red cape, head and brow lowered. “What did you do to her?”
