Page 89 of Evil at the Essex House
“Miss Schlomsky had a trunk when she arrived,” Evans nodded, “and a valise. No furniture. That all arrived later, brand new.”
Of course. Flossie wouldn’t have crossed the Atlantic with furniture in tow.
Although from what her mother had told me, Flossie had bought her entire wardrobe new too, it seemed.
I took the key, and then the lift down to the cellars. They’re dark and gloomy—the boiler is down there, along with the innards for the lift mechanism and the electrical board for the building and other things of that nature. The trunk room is directly opposite the lift, and I inserted the key in the lock and pulled the door open, only to find myself facing a wall of luggage.
I had never been inside before. When Christopher and I moved in, it had been with a trunk each of clothes from home. A lorry had followed with spare furnishings, and that lorry had taken the trunks back to Wiltshire once they were empty, and had stored them in the big box room at Sutherland Hall until we needed them again. Which we didn’t expect we would. We had taken short weekend trips so far, to Wiltshire and Dorset and other places, but a weekender bag had always sufficed for that. A trunk is really only something you need for long voyages or big moves.
A lot of residents of the Essex House Mansions seemed to own trunks, and the trunk room was not organized in a manner that made sense to me. It took me several long minutes to walk around the room peering at each trunk in turn before I found Flossie’s, marked with her last name and the number of her flat. I dragged it out behind me, locked the door, and then took the key back to Evans, before I took the lift—and trunk—up to the second floor and dragged it down the hallway and into Flossie’s flat.
Mrs. Schlomsky heard me come through the door—or heard the trunk scrape across the floor—and she came into the foyer to greet me. “You found it. Good.”
And then she got a look at the trunk, and her brows drew together. “That isn’t Florence’s trunk.”
“It has her name on it,” I wheezed. I straightened my back and tick-tocked my hips to work out the kinks before I added, “And her flat number. Look.”
Sarah looked at it, but shook her head. “I can see that, Miss Darling. But I’m telling you, this isn’t Florence’s trunk. Not the one she left Toledo with.”
I eyed it doubtfully. “Perhaps she bought herself new luggage once she arrived?”
“Why would she do that? Surely the time to buy new luggage is before you leave on a trip?”
It was a rhetorical question, clearly, because she went on without waiting for my answer. It was just as well, since of course I would have had to agree with her. No one buys luggage when they come home from traveling. Even if something’s wrong with said luggage, the trunk goes in storage not to be considered again until the next time it is needed, andthena new trunk is acquired.
“Besides,” Sarah said, still eyeing it critically, “this trunk is hardly new, is it? It has stickers and scrapes and scratches.
“Perhaps Florence bought it used?”
She gave me a look, as she should, really, since the suggestion made no sense. If Flossie wanted to replace her existing trunk, of course she would buy a brand new one.
“Could she be holding it for someone else? Ruth, perhaps?”
“If that’s the case,” Sarah said, hands on her hips and eyes still on the trunk, “where is Florence’s trunk? Did you look to see whether there was another one with her name on it?”
I hadn’t, although I had already searched more than half the luggage room when I’d come across this trunk. And surely they would have been stored together? “I can go back,” I offered.
Sarah shook her head. “If it was there, you would have seen it. And no, to answer your other question, it isn’t Ruth’s trunk. Hers was black.”
While this was brown. “What about Flossie’s? What did that look like?”
“It was green,” Sarah said. “Dark green, and bigger than this. A proper steamer trunk.”
So this—clearly used, clearly brown—trunk didn’t belong to either of the women who supposedly lived in this mansion flat.
“You are…” I cleared my throat. “You’re absolutely certain that the women we saw today was your daughter, aren’t you?”
“Of course,” Sarah said, eyes flashing. “I’d hardly mistake my own daughter, would I? She lived with me for more than twenty years. Besides, there was the scar. I told you.”
I nodded. “I’d never noticed the scar before. None of us had.”
“Well, she’d had it for at least a year and a half,” Sarah said. “She got it during that botched kidnapping attempt at Vassar year before last. Eight stitches. I know my daughter, Miss Darling!”
“Of course you do,” I soothed. “I’m just trying to figure out why her clothes are different, and why her trunk is different, and why I’ve never seen her scar before, or her maid, for that matter…”
And when I put it like that, the explanation was obvious, wasn’t it? If Sarah wasn’t lying, and the body in the morgue truly was Florence Schlomsky, then the woman I had known for six months, the woman who had kissed Crispin in the lift and called Uncle Harold ‘Your Highness’… was someone else.
“Just out of curiosity,” I said, “can you describe Ruth to me?”
