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HAVING LEARNED HIS secrets, Rosemary and Vera exited Richard Wright’s room to find Frederick and Desmond waiting outside the door of their suite. “What have you two been doing in there?” Frederick demanded before he noticed the blood on Rosemary’s dress. “And what did he do to you?” If looks could kill, Richard Wright would have been dead right on the spot.
“Nothing, Freddie, calm down,” Rosemary said, averting her eyes from Desmond’s gaze. His face had turned bright red, and his fingers clenched at his sides. She still hadn’t been alone with him and they’d hardly spoken since their kiss on the beach. Due, no doubt, to the poor way she’d handled the awkward moment, and probably to Max’s arrival as well.
Seeing her hurt, however, softened his resolve even as he felt his blood rise up to a boil at the thought of anyone harming her. “I cut myself on a nail is all. I’m fine; I simply need a moment to get cleaned up.”
Inside their suite, Anna’s bedroom door was closed, and they could hear her moving around on the other side. By the time Rosemary had changed her clothes and allowed Vera to help her dress the wound on her hand, Max had arrived to round out the group.
He paced across the sitting room, his brow furrowed. “I’ve been looking for the lot of you for hours. Where have you been?”
“Well, first we were talking to Benny, the porter,” Rosemary explained sheepishly. “He didn’t attack Gloria, or Cecily for that matter, but let’s keep that to ourselves and let Inspector Boothe run around in circles.”
“I don’t know who Benny the porter is,” Max reminded her. “I only arrived last night, remember?”
Rosemary accepted the gin and tonic Frederick pressed into her hand and grinned up at him. “Thank you,” she said, for once thoroughly pleased that her brother always had a cocktail at the ready. “Benny is a big hulking man-child whose deep, dark secret is that he’s hiding a puppy in his staff cabin.”
“Oh,” Max said, catching up. “Gloria mentioned him, and she told the inspector that Benny was supposed to work this morning and never arrived.”
“Yes, that’s correct. The thing is, he says he had the day off and the other porter, the one who has been out of work due to an accident, was actually scheduled. An innocent mix-up from the sounds of it, and of no concern to the case.”
“We also managed to check Richard Wright off the list of suspects.” Vera sounded quite pleased with herself. Rosemary sipped her drink and allowed Vera to tell the tale with all the pomp and circumstance of a trained actress.
“He could barely stomach the spots of blood on Rosie’s dress, let alone have bludgeoned Cecily to death. It would have taken someone with a strong constitution if not actual physical strength. Which also, one would assume, negates the possibility of it having been little Charlotte, the maid. She’s a mere slip of a thing, after all.”
She couldn’t help but include the not-so-subtle dig in her retelling of the events of the afternoon, and though Desmond appeared to be having second thoughts about their number one suspect, her words didn’t have the intended effect of extinguishing Frederick’s conviction.
“You don’t know that for certain, Vera,” he said sharply. “Desperate people do desperate things. As evidenced by your brash attempt to break into Mr. Wright’s suite.”
Max cleared his throat loudly. “He’s right, you know, and actually, Rose, these two may not be as far off base as you’d like to believe.”
Vera snapped her mouth shut and stared at Max with barely concealed irritation. “What do you mean?”
“Well, Inspector Boothe came through with some information, and I’ve spent all afternoon communicating with London to confirm it. What it amounts to is this: Charlotte’s last name is Marlowe.”
Rosemary’s sip of gin and tonic went down wrong, and after a bout of coughing, she exclaimed, “As in Benjamin Marlowe?”
“The same. She’s his wife.” He paused a moment to let the news sink in. “Apparently, she left him and then came down here to lie low. He’s been looking for her for months. The missing-person report ran across my desk, but I didn’t make the connection until the inspector here in Cyprus filled me in.” The fact didn’t appear to please him, but he shrugged it off.
“I knew it!” Vera cried. “I knew she wasn’t just a lowly maid.” She flushed, grateful Anna was in the other room and hadn’t heard the comment.
“Richard Wright said he thought there had to be a more personal connection between her and Cecily,” Rosemary said thoughtfully. “Perhaps Cecily found out who she really was, and...but that doesn’t make any sense. One would think, if that were the case, the blackmail would have worked the other way around.”
“Unless,” Desmond said, drawing out the word, “she’s the one who was stealing money. Cecily tried to draw the thief out, promising that if the money was returned, she’d let it go. Let’s say it was Charlotte; that would have given her reason to threaten Cecily. Those letters contained only threats, correct? No demands? Maybe Charlotte wanted Cecily to drop it so she could keep the money and run.”
Anna’s door creaked open behind the group, and a voice that wasn’t hers spoke into the din. “Those are all very interesting theories, but unfortunately none of you have hit the nail on the head.” Rosemary and her friends whipped around to see Charlotte standing with her hands on her hips, a snarl painted across her narrow face.
“Where did you come from?” Rosemary asked even as she figured out that it had been Charlotte in Anna’s room the entire time, and that the girl had overheard everything they’d been saying about her.
“I’m a maid. I was doing my job. Cleaning up after the likes of you all day long wasn’t exactly my life’s ambition, you know!” Malice etched her face. Even though she’d denied the accusations against her, Charlotte looked, for the first time, as though she might have been able to carry out a grisly murder after all.
“If I’d stolen that money, don’t you think I would have used it to get out of here? Why would I continue to do a job that I detest? And I didn’t kill Miss DeVant, either. She was my friend,” Charlotte said, her voice hitting a pitch so shrill Max put a finger to his ear and cringed.
“But that morning,” Rosemary said slowly, “after I found the body when the police were about to question you, you said you didn’t like Cecily.” She thought back and realized that perhaps Charlotte hadn’t quite said as much after all. “Didn’t you?”
Charlotte snorted. “No, I didn’t. You said nobody liked her. I didn’t disagree, but that’s because I was upset. Miss DeVant knew about my estrangement from Ben, and she felt sorry for me. She knew what it would mean—a divorce”—Charlotte spat out the word as if it burned her tongue—“to my family and to my friends. Some of us were raised with high morals and standards. Some of us don’t subscribe to the theory that marriage ought to be tossed over just because a couple isn’t as happy as they thought they would be!”
Frederick, apparently having come to terms with the fact that he might have been wrong—or perhaps scared that if somehow Charlotte was still lying, she might make him her next victim—poured the girl a brandy. “Why don’t you sit down and tell us what’s going on,” he said, attempting to lead her towards an armchair.
“No!” Charlotte cried. “I don’t want a drink, and I don’t want to calm down. All I wanted was to make my husband realize what a mistake he’d made. I thought, eventually, that he would tire of his debauchery, come and find me, and bring me home.”
A look of distaste mixed with pity crossed Vera’s face. What sort of modern woman would behave this way? she wondered. It hadn’t occurred to her that not all women were as modern as she was.
“Instead,” Charlotte continued, “he brought that hussy Geneviève here with him and tried to bribe me to petition for divorce.” She was pacing at this point, and in such a tizzy that the hair pulled severely back from her face and wound into a bun had come loose. Tendrils of auburn spilled around her eyes, which were wild with rage. “All he wants is her money and to use her as a trophy. Believe me, if I were going to kill anyone, it would be the two-bit tramp who stole my husband!”
Rosemary didn’t know quite what to say or how to handle the situation and was relieved when Max took control. “Charlotte, we’re all terribly sorry for what you’ve been through—and for good reason. If what you say is true and you cared about Miss DeVant, perhaps you know something that might help us catch her killer.”
“Well,” Charlotte said, taking a deep breath and sinking, finally, into one of the armchairs. “That horrible Richard Wright was trying to put something over on Miss DeVant. I wouldn’t put anything past him. He’s spent the last two weeks terrorizing the rest of the staff and me. For what purpose I couldn’t say, though I suspect it has something to do with money. As things so often do.”
“Cecily had, in her possession, letters of a threatening nature. We know Richard Wright didn’t blackmail Cecily,” Rosemary explained. “He would have if he’d had the opportunity, but he couldn’t find anything to hold over her head. Someone else must have had reason to write those letters though. They have to mean something.”
“Do you still have them?” Charlotte asked.
Rosemary produced the clutch that held the stack of notes and handed it to Charlotte. “Cecily left this in our room the night before she was murdered. I suppose we should have handed them over to Boothe,” she said when she saw the look on Max’s face. “It just now occurs to me that we’ve withheld evidence.”
Charlotte fingered the handbag, a puzzled expression on her face. “This isn’t Miss DeVant’s,” she said. “It wasn’t her style. I’ve seen it before, but I can’t for the life of me remember where. Perhaps in one of the guest rooms...”
“If that’s not Cecily’s, then maybe the letters aren’t hers either!” Rosemary exclaimed. “Could we have been chasing a dead end this whole time?” The new information forced her to look at things from another perspective. She began to pace the room, much as Charlotte had done, talking to herself as she did.
“We know it wasn’t Benny; his alibi makes too much sense, and I just can’t see him as the violent type. Richard Wright has too weak a stomach for murder. None of the other staff seem dissatisfied enough to resort to murder. I hate to broach the subject, but just how duplicitous is your husband?”
Charlotte hopped to her feet, the blood rising to her face. “It wasn’t Ben,” she snapped. “He was with me the night Miss DeVant was killed.”
Max whipped his head around to face Charlotte. “All night?”
She shot him an indignant look and spat, “He was still my husband, so if I had been with him all night, there would have been no shame to it. We were together until after midnight, and though I don’t owe anyone an explanation, it wasn’t a scandalous meeting.” The blush rose to her cheeks again, and Rosemary tilted her head.
“Would he have liked it to be?” she asked, going with her hunch.
“He’s a man,” Charlotte responded without meeting Rosemary’s gaze. “But he’s not a murderer. His new fiancée proves his taste in women has declined, but there’s no crime in chasing after the wrong skirts. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a job to do.” She gathered her cart from the other room and made for the door.
“If you remember where you saw that clutch, please let us know immediately,” Rosemary implored the maid as Charlotte closed the door behind herself.
