Victoria Thompson - Murder On Waverly Place

Catherine and Maeve hurried to answer it. Sarah thought it would be a summons to another delivery until she heard Maeve call.

“Mrs. Brandt, there’s a policeman here to see you.”

She didn’t sound alarmed, but Sarah knew this couldn’t be good news. She hurried out of the kitchen and through the front room that served as her medical office into the entry hall. She found the girls staring at a handsome young man in a blue uniform. He held his hat in both hands in front of his chest, and he was staring at Maeve with more than a little interest.

“Officer Donatelli?” Sarah asked in surprise.

He looked up. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Brandt,” he said, suddenly all business. “I’m sorry to bother you, but Detective Sergeant Malloy sent me to fetch you.”

“What for?” she asked in surprise. She hadn’t heard from Malloy for weeks and she knew he’d never send for her unless it was something very serious.

“There’s been some trouble…” He glanced meaningfully at Catherine, who was listening intently to every word.

“Maeve, would you take Catherine upstairs?” Sarah asked, worried herself now.

Plainly, neither girl wanted to miss hearing Officer Donatelli’s news, but they obediently marched up the stairs. When they were safely out of earshot, Sarah asked urgently, “Is Malloy all right?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” he hastened to assure her. “He just… Well, it’s your mother, you see.”

“My mother!” she echoed in alarm. “Has she been injured?”

“Oh, no, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you. She’s fine, just fine. It’s just…”

“What is it!” she demanded impatiently when he hesitated.

“Well, I’m sorry to say that there’s been a murder.”

“Who was murdered? Someone I know?”

“I don’t know if you do or not, but it happened at a séance.”

“A séance! At Madame Serafina’s?”

“Yes, ma’am, that’s it, on Waverly Place.”

“And my mother was there?” Sarah asked, almost wailing in despair.

“I’m afraid she was. That’s why they called for Detective Sergeant Malloy. She asked for him special.”

Of course she had. She knew he would handle everything with the utmost discretion. If he could. If anyone could. What would happen when the press found out that someone had been murdered at a séance attended by a half-dozen socially prominent citizens, one of them Mrs. Felix Decker?

“And he sent me to get you,” Officer Donatelli was saying. “He wanted you to make sure your mother gets home all right.”

Sarah sighed wearily. “I’ll get my things.”

DETECTIVE SERGEANT FRANK MALLOY COULDN’T BELIEVE it. He’d managed to keep Sarah Brandt from becoming involved in a murder investigation for weeks, and now she was summoning him to one!

At least that’s what he’d been told. They’d sent a uniformed officer out to track him down where he was investigating a warehouse robbery over near the docks this morning. They’d told him somebody’d been murdered at a séance, and Sarah Brandt was there and demanding he be brought in to investigate. That sounded like Sarah. Imagine his surprise when he arrived at the house to find not Sarah at all but her mother, Elizabeth Decker.

“I couldn’t give the police my real name,” Mrs. Decker explained to him the moment they were alone. He’d immediately taken her to what appeared to be some sort of office to interrogate her in private. “Do you know what the newspapers would do if they found out I was present at a murder?”

“But nobody would think twice about your daughter being at one,” Frank said with a weary sigh.

“Exactly.” Mrs. Decker gave him an approving smile. “And she’d already been here with me the first time I came.”

Why was Frank not surprised? “Tell me what happened here,” he said, not feeling at all like smiling.

Mrs. Decker sobered instantly. “We were having a séance in that room where the… the…”

“The body,” he supplied when she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

“Yes, where the body is. We were seated around the table, holding hands.”

“Holding hands?” he echoed in surprise. He had seen the room with the table where the body was, but nobody had mentioned holding hands.

“Yes, it increases the bond to help the spirits communicate with us.”

“Maybe we should sit down,” he suggested, feeling a headache starting to form behind his eyes.

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Malloy. I’m afraid I’m still suffering from the shock of seeing her lying there-”

“Over here,” Frank said, taking her elbow and directing her to one of two straight-backed chairs that had been placed in front of the desk that sat in the center of the room. The top of the desk was bare and slightly dusty, as if no one ever actually used it. He seated Mrs. Decker and took the other chair, turning it to face hers. “You were sitting around the table holding hands,” he reminded her.

“Well, I guess we weren’t exactly holding hands,” she clarified. “We were holding each other’s wrists, but it has the same effect, doesn’t it? In any event, Madame Serafina-she’s the spiritualist-she was talking with the spirits, or rather Yellow Feather was talking with them-”

“What’s Yellow Feather?” Frank asked, confused already.

“He’s Madame’s spirit guide. He’s an Indian warrior who died in battle over a hundred years ago.”

Frank was having trouble following all this. “Is he some kind of ghost?”

“No, I told you, he’s a spirit guide. He comes when Madame calls him, and then he speaks through her.”

“What do you mean, he speaks through her?”

“He uses her body. It’s his voice, though, very obviously. Her body speaks but a man’s voice comes out.”

Frank had a lot of questions about that, but he decided to save them for later. “All right, so this Indian spirit is talking through her. Then what happened?”

“We were all asking questions, and Yellow Feather was getting very agitated. He was shouting, and there was some music-”

“Music?”

“Yes, we could hear music playing, although I confess I wasn’t paying much attention to it. I was too distracted by what Yellow Feather was saying.”

“But there was a lot of noise in the room?”

“That’s right, so we didn’t notice… Or at least I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary until Mrs. Burke screamed.”

Frank gaped at her. She had been sitting in a room, practically holding hands with perfect strangers and talking to ghosts, and she didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary? He was really beginning to understand where Sarah had inherited her intrepid disposition. “Didn’t anybody notice somebody going up behind this woman and sticking a knife into her back?” he asked in amazement.

“How could we? It was pitch dark.”

“All this was going on in the dark?”

“Oh, yes. The room must be dark to decrease distractions when you’re contacting the spirits.”

Frank stared at her for a long moment, trying to judge her sincerity. Plainly, she was telling the absolute truth, no matter how ridiculous it sounded to him. “Then that would explain how someone could sneak into the room.”

“Oh, no, it couldn’t,” Mrs. Decker protested. “There’s only one door to the room, and it was closed tightly the entire time. We would have noticed immediately if someone opened it because light would have come in.”

That was good. The number of suspects would be limited to those in the room. “So one of the…” He couldn’t think of what people attending a séance would be called. “One of the other people in the room killed her, then.”