All Bedlam Courses Past (part two hundred thirty-two)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Eight

Things Relative

(part two hundred thirty-two)

“The greasy material could not have been trodden to invisibility, for all the comings and goings. Likewise the foot would bear its carpet fluff. But the conspirators were in the dark, they did not know, due to the protection of Mrs. Demrose by Miss Zucker, that the foot was ulcerous. They believed Mrs. Demrose disinclined to walk, but not incapable. She was a woman of impulses and notions. They felt themselves safe in this, that her fall would seem the sad consequence of some caprice.

“Given this complexion, you will see that Miss Buckley—I say it—and Mr. Demrose, need not have contemplated an enormity, framing the enterprise in secret. I have known murderers…of the elderly, the cripple, the slow child, count themselves kindly reapers, indeed. Perhaps it was so, when Demrose smothered his wife in her bed, that he called it an intervention, a preserving of her from suffering to come.”

“How do you…”

“Sir. The coroner found asphyxiation to have been the cause of death. Mr. Gremot, your daughter has seen this, you have not. The dead woman at the foot of the stairs.”

Not waiting for Élucide’s father to express delicacy, Monaghan offered the photograph.

“Staged. Mrs. Demrose may have been drunk, laying her head on her pillow for the last time. But she would not have been flung down a flight of steps without coming to a wakefulness. It is unlikely they’d have got her out of bed, full asleep, and into the chair. The wheeled chair, sir.”

“The body was arranged with the head down, pressed into the shawl.”

“Yes, Mr. Thacker. A telling detail, to have taken thought for it.”

“What’s to say she didn’t?”

“Asphyxiate, at the foot of the stairs, having fallen that way?”

“Well, no, I understand she didn’t walk out there. But why figure they murdered her in her room?”

Tones of voice were at battle here, yet Monaghan said civilly: “Expedience. The end product was to be the woman’s death, why undertake to manage her body living? Miss Zucker’s dreams would accommodate only so many odd noises.”

“Why not,” said Élucide’s father, “murder her at the house in Chicago? Or down in Nashville? Are you saying they booked the cruise…?”

“In advancement of the scheme. Or, you may be thinking, had they discussed the murder, then seized opportunity when it seemed to favor them? But I do, sir, say that the cruise and the scheme were one. To have Mrs. Demrose surrounded by strangers, scarce observed by any who knew her, off her daily schedule, plausibly with her husband and daughter lax in their care of her, responsibilities fallen to Miss Zucker and the ship’s crew, aided the plan. The staging of an accident, not the covering of a crime. And here, we want to set aside those facts obtained from one individual and no other, for special examination.”

244

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part two hundred thirty-three)

(2025, Stephanie Foster)