Free Snow White Red-Handed (A Fairy Tale Fatal Mystery) by Maia Chance Page A

Surely they ain’t going to keep me locked up in this tower once they learn more about who really done in Mr. Coop.” Miss Amaryllis had done it, Ophelia had insisted last night. And Ophelia was almost always right. But Prue also knew she’d deserve a dunce cap if she trumpeted Ophelia’s suspicions to Hansel.
    “I shall tell you every new thing that I learn.”
    “And maybe bring me some more pastries, too?”
    Hansel grinned and sauntered back to his vegetable patch.
    *   *   *
    Ophelia looked left and right. The long castle corridor was empty. She let herself into Amaryllis’s bedchamber.
    Inside, the drapes were drawn, and the air was choked with lilac eau de toilette. The bed was unmade and clothing littered the carpet.
    Interesting. Amaryllis hadn’t allowed
any
of the servants into her chamber that morning, then. That explained why she was taking her breakfast downstairs, instead of on her usual tray in bed.
    Ophelia got started with the dressing table.
    She’d find proof, somehow, that Amaryllis had poisoned Mr. Coop and fixed things so that Prue would take the blame.
    The dressing table held only a couple of boxes and bottles, since Amaryllis used few cosmetic preparations. Still, Ophelia did a thorough rummage of the dressing table drawers and even felt—recalling a pivotal scene in
The Terrors of Swansdon Hall
—along the underside of the table, in case an incriminating letter had been hidden there.
    Nothing.
    Next, she checked the tables on either side of the bed but came up with only a dog-eared volume of Lord Byron and a dented tin of anise pastilles.
    She looked under the bed, behind the drapes, and beneath the pictures on the walls.
    She was about to shuffle off—Amaryllis had surely finished crunching toast—when it hit her: the wardrobe. She hadn’t checked there.
    The wardrobe was big as a barn, painted white and gold, and bursting with gowns. Even though Ophelia had tidied it just yesterday morning, it was already higgledy-piggledy.
    She knelt to feel along the sides and back. No thick envelopes, no diaries.
    She stood. Her knee bumped the boots and slippers piled on the bottom, and a shoe tumbled out onto the floor.
    It was one of Amaryllis’s pale yellow silk slippers. The fragile material was blotched with dirt, the suede sole grass-stained and embedded with pebbles.
    Hang on to your hat.
    Yesterday, when they’d all gone out to the woods to view the cottage, Amaryllis had been attired in a walking costume and sturdy leather boots. Before luncheon, Ophelia had helped her change into the yellow silk gown and slippers that she’d worn for the rest of the day.
    If this slipper was soiled, then Amaryllis had gone outside at some point
after
luncheon. At some point, as a matter of fact, in the window of time that Mr. Coop’s murderer had fetched an orchard apple and laced it with poison.
    If Ophelia could match the soil and pebbles on the slipper to those in the orchard, or even find matching footprints, well, that was proof of Amaryllis’s guilt, wasn’t it? Ophelia could go straight to Inspector Schubert with the evidence, Prue would be freed, and they could stir their stumps as fast as they could back to New York.
    She bundled the slipper in her apron pocket, closed the wardrobe, and hurried out of the room.
    *   *   *
    “What do you mean, gone?” Gabriel said to Professor Winkler. The woodsman, Herz, was chopping away at the thicket around the cottage, and Gabriel had to speak over the noise.
    “I cannot put it more simply,” Winkler said, blotting his forehead with a handkerchief. It was almost midday, and the sun was growing hot, even in the forest glade. “When I went to the castle library to view the skeleton, just after we had breakfasted together—with the view of drawing and measuring it, you see—it was no longer there.”
    “Did you ask the servants—”
    “Of course. No one claimed to know anything.”
    “What about the ceiling beam?”
    “Gone as