Snow White Red-Handed (A Fairy Tale Fatal Mystery) Read online

  Besides, Ma had always cautioned that reading gave a lady a scrunched-up forehead and a panoramic derriere.

  Baden-Baden, a German town nestled in plush hills, was called the Paris of the summer months. Leastways, that’s what the Baedeker said. All the cream of Europe’s crop, from Polish princes and British nobles to Italian opera stars and Russian novelists, gathered there to socialize, dance, take the waters, and gamble at the races or in the opulent gaming rooms.

  But their coach had left Baden-Baden miles behind, and they were headed up into the mountains.

  “I reckoned,” Prue said, “when we took that boat to Brussels, we were headed to civilization. But this!” She scowled out the window. Mountains reared up into the chambray-colored sky. “This looks worse than Maine.”

  “We’re in the Black Forest, Prue. Haven’t you heard of it?”

  “Never.”

  “Your mother didn’t read you those fairy stories by the Grimm Brothers?”

  “Read me stories?” Prue bit into one of the strawberry jelly sweets she’d spent her last penny on, back at the railway station. “Not her. But I sure know how to tell real diamonds from paste, and if a gentleman’s got a walloping bank account or is just trying to dupe a lady.” She chewed hard. The topic of Ma made her feel sore somewhere under her ribs. “Looks like the first-class carriage is getting away from us.”

  “We are servants now,” Ophelia said. Her voice was gentle. “We can’t expect to ride with the family.”

  “Can’t expect a decent coach, neither.”

  “I allow, this coach isn’t the most comfortable—”

  “It’s a rickety old rattletrap.” Prue eyed the black wood fittings around the window: carved thorny vines. “Or maybe a hearse.”

  “We are fortunate to have found employment.”

  “Well, don’t that beat all!” Prue exclaimed. “Look at that castle.”

  “Where?”

  “Up there.”

  Ophelia followed Prue’s pointed finger. “That,” she murmured, “beats all indeed.”

  High on a jutting stone outcrop, framed by pine trees, was a castle. It was built of pale stone, with turrets of various sizes, battlements, walls, parapets, and balconies. It glowed like an enchanted wedding cake in the afternoon sun, and hazy mountains stretched endlessly behind it like a painted theater backdrop.

  “Ain’t got those in Maine.” Prue popped another strawberry jelly in her mouth.

  “I think,” Ophelia said, “that’s where we’re going to live.”

  2

  Two weeks later

  “Snow White’s little house,” Professor Winkler said in his thick German accent, “the house, you understand, in the wood wherein she lived with her seven dwarves, has been, according to the telegram, found.” He chuckled, holding tight to a hand strap as the carriage bumped up the mountain road. “Such beliefs, of course, are merely fancies of the peasantry. I cannot think how this American millionaire’s wife got hold of such a notion, particularly since she has been in Germany only a few weeks.”

  “Curious indeed,” Gabriel Augustus Penrose said. “And I do agree with you, it goes without saying that superstitious stories are the product of debased minds and, I suspect, poor nutrition as well.” He tried to stretch his long legs, which were stiff from that morning’s fifty-mile railway journey from Heidelberg to Baden-Baden. “We are fortunate that the philological work that began with Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm laid the groundwork for a more enlightened understanding of fairy tales.”

  “But the folk are wily, Professor Penrose, and ready to defend their backwards beliefs to the death. Why, once, in a dark, kleine hamlet in the Brigach River valley, I encountered an old crone who swore that she was the great-great-granddaughter of Gretel.”

  “Of ‘Hansel und Gretel’?” Gabriel raised an eyebrow as he straightened his spectacles, a bemused, condescending look he’d perfected years ago.

  “The same. How I did laugh at the miserable thing. By the sorry appearance of her teeth, I judged she had eaten a fair share of candy windows and cake roofs herself. Now, where is this Schloss Grunewald?” Winkler hunched his aged, oxlike frame to better see out the carriage window. “Mr. Coop’s telegram indicated that it was five miles from the Baden-Baden station. Ah. There. I see the towers through the trees. One of those piles the romantics renovated to appear more picturesque.”

  Gabriel glimpsed the castle, too, floating like a mirage over a half-timbered village in a valley. “I was told,” he said, “that the schloss retains portions that are ancient, but the greater part was rebuilt in the twenties by the grandfather of the former owner—a certain Count Grunewald—as a summer retreat.” He paused to admire the effect of the castle’s creamy stones surrounded by emerald mountains. “So, it would seem that it isn’t only the peasants who indulge in romantic notions.”

  Winkler gave him a sharp look. “It is not the same, is it?”

  “Mmm,” Gabriel said, and pretended to be deep in a study of the passing forest.

  Hang it. That had been a slipup.

  Gabriel had built his academic career upon a rather snobbish outlook on the origins and significance of folklore. As professor of philology at St. Remigius’s College, Oxford, he painstakingly researched archaic texts to expose the deluded—but nonetheless fascinating—imaginations of a pagan folk that still lingered in remote pockets of modern Europe. Fairy tales and myths were nothing but drivel, he and his colleagues insisted.

  He was obliged to keep it hidden that he believed quite the opposite. That he had believed in the inexplicable ever since that strange, magical dawn in the Crimea almost thirteen years ago.

  “Thank you,” he said to Winkler, “for bringing me along, by the way. I’m interested to see how you set these superstitious people to rights.”

  “I am called upon to do it more than I care to admit. The benefit is that the remote hamlets, where these summons usually bring me, have some of the best food and drink in all of Germany. Ach, the bratwurst I dined upon when some fools thought they had found golden straw sealed up in an ancient silo. I must have eaten two hogs’ worth! With a kraut to accompany it that—oh!—it was worth all the annoyance.” He smacked his lips.

  “It was fortuitous that I encountered you at the university last night,” Gabriel said. “I usually conduct my evening studies at my rented rooms in the Klingenteichstrasse. I’d only gone in to the university because I’d forgotten a book.” Gabriel was spending the summer as a visiting scholar at Heidelberg University in order to examine a crumbling fifteenth-century manuscript.

  “I am pleased to have you along.”

  Gabriel eyed the black bag resembling a doctor’s bag on the seat beside Winkler. “What sort of things do you do when you’re called upon to investigate so-called fairy tale evidence?”

  “It is all strictly scientific, very precise. While I, like you, am a philologist, as a young man, I studied chemistry. In that kit there”—Winkler gestured with his chins towards the bag—“you shall find an array of testing equipment.”

  “Testing? For—?”

  Winkler chuckled again. “Gold, my dear professor. The peasants always believe they have discovered dwarf’s gold.”

  * * *

  Winkler and Gabriel stepped down from their carriage into Schloss Grunewald’s forecourt.

  “You the college men?” A middle-aged gentleman gestured towards them with a half-eaten apple.

  “Professor Penrose,” Gabriel said, extending his deerskin-gloved hand. “And this is my esteemed colleague, Professor Winkler.”

  “Coop. Homer T. Coop.” Coop’s handshake was as gruff as his American accent. He had a bristling mustache and side-whiskers, and his head was shrubbed with coppery hair streaked with gray. He was barrel-chested and wearing a well-tailored checked suit and a porkpie hat. His hands were not gloved, and they looked more s
uited to a railway gang laborer than a railway millionaire. “I want you to know straight off,” Coop said, “that I don’t have time for this tomfoolery. I telegraphed you on account of my wife, Pearl.”

  “So you mentioned,” Winkler said, “in your telegram.”

  “Her head’s rotted with this storybook nonsense, as if she were a little miss of six. One of the servants told her about the famous fairy tale professor in Heidelberg, and she wouldn’t stop buzzing in my ear like a dangnabbed mosquito about it until I agreed to send a telegram.” He gnawed his apple. “Never went to college myself. Guess I’m a good example of how you don’t need it.” He snorted. “I started off on Wall Street, you know. Worked for a Harvard man. He never did manage to get his snotty nose down low enough to sniff out a bad deal. Went bankrupt in forty-nine. That’s when I cleared out.”

  “Shall we have a look at the find?” Gabriel said.

  “It’s now or never,” Coop said. “I mean to raze the house once you’ve looked it over.” He suddenly bellowed, “Smith!” He threw the apple core onto the flagstones. “Smith,” he said to Gabriel and Winkler, “is my right hand. I don’t cotton to manservants and the like, such as you European fellers have. But for business matters, I’ve got Smith.”

  “Mr. Coop?” someone said.

  Gabriel and Winkler turned. It was a brilliant summer morning, and sunny where they stood, but half of the forecourt was still in shadow. So when Gabriel followed the meek voice, his sun-dazzled eyes convinced him that one of the crouching stone gargoyles that flanked the steps leading up to the castle doors had come to life and was skulking towards them.

  Gabriel’s breath caught. There it was, that feeling he’d had a handful of times before. A sense of the bottom quite falling out of reality, and wonderment and magic gusting in.

  He blinked. His eyes adjusted to the shadows, and he saw, with combined relief and dismay, that it was only a remarkably short gentleman and that the gargoyles by the stair hadn’t moved an inch.

  “This here’s my secretary,” Coop said, “Mr. George Smith.”

  Smith shook their hands. He had a face like an intelligent pug dog, and graying hair parted and combed like a schoolboy’s. He wore a neat suit of flannels and a bowler hat.

  “Come on,” Coop said to Smith. “Let’s take these college boys out to the woods.”

  * * *

  They left the castle behind and tramped through rugged, sun-dappled hills for twenty minutes.

  “Right through here,” Smith called over his shoulder. He led the way up through a dry gully, Gabriel close behind, followed by Winkler and Coop.

  All of a sudden, a figure emerged on the path ahead. A sturdy woman, in a dust-colored walking costume, leather belt, and broad-brimmed straw hat. She was all alone. She strode towards them, a leather satchel swinging from her shoulder. She had a large, bland face, a nose like a drawer knob, and pale, nearly invisible eyebrows over lashless gray eyes. Her cheeks were flushed with exertion or, perhaps, sunburn.

  The men paused to allow her to pass.

  “Fancy meeting anyone out here in this wilderness,” she called.

  British. The world was simply crawling with British tourists. You could be shipwrecked at the farthest reaches of the globe, wearing mere tatters and chomping coconuts, and look up to see one of the queen’s hale subjects striding out of the brush in a safari jacket and a pith helmet.

  “Good morning,” Gabriel said. He lifted his hat. “Pleasant day for a tramp, isn’t it?”

  “Oh yes,” she said in a hearty voice. “Absolutely ripping. Watch out for the flies,” she added over her shoulder. “Horrid little mites. Swarmed like cannibals and made a feast of my apple.”

  She loped out of sight around a turn in the gully.

  “Got to put up some private property signs, Smith,” Mr. Coop said.

  They continued on their way up the path.

  Presently, the gully opened out onto a forest glade filled with wild blueberry bushes and enormous trees.

  The four men paused to mop their brows with handkerchiefs.

  The glade had an enchanted feeling to it. Insects hummed, the air was spicy-sweet with pinesap and wildflowers, and sunlight mottled the mossy ground.

  “The castle woodsman, Herz,” Smith said, “will cut these three trees just here”—he gestured with a small gloved hand—“and in preparation yesterday, he was clearing out the undergrowth. To get at the trunks of the trees, see.”

  “Forgive my impertinence,” Gabriel said, “but why would one cut these trees? They must be at least four hundred years old.” The pine trees, as big around as barrels, rose cathedral-like into the azure sky. Aloft, their boughs bounced in the breeze.

  “Clear the view,” Coop said. He propped his thick, booted leg on a boulder, pulled another green apple from his jacket pocket, and bit it. “I was looking out my study window and this here patch lay directly in my line of sight. Couldn’t see a consarned thing but trees. Damages the mind.”

  “Trees do?” Gabriel said.

  “They just sit there. No energy to them. That’s no way to succeed in life.”

  “Ah.”

  “Through here, then?” Winkler called back to them. He was bustling, black bag in hand, towards the hole in the thicket the woodsman had made. “Shall we proceed? I do not wish to forego luncheon.”

  “I like that man,” Coop said, munching his apple. “Not like a college feller at all. Smith, get out your notebook. I’ve just had a notion for that St. Louis pickle.”

  * * *

  Gabriel followed Winkler into the hole in the thicket, where he found Winkler on his hands and knees.

  Gabriel’s heart sped up a notch. There, as Coop’s telegram had mentioned, was a miniature house with a small door, just high enough for a five-year-old child to pass through. He knelt beside Winkler. “May I?”

  “By all means. I have had my fill of such things.”

  Gabriel pushed aside the tensile brambles that framed the door. The door was made of rough wood planks, and it was soft with decay. It had a small iron handle that felt, as he grasped it, like a toy. He pushed the door inward. Chunks of moss and dirt rained down from the roof, but the door opened. A dank odor of loam and subterranean vegetation swirled out.

  Gabriel gasped.

  A sliver of daylight illuminated a skeleton lying on the floor, just inside the door. Its bones glimmered whitely. Skull and spine were neatly arranged between short leg bones; one femur was missing. The arm bones were crossed over the ribcage, as in a tomb. Little bones, probably toes and fingers, were scattered about like breadcrumbs.

  “What an ingenious hoax,” Winkler said. “The German volk, Professor Penrose, are perhaps the most enterprising of all the European peasants when it comes to such things. They do so want the rest of the world to believe in their fairy stories as much as they do.”

  “That’s a tiny skeleton,” Gabriel said.

  “Ja. A child’s skeleton.”

  “But the head is the size of a grown man’s.”

  “It would have been but a simple matter to replace the child’s skull with an adult’s.”

  “If this is a hoax, you would infer that the house is, what—twenty years old?”

  “Fifty at most.”

  “Then how would you account for the way the roots of that ancient tree have grown quite over the threshold?”

  Winkler paused.

  Gabriel pointed at the tree root in question, trying not to seem smug. Although he was beginning to believe this find was something very, very important, he could not let Winkler know he cared. “That would date the house to, oh, three or four hundred years, would it not?”

  “There are various ways that the roots could have been placed like that, I have no doubt. Let us have a look inside, shall we?” He unbuckled his bag and took out a small gas lantern and a box of ma
tches. Once the lantern was lit, he began to crawl through the door.

  For a few seconds, Gabriel feared Winkler’s girth would not fit. But after a moment of straining, he popped through. Gabriel followed.

  3

  It was a one-room cottage, perhaps twenty by thirty feet. The roof had probably once been thatched, but now nothing was left but ceiling beams woven with brambles, which created a roof of green leaves. Splotches of sunlight fell through the leaves onto the dirt-covered floor. Gabriel made an exploratory probe in the floor with his penknife, revealing rotted floorboards.

  Puzzling. Everything was coated with rot and loam. Everything, that is, except the skeleton. That had been laid out recently.

  “Precisely like the Grimm tale,” Winkler said, holding up the lantern. “Little chairs and a table, and seven kleine beds along the wall there. Observe those small pots and kettles by the fireplace, and spoons and plates”—he lifted a dirt-covered plate from the table—“of pewter. Our charlatans were certainly faithful to the Grimms’ text ‘Schneewittchen’.”

  “The style of the spoons”—Gabriel picked up a begrimed spoon from the table—“is sixteenth century, is it not? I don’t know a great deal about German antiquities, yet I recall seeing a similar design at a castle in Scotland.”

  Winkler brought his lantern close and squinted at the spoon. “The peasants tend to reproduce the same styles for century upon century, making their objects difficult to date. They have not the capacity for originality, you see.” He crawled away. “What have we here?”

  Gabriel looked up. Winkler held the lantern high. The middle ceiling beam glinted behind leafy brambles.

  “Gold,” Gabriel said, and then recited a line from the Grimms’ “Snow White”: “The seven dwarves spent their days mining ore and digging for minerals.”

  “Ach, you are falling under the spell, Penrose.” Winkler moved the lamp along the length of the ceiling beam. Much of it was coated with dirt. But here and there they saw that its surface was carved wooden relief, and flecks of gold leaf and colorful chipped paint still remained.