Her Dark Curiosity. Megan Shepherd

      5

      Flowers dipped in blood, Joyce’s voice echoed. That’s his mark.

      In a blind panic I stumbled to my feet, screaming for Sharkey. His little face peeked out from the alleyway.

      ‘Come here, boy!’ I cried.

      He took a few shaky steps toward me, and my eyes went to the tracks he left in the snow.

      His paw prints were bloody.

      ‘Sharkey!’ I raced toward him, scooping him up and checking his feet, his legs, his body for cuts, but it wasn’t his blood in the snow, and I set him back down. Whose blood was it? He must have tracked the blood from within the alleyway, and whatever he’d seen or smelled in there now made him shiver and bury his snout in the fold of my arm.

      The light was dark, and I fumbled for a matchbox in my coat pocket. I knew I shouldn’t look, and yet it was impossible not to. I lit a match and took a step deeper into the alleyway, then another, and another, despite my every sense screaming to turn away. The match light caught on a dark pile of rags in the corner, splashed with blood that smelled sharp in the crisp air. A pale hand lay beneath the pile, missing a middle finger, heavily bruised as though it had been trampled.

      I jolted with recognition – the girl who tried to steal my silver buttons not but an hour ago, now trampled and bleeding. Murdered.

      I took in the crime scene in flashes of the flickering match, my mind whirling as I stumbled closer, then away, then closer yet again, my instincts caught in a frantic fight-or-flight, curiosity winning in the struggle. I could only see tears in her men’s clothing, smell the blood. In my delirium, it brought back too many memories from the island.

      A crack of ice sounded behind me. I gasped, afraid I wasn’t alone, and broke into a frantic run with Sharkey at my heels. I raced through the snow, ignoring the burn in my lungs. Sweat poured down my back like oozing fear, and my strangled breath grew shallower the farther I ran, past the row of closed doors, past the dress shop with headless mannequins, into the wider street where lights shone like beacons of safety.

      I collapsed in the doorway of a closed bakery and glanced behind to make sure I wasn’t being followed by anyone other than Sharkey, who trotted up beside me. Visions of the girl thief’s body haunted me. Steam still rising from the body, signaling a fresh kill. The murderer must have been there moments before – the murderer Scotland Yard was so desperately hunting. The man who had killed Daniel Penderwick. Annie Benton. An unnamed victim.

      And now one more.

      The wind blew cold enough to make my teeth ache. A rusty hinge groaned, and I jumped back into a run. It all threatened to overwhelm me – the thief’s body curled in the snow, the bloody flower – and I had to choke back a sob. At last I reached the church on the corner and turned onto Dumbarton Street, where I slowed to a jittery walk. Sharkey trotted beside me, still shivering. I picked him up and wrapped him in the folds of my coat as best I could, mindless of the blood getting on the fabric.

      It wasn’t easy to climb the professor’s garden trellis with the dog tucked inside my coat, but I managed. The window had a keyed lock, but I had broken through that my second night in the house. Hydrochloric acid was easy to get from the chemist’s, and it dissolved iron even in small doses. After that it had been a simple matter of replacing it with a similar lock to which I held the key.

      I eased the window up as quietly as I could and climbed inside. I wiped Sharkey’s paws with a handkerchief before setting him on the rug, then tore off my coat and stripped out of my dress and corset and all the trappings I was made to wear, leaving them pooled in the corner of the room.

      Tomorrow I’d hide the bloody clothes from the maid.

      Tomorrow I’d see things clearly again.

      Today, though, all I could manage was to dress in fresh clothes and grab another coat, then climb back out of my window and return to the front door so the professor wouldn’t suspect anything was wrong. I smoothed my hair back, checking my hands one last time for flecks of blood, and then pressed a trembling finger against the door chime.

      An eternity passed before Mary answered, drying her hands on a cotton towel, her face flushed from the kitchen fire. She had the smell of ginger on her and a streak of rust-colored cinnamon across her apron, but all I could think of was blood, and my stomach lurched.

      ‘Evening, miss.’ She barely glanced at me as she brushed away the streak of cinnamon. I had to force my body to step into the foyer. Close the door behind me. Lock it tight.

      From the dining room came a half-strangled sound like a cat dying, and my nerves flared to life again. I should tell someone about the body. I must. And yet the police would have certainly found her by now. If I said anything, there would be questions: why was I in such a rough neighborhood, not at tea with Lucy where I belonged …

      Mary sighed as another mechanical shriek came from the dining room. ‘It’s that clock of his,’ she whispered. ‘Broke this morning while you were out, and he’s gotten it into his head to fix it himself.’ Another strangled cry of the wood bird sounded. ‘Maybe you can convince him to take it to the clockmaker.’ She sniffed the air suddenly. ‘The gingerbread!’

      As she fled to the kitchen, I undid the buttons of my coat, glancing up the stairs toward my bedroom where the little dog was hidden from the world along with the bloodstained coat. My fingers felt stiff, my limbs like wood. I entered the dining room like a ghost, and I must have looked the same, but the professor was so occupied by the broken clock that he didn’t do more than glance at me as I sank onto one of the straight-backed dining chairs at the table.

      I wanted to rest my head in my hands. I wanted to tell him everything.

      ‘Blast these tiny parts,’ he muttered, holding up a spring no larger than his fingernail. ‘They were made for nimbler fingers.’

      The wooden clock sat upright on the table, its insides laid out as the professor performed his mechanical autopsy. He hadn’t practiced surgery in over a decade, but his skill was apparent in the way he cataloged the clock’s parts, testing each one methodically for faults. I kept my hands clasped under the table, my mind still too numb for words.

      Mary brought out a plate of gingerbread cut into star shapes, warning us not to eat too many and ruin our appetites, though that hardly stopped the professor. I couldn’t yet face returning to my room, to the dog who had trod in a dead girl’s blood, and to the stains on my coat. Besides, watching the professor work calmed me. He was careful and attentive, but he paused for bites of cake. So unlike my father, who had been so serious. So unlike me, too.

      I stayed up quite late to avoid the secrets stashed in my bedroom, long after Mary left for the day and the professor retired to bed. Then, by the light of a lantern, I worked on the clock myself, using an old book of mechanics to repair the broken gears that were too small for the professor’s arthritic old fingers. At last I replaced the final screw and closed the clock’s wooden door. When the professor woke in the morning, it would be to the god-awful squawk of that blasted bird he loved so much. It wasn’t much to repay his kindness, but it