Miss Temple gazed up at the woman—older, taller, stronger, in her own home—with the clear confidence of an inquisitor not to be trifled with. She set down her knife and fork, and indicated the empty chair opposite her. Mrs. Daube sank into it with a grudging sniff.
“Karthe does not take to strangers, much less those that walk about looking like the devil himself.”
“How long after Chang arrived did the Doctor—”
“And then came the murders—of course men from the town went looking, even your other friend, the foreign Doctor.”
“He is a surgeon, to be precise, in the Macklenburg Navy. Where is the Doctor now?”
“I told you—he joined the party of men to search. I'm sure I don't know what's taken them so long to return.”
“But where did they go—to the train?”
Mrs. Daube snorted at this ridiculous suggestion.
“The mountains, of course. Dangerous any time of year, and even more so after winter, when what beasts that have survived are ravenous.”
“Beasts?”
“Wolves, my dear—our hills are full of them.”
Miss Temple was appalled at two such violently complementary thoughts—the missing men and a propensity for wolves—existing so placidly next to one another in the woman's mind.
“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Daube, but you seem to be saying that Doctor Svenson left Karthe with a party of men, traveling into the wolf-ridden mountains, and has failed to return. Is no one worried? Surely the missing townsmen have families.”
“No one tells me,” snapped Mrs. Daube sullenly. “Merely a poor widow, no one cares for an old woman—”
“But who would know where they went?”
“Anyone else in Karthe! Even Franck,” the woman huffed. “Not that he's breathed a word to me, though one would only think, after my generosity—”
“Did either of you mention this to Mrs. Dujong?”
“How am I expected to know that?” she snapped, but then grinned with poorly hidden relish. “But I can guess how the likes of him would enjoy frightening her with stories.”
Miss Temple shut her eyes, imagining how news of the Doctor's vanishing must have been taken by Elöise.
“My goodness, yes,” Mrs. Daube went on, “ever since the first strangers—and then your man Chang—”
“Wait—what first strangers? Do you mean Mr. Olsteen and his fellows—or someone else?”
“The Flaming Star is extremely popular with travelers of all sorts—”
“What travelers? From the north like us?”
“I'm sure I do not know,” the woman whispered, “that is the very mystery of it.” She leaned over the table with a conspiratorial leer that revealed the absence of an upper bicuspid. “A boy—the same that died—came running from the livery to say a room would be wanted, the finest we had. But then the fool ran on before we knew for who or how many. Every effort was made, rooms cleaned and food prepared— such expense!—only to have not a single soul appear! And then your man Chang arrived—not from the stables, for he had no horse—and the next day, before I could switch that lying horse groom raw, I was told both he and his shiftless father had been killed!”
“But … you don't actually believe that wolves, driven down from the hills, could have stalked into the streets of this village?”
Mrs. Daube, apparently revived for having voiced her pent-up discontent, took it upon herself to dunk a piece of bread into the turnips and spoke through her chewing.
“It has not happened since my grandmother's time, but such a dreadful thing is possible. Indeed, my dear, whatever else but wolves could explain it?”
TWO MINUTES later, the sharp knife in her hand, Miss Temple again strode down the main road of Karthe. The air was cold—she could see her breath—and she regretted not having a wrap, impulsively refusing the musty brown cloak offered by Mrs. Daube (ingrained as she was to reject any brown garment out of hand). The moon had dropped closer to the shadowed hills, but still shone bright. She felt sure Elöise would have sought the murdered stable boy's hut, and all too soon Miss Temple found herself, unsettled, at its door—no longer hanging open, a sliver of yellow light winking out where it met the floor.
The door was latched from within and would not open. Miss Temple knocked—the noise absurdly loud in the night. There was no answer. She knocked again, and then whispered sharply, “Elöise! It is Miss Temple.” She sighed. “It is Celeste!”
There was still no answer. She pulled on the handle with no more success than before.
“Mr. Olsteen! Franck! I insist that you open this door!”
She was getting chilled. She rapped on the window shutters, but could not pry them apart. Miss Temple stalked to a narrow passage that ran between the cottage and the stone wall of its neighbor, straight through to the rear of the house. She swallowed. Was it likely that Elöise had gone instead to the stables? Where were the two men? Had they done something to Elöise, luring her to such an isolated place? Or was it someone else entirely in the house? Someone with a corpselike, ravaged face?
She took another breath and entered the passage, slipping from the moonlight like a ghost, her feet rustling through grass thick with dew, wetting her dress and swatting at her ankles. This wall held no windows, and she heard nothing from inside the house as she went. Miss Temple made sure of her grip on the knife and slowly, like a drop of grudging honey into a cup of tea, leaned around the rear corner.
A waft of evening wind nearly smothered her with the fumes of indigo clay.
She swallowed, throat burning and eyes blinking tears, but forced herself to look once more. Behind the cottage was a patch of grass strewn with an odd assortment of wooden hutches—abandoned now but once housing chickens or rabbits—all brightly illuminated by a square of yellow light thrown from the house, from the very window she had peered through in the rearmost room, its frame and glass now fully shattered, as if by a brutal series of kicks. Miss Temple studied the snapped remnants of the panes that dotted the window's edge like a sailor's meager teeth, and realized they were bent back into the room. The force to smash the window had come from outside.
She crept closer. The window was too high to see through—but there had to be a rear door if there was a yard. She padded past the window and found it behind the hutches, made of hammered-together planking and hanging feebly from a pair of rusted hinges. Her first pull on the handle told her it was held by a chain from within, which made sense—if the door was open, why would anyone kick in the window?
Reasoning that between rattling the chain and calling out for Elöise at the front door she had already alerted anyone inside as to her presence, Miss Temple noisily dragged one of the hutches over to the window, gingerly tested its strength with one foot, and then carefully climbed up. From this height she could just see over the battered sill. On the floor lay Franck, curled away from her on his side. Set down in the center of the room was a lantern, its bright beams glittering the shards that covered the floor.
More glass stuck out in brittle needles across the length of the sill—she could not possibly climb through without injuring herself. She exhaled, happy for a good excuse not to ruin her dress, and then, remembering her first visit, looked down at the center of the frame. A dark, sticky stain had soaked into the wood. She sniffed at it and was rewarded with the loathsome mechanical odor of indigo clay. But Miss Temple frowned and sniffed again, shutting her eyes to concentrate—salt… and iron. She opened her eyes and grimaced. Mixed into the noxious blue fluid was blood.
MISS TEMPLE leapt off the hutch and strode back to the rickety door. With a satisfying thrust she shoved the knife blade between the planking and the frame and tugged upwards, catching the chain. She jerked it upwards again, exclaiming with irritation as a sliver of wood caught on her hand, and dislodged the chain from its post. In an instant she stood at the room's threshold, holding her nose with one hand and licking a bead of blood from the other. The man on the floor was quite dead. Glass crunching beneath her boots, Miss Temple moved cautiously into the middle room, stacked with furniture, aware that it afforded ample nooks for concealment and ambush. She did her best to peer underneath along the floor, but found her attention taken by details she'd not noticed before—heaped clothing, a box of battered toys, a folded Sunday jacket, shoes. With an uncomfortable swallow she went on to the final room—darkest, being farthest from the lantern—which remained as empty as ever. Though it gave her no pleasure, she returned to the body.