Femme Fatale by Carole Nelson Douglas Read Free Book Online Page A

looked up, as if surprised to find that we were still there and then further startled to see us on our feet. Clearly she had heard nothing for the past few minutes.
    “Something has happened,” Godfrey said.
    She looked around, as if seeking an explanation. Her eye fellon the piano top. “That old violin that was left with me. It is a Guarneri. I had no idea.”
    “Guarneri? What is a Guarneri?” Godfrey glanced at the instrument in its shabby case with true incomprehension. “I didn’t know you had a violin. Did it arrive today? With that Holmes fellow? Is that it?”
    His tone had definitely become as suspicious as mine would have been when discussing Sherlock Holmes.
    While I was pleased to see Godfrey extending the man some of the same animosity I felt toward him, I could not see even he falsely accused.
    “The violin is Irene’s,” I explained. “She’d kept it at the bottom of that old trunk all these years. She merely showed it to Mr. Holmes, who being the expert he is on all minutiae, immediately declared it an apparently rare and valuable Guarneri.”
    “So it is worth something?” Godfrey asked.
    “I suspect a great deal, when it is restored.”
    His regard fixed on Irene again. “That is not cause for this. Irene adores finding lost treasures. She is as bad as a nine-year-old in her fever to find things. She should be pounding celebratory mazurkas into those old keys, not mooning over a telegram from Nellie Bly.” He moved toward his wife. “I must read this for myself.”
    She snatched it away, not playfully as he had earlier, but with a gesture of unconsidered protectiveness.
    “Irene!” I admonished.
    I could not help it. The governess instinct becomes ingrained, even though I only held such positions for a year or two. At the moment, my friend and mentor was acting like a sullen child. Although as a former operatic diva she had her share of temperament, this was not a display of that. This was a worrisome state of shock.
    Godfrey glanced at me, then lowered his tone into a soothingone. “Irene, we can’t . . . help you if you won’t share the contents of the message that has so upset you. Please.”
    At that, the voice of reason, and I must say that Godfrey before the bar was always the most attractive representative of the Voice of Reason in all the Inns of Court, Irene literally shook off her strange state.
    “Oh,” she said, massaging one temple with her free hand. “I think it must be a bit of mischief engineered by that imp of international interference, Pink.” She held the paper out to Godfrey with a rueful smile. “Forgive me, but you will see that the contents are nonsensical enough to strike Casanova mute.”
    He said nothing as he held the message under the milk-glass globe of the lamp to read.
    He still said nothing.
    Now he simply stood there, frowning down at the paper and reading what was obviously only two or three lines over and over.
    Had two such brilliant and independent adults ever behaved so much like schoolroom ninnies? I marched over to Godfrey, snatched the impertinent paper, and read it.
    Read it again.
    Stared at the typed words as I had once regarded my own work when I had become one of the first typewriter-girls in London.
    Well.
    What to say?
    Something.
    Someone must.
    I would.
    “Irene, this . . . communication—it says that Pink believes that someone is trying to murder your mother. A shocking revelation indeed. Well, if anyone is equipped to deal with such an atrocious situation, who else would it be but a former Pinkerton inquiry agent like yourself?”
    “Who else indeed, Nell? Except that I don’t have a mother. I have never been known to have a mother . . . to murder, or not.”
    “Oh, Irene! Please! Everyone has a mother.”
    “You don’t.”
    “I did. She died at my birth. I definitely had one, as she had me.”
    “Well, I don’t,” Irene declared with rising animation, as if released from a stage hypnotist’s spell. “I have never