“Explains the bodies, too,” said Andy, stepping further away
from the door. “Been a while since we’ve had a homicidal Cinderella. But it
happens.”
“Unfortunately, yes.” Being Cinderella in the most
traditional sense means taking endless servings of shit with a smile on your
face and a song on your lips. It means believing that the world is an
intrinsically good place, and that you are an intrinsically good person, while
spending every day in squalor and suffering. Some Cinderellas rise above it and
become the inspirational platitudes who get immortalized in fairy tales. They’re
triumphs of the narrative, people who are more story than self. Those are the
rare ones. More commit suicide, slitting their wrists in bathtubs full of
water—because even in death, your average Cinderella is dedicated to keeping
things neat—or drinking nightcaps made from hemlock and bleach.
And some, a rare few, decide that they’ve had enough. It’s
easy for a girl who works in the kitchen to get her hands on a carving knife,
and there are a surprising number of common household poisons that won’t change
the flavor of food. A Cinderella who decides to take the story into her own
hands can do an awful lot of damage.
An awful lot of damage had certainly been done here.
There were three bodies, all female, one older than the
others, if clothing and size could be believed. The older woman was sitting in
an armchair with a good angle on the television, a TV tray on her lap with a
plate of moldy, half-eaten food. This Cinderella hadn’t bothered cleaning up
after herself. The two smaller figures were together on the couch, with
standing wooden trays in front of them. All three women had been dead for quite
some time, and while it had taken the human neighbors a while to catch on, the
neighborhood flies had been much quicker on the draw. The faces of all three
bodies boiled with maggots, their fat white bodies glistening in the light.
“If our Cinderella did this, she’s got a good head start on
us by now,” said Jeff. “She could be anywhere.”
“If our Cinderella did this, we’re finished,” I said. “I
won’t say that these women would have deserved to die under normal
circumstances, but if they pushed a five-ten-a into going homicidal, they
probably did something unforgivable. She’s already paid for this crime in
advance.”
Footsteps behind me announced the return of our youngest
team member. I turned to see Demi standing in the doorway, wiping her mouth
with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry,” she said, before any of us could say
anything. “All the houses on this block look alike. I didn’t realize I knew
these people until I saw the living room, and then I realized that if the
Marlowes were dead, that meant Heather and Emily were dead, and that’s just not
fair. Not after everything else they’ve been through.”
I frowned. “What do you mean, that meant
Heather
was
dead? Heather’s the one who fits the five-ten-a profile. She’s our Cinderella.
Wicked stepmother, two wicked stepsisters …”
“But she doesn’t have two stepsisters anymore,” said Demi.
Jeff put his hand up. “Hang on. Demi, what do you mean,
‘after everything else they’ve been through’? Are you talking about Michael
Marlowe’s death?”
“No. I mean, yes, but not exactly.” Demi stole a glance at
the couch, blanched, and looked away again. “Heather
used
to have two
stepsisters, until Jamie disappeared two years ago. It was all over the school.
That was my senior year—she was a year behind me, and we were in band together.
They never did find her.”
“Wait.” I looked at the bodies again. One adult, two teens.
“Jamie would have to have been one of Christina’s biological daughters. Jeff,
are there any variations with just
one
Wicked Stepsister?”
“A few,” he said slowly, “but they all have other
conditions. This setup is pure Western Cinderella, which is the strongest form
of the narrative in the modern American psyche. I don’t think you could pull
off a strict five-ten-a with only one Wicked Stepsister.”
“Jamie and Emily weren’t wicked to Heather,” protested Demi.
“They actually seemed to like her okay. Heather liked clothes and boys, which
meant she had something in common with Jamie, and Emily liked being left alone
to read. I think she was grateful to have someone to distract her sister once
in a while.”
I turned to look at the scene in front of me one more time,
trying to push away my preconceptions, all the little tropes and touches that
came with being absolutely sure of the fairy tale trying to unfold around me.
Three bodies: a woman and her two daughters. All were dressed in equally nice
clothing—not too fancy, but not shabby, either—none of the rags and tatters
that we expected from a Cinderella. The plates of food were too maggot-eaten
and decayed for me to tell what they had originally contained, but they all
looked equally full. No one was getting shorted or denied her fair portion.
“Demi, you said you’d been here before,” I said. “Where are
the bedrooms?”
“Down the hall,” Demi said. “Why?”
“Just a thought. Andy, you and Demi stay here, start
photographing the scene. Jeff, you’re with me.” I gestured for the wiry
archivist to follow as I started in the direction Demi had indicated.
My team has been working with me for long enough that no one
questioned my instructions. Jeff fell in, and together we walked out of the
living room, into the part of the house that had been touched only by dust, and
not yet by decay. Behind us, the whir of Andy’s camera started up. He’d
photograph everything, even the things that never deserved to be recorded on
film, because you never knew what a photograph might reveal that the eye would
miss. His pictures would help as we began the hard task of figuring out what
actually happened.
I hate cases like these, where we wind up taking over for
the police instead of making it so that the police never have to get involved
at all. The narrative was definitely at work here—I could smell it, under the
reek of rotting human flesh—but I couldn’t see the shape of it. Not clearly,
not yet.
But I would. Jeff beside me, I walked on.
It was a good-sized house: big enough that all three girls
had been able to have their own rooms, rather than being forced to share. But
being big enough didn’t always mean anything—I’ve been in mansions where the
Cinderellas were forced into repurposed pantries or the back of laundry rooms.
There was none of that here. Heather’s room was just as
large as Emily and Jamie’s rooms, and was decorated with the same mixture of
nostalgia and rebellion. They were all teenagers, and they had their own ideas
about appropriate décor, but I couldn’t look at Heather’s room and honestly say
that she had been in any way neglected. If anything, she’d been a little bit
spoiled. They all had.
Jamie’s room was like something out of a model home.
Everything was put away. The clothes were folded and the bed was made … and
there was a thin layer of dust over the whole place, like it had been closed
off and left as a memorial to a girl who was never coming home. I stood there
looking at it for a long while, thoughtful and a little sad. Whatever happened
to Jamie, she lost her home and family, and they lost her. That was as much as
a tragedy as what was being documented in the living room right now.
A hand touched my elbow. I turned to see Jeff standing
there, frowning. “I think I may have found something,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. I closed Jamie’s bedroom door behind me as I
turned to follow him. Let her shrine endure for just a little longer. The
cleaners and the estate sales and the realtors would tear it down soon enough.
That’s what happens to all our private family churches, eventually. The real
world can’t let them stay.
Jeff led me to the door at the end of the hall: the master
bedroom. Christina had apparently never redecorated after Michael’s death.
There were still little touches that clearly indicated the involvement of
another person. They were small—a lamp here, a bedside table there—and that was
what made me believe that she had never truly moved on from her husband’s loss.
Unlike most women who got pulled into the Cinderella stories of their
stepdaughters, she had truly loved him. The narrative should never have been
able to find a foothold here.
“Smell that?” Jeff asked.
I sniffed the air. This far from the living room, the smell
of decay was virtually absent, and I was able to pick up a faint, lingering
sweetness. “Perfume?” I guessed.
“Mmm-hmm.” Jeff walked to the dresser, where he picked up a
bottle. “She seems to have been devoted to a specific brand—Blue Wishes. It has
a very distinctive scent. Neither of the girls would have been likely to wear
this. It’s too old for them. They would have thought of it as ‘mom perfume,’
and steered clear.”
“All right,” I said. “So a woman’s bedroom smells like her
perfume. Is that so unusual? I think most women’s bedrooms probably smell like
their perfume.”
“Does yours?” asked Jeff.
I raised an eyebrow. “No,” I said. “My bedroom smells like
apples and snow. Thanks for asking.” He had the decency to redden. “Now what is
it that you wanted to show me in here?”
“Come on.” He gestured for me to follow him again, this time
to the closet on the far side of the room. It was big—bigger than the bedrooms
I’ve seen some Cinderellas forced into—with shutter-style doors that allowed
the clothes inside to “breathe” even when closed politely away from the public
eye. The shutter on the left was standing open. Jeff moved to stand beside it,
gesturing for me to take a look inside.
A small nest of bedding and pillows had been created on the
floor of the closet, incorporating clothes pulled down from the nearest
hangers. The smell of Christina’s Blue Wishes perfume pervaded the air,
rendered strong and cloying by the confined space. I pulled my head out of the
closet, giving Jeff a curious look.
He shook his head. “She’s been sleeping in there for at
least a week; maybe longer, if she hasn’t been dousing herself in that perfume.
She might have been. There are dirt stains on the pillows, and there’s blood
smeared on the sheets. I don’t think she was being allowed to shower.”
I looked at him for a moment, rolling this new information
over in my head as I tried to make sense of it. “So our prospective Cinderella
is one of the bodies, and our likely Wicked Stepmother was being held prisoner
in her own home. Okay … why?”
“I don’t know,” said Jeff, looking disturbed. “But I think
we need to get Sloane over here. Something’s missing, and she has a perspective
that none us can actually share.”
I nodded slowly. “All right,” I said. “I’ll call the
office.”
The cleanup team arrived about twenty minutes later and
boiled out of their van with unhappy expressions on their faces that had
nothing to do with the murder scene they were about to start sanitizing. The
explanation for their unhappiness climbed out of the back of the van after them
and sauntered across the lawn, somehow managing to look like she was clomping
down a runway when she was actually walking on muddy grass while wearing
platform heels. Her mouth was set in a line of firm disapproval. Sloane’s eyes
narrowed as she considered the front of the house.
The rest of us were waiting on the porch, as much to get
away from the smell as to meet her. Jeff straightened, saying, “Ah, Sloane—”
“Can it, cobbler,” she snarled, and clomped right on past
him, into the death-scented living room.
Slowly—and in my case at least, afraid of the explosion that
was almost sure to follow—the four of us leaned around and looked through the
open door. Sloane was standing in the center of the living room, her arms
hanging loosely at her sides, considering the scene. She was moving her head in
small, birdlike jerks, taking in one thing after another. Finally, she turned
and clomped toward the larger of the three bodies, stopping in front of what
had once been Christina Marlowe. Bending close, she took a deep breath.
Demi gagged beside me, clapping a hand over her mouth and
turning away. I put a hand on her back, hopefully providing a little comfort,
but I didn’t try to get her to turn back around. I had a pretty decent idea of
what was about to happen, and it wasn’t anything that Demi needed to see.
Sloane picked up the dead woman’s spoon, lying on the tray
next to her curled, maggot-covered fingers, and shoved it through the crust of
mold that had formed on her plate, scooping up a healthy portion of whatever
Christina had been eating right before she died. Sloane raised the spoon,
studying its contents, which continued to pulse a little as the maggots she had
collected along with her target writhed in dismay. Then she brought it closer
to her face, sniffing once again.
Dropping the spoon back onto the plate, Sloane turned and
clomped back to the doorway. “These people were poisoned,” she said. “That’s the
good news.”
“How is that good news?” demanded Andy. “I don’t know if you
noticed, but three people are dead in there.”
Sloane waved her hand dismissively. “People die every day.
Somebody died while you were thinking of that pithy comeback. Dying is amateur
hour.”
“If that’s the good news, what’s the bad news?” I asked,
trying to keep us on track—or at least keep us from turning on each other.
Sloane was in a clompy mood, and that meant her temper, never the most reliable
of things, was on a hair trigger.
“The killer used cyanide mixed with applesauce. You can’t
really tell unless you break through the gunk that’s growing on the plates, but
all that’s
in
there is applesauce.” Sloane shook her head. “This was a
fairy tale murder. Are we looking at a five-ten-a?”
“We would be, except that our potential Cinderella is one of
the bodies in there. Unless this was a murder-suicide, she didn’t do it. And
there’s more.” I took my hand off Demi’s back, folding my arms in front of my
chest. “The stepmother was sleeping in her closet. For at least a week,
according to Jeff; maybe longer.”