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

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 matches. 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

    I t 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.
    “We shall have this beam and the skeleton removed and carried to the castle,” Winkler said, “and clean and inspect them after luncheon. It must be twelve o’clock already.”
    “If the images on this beam are still intact,” Gabriel said, “they could provide clues to the mystery of this cottage.”
    It was an effort to sound disinterested. His secret life’s obsession was to compile a collection of relics that