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

absurd in his memorandum book.
    *   *   *
    “I simply must have you at my side this afternoon, Flax,” Mrs. Coop said. “I’ve come down with a sick headache, but I wouldn’t miss Professor Winkler’s gold test for the world. Tighter!”
    “I’m doing my utmost, ma’am,” Ophelia said, straining to cinch Mrs. Coop’s corset laces.
    After luncheon, Mrs. Coop had returned to her cream-and-gold jewel box of a boudoir, high in a turret of the castle, to change into her afternoon gown. She’d been breathless and disheveled, and determined to shrink her waist to a smaller compass.
    Mrs. Coop’s disarray, and her sudden wish to appear pixielike, resulted, Ophelia suspected, from the presence in the castle of either Princess Verushka or Mr. Royall Hunt. Mrs. Coop and Miss Amaryllis had made the acquaintance of these two fashionable personages at some point in the last two weeks’ frenzy of excursions into Baden-Baden.
    “You must,” Mrs. Coop said, “stay by my side with my smelling salts, should I need them, and fetch me glasses of water and whatever else I may need. I am not well, Flax—even Mr. Hunt noted that I’m white as a lily—yet this is perhaps the most thrilling day of my life.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” Ophelia said.
    “Just think! Snow White’s cottage on my own estate. And a dwarf’s bones!”
    “Mm.”
    “Do I hear doubt in your tone, Flax?”
    “Truth be told, ma’am, it is difficult for me to believe that that house belonged to creatures from a storybook.”
    “Difficult to believe?”
    “Well, ma’am, near impossible.”
    Ophelia had performed with P. Q. Putnam’s Traveling Circus for two years, and she’d known a so-called dwarf. He’d been a shrimp, true, but there hadn’t been a thing magical about him. Unless you counted swearing like a sailor and smoking like a house on fire as magic.
    “Of course.” Mrs. Coop sniffed. “I nearly forgot you’re a Yankee.”
    Ophelia held her tongue; she was stepping out of character. It had to be the result of exhaustion. Mrs. Coop and her stepsister, Amaryllis, kept Ophelia on her feet from dawn to dusk, arranging their hair, pressing their clothing, mixing beauty concoctions, and running up and down the spiraling castle stairs fetching things.
    How could anyone past the age of pigtails think Snow White and the seven dwarves had really existed? And it wasn’t only Mrs. Coop, who could be counted upon to be frivolous, who was entertaining the notion. Those two university professors were as well. The younger of the two professors, the tall, handsome, bespectacled one with the upper-crust British accent, looked far too intelligent to be taken in by such hogwash.
    “There,” Ophelia said, tying a seaworthy knot at the end of the corset laces. “That’s as tight as I can get it. Will you be wearing the blue silk, ma’am?”
    “No, no, the tea gown with the lavender stripes.” Mrs. Coop surveyed herself—still in only crinoline, petticoats, and corset—in a tall, gilt-framed mirror. She tipped her head sideways. “Whatever is wrong with this mirror? It’s gone all squat.”
    Mirrors weren’t known for lying. But Mrs. Coop wouldn’t take kindly to that observation.
    “I don’t think this corset is strong enough,” Mrs. Coop went on. “But it’s made of real whalebone, you know. It’s not one of those cheap starched things.”
    Then it had been strong enough for the whale.
    “Hurry up, Flax. Professor Winkler shall be starting soon.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    *   *   *
    “The first item I require,” Professor Winkler said, once everyone had reassembled in the library, “is a small quantity of washing soda from the castle laundry.”
    Ophelia watched from the shadows beside the fireplace. Winkler looked like an elderly walrus and had something of the snake oil salesman about him. But everyone else in the lofty, book-lined chamber—Mrs. Coop, Miss Amaryllis, Princess Verushka, Mr. Hunt, Mr. Coop, and Mr. Smith, even