Louisa and the Missing Heiress by Anna Maclean

days in a row. Them nobs should stay at home. . . .”
    “Thank you,” I said. “If you need a winter coat, you can get one at the charity house next to Trinity Church. I’ll make sure there is one there for you.”
    “The young woman’s? That fur collar looked warm.”
    “Perhaps,” I said. “I’ll have to ask her family.”
    One part of the mystery had offered itself up to possible answers: the how of Dot’s death. It was too soon, I felt, to think about the next question: Why? The why would, of course, lead to who, and that part of the mystery must be approached cautiously, slowly, gravely.
    But one other question taunted me. Dot, as a girl, had often remarked that home and hearth, not adventure, were her joy and she had spent her entire honeymoon year traveling, as fashion dictated, and, I suspected, Mother Brownly required. Surely Dot had grown sufficiently weary of the sight of ship and sea! So what had she been doing at the harbor in the first place?

CHAPTER SIX
    A Mother Mourns
    “ABBA, IT WAS NOT an accident,” I said, hanging my coat and hat on the waiting hooks by the front door. My mother was on her hands and knees wiping away sticky biscuit crumbs and drops of honey-sweetened milk from the bare wood floor of the hall.
    “Dot’s death was not an accident,” I repeated. The words tasted strange, like burned onions, bitter and heavy on the tongue.
    “Is that what the doctor said at the postmortem? Hand me that bucket, Louy. What is it about arrowroot biscuits? I swear they could use them to glue bricks together. Now, tell me about Dot.” Abba continued scrubbing the floor, well used to the necessity of blending manual labor with domestic conversation to conserve precious time.
    I, heedless of my gown, got down on my hands and knees and started wiping dry with a towel those areas my mother had just scrubbed.
    “He didn’t say it in so many words,” I said. “But that was the gist of his deductions. Dot was already dead when she was thrown into the river. Some crumbs over there, Abba. No, I can reach them.” I scraped at the sticky drops with my thumbnail. “There were bruises at the throat, a wound on the head, and no water in the lungs or sinuses. Oh, Abba, you should have seen Dot—Dot’s corpse—there on the marble table. . . .”
    “Poor child.” Abba sat back on her heels and wiped her forehead, and that one phrase, intoned like a prayer, included Dot and me as well, as I had spent the morning studying the result of violent death.
    “What poor child? Where have you been, Louy?” My father, tall, silver-haired, and still handsome despite his fiftysome years, came out of his study and hooked his thumbs behind his suspenders. His black trousers bagged at the knees, the elbows of his jacket had worn through, and he had forgotten to shine his boots. Yet still he maintained the aura of an Olympian, albeit a down-at-the-heels deity, especially when viewed from floor level, where Abba and I still searched for crumbs. Father did as well as a philosopher can in a money-loving world, but one could never describe his appearance as prosperous.
    I smiled up at him, glad to have him safely home again. We all brooded about Father, about whether he had remembered to eat, to sleep, to wear a clean shirt collar.
    I felt warm when he came home, but I felt a reserve with him that I did not with my mother. Perhaps because he often called me his topsy-turvy Louisa in a tone of voice that indicated doubt in my ability to amount to anything; perhaps it was because I could not completely be myself with him but had to hide some of that intellect, that ambition, that was all my own, for the sake of domestic peace. I had learned this difficult lesson at an early age. Yet I loved him, and knew that anything real I would write would contain elements of him.
    “Your father has been cheated once again.” Abba sighed. “Promised ten dollars, and paid one.”
    “Promises have been broken,” Father agreed.
    The