Read Online Louisa and the Crystal Gazer by Anna Maclean - Free Book Online Page B

was bunched up under her head; a second, which proclaimed in bright embroidered letters SCENIC NIAGARA FALLS , had fallen to the floor. Her face was turned away from us, and there was a sickly sweet odor in the room.
    “Opium!” exclaimed Mr. Barnum in outrage. For all his showmanship and eccentricity he was, underneath it all, quite a conservative person.
    “Opium, indeed,” said Mr. Phips. “It smells like one of the Canton dens in here. Evil habit.”
    I walked to the other side of the chaise longue, so that I might see Mrs. Percy’s face. The use of opium was said to cause strange dreams, and I wished to see if those exotic fantasies played on her features.
    It was a face I would not soon forget. Her eyes were open, staring at the ceiling, and never had I seen eyes so bloodshot. They were painful to behold. There was a strange set to her thin mouth, as if she wished to speak. But no hint of breath made her chest rise or fall; no sigh or mumble stirred her lips. What she saw was not the plaster molds of roses and painted vines overhead, but a vision of eternity. Mrs. Percy was dead. It is so shocking, mortal reader, to expect an amusing hour with a personage and instead to discover them dead on a chaise longue, the smell of opium heavy in the air—
    “Damn, damn, damn!” exclaimed Suzie Dear. I hoped, for the eternal life of Mrs. Percy, that her maid wasn’t correct.
    “Louy, what is it?” called Lizzie from where she still stood next to Sylvia, in the hall.
    “Stay there,” I called back. “Do not come in here.”
    Of course, I had forgotten what it is like to be a younger sister always receiving commands from an elder. Lizzie was in the room before I finished my sentence.
    “Oh! What a strange odor!” Then she saw Mrs. Percy. Her long-fingered, artistic hands shot to her face in horror. I feared that she, like Mrs. Deeds, might swoon, but no, Marmee steeled her daughters better, and Lizzie regained her composure. Instead, Sylvia swooned.
    “Suzie, more water and smelling salts,” I said somewhat impatiently. But Suzie Dear had disappeared.
    “Miss Dear!” I shouted, running into the hall. The maid was nowhere to be seen, and the front door, which had just been opened, fell shut with a groan.

CHAPTER FIVE
The Heart Proves Staunch
    I DO NOT mean this harshly, understanding reader, but I experienced a kind of exasperation with poor Mrs. Percy, that she had not found the means to resist death. She had become an interesting character study, and now here she was, dead, and only just recently.
    “Another one,” said young Constable Cobban, bending over to check the wrist of the prone Mrs. Percy for a pulse, which we all knew he would not find. “Corpses tend to accumulate in your immediate vicinity, Miss Alcott.”
    Constable Cobban of the new Boston Watch and Police, whom we had notified immediately after Suzie Dear’s departure, was, as you may have suspected from that above comment, no stranger to me. We had met the winter before, during the investigation of another untimely death.
    “People will die,” spoke up Sylvia in my defense.
    Constable Cobban grinned. He was a young man with orangish red hair, freckles, and a deplorable taste in suits,which tended to be store-made from bolts of large plaid or bold-striped stuff. He tweaked the pillow under Mrs. Percy’s head as if trying to awaken her, but she remained unmoving, growing colder each moment. Next he examined an empty bottle of gin, the glass fallen on the floor under her hand.
    “What’s this?” he said, his voice deepening with curiosity. He had turned to face a little table next to the chaise longue upon which a box of lucifers rested, and next to them a small pot of dark paste.
    “Opium,” he confirmed, his mouth puckering from the bitterness of the taste, as he had stuck the tip of his little finger into that intriguing pot.
    “That seems to complete the explanation of how she came to be dead in a locked room, doesn’t it?” I