The Spook Lights Affair Read Free Page B

behind the lighted ballroom windows as she hurried along the rim of the lower terrace. She made her way to the servant’s entrance, found the door there unlocked. Her sudden entrance and her disheveled appearance brought shocked stares from three members of the kitchen staff.
    “There’s been a terrible accident,” she told them. “One of you fetch Mr. Sutro. Quickly!”
    Her voice sounded as benumbed as her body felt, but the note of command in it was still strong enough to brook no argument. The male member of the staff nodded and hurried out. One of the two women guided Sabina over near the cookstove, where its pulsing heat soon warmed her blood and sent pins and needles tingling through her chilled flesh.
    She realized then that she still held Virginia’s handbag. Impulse led her to unsnap the clasp and reach inside. The usual feminine necessities, and a folded sheet of notepaper that Sabina drew out. She knew what it was even before she spread it open and read the lines written on it in a firm, girlish hand.
    I cannot bear to go on living in misery, facing a hopeless future. Everyone will be better off without me. Good-bye.
    Virginia
    So young, and so foolish!
    Portly and bewhiskered Adolph Sutro appeared just then, with a second, liveried servant in tow. Sabina had been introduced to the mayor briefly when she arrived and he remembered her, though he’d had no idea of her profession until she revealed it as part of her terse explanation of what had happened. As taken aback as he was by her words, and by those in the suicide note she handed him, he wasted no time with frivolous questions but took immediate charge.
    He sent the liveried servant to quietly summon David St. Ives and a doctor Sabina didn’t know named Bowers to the front terrace. “Tell them only that there is an emergency,” he said. “And bring along a brace of hand lanterns.” Then he instructed one of the kitchen women to fetch Sabina’s beaver coat, which she described, and the other to find shoes to replace the ruined slippers. In less than five minutes she was bundled and reshod and almost warm again, only to have Sutro lead her back out into the cold darkness and around to the front where Virginia’s brother and Dr. Bowers waited.
    David St. Ives was grimly incredulous at the news of his sister’s plunge. As Sabina and the three men hurriedly settled into the coach that belonged to the St. Ives family, he said, “Suicide? Virginia? I don’t believe it.”
    “The note is in her handwriting?” Sabina said.
    “Yes, it’s hers. ‘Living in misery … hopeless future … everyone will be better off without me.’ None of that makes any sense. She had everything to live for.”
    “Obviously she didn’t think so. Young girls take life very seriously, Mr. St. Ives. And love as well.”
    “Love? She wasn’t in love with anyone.”
    “Your father believed she might be.”
    “That damned rascal Lucas Whiffing? Nonsense. She was upset at not being allowed to see him, but not despondent over it.”
    “Isn’t it possible she simply slipped and fell?” Mayor Sutro asked Sabina.
    “No, sir. She jumped from the parapet.”
    “You saw this clearly? Fog has a way of distorting what one observes from a distance.”
    “Clearly enough not to be mistaken.”
    “I still don’t believe it.” David St. Ives was glaring at her; she could feel as well as see the intensity of his stare in the lantern light as the coach rattled at a rapid pace along the carriageway. He was an arrogant, vain young man whom Sabina had disliked on their first meeting; his attitude now was even more overbearing and offensive, despite his obvious grief. “You were hired to watch over my sister, Mrs. Carpenter,” he said angrily. “How could you let something like this happen?”
    “I had no way of knowing what she was planning to do. I thought she was intent on meeting someone on the parapet. Lucas Whiffing, perhaps.”
    “Did you speak to her when you saw