“Then why are you here?” He glanced over my shoulder. “Brady? What brought the two of you down here? And don’t tell me you thought you’d fancy a stroll on the beach.”
“One of Nanny’s friends thought she might have seen Consuelo walking here,” I said a bit shakily. “Brady and I came to see if we could find her.” I pressed my hand to my mouth. “Oh, but it couldn’t have been Consuelo. It must have been . . .”
Lady Amelia. Lovely, elegant, but not wholly genuine Lady Amelia. Even as I uttered my next question, I knew the answer. “D-did she drown?”
“I’ll find out,” he said, and moved off to confer with his men. He returned within moments. “She didn’t drown,” he said gently. “It doesn’t appear as if she’d been any closer to the water than she is now.”
Brady stepped up beside us and slipped an anchoring arm around my waist. “What you just said, Em. It can’t be right. It couldn’t have been Lady Amelia Mrs. Hanson saw. According to Nanny, the sighting would have been more than two hours ago by now. We saw Lady Amelia at Marble House an hour ago at the most.”
As he spoke, my gaze was drawn to the nearby cattails and rocky, weedy hillocks. Yes, a murder could easily take place here with little chance of anyone seeing. But what could have brought Lady Amelia to this nearly deserted part of the island? There could be only one connection between Lady Amelia and this place: Consuelo.
“You say you saw the victim recently?” Jesse reached into his coat pocket for a pencil and small tablet.
“Y-yes.” I shook my thoughts away. “She was breakfasting with Aunt Alva. But she left quite suddenly, didn’t she, Brady?”
“That’s right. Said she was going for a walk.” Brady glanced out over the calm swell of Sachuest Bay and then down at the lifeless woman. “Some walk. I wonder how she got all the way down here.”
I stepped out of Brady’s embrace. “Jesse . . . if she didn’t drown, how did she die?”
He chewed his lip. “Do you want to see?”
I sucked in a breath and nodded. Still holding my hand, he led me across the sand, skirting the officers still examining the scene. Brady followed close behind us. At Lady Amelia’s side—I couldn’t yet bring myself to think of her as the body—Jesse pointed.
The tangles of her hair had been swept to one side. He spoke a single word. “Strangled.”
I followed the angle of his outstretched finger; the same silk and velvet ribbon that had held her hair up earlier was now wrapped tight around her neck, its two ends dancing gaily in the breeze.
So like Madame Devereaux. Eerily, appallingly similar.
Brady swore.
“The same,” I said, the words stinging like salt in my throat. “Dear heavens, Jesse, don’t you realize what this means? Whoever killed Madame Devereaux also killed Lady Amelia. Clara Parker, and even Detective Dobbs, can be exonerated.”
Brady gave a snort at that second suggestion, but Jesse was already shaking his head. “Hold up there, now. We need more evidence than this. For all we know at this point, this murder was random, or carried out by an imitator or an accomplice.”
“But you already arrested Clara’s so-called accomplice—Anthony Dobbs.” I struggled to keep the anger from my voice. “Neither one of them could have murdered Lady Amelia.”
“As I said, I need more evidence. Clues, a motive—”
At that I cut him off. “I can tell you the motive. It’s because she knew him, Jesse. I believe Lady Amelia was having an affair with the man who murdered Madame Devereaux.” At his skeptical frown, I said, “The rugosa roses . . . she had a sprig in her room—in her jewelry box. Oh, blast, Jesse, you can’t ignore this. You’ve got to—” My grip on my emotions was slipping. Brady set a hand on my arm.
“It’s all right, Em. I’m sure Jesse has no intention of ignoring anything.”
“Then there’s this, too,” I said, suddenly remembering a detail I’d forgotten in the shock of Lady Amelia’s fate. “I’m sure this is merely a coincidence, and I wouldn’t even mention it if . . . I probably shouldn’t mention it, really . . .”
“Emma, as Brady said, I want to know about anything that could possibly have any bearing on this crime.” Jesse held his pencil aloft and waited.
“It’s just that as Brady and I were driving home from Marble House, Winthrop Rutherfurd passed us in his curricle at a runaway pace. He nearly hit us. He was heading north on Bellevue.”
“That’s it?” Jesse looked from me to Brady and back. “A man out driving in his rig?”