Pale Painter Ch. 06

He pulled away and rolled over to rest beside his wife, panting, but content. For a moment, he had forgotten all of his troubles.

Erdgar even wondered if Danetta would become pregnant again.

***

They were agents of the Royal Investigators, also called the Invests, for short. It was the late afternoon when they arrived in three carriages, each one bearing the royal family crest. Rosanda watched them from the large window of her guest room, which was a good distance up. The first ones to exit were groups of men in simple, yet commanding uniforms. Then, there was a woman with dark chocolate colored skin, wearing an austere gray gown and a brown cloak.

Rosanda couldn't make out her features, but she imagined she was probably an immigrant, or a child of an immigrant. If she was with this group of men, then she was probably employed at the palace, which meant she was doing very well.

And finally, someone else emerged. He was the only one to leave the third carriage. He apparently had one all to himself. It was either the king or the prince. She couldn't quite figure out which man it was, because they were so similar. It didn't matter who it was, though. Her heart still fell into her belly when she saw him. Why would either of them be here? For a king or a prince to show up at an investigation was ridiculous. They had more important things to do.

Rosanda watched them enter the keep, wondering when she would be called for an interview. They'd probably examine the dungeon first. That might take a while. Rosanda didn't want to seek them out. What if she ended up in a private moment with the prince or king?

It was definitely best to wait in her guest room. She tried to engage her mind with sketches and reading, but she ended up holding her little brother's pomander, his favorite good luck charm, to her lips and weeping.

***

Agent Esther Urvine didn't understand why His Majesty, the King was coming along for this trip. Maybe he was genuinely curious about this issue. The Duke's letter was quite miserable, yet urgent. He even sketched out a crude floor plan of the dungeon.

For an aristocrat to actually ask the Invests to look into a crime that he could be suspected of ... how ... interesting? Similar things had happened before. It wasn't impossible for the Duke to be guilty.

Her fingers tightened over the handles of her bag. She allowed the king to lead her while she led the men into the keep. It was a lovely place. It was a shame to know that children might have been murdered here.

Well, that was a shame no matter the location, really.

She patted her close-cropped, black hair, even though there wasn't much to pat. It was a habit from her youth. She once had wild, tight curls floating all about her head. This career, however, demanded a more severe look.

When everyone was in the grand foyer, two people politely greeted them. One was a short woman with strangely pretty cyan eyes. The other person was a man with an unfortunately scarred face. Esther had to remind herself not to stare. There were polite introductions all around, and then Esther took command.

"I want all four of the witnesses in separate rooms, and that includes Your Graces, unfortunately."

Thank goodness the couple was so willing to cooperate. Soon, all the witnesses were located and put in separate bedrooms. One of them, an albino named Rosanda Lunai, was already in her room. That made things even easier. Esther ordered that they should each be interviewed while she and a few of the men went down into the dungeon. As for the king, well, he got to lounge about in a drawing room while the housekeeper fussed over him.

"What's your name?" His Majesty asked with a friendly smile.

A blush, and the woman said, "Oh, my name's Tilly. It's an honor to meet you, Your Majesty, a great honor! My husband will be so jealous when I tell him who I got to serve today!" She was incredibly eager to make sure his seat was cozy, check the warmth of his tea, and generally hang around to make sure she wasn't missing when he needed something.

Esther and her men took oil lamps down into the dungeon. It really was an unpleasant place, which made sense. It was a fucking dungeon, after all.

They noted the large bed, which looked fairly recently made, considering this dungeon was so old, and there hadn't been any legally obtained prisoners in centuries. She also noted, however, that while it was recently made, it wasn't so recent that she could assume it was made within, say, a month or so. Time had certainly had its way with it.

One of her men held up two lamps so that another man could use their light as he took notes on a pad of paper. Esther went down to the cells. She found more fairly contemporary beds in the cells, and that was also disturbing. When she was at the last cell, her light revealed to her some bones on a bed. Esther broke the lock on the bars and moved closer to the bed. The bed smelled worse than the bones ever could have.

She dug into her bag and pulled out a pair of tongs. She used them to carefully lift a few bones up only an inch or so at a time. She wasn't a pathologist, or even an anatomist, but she was pretty fucking sure these were the bones of a child, not even a teenager, just a child.

Esther wrapped her tongs up in a cloth and put them in a side pocket of her bag, away from the other utensils. Then she left the cells and went back to where the large bed was. "There are bones in the last cell," she told the men, making her way to the torture chamber. As expected, there were some old looking implements of violence, but what had her grinding her teeth was an amount of objects hung on a display board. They seemed to belong to children.

It was possible that all of these objects belonged to a single person, who could have been that skeleton in the cells. It was more likely, however, that there had been several children. There were multiple beds set out. Why go to the trouble of putting a bed in each cell if the culprit was going to only work with one victim at a time?

But, where would one hide multiple bodies?

Esther spent more time looking around the dungeon as her men packed up the skeleton. She couldn't find any room or hole that had any sign of storing dead bodies. She couldn't find any levers, buttons, or cords that could open something up. There were no trapdoors, and obviously no windows. The only exit was also the entrance to the dungeon. Cremating the bodies wasn't an option. There was no proper ventilation in the dungeon.

She gave an order to have the trophies and torture devices packed away, because they were evidence. Then she left the dungeon and went to the guest rooms, noting that it had gotten much darker. It was practically night.

A man went to her, holding a few papers of notes. "I've finished interviewing the locksmith."

Esther praised him and took the notes from him. Her dark eyes scanned the questions he asked, and each answer given. "Alright, pack these away. Where's the painter's room?"

The man pointed her in the correct direction. Esther thanked him and returned the papers to him. Then she went off to find the door to the woman's room. The man outside the door was holding his notes, but there was a worried frown on his face. "I've finished the interview, but there's a problem."

"What is it?"

"Well, she has a piece of evidence, a small pomander that belonged to her brother. He went missing years ago, you see. She won't give it up. She says it's hers and we can't take it away from her."

A smooth, but tired exhale came from the woman. She understood why the painter would want to keep the pomander, but it was officially evidence from a crime scene. Esther wanted to force it out of her hands, but she didn't want to do anything particularly traumatic. The poor woman was more than likely desolate, and rightfully so.

Very politely, Esther knocked on the door, and she called out, "Good evening, this is Agent Esther Urvine. I'm in charge of the investigation here."

A moment of silence.

"Isn't this Miss Lunai? Hello? Can you hear me?"

"I'm not giving it up! It's all I have of him!"

Esther let her forehead tap the door. Her eyes screwed shut. "The best way to have closure is to give us the evidence. We'll return it once the case is closed."

Again, there was silence.

Then the door opened.

Esther opened her eyes and saw an extremely pale woman with a short stature. She seemed even smaller to Esther, since Esther was fairly tall. Behind her round glasses, Rosanda Lunai's eyes were puffy and shiny from obvious crying. She held up a silver pomander, and she asked, "Are you certain? I'll have it when all this is over, right?"

"It's almost a guarantee," Esther said, reaching out for the pomander. "If you don't, you could always sue us."

Miss Lunai made a great sniff, and then she put the pomander in Esther's palm.

"Thank you." Esther curtsied to her, and she gave a polite goodbye. Then she looked over the notes of Miss Lunai's interview.

Then she made her way to the private bedchambers of the lord and lady of the lands. She paused at a door that had beautiful butterflies carved into it. A man showed her the notes from his interview. Everything seemed normal there. He had even asked her why her husband was scarred. The duchess had replied that years before she had met him, he was horribly burned when he was trying to rescue his parents in the music room.

When she was asked about that incident, the duchess said that his parents apparently were fighting each other and set the room ablaze. Both ended up unconscious, according to the duchess' knowledge, and if their head wounds didn't kill them, the smoke from the fire certainly did.

Esther returned the notes and went on to the duke's door. A man handed him his notes. Esther went through them. When asked about the incident, the duke claimed that he didn't remember exactly how he received most of the burns. He did, though, remember the events before and after he was burned. When asked if he thought it was strange or shocking for his parents to be fighting at all, the duke said that his parents had been violent with each other for as long as he could remember.

Esther had a hypothesis in her brain.

"I want as many servants interviewed about the late duke and duchess as possible. I want to know what they have to say about their natures."

"Yes, Miss," the man said as he took back his notes.

Esther knocked on the duke's door and asked, "Your Grace, this is Agent Esther Urvine. Would you mind telling me where the music room is?"

He sounded mildly baffled, but he gave her the directions. Esther nodded and gave him her thanks. Then she made her way to the music room.

It had clearly been fixed up since the fire. The current duchess must not have seen it in a less than pristine state. An inspection of the room gave her no results, and she was absolutely frustrated by it. If there was any evidence concerning the deaths here, it would be long gone by now. Still, she had wanted to look, to see if there was any sort of hint to anything about the deaths. Part of her wondered if there were any bones hidden in the room. She even gave the floor experimental stomps to see if there were any hollow bits.

Esther hissed out a curse and left the music room. She decided that she might as well go for something slightly more obvious.

The death of the previous duke and duchess was related to the weirdness in the dungeon. Definitely. Absolutely. She could feel it in her toes.

She didn't want to go to the most obvious route.

She really didn't want to.

It was the most boring route.

Esther asked around for the estate's gardener. She was given directions to his room. Then she heard something ring out from that area, something loud and sharp, something that sounded like a gunshot. She ran through panicking servants to the gardener's bedroom.

When they found him, though, he was dead on the floor, with a gunshot wound in his head. Esther noticed the position of the gun, and the location of the wound. She concluded that he had shot himself.

His bed was big enough for two people.

Esther went to an understandably scared and crying maid and asked her if the gardener was married.

"Yes," the maid said after a big, hapless sniff. "He's Mrs. Tilly's man."

The housekeeper!

Esther thanked her and rushed to the last place she had seen Tilly, that drawing room where she had been gushing over the king.

Nobody was in there.

"God of Hope, give me strength." Esther rubbed her fingertips against her temples and called as many of her men as she could, hoping they'd abandon any interviews they might have been giving. When a decent amount were near her, she said, "Bundle up. Find some shovels. Half of you are going to dig up as much of the gardens as you can. The other half are going to search for the housekeeper, a woman named Mrs. Tilly. Bring her to me if you can, but don't hurt her. I'm going to wait in the gardens until I see some results."

***