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Ernest shook his head. “We were playing hide-and-seek. It was William’s turn. I counted to fifty as he asked. I searched and searched—I looked everywhere—but I could not find him! I hoped he had come back here as a trick.”
I sighed in exasperation. If we delayed much longer, it would be dark before we returned home. Heavy clouds gathered on the horizon, promising a tremendous storm. All the brilliant grace of the day was gone. I was tired and cross and sore from sitting on the ground for so long.
“William! The game is over!” I sounded too annoyed. He would not be lured out by that. With Ernest and Judge Frankenstein at my side, I changed tactics as we fanned out through the trees and looked. “William! Oh, William! I have a pocket full of candy for the first person who finds me!”
Ernest adopted a similar ploy. Judge Frankenstein merely shouted the boy’s name, which was, I supposed, as much as we could ask from a man who had never done anything to care for his own children.
Ernest doubled back to check our picnic place again while Judge Frankenstein and I ranged in larger circles around the area William had last been seen. My voice grew hoarse, and I decided William would be forced to sit in the playroom all the next day with nothing to entertain him.
The sun was at the horizon, rain clouds quickly overtaking it all, when a howl of agony and terror came from behind me.
I ran toward the sound, pushing through clawing trees and branches that barred my path. When I broke through to the meadow that still held our abandoned picnic, I saw Ernest, kneeling on the ground with his head bowed. Before him, laid out on the blanket, was little William, fast asleep.
I did not know how he had beaten us back here and managed to fall asleep, but—
Why had Ernest made that sound?
Why had he not just called for us?
Why was William lying so still?
I stumbled forward. “He is sleeping,” I whispered to myself as a charm, willing it to be true. “He is sleeping.”
Dark bruises like a collar around his neck, his face peaceful.
I dropped to my knees beside Ernest. He collapsed into me, animal sobs wrenching from his throat. I could not cry, or move, or do anything but stare at little William. He was sleeping, and he would never wake again.
I COULD NOT SAY how I was pulled from William’s side or returned to the house. Once securely back in my room—for death is, and always has been, the occupation of men—I was left alone to my astonished grief. Ernest, only eleven but suddenly a man, and Judge Frankenstein joined the local men to search the forest for William’s murderer.
Who would have done such a thing? For what purpose?
Either the murderer had found William after he had wandered back to meet us, before we found him, and killed him there—
Or, a degree worse, if hell has degrees—
Someone choked the breath from his body and then placed him on the blanket for us to discover.
I could not cleanse from my mind his ruined neck, the ink-dark bruises that marked his parting from this world. The end, they had written in fingerprints across his unblemished skin. But why? Why murder a child? I had been in that meadow, as had Judge Frankenstein, asleep and vulnerable. Why William?
My hand drifted to my throat, and dread sank its terrible claws into my soul.
The necklace.
The child had been wearing a necklace of gold that I, in my impatience to distract and quiet him, had given him.
I would have pretended to question whether it was motivation enough for someone to kill a child, but I knew better. My caregiver on Lake Como certainly would have murdered me if there were any profit to be had in it. I had no doubt. And somewhere out in those woods was someone equally callous, equally uncaring of the value of a life when compared to the value of a bit of gold.
I tasted acid at the back of my throat. I knew exactly such a person. I had stabbed his wrist with my hatpin.
All the times I had felt watched since returning here rushed back as I ran from the sitting room and out to our barn. Two men stood guard, dripping water from the pouring rain. They tried to bar me entrance, but I pushed them aside and ran in.
Judge Frankenstein turned, along with the constable and several men I did not know. They shifted to block my view of William’s carefully laid out body. As if I had not already seen it. As if I would ever be able to unsee it.
“I have murdered him!” I cried, the guilt of it a millstone around my neck. This child, whose life I never cared enough about, but whose care had been given to me by his dying mother—he would have been better had he never met me.
“What is the meaning of this, Elizabeth?” Judge Frankenstein said, catching me by the shoulders and shaking me. “You were with me the entire time.”
I wished I could slap him. “A necklace! William wore a
