“So we won’t be going anywhere at the moment,” Helen said.
“No,” Jane agreed glumly. “I suppose not.”
THREE
Alexander
The moment he stepped onto the grounds of Lowood, Alexander Blackwood was surrounded by ghosts.
Twenty-seven of them, in fact. An unusually high number.
Now, Alexander was no stranger to ghosts. Ghosts were his job. (His main job, that is. The job that paid the bills. His side job—well, more about that later.) But he wasn’t here for ghosts. He was here for a girl, the one he thought could be a seer. But instead he ended up with twenty-seven ghosts, twenty-six of whom were young girls, and one of whom wanted his murder solved.
“Are you listening?” asked the ghost. “I’ve been murdered.”
Alexander made a note in his notebook: Twenty-seven ghosts. One claims he’s been murdered.
The girls were all different ages, with different color hair and skin and eyes, and different—uh—names, too, presumably (although Alexander didn’t bother to make formal introductions), but the one thing they all had in common was the sad expressions that spoke of short, difficult lives without affection.
Well, that and the fact that they were all dead.
“Mr. Brocklehurst killed me,” said a transparent girl wearing a dress of colorless burlap. Her lips were tinged blue, as though she’d been very cold when she’d died. “He locked me in a closet for five hours. By the time anyone came to find me, I was dead.”
Alexander’s eyebrows rose.
“You needed to think about what you’d done,” said the ghost of Mr. Brocklehurst.
“He killed me, too,” claimed another girl. This one had red welts all over her arms and neck, with angry slashes across her skin like she’d tried to scratch the welts right off. “I’m allergic to burlap.”
(Hey, reader, it’s us again. We did some digging, and it seems as though burlap wasn’t produced until 1855. At least, that’s the popular theory. We did a little more digging and it turns out that Brocklehurst actually invented burlap just to make his students miserable, but it wasn’t widely known about until much later. Now you know.)
Alexander looked at the ghost of Mr. Brocklehurst, who just shrugged.
“Itching is good for the soul,” he said. “It inspires prayer.”
As Alexander walked up the stairs to the crumbling school building, the ghosts continued offering grievances against the late Mr. Brocklehurst, who countered every accusation with an excuse of some sort.
The door squeaked open before Alexander could knock, and another girl squinted out at him. This one was alive, we should mention.
She raised a pair of thick spectacles on a wand. “You must be from the Society! I recognized you by your mask. Everyone says people from the Society wear masks so the ghosts can’t discern what they look like. Is that true?”
“My name is Alexander Blackwood. I’m here to speak with one of your teachers.”
“Are you here about the murder?” she asked tightly.
“I could tell you about the murder,” said the ghost of Mr. Brocklehurst. “I was there, after all.”
“I’m here to speak with one of your teachers,” Alexander said again.
“Which teacher?”
Well. That one was harder. He hadn’t caught the teacher’s name. “I’d like to see all the teachers.” He was fairly certain he’d recognize the girl from the pub if he saw her again, although if he’d been asked to describe her, he wasn’t sure about her hair or eye color. She was small in stature, he recalled. And her coat had been gray.
“Shouldn’t there be another agent with you?” the girl asked, and peered around him as though someone might be hiding in the tall weeds that lined the walkway. “I’ve heard that you work in pairs.”
“I don’t need an assistant today.” He cringed at the thought of last night. Who tried to tackle a ghost? They’d almost failed the assignment because of that dunce.
“Interesting.” The girl traded her spectacles for a notebook and began scribbling into it.
“That’s Charlotte,” supplied Mr. Brocklehurst. “And if I weren’t dead, I’d—”
“Stop,” Alexander interrupted. He didn’t want to hear what kind of punishment would be dealt to the girl. In fact, he was rather coming to understand why someone might have wanted to murder Mr. Brocklehurst.
The girl looked up from her notebook. “Excuse me?”
“Stop delaying, I mean.” Alexander pointedly looked around her, peering into the foyer. “I’m on a schedule. Miss . . . ?” He had learned that her name was Charlotte, but of course it would be improper to address a young woman by her first name.
“Sorry.” She stowed her notebook and pencil and stepped aside so he could enter. “I’m a writer, you see. Charlotte Brontë, at your service.”
“A pleasure to meet you, Miss Brontë.” Alexander went inside, the ghosts of dead students trailing behind him. “What do you write about?”
“Everything,” Miss Brontë said. “But murder, lately.”
“A popular subject.” He looked at her more closely; murder (and the avenging of) was one of the topics he was most interested in, himself. “Have you been writing about this murder in particular?”
Her face went blank and her voice flat. “I suppose you could say that.”
“And what have you concluded?”
“That it’s generally agreed upon that we’re better off now that Mr. Brocklehurst is gone, so who cares who did it?”
“I’m standing right here!” cried Mr. Brocklehurst.
“Whoever killed him did us a great service,” Miss Brontë went on, not hearing the ghost, of course.
“I see. So you won’t tell me who you think did it?”
She shook her head.
He found that commendable, in a way, but solving the murder made an excellent excuse to gather the teachers together. He didn’t want anyone to get ideas about him coming to see a young lady he’d met at the pub.
“Very well. I’ll solve your murder.”
“It’s not my murder,” Miss Brontë insisted. “It’s our murder, in that it benefits us all.”
“Then will you please allow me to see the teachers?”
“Of course I want the murder solved!” Miss Brontë collected herself. “I mean, please follow me.”
“Miss Brontë thinks Miss Eyre poisoned me. I read her notebook over her shoulder.” Brocklehurst sighed. “They’re friends. Makes sense, if you ask me. They’re both ungrateful little liars.”
“You believe Miss Eyre did it, don’t you?” Alexander asked. To confirm the ghost’s claims, and definitely not because he enjoyed shocking people.
Miss Brontë’s face turned white. “Of course I don’t. Why would I think that?”
Alexander took out his own notebook. Student suspects “Miss Eyre” may have poisoned Brocklehurst, he wrote. And then, to Miss Brontë, he said, “All right, please gather all the teachers together.”
Miss Brontë lifted her chin. “I’d rather not do anything until I know whether you’re going to arrest my friend.”