Read The Unpleasantness at Baskerville Hall (Reeves & Worcester Steampunk Mysteries Book 4) for Free Online Page B

greenish glow — shining out from beneath a hood. She, or it, wore a long black dress and was oiling along the ill-lit landing.
    “It’s Theodosia!” said Henry. “She’s the image of her portrait.”
    Henry looked at his father, whose face had turned ashen. “It can’t be,” said Sir Robert.
    Henry set off up the stairs at a fair lick. I followed. The ghost had turned into the very corridor that Emmeline and I had had our earlier conversation.
    But when Henry and I reached the corridor, it was empty. Every door in the corridor was closed, save one: the nearest on the right, which was wide open.
    The Worcester heart was beating at a considerable rate. The room in front of us was dark, the only light coming from a single gas lamp on the landing behind us. If the ghost was inside the room, it was hiding its glowing face.
    A footman arrived with a lamp. Henry took it and slowly entered the room, holding the lamp high in front of him. We all shuffled after him.
    Then there was a collective gasp. There was a message on the mirror over the chimney breast.
    Written in rouge, it said in large letters, ‘He dies tomorrow!’
    ~
    We searched the entire bedroom. There was no sign of the ghost, and nowhere anyone pretending to be a ghost could have gone. Both windows were locked, and Sir Robert was adamant there were no secret passages.
    “Our family have lived here for generations. If there was a secret passage, I’d know about it.”
    “I searched high and low for secret passages when I was a boy,” said Henry. “I measured the house inside and out. There are no spaces unaccounted for.”
    “You’re not saying it’s a real ghost?” asked Emmeline.
    “Of course not,” said Henry. “But... I can’t see how anyone could have run in here, written that message, then disappeared. There wasn’t time.”
    Reeves, for who else could it have been, coughed from the corridor.
    “This is my man Reeves,” I said. “Do you have an observation?”
    “I do, sir. Mister Henry is correct in his assertion that there was insufficient time to write that message and effect an escape, ergo the message was written earlier.”
    Words are insufficient to encapsulate the enormity of Reeves’ brain. Perhaps a hieroglyph could do it justice — an extra large one with an all-seeing eye and a couple of fish.
    “Go on, Reeves,” I said. “What else do you deduce?”
    “I suspect, sir, that the open door to this room, and the message inside, were what is commonly called a red herring, designed to detain his or her pursuers while the perpetrator made good their escape elsewhere.”
    “Then they’re still in this wing,” said Henry. “No one could have doubled back down this corridor. We’d have seen them. Come on. We’ll search every room.”
    Every room off the corridor was searched. Nothing was found. No ghost, no abandoned black dress, and no further missives written on mirrors.
    “Could the ghost have been a projection?” asked Sir Robert.
    “I don’t think so, Sir Robert,” said T. Everett. “There would have been a cone of light from the projector to the image. There wasn’t one. I looked.”
    “So how did they escape?” said Henry. “Every window is locked.”
    Cometh the locked room mystery, cometh the cough.
    “Not every window, sir,” said Reeves as a roomful of eyes swivelled his way. “I did notice that one, although closed, was unlatched.”
    “Which one?”
    “The one in the room opposite to the one with the message, sir.”
    I’m not sure how many there were of us, but by this time we were a sizeable party of guests and servants, and all of us followed Henry into the room with the unlatched window.
    Henry hoisted up the lower pane of the sash window and let in half a gale that lifted both curtains towards the ceiling.
    “I can’t see anything,” said Henry, leaning out into the night. “There’s no ladder or anything to climb down on.”
    “May I borrow your lamp?” I asked Henry. “I have