“What’s this?” Hypatia murmured. She held up a handbill, the same one Celeste had noticed at the crossroads, the one about wanting to buy Drench houses.

“I’ve seen this before,” she said, taking it and looking it over.

“Could be a clue,” Hypatia offered.

“Or it could be trash. These seem to be everywhere in town.” She stuffed the bill into her coat pocket.

They continued to search, but after a quarter of an hour, they had turned up nothing suspicious or out of place.

“This is no good.” Frustration bubbled in Celeste’s gut. She stepped back, trying to imagine it as Mariel had told it, with her lying on the bed asleep.

“What are you doing?” Hypatia’s voice rose.

“I’m lying down.” Celeste took the position Mariel must have had and tried not to think about the grisly sheets against her back. “Come lie next to me.”

“Why?”

“Mariel said she awoke with the dead man in the bed with her, but by my reckoning, there’s not room for that.” She extended her arm, and it dangled off the edge.

“Two don’t fit,” Hypatia agreed. “I can tell that from experience.”

Celeste sat up, scooting off the side. “Have you been bringing your saloon girls in here?”

Hypatia grinned. “Only for kissin’. For more serious stuff, I take ’em upstairs to my boudoir.”

“The mattress was soaked through, which suggests he was killed here.”

“It is a lot of blood.” Hypatia scratched at her neck, thinking. “Do you know how he died?”

“Castration. Bled out.”

“Heaven and hell,” she murmured. “That sounds personal.”

“How could he have entered alive, been castrated on this bed too narrow for two, and all the while Mariel slept through it?”

“This might do it.” Hypatia picked up a laudanum bottle from the desk and shook it. It was empty.

“If she drank that whole bottle, she would be dead.”

“Maybe it was already half-empty?”

Celeste frowned. “Wouldn’t you know? I mean, isn’t it yours?” Mariel had said Hypatia gave her the laudanum.

“I’ve never seen this bottle in my life.” Hypatia reached for something else on the desk and lifted up the remains of a broken cap seal. “Freshly opened in this room.”

“Then someone else must have been here to share the bottle.”

“The victim?”

“Or the murderer.” Celeste shook her head. “It makes no sense.”

Hypatia’s face was troubled.

“What is it?”

“There’s one way it makes sense.” Her look was sympathetic. “Mariel’s not telling you the truth.”

A noise in the hallway, and a figure popped up in the doorway. She was short, her black hair cut in a fringe. Her expression was serious, so Celeste couldn’t see her dimples, but she was sure this was Hypatia’s new girl, Lilitha.

“Virtues are coming,” she hissed. “Four of ’em. They’re at the front door.”