The Price of Money
an excerpt

“I-I didn’t do it. I s-swear it. I di-didn’t do it! I-I just woke up,” he whispered, his thin voice breaking more than once.

“Didn’t do--” the detective began to ask, but she stepped forward, past the frightened young lord, to look into the library.

It was an expansive room with a high ceiling and shelves made of mahogany that were full of books reached to nearly the very top of the room. Mahogany ladders could be moved about on a system of gold-finished poles atop the bookcases. All of the furniture was mahogany-made and the cushions were all a soft cream color. The floor was carpeted, a deep, deep red in color. Where there was wall, paintings by the same artist featured in the dining room hung, these of a more intimate nature. Things such as lovers, though perfectly chaste ones, and friends were featured in seculded woods or swimming or holidaying or in domestic scenes. Above the fireplace, which occupied the middle of the southern wall, there was a portrait of a man, fair-haired and with bright green eyes, who was not older than thirty in the painting and he stood by a cream and mahogany chair and in front of many grand bookcases. In the chair, a slim woman with vivid red hair and blue eyes sat, pristine and perfect. The painting was of the late Jonathon Wilding and his new bride. A testament to the marriage, painted in the same library that it occupied, painted by the same artist who had supplied every other picture, and the large frame obscured all but part of the vermillion letters on the right-hand bottom of the portrait. “B” was visible as it had been on a few of the others, and another letter was also legible, though barely, an “H.” Beneath the carefully crafted painting, though, was something less picturesque.

Susanna Wilding, still dressed in her dark green evening dress, lay on the floor of the library, her body sprawled and her head bent at an odd angle. The blue scarf that her daughter had discarded early in the evening was around her neck.

“Wake Doctor Davis,” Holmes commanded the young lord, and Lord Percy nodded and quickly went a small ways down the hall.