Of Light So Dark and Dear

Chapter 4

Though Lena had had more excitement in one morning than most people had had in a month, the day was still young, and Lena needed to find a way to spend it.

The first thing she needed to do was to deliver her notes to Lord Wimmer.

In front of her sat four pages of inquiries and details that were organized in no particular manner. She feared the Count may need a magnifying glass to read some of them.

The overarching points were fairly legible for the most part. As long as he took away her predicted height requirement for the aggressor and the name of a physicist, she recommended he telegram, that would be enough.

She didn't much like Dr. Mckailey's plan of eliminating the town's people until there were only a select few left. That would take far too much time.

Time was a luxury they didn't have.

Lena preferred to utilize a more victim based approached for cases like this. When working for the magistrate, he had always said, when evidence is limited, you find what they have in common. That's what he wants to destroy. That's what he lacks- or what he hates about himself.

And so, she did just that. For an hour she read all about each of the four lives this oppressor had prematurely ended. It was a sorrowing endeavor, but one that was necessary.

Gender would have been a shared trait, had it not been for the housekeeper who had just been slaughtered. Next, she enquired about ethnicity, which she discovered to be a dead end as only two of them had been native Bavarians. Religion yielded some commonality, but no significance when taking into account that virtually everyone within five miles of here was a devout Catholic.

Once all the basic demographics had been ruled out, she honed her focus to much smaller details. Things such as where they had worked, where their parents had worked, who had worked for them, where they had gone to school in their youth, and the demographics of their family members were all topics of her research.

Just when she was ready to call it a day for her investigating, she found something. A possible link between the four victims presented itself in the form of a missing co-worker.

Most of her long-distance correspondence with the Count had been her requesting information about the case and him finding the documents she needed and sending them to her. Lord Wimmer had somehow been able obtain all of the references that had been written for each of the victims as they transitioned from employer to employer. From this, Lena had been able to create a list of all the houses and individuals each victim had worked for in the past.

Lena had sent this list to the Count in one of her letters and he had sent her one back with all of the other staff that household had ever employed and when. Lena didn't see the similarities then, but now it was staring her right in the face.

A man who had commissioned a work from the painter, a household the gardener had worked at for a year, and a family the baker had privately worked for before opening up his own shop had all had one thing in common: they had had no cook at the time of the victim's employ.

One may not think much of this, for it was becoming more common for households of a lower status to neglect hiring a cook altogether. But these employers were far from middle-class. Their staff consisted of butlers, housekeepers, ladies' maids, footmen, housemaids, governesses, and coachmen. It seemed awfully peculiar that they would not have had a cook.

To Lena, it seemed a much more likely explanation that a name had been removed from the ledgers. Likely the same name in each one, too. This name could belong to someone who knew the murderer, or perhaps the aggressor himself.