The Heir of Thornfield Manor

by Ellie Thornton

  Elizabeth fell back a step and grabbed her cheek. Her mind whirled from pain and confusion. Helen slapped her? Helen slapped her! Ow!

  “Helen, no!” Alice cried.

  “None of this would’ve happened if you and Agent Finley hadn’t gotten involved.” Helen jabbed a finger in Elizabeth’s direction. “I trusted you—we all did. You, you, you took advantage of him. If he’d known you were a cop—”

  Elizabeth lifted her hands, palms forward in a warding gesture. “Helen, he knew I was a cop.”

  Helen drew back. “What? That … that can’t be right.”

  “He knew from the moment we met,” Elizabeth said.

  “No.” She shook her head. “That can’t be.” She turned and fled.

  Alice pulled Elizabeth’s hand back to look at her cheek. “Are you all right, dear?”

  “I’m fine.” Although she did wonder if Helen’s ring had chipped off a piece of her cheekbone.

  “Let me get you some ice.” Alice grabbed her hand and tried to pull her down the hall.

  “Alice, stop,” Elizabeth said. “I need to ask you something.”

  Alice faced her.

  “You were in on this?”

  She nodded, her eyes glistening with tears. “Not all of it. I didn’t know about Susan, I didn’t know—”

  “Did you know about the belladonna?”

  Alice dropped her gaze and sucked in a sob. “Not at first. I swear. If I had, I never would’ve …”

  She didn’t know. Elizabeth breathed a sigh of relief. “I believe you.” She turned on her heel and glanced into the dining room. There, at the end of the table where the Bakers and the Marshalls had sat, were a couple green bottles of sparkling cider. She must have missed them in the dark. He hadn’t drugged them after all.

  “You’re leaving now?” Helen’s voice cracked.

  Elizabeth hugged her. “I’ll miss you.” She walked around her.

  “He’s a good man, Elizabeth,” Helen said. “Despite what you saw tonight.”

  Elizabeth glanced over her shoulder. “He could be.”

  * * *

  Half an hour out and away from that cursed house, Elizabeth didn’t think about Patrick. Not really. She didn’t think about his beautiful oak tree she’d seen as she’d fled and the limb that appeared to be cut down with a chainsaw. She didn’t think about how the fact that seeing that made her angry enough to go twenty miles over the speed limit until she was clear out of town. She didn’t think about the look on Patrick’s face or the desperation in his voice when she’d left him standing in the kitchen, and she didn’t even think about the little sob that’d escaped Helen when she’d run away from her. But she did think about Helen.

  Their entire encounter had been strange. She hadn’t acted like the woman Elizabeth had known since she’d arrived. Helen’d acted like a woman in love, and a little crazy about it too.

  Elizabeth moved her jaw back and forth, trying to ease the throbbing in her cheek. The pain worsened every minute. Man, Helen had walloped her a good one.

  The rain wasn’t so bad now that she was out of town, but the roads were dark and empty, and it was hard to see. She tightened her grip on the steering wheel as wrongness continued to swell inside her.

  While she was still mad at Patrick for drugging people, she knew Patrick hadn’t drugged the innocents. He wasn’t a careless man like that. She was sure that he’d taken painstaking care to make sure the Bakers and the Marshalls had been given cider; he would’ve been as careful about that as he had planning the rest of his scheme. This was his night to get justice for his wife—he wouldn’t have missed a detail.

  But he’d missed Helen. She’d been drugged too. Her pupils had been as dilated as the rest of them, and her face had been pale as a sheet from the moment she’d heard Katelyn’s voice in the dining room. She’d been acting like she’d seen a ghost. So why would he have given her the belladonna unless he thought she was somehow involved?

  Did he think Helen was involved?

  She grabbed her cell phone from the passenger seat where she’d tossed it and dialed Lee.

  He picked up on the first ring. “What’s wrong?”

  “Are you at work?”

  “It’s eleven on a Friday night; of course.”

  Yeah, if she hadn’t come to Thornfield, she’d be right there with him. They really were pathetic. “Would you look up Helen Smith for me?”

  “Helen Smith, the gardener you’re working with?”

  She’d told Lee all about the case and he’d looked up everyone in the file, so he knew what she looked like. “Yes.”

  “Okay.” Through the phone came the clacking of fingers flying over computer keys.

  “Okay.”

  A moment later, he said, “She’s not in the system in California. Where’s she from?”

  “Ida—” Wait. That was what her file had read, but when Helen had told her about Patrick’s guesses about her, she said he’d guessed wrong, that she was actually from Colorado.

  “Idaho?”

  “No.” She pulled to the shoulder of I-80 and parked. A nervous tension was whirling through her. “Try Colorado.”

  More typing. “I’m not finding her in the system, but let me … No criminal record … wait, here’s a newspaper article on her from six years ago.” He was quiet a moment. “Apparently, her dorm caught on fire one night and destroyed half the building. No one was killed, but Helen was investigated because the blaze originated in her room and sent her roommate, whom she was angry with over a boy, to the hospital with minor burns and smoke inhalation.”

  Elizabeth gasped.

  “She’s the one who turned the gas on in his room, isn’t she?” Lee asked.

  Yeah, Elizabeth was pretty sure. And Helen was the one who’d misplaced her key six months before Katelyn’s death. No doubt so that Bridgette could make a copy to get through that gate. “Helen hired Bridgette to kill Katelyn.” She pulled back onto the I-80. “Call the local police in Thornfield. Tell them what’s going on.”

  “On it. And Shea …”

  “Yes?”

  “Be careful.”

  She disconnected without saying goodbye as panic tried to overwhelm her. A lump formed in her throat, making it hard to breathe. She headed back, pushing her speed faster and faster as she went.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The manor was dark when she pulled up, rain still pouring heavily and making it hard to see. There wasn’t a person in sight. It made her uneasy to look up at the dark windows when she knew that only a little more than an hour before, most of the house had been filled with people. She drove past the canopy they’d set up in the front of the house and circled around back.

  Where were the cops? Lee would’ve called them right when he’d hung up. They should be here. Or maybe they’d already come and left? But if they had, why hadn’t Lee called her back? She picked up her phone to call him, but her phone read no service. Hadn’t Finley gotten the phones fixed?

  She pulled her gun from her ankle holster and double-checked to make sure it was loaded, even though she knew it was. She ran for the back door with her free hand holding her sweater over her head.

  Once inside, the pungent smell of rotten eggs surrounded her. Pushing the door all the way open, she moved toward the kitchen, the smell getting stronger as she went.

  Stopping at the entrance to the kitchen, the soft sound of hissing met her coming from the stove. Her heart jumped in her chest as she rushed to the stove. The door to the oven was open, and gas flooded out the open door and from each of the six burners on top. She set her gun down and turned off the burners. She’d only been in the house a minute, and already she was getting a headache. This was bad. She rushed to the windows, yanking them open, and took a deep breath.

  She went to the counter to grab her gun and holstered it. She couldn’t use it in here. One spark could send the house up in flames. Turning a light on could do the same.

  She dashed out of the kitchen and
down the hall. Just as she passed the library, Alice came wobbling out.

  “Help.” Alice stumbled forward.

  Elizabeth caught her.

  “She’s turned the gas on in all the fireplaces,” Alice said.

  Bad. This was so bad. “Are you all right?” She turned her toward the back door and held her up as they headed that way.

  “Light-headed. I turned the gas off on the fireplace in the library, but there’s too many in the house. We’d never get them all before passing out.” Once outside, Alice leaned over and took a deep breath.

  “Where’s Patrick?”

  Alice pointed back inside. “Last I saw, he was running upstairs to find Helen.”

  He was upstairs? In a house filling with gas?

  “Why is this happening?” Alice asked.

  Elizabeth pulled her keys from her pocket and handed them to Alice. “Go get in my car. Drive to town and find the cops or Finley. Tell them to get out here now.” Something had delayed them, and she had the horrible thought that the phone lines were down all over town.

  She didn’t wait for Alice to leave, but sprinted back into the house and toward the front entrance. She opened the front door when a half-crazed laugh came from upstairs. The same laugh she’d heard outside her bedroom the night she’d found Patrick in his gas-filled room. The voice was a little different this time—more unhinged, more desperate, more tortured.

  Elizabeth darted up stairs, stopping before the landing as voices drifted to her. She didn’t want to step into the hall until she had a better idea of what was going on.

  “You were so unhappy,” Helen said. “She was making you so unhappy. I, I did it for you.”

  What on earth? Elizabeth dropped to her knees and peered around the corner into the hall.

  A few doors down, by her bedroom door, which in her haste to leave she’d left slightly ajar, Patrick stood in the middle of the hall. Another few doors down from him was Helen. Elizabeth could barely see her because Patrick blocked her mostly from sight. She could see that Helen’s updo now hung loose and messy about her shoulders. She held something in her hand that Elizabeth couldn’t make out from where she was, but from Patrick’s defensive stance, it couldn’t be good. A nervous prickle went up her spine.

  She couldn’t move, couldn’t step out to help until she was certain what she was dealing with.

  Patrick held his hands up, palms out as though supplicating. “I know, Helen—”

  “You don’t know!” she screamed. “This man approached me … I told him everything. That you and Katelyn fought all the time, that you were miserable, that …”

  “You loved me?” Patrick kept his voice calm and soothing, as he inched forward.

  “Yes,” she whispered, then let out a sob. “He, he told me he could help me. That he knew someone who could fix it. Make it go away. And I said yes. Lord help me, I said yes.” She glanced toward the ceiling. “And now that poor doctor’s dead too. I didn’t know Bridgette would do that. I didn’t know she’d come back and step in like she did. I didn’t know.”

  Elizabeth moved up a step, preparing to insert herself.

  “You were just trying to help,” Patrick said. “I see that now. Just drop the match, please.”

  Elizabeth’s stomach flip-flopped, and she pulled back again. Her mind whirred as she tried to decide what to do. Would going out there help or make things worse? Helen hadn’t been happy with her earlier; the bruise she was sure was forming on her cheek was proof enough of that.

  “No, it’s too late.” Helen’s tone turned hard and cold. “It didn’t work. I thought Elizabeth was a fling—that you’d get over her. I even tried to scare her away. But you’re lost to her. I can see it in your face. All of this was for nothing, and I have to end it, now.”

  “No, no, Helen, just think about this,” Patrick’s voice panicked.

  “I’m sorry,” Helen said.

  Elizabeth moved into the landing. “Helen!”

  Patrick glanced over his shoulder right as Helen looked up. “Run!” Patrick yelled as he rushed toward her bedroom door.

  Helen’s look of calm defiance morphed to something ugly and bitter. With a flick of her thumb, fire burst out around her and shot forward. Elizabeth jumped back onto the stairs, flattened against them, and yanked her sweater over her head. Burning heat shot across her skin and then pulled back. She was barely aware of the screaming coming from Helen, followed seconds later by nothing more than a rushing sound as the fire burned its way across the ceiling.

  She moved her arm and looked around. On the second floor, not only the ceiling but the walls and the carpet were on fire. Downstairs, part of the banister was on fire, and one of the pillars by the front door had been burnt, but it appeared the fire had spared most of it as of now. She glanced down the hall and coughed as she breathed in a lungful of smoke.

  She stumbled to her feet and down the hall. “Patri—” She choked on his name, coughing again. “Patrick?”

  No, he couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t.

  “Patrick, answer me!”

  When she was almost to where he’d been standing, a moan came from her room. The door, which had been almost all the way open, was now mostly shut and ablaze. She pulled off her soaked sweater and whipped it at the door until she’d cleared a spot on the edge of flames. She wrapped her hand in her sweater and pulled the door open. There, on the floor of her room, was Patrick. He lay on his back, his hands cradled to his chest, red and sore, his face singed around his closed eyes.

  She dropped to her knees, grabbed his shoulders, and shook him. “Patrick, wake up.” She glanced up as flames danced over the frame of the now open door, and across the ceiling.

  “Elizabeth?” He opened his eyes.

  She pulled him to his feet, draping his arm about her shoulders. “Come on.”

  The fire burned over the walls and most of the floor, but she pulled him along as his weight tried to topple them. They’d barely reached the stairs when the ceiling collapsed behind them. Sirens blared from outside as they stumbled down the stairs.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Patrick dropped to his knees, bringing her with him.

  “Patrick, no.” Her head spun. “We have to get out.”

  He faced her—exhaustion and pain over his face, but his gaze held hers for just a moment before they blinked closed.

  She grabbed his face. “Patrick, wake up.” Flames were quickly engulfing the downstairs now too. “I can’t carry you. Please.” A sob caught in her throat. She closed her eyes and prayed. Please, help us.

  Sirens sounded in the distance. Flames rushed around the doorframe. They were too late. A lump grew in her throat. Please.

  “Go,” Patrick whispered. “Get out.”

  She faced him. “I won’t leave you. You have to get up, Patrick. You have to help me.”

  His face was drawn, and he was in pain and near passing out, but he nodded. He tightened his grip on her shoulder, and she helped him to his feet. He wobbled precariously, and she gripped him around the middle.

  “Elizabeth!” Through a fog of smoke, a tall figure burst forward. Finley.

  “Here! We’re here!” she yelled.

  He reached them and, with a sweeping glance, pulled Patrick from her grasp and flung his arm over his shoulder. “Let’s go.” Fin dragged Patrick through the door and out into the rain. Relief filled her as she hurried after them.

  Fin helped Patrick to one of several cop cars. More sirens sounded in the distance. Once far enough away from the blaze, she faced the house, eyes wide as it burned and then collapsed in front of her.

  “Is there anyone else in there?” Fin asked.

  She thought of Helen and shook her head. “No.” And if Elizabeth had been ten minutes later, Patrick wouldn’t be there either. She sought him out, back in a police car surrounded by cops. What were they doing to him?

  She started for him, but Finley stopped her as an ambulance pulled in. “Wait,” Fin said.

  The
medics jumped out as a ringing started in her ears. She yanked her arm free and rushed over, but he caught her again.

  “You don’t want to see this,” Fin said.

  Her breathing came shallow. She cussed at him under her breath. “Let me go!”

  The world started to blur.

  “Shea?” Fin asked.

  She blinked, her strength leaving her. She couldn’t breathe.

  “Shea, are you all right?”

  She thought she saw Patrick on a stretcher. She thought she saw a mask over his mouth.

  She thought she heard Fin yell, “I need a medic over here!”

  And then she thought she saw Katelyn back by Patrick’s ambulance. Robed in white, she lit the space around her like the sun, with her wheat-colored hair flowing around her shoulders. Elizabeth thought she saw Katelyn smile. And then she thought no more.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Elizabeth awoke the next day in the hospital. She’d passed out from smoke inhalation and apparently was very lucky to be alive. She had minor heat burn, which for several days just looked like a bad sunburn. None of that had stopped her from leaving her hospital bed, gown and all, and finding Patrick.

  It hadn’t been hard. His was the only room with a police officer standing guard. He’d known who she was—Finley had told him who she was and to let her through—and the officer had immediately.

  Patrick lay in his bed with bandages wrapped around his hands and eyes. He didn’t appear to be injured anywhere else, and he was breathing. She touched his cheek, a little warmer to the touch than she remembered. He was alive. Her prayer had been answered. She breathed deep, feeling a weight lift from her shoulders that she hadn’t realized was there.

  After being assured he’d make a full recovery, and receiving a thorough scolding from her nurses, she’d been taken back to her room.

  The next day she was released, and she spent the next three days sitting vigil over Patrick’s bed.

  When Helen had lit the match, Patrick had lunged for her room, grabbing the door from its side and closed behind him. Because of that, his hands had been exposed to the bulk of the blast. And his beautiful eyes had been wide open as the flames shot through the crack of the door. He had second-degree burns on his hands, a miracle the doctors said given the heat of the fire. They expected his hands would heal in a few weeks and be good as new.