“I don’t know anything,” he replied. “She’s not even supposed to exist.”
My stomach turned. I had stood in that musty living room with Jarvis, looked him in the eye, listened to him lie—a man who had abused a helpless girl and left her for dead. But had I led Maddy to him, caused his death? “She’s so vague,” I said, trying not to believe. “Perhaps she wasn’t talking of Jarvis at all.”
“It all fits together.” Matthew raised his head and looked at me. “She’s been following you, ever since the barn burned down. She said she’s been watching you.”
“The birds,” I said.
“Yes. And last night she said, I saw you with the other one.”
I felt myself heat. “I thought she meant you.”
A slow beat of silence, as we both remembered our lovemaking the night before.
Matthew spoke softly. “I think we would have noticed if she was watching. Don’t you?”
I bit my lip and said nothing.
“She didn’t mean me.”
I took a breath and nodded. I was thinking of the birds I thought I’d heard yesterday, as we left Roderick Nesbit’s shabby little house. “We need to check on Nesbit.”
“No.” His voice was thoughtful. “You need to check on Nesbit.”
“Where will you go?”
“There were three of them, according to Maddy.” He ran a hand through his hair, tousling it. His gaze went past me, directed inward where I couldn’t see. “Jarvis was one, then. And it’s possible Roderick Nesbit was another.”
“God,” I said, as it hit me that I had again been in the presence of one of Maddy’s pitiless attackers. “Do you think so?”
“If he is, Maddy has already found him. So you can’t do any harm by going to him now.”
My blood chilled. I looked at Matthew’s face and couldn’t help but ask him, “Doesn’t this bother you? I feel so angry that these men could have done this to Maddy. And yet—when I think of her, how cold she is, how mad—I don’t know what to think of it. Do they deserve the revenge she wants to give them? Can we say that anyone deserves it?”
Matthew stood, paced away, and looked out the window. “It’s utterly insane, all of it.” He crossed his arms. “I don’t know what Maddy did to Jarvis. Perhaps nothing, and we’re worrying for no reason. But if she did something to him—if she killed him…” He paused for a long moment, his shoulders tensed. “I’ve seen enough men killed. Good men who didn’t deserve it. I shouldn’t worry about what will happen to a few rapists. I wish I could call up the necessary heartlessness.” He turned and faced me again, lines of strain etched in his features. “Maybe I’ll manage. To save Alistair, we have to find Maddy’s grave. We have to find where they buried her that day. That’s what you’re going to get from Nesbit—if he’s still alive.”
“And you?” I said softly.
“There’s a key person in all of this we haven’t talked to yet, not really. I’m going to see Tom Barry.”
Despite myself, I felt a cold chill of fear. “Are you sure?”
Matthew shrugged on his jacket. “It makes sense. Barry is friends with both Jarvis and Nesbit. He’s either the third man, or he has information that will lead me to him. I intend to get that information out of him. I can’t do that if you come with me and bring Maddy with you.”
“You don’t want her to hurt him,” I said.
“No.” He came toward me, strong and so full of purpose. “She’s cut off Jarvis as an interview subject. She may have found Nesbit. I don’t want her tracking our movements until we’ve solved this.” He took my elbow, his hand warm through my sleeve, and looked into my eyes. “We can do this, Sarah.”
I nodded. “And we leave Alistair to Nan.” I stood and brushed at his lapel, lightly, any excuse to touch him. “Do you know, she lost a nephew at the Somme?”
“Excellent,” he said. “So she thinks Alistair is a war hero.”
I touched his face, ran my fingers down the rough skin of his cheek. “He is.”
Matthew pulled away. “Let’s go, then. It’s already late.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
Roderick Nesbit’s small house was quiet, the windows shuttered under the bright June sunshine. I approached through the thatch of weeds in the front garden, taking in the silence around me. It was the heavy, eerie hush of a house of sickness or death. My throat closed and I stood before the front door, helpless as I remembered the day I had come home to my parents’ house with my basket of strawberries. The silence had been much the same.
I raised my hand to knock, but the same instinct that disliked the hush around me would not let me do it. After a brief hesitation, I instead pressed my palm to the front door and pushed. The door swung open, unlocked and unlatched.
The house inside was dark and gloomy, belying the pretty sunshine of the day. I stepped into the main room, where we had interviewed Roderick Nesbit the day before, and let my eyes adjust. The room sat dusty and quiet, undisturbed.
I heard no movement in the house, no voice. I walked through the short hall, past the stairs, to the kitchen at the back of the house. Here was a small bachelor’s kitchen, with a compact stove, a single, cold teapot, and mostly empty shelves. A greasy plate sat on the small, heavy wood table, the remnants of a pork chop and a spoonful of peas. Last night’s supper, interrupted.
Still, there was no sound. I thought of calling out, forcing words from my stricken throat, until I noticed the door to the back garden. It was ajar, just as the front door had been.
It was too much like what Constable Moores had said happened to Jarvis—the silent house, the interrupted life. I walked back to the sitting room and looked at the wall over the fireplace. Roderick Nesbit’s rifle was gone.
I swallowed, took a deep breath, and went back to the kitchen. I pushed open the garden door and walked out into the sunlight, squinting my eyes. The ground here was cleared, the dirt hard-packed around a rough stone walk. No garden was planted, and the wildflowers ran rampant, as they did in the front. The small woodshed stood off to the left, flanked by the woodpile.
I stood for an uncertain moment, listening to the breeze and the faraway larks in the trees. A soft metallic click made my palms sweat and my stomach turn. The sound of the rifle.
“Mr. Nesbit?” I called softly, turning toward the woodpile and walking slowly toward it. “Are you there?”
No voice, but a soft shifting shuffle, the scrape of a shoe against the dirt, told me someone was there.
I came closer. “Mr. Nesbit?”
The click did not come again; whether the first had been the cocking or the uncocking of the rifle, I did not know. I was close enough to the woodpile now to see around it. I took one further step and looked at the other side.
He was sitting there, his back to the pile, his legs stretched before him, the rifle in his lap. He did not look at me, but looked straight ahead. It was Roderick Nesbit, but whatever had happened to him since I had last seen him seemed to have aged him twenty years. His face was as haggard as an old man’s.
“Go away,” he whispered.
I edged closer to him. “Are you all right?”
“Ssh.” He looked up at me for the first time, and I saw his eyes were sunk into his head with exhaustion. “Shut up and go away. She’ll hear you. I thought you were her. You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you.”
I crouched down, closer to him, my heart hammering in my chest. “Who will hear me?”
He looked at me. “Do you think I believe you don’t know? You’re the one who brought her.”
My hand flew to my mouth. We had been right, then. Maddy had come. Still, I did not feel her presence, nor did I notice any metallic smell—except for the rifle in Roderick Nesbit’s lap. I waited for my breath to come back, as I let all the implications come to me. “So it was you, then. You were one of them.”
He closed his eyes and tilted his head back, leaning it against the woodpile, and said nothing.
“You’re in danger,�
�� I said. I put my hand on his arm. I would take him to Constable Moores, and we would finally close the case on Maddy Clare. “Come with me.”
He did not move or open his eyes.
“Mr. Nesbit.” I shook him. “You don’t understand. The danger—”
A sound came from him then, a low humorless laugh. “The danger, ah yes. It’s what she wants, isn’t it? For me to run. To think for a moment that I have any hope of escaping her.” He opened his eyes, stared tiredly into the distance. “She came to me last night. I thought I heard something during supper. I looked up, and—Mother of God—” He raised the hand not holding the rifle to his face, scrubbed it over his eyes. “I don’t know. All night. I knew it was her as soon as I saw her. Jesus God, I’ve tried everything. Confessing, apologizing. I begged on my knees. I wish to God she’d just say something, anything, instead of looking at me with those eyes.”
“Mr. Nesbit, you have to leave. She wants revenge.”
“She can have it, then.” His fingers curled over the rifle in his lap. “But she’ll have to come and take it. Maybe she can’t be blamed, but I’m not running like a scared rabbit. I came out here after midnight when I couldn’t take it in the house anymore, but I decided not to run. Where would I run that she can’t follow? I’m here, but she hasn’t come out, not yet. When she does, I’ll be ready for her.”
I was squatting next to him, and I eased my legs forward to kneel, feeling the muscles unknot. I tried to think. He was a little unhinged; I couldn’t use force. He was armed and needed soothing, placating. Besides, what force did I have, a woman, next to him? My only hope was to fetch Constable Moores and bring him back here before it was too late. It would be another wild tale to tell the skeptical policeman, but I didn’t care.
The other option was to draw Maddy away. And hadn’t she told me herself how to do that?
“Mr. Nesbit.” I kept the tremor, mostly, from my voice. “I can help you. It isn’t just you Maddy wants. There’s something she’s looking for, something she can’t remember from…that day.”
He looked at me then, his eyes widening. “She spoke to you?”
“Yes.” I touched his arm again. “On that day, you…buried her. Where? Where is that grave? If I could find it, I might be able to draw her away…. I’ll bring the constable to you.” It was a wild, unlikely scheme, and I forced myself not to think of its impossible aspects, like how exactly Constable Moores would be able to protect anyone against Maddy Clare. My only hope was to placate Maddy with what she had asked, and hope that protection would not be necessary.
He was not following. His eyes had glazed at the memory of the grave. “God, yes. We buried her. It wasn’t my idea—you have to understand that. None of it was my idea. It never was. Not with them. Bill Jarvis was a bully—I knew the type from school. God, the way he’d laugh at me.” A small, terrifying smile crossed his lips. “Well, maybe he’s not laughing now, wherever he is. That’s one thing.”
I listened, silent. I didn’t want to hear it, but in a way I knew I had to. I needed to hear it at last.
“We found her in the woods,” he said as he stared into the distance, into his memories. “We were out hunting, and there she was. Taking a shortcut through the woods, down the path by the stream. We’d hardly shot anything all day. And we’d been drinking, of course. I had to keep up with them, always keep up with them, or they’d laugh at me. I was nearly sick with it. And she came along, this pretty girl with long dark hair. No one, really. A servant girl. A bit of sport, they said. Who would she tell? Who would believe her? And so she was—” He faltered, put a hand over his eyes for a brief moment, as some kind of terrible pain wrenched through his body. “It got out of hand in the end. I didn’t want to do it, I swear. I think, when she saw us, she had an inkling of what we were thinking. She tried to run, but she didn’t get far. She had a small bag of belongings that she dropped when she ran. We never found it. It was the only thing she had on her. I went back into the woods, at night, in the years after, looking for it. I don’t know why. But I never found it.”
He took a deep breath as the pain wracked his body again, but he had started now, and he meant to continue. “It wasn’t me that killed her. It wasn’t. It was completely unexpected; even Bill was a little shocked, I think, in that thick head of his, as we watched it happen. But he strangled her, he said, to shut her up. She kept screaming and screaming. And when she was still, he said we had to bury her.”
I swallowed my horror. “Who was it?” I said as softly as I could. “Who was the third man? And where did you bury her?”
That humorless smile crossed his lips again. “I thought you knew. It was Tom Barry that killed her, Tom Barry we followed all the time. And we buried her in Tom Barry’s woods, six feet from the well behind his house.”
My stomach lurched. “No. It isn’t possible. It wasn’t there. It was somewhere else. The chimney…”
“What chimney?”
“Where Maddy was buried. There was a redbrick chimney, visible through the trees. But Tom Barry’s chimney is gray.”
He looked at me for a moment, and something that was almost wonder came into his face. “You really do speak to her,” he said. “You really are what they say. Tom had his chimney rebuilt five years ago, along with the other renovations. The old one was crumbling and rotted through.”
The cold, icy bands on my arms throbbed sharply. “And the old chimney was redbrick,” I said.
“Yes,” he replied. “It was.”
Evangeline’s husband was the third man. And Matthew was there even now, at Tom Barry’s house. Did he know? Had he put it together yet? Was he in danger?
“I hate him,” Roderick Nesbit said almost dreamily. “I hate him so. But I’ve always been there when he calls me, one of his acolytes, Bill and I. There’s something about Tom that makes you do what he says, even if it’s repugnant to you. Even if he insults you, says you’re a queer and a fairy-boy and a coward. You still do what he says. I enlisted because of him, you know. After what happened in the woods that day, I couldn’t stand it. I was thinking of killing myself. Instead I enlisted, to get away from him, and because he couldn’t. He had those bad knees. I got the satisfaction of saying I was going off to fight while he was staying home. Who was a fairy-boy then? But I saw things over there that seared my soul, burned it away to ashes. I came back with nothing inside me. And he was still here, throwing around his money and playing his foolish games.”
Things were falling into place in my mind, so fast I could barely register them. “You saw her,” I said. “It was you. You saw her last year, at the Clares’ house.”
“My God.” A dry sound came out of him. “After all that. I’d been suffering, I’d put myself on the cross, and she wasn’t dead! I went to fix a broken windowpane for Mrs. Clare. She said she’d be out, Mrs. Macready would be out, to simply fix it while they were away. I came around behind the house and there, on the path between the house and the barn—there she was. She had a metal bucket in her hand. She saw me at the same time I saw her, and the look on her face—like she’d opened a door and seen something inside that tore her heart out.”
“We think she had memory loss,” I said. “She could feel the effects of the trauma, but she couldn’t remember it.”
“Is that so?” He looked up, as if pondering the blue June sky. “That would explain it, then. She never left the house in all those years. None of us had seen her, and she hadn’t seen us. And we didn’t note the comings and goings of servant girls, of course. Not when we believed she was dead.”
“But that day—when she saw you…”
“Oh, she remembered. She most certainly did. Everything came back to her clear as day when she saw me, and I watched it on her face.”
“Did she seem angry?”
“God, no. She dropped the bucket and fell to the ground—it was like her legs gave way under her. She looked at me with such utter horror. Some sound came out of her, almost a high-pitched scream. I was just
as terrified, myself. I think I said something stupid—like ‘Sshh, sshh’—like a fool. And then she was gone. She got up and ran into the house as if the devil were after her. I left, too. I didn’t even fix the damned window.”
“Did you tell the others what you had seen?”
“Yes. Bill wanted to see for himself. Tom—I could tell that Tom was already thinking ahead, to what could be done. He was worried she would go to the police. But by the next day it was news that the Clares’ maid had hung herself, so she was truly dead then. But I was wrong again, wasn’t I? Because she may have been dead, but she still was not gone.”
“Mr. Nesbit.” My voice was pleading. “You really should come with me. I’ll find the constable. This can all be over.”
But he was grim now. He tightened his grip on the rifle in his lap. “You go, young lady. It’s best. She’s teasing me now, but she’ll be out soon. She can have her revenge, but, by God, she’ll have to fight me for it. I’m not going anywhere.”
I stood. I had no more time to waste. Matthew was in trouble, and I needed to find Constable Moores. I looked around me, at the peaceful, quiet, weedy yard. It seemed a somnolent afternoon like any other, the bees buzzing in the straggling wildflowers. I still saw no sign of Maddy.
“I’m sorry,” I said, before I turned to go.
“We all are,” he said to my back. “All of us.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
There was no one on High Street in Waringstoke at this quiet time of day. No matter. I nearly ran to the post office; after an agonizing decision, I determined that I needed to call Constable Moores before doing anything else. The post office had the nearest telephone in town.
Evangeline Barry exited just as I approached the door. She stopped when she saw me, her expression filling with alarm. “Miss Piper, is everything all right?”
I stopped in my tracks. She was as beautiful, as immaculate, as ever; her hair had been freshly marcelled, and she wore a soft, casual, achingly expensive shawl tossed over a short-sleeved dress of dark bohemian gray. I thought of her approach to me in the change room, the panic in her voice.
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