A Simple Country Tragedy Page 7

  His eyes were boring into the back of my neck, and for a moment, all I could hear was the sound of my own heartbeat in my ears.

  My throat, as dry as sand, wouldn’t allow me to swallow. I tried to clear it.

  “I – I was, yes,” I said, knowing it made little sense to lie about it.

  “What’s going on between you two?” he asked. “It seems you have been spending a great deal of time together as of late.”

  He wasn’t the first to point that out, but Sam had asked me to keep it quiet that I had been helping the police with their investigations. I wanted to keep my word about that, but was beginning to realize that people were likely making false assumptions about the state of our relationship.

  “It’s nothing like that,” I said, getting to my feet and finally meeting his gaze. “We were simply following up about the last case I’d done for him. He’s asked me to keep that quiet, as there would be many people in the police department who wouldn’t take kindly to someone like me being involved with – ”

  “I see,” he said, his eyes narrowing slightly, his smile faltering.

  Somehow, the conversation had been completely redirected toward me. Fear pumped through my veins, and I felt trapped in my own home.

  He knew I was lying. It was clear in his gaze.

  I needed to get myself out of this situation. If he prodded any further, he might figure out that Sam had told me about Sidney’s possible involvement with Wilson Baxter’s death.

  My heart lurched as the phone nearby rang, and I gasped.

  “Oh my goodness gracious,” I said, hurrying over to it.

  I hoisted the receiver into the air, quickly pressing it to my ear. I felt Sidney’s gaze on me as I stood there, my back to him.

  “Hello?” I asked.

  “Hello, Mrs. Lightholder?” asked a voice on the other end. “I was wondering if I could place an order.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Harriot,” I said, nearly giddy with relief. This was the out I needed. “Of course, yes. Just hold on one moment, all right? I need to get my order book.”

  “No problem, dear, I’ll wait.”

  I set the receiver down on the table where the phone resided. I looked over at Sidney, and shrugged. “I’m sorry, Sidney, but it seems I need to get back to work. I suppose it’s the price I pay for being away for a week.”

  Sidney’s eyes flashed, but it quickly disappeared. He grinned at me, and his charming demeanor returned, as bright and sunny as always. “Of course,” he said, winking. “It’s a small price to pay, though, I’m certain. Oh, before I leave, did you still want me to take a look at that loose part of the garden wall in the back for you?”

  “Oh, would you?” I asked, grabbing my order book and a pen from beside the till. “That would be wonderful.”

  “It’s no trouble,” he said. “I will get back to that, and leave you to your work.”

  “Thank you!” I said, beaming at him as I set the order book down on the table beside the telephone, lifting the phone back up to my ear.

  He waved, and pulled the back door shut behind him.

  I closed my eyes, sinking down into the chair beside the phone.

  He was gone…and I couldn’t have been more relieved.

  8

  I quickly wrote down Mrs. Harriot’s order, which was a stressful endeavor in and of itself, but didn’t linger at home. Sidney’s behavior was enough to completely put me on edge, and there was only one person that I knew I could turn to in a situation like this.

  Irene Driscoll.

  I hurried through the village, the sun glaring down on the street. Everyone else seemed to be enjoying the beautiful day. Parents sat out in their front gardens while their children chased one another through the grass. Mr. Trent was pushing his mower, keeping his lawn trim and clean. I saw Mrs. Bennet ride by on her bicycle, smiling merrily even as she held her floppy hat atop her head.

  I wished I could have stopped and enjoyed their happiness with them. They called out to me as I walked past, some even asking me to join them.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m in a hurry,” I said, my hand on my heart. “I would love to, though! Save some lemonade for me!”

  The tea house appeared, and I hurried toward it.

  When I stepped inside, I was surprised to find it very nearly empty. An elderly couple sat near the back, enjoying some tea cakes, several empty cups scattered around the table.

  “Helen,” said a voice off to the side. “What a surprise!”

  I looked and saw Nathanial wiping down a table.

  “Hello, Nathanial,” I said.

  He opened his arms to embrace me. “It’s good to see you.”

  “It’s wonderful to see you too,” I said, giving him a warm hug. “You have no idea.”

  He released me, stepping back and looking at me. “Is everything all right? You look distressed.”

  “Well…is your wife here?” I asked. “There is something that I needed to speak with her about.”

  He wiped his hands on a cloth he procured from his apron pocket. “Yes, she is, but she’s laid up in bed with a nasty cold.”

  My heart sank. “Oh,” I said. “I was beginning to wonder why I hadn’t heard from her since I got home.”

  “Yes, she was worried about that as well,” Nathanial said. He looked down at the tray on the table, stacked high with dirty dishes. “Well, you know, I think she would be happy to see you. It might be just the thing to cheer her up. Why don’t I go up and let her know? Would you mind watching the tables around here while I go speak with her?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’d be happy to.”

  He disappeared through the back door near the kitchen, and returned just a few moments later.

  “She said you are more than welcome to go up, but she asks that you excuse the state the house is in. I think everything is perfectly fine, but you know how she is. Everything needs to have a certain level of organization.”

  I smiled. “That’s not a problem. Thank you for allowing me to see her.”

  I headed up to their house, feeling rather strange to be walking upstairs without either Nathanial or Irene, even though I’d been there many, many times now.

  Their house was quaint, and comfortable, with a worn, red sofa, and a dining table that held as many memories as it did dents and scratches. The kitchen was painted a soft green, a color that Nathanial was not very keen on, but Irene had painted each door herself, adding little details of flowers and ivy around the frames.

  Michael’s toys were tucked away in a hand-painted blue chest that sat beside the fireplace, silently waiting for him to come home to play with them.

  I hesitated before proceeding down the hall to their bedrooms. I had only ever glimpsed inside the one briefly, and Michael’s door was usually kept closed, given the mess that Irene insisted that he lived in.

  Sunlight streamed through a crack in the door, creating elongated shapes on the floor in the hall. I approached it with caution, finding myself rather nervous.

  I raised my hand and gently knocked on the ancient, wooden frame. “Irene?” I asked. “It’s me.”

  I thought I heard a muffled cry of some sort from inside, which was followed by a nose being cleared into a handkerchief. “Come in, dear,” she said, rather congested. “Please come in.”

  I pushed open the door and found Irene sitting upright in her four poster bed, dressed in an ivory nightgown embroidered with roses, and a matching cap.

  She rubbed her nose with a handkerchief, her face pink, her eyes puffy.

  “Oh, my dear, it is good to see you,” she said, smiling at me. “It feels as though we haven’t seen each other in so much longer than a week.”

  “I understand that,” I said, walking over to the side of the bed.

  “Oh, I’m as well as I can be, I suppose…” she said, sniffling once again.

  I took a seat at the end of the four poster, sinking into the rather pleasant down comforter folded up at the foot of the mattress. “T
hat’s what your husband said,” I said. “I promise I won’t get too close, though.” I patted her leg through the blankets affectionately. “Though I do wish I’d known before I came over. I could have had some soup made up for you. Maybe brought you some of the chicken stock I made a few days back.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Whatever do you mean, dear?”

  “For your illness, of course,” I said. “Nathanial said you were laid up in bed with a terrible cold.”

  Irene’s eyes widened, and then she sighed, her shoulders now heavy with frustration. “That man…I love him dearly, but what good does he think that will do?”

  It was my turn to be confused. “What’s the matter?”

  Irene sniffled once again, rubbing her nose with the handkerchief. “I’m not ill, though I suppose I can see why you would believe that. No, we received some very troubling news last night.”

  “Oh, dear,” I said, all of my hopes of speaking to her about Sidney and the murder investigation falling by the wayside. “What happened?”

  Irene kneaded the handkerchief in her lap, staring down at its lovely, pale blue fabric. “Well, it’s something we’ve been keeping track of for a few days now. The night after you left home, I received a phone call from my sister-in-law, Nancy. She was calling to let us know that my brother was finally being released from the military, and would be on his way home within the next few days. Elated and relieved, I thought the news could only be good. However, when she called us again two days later, she was in tears…”

  My heart twisted in my chest.

  Irene’s eyes welled up, and she dabbed the tear-stained handkerchief to her eyes. “When she went to pick him up from the station, the person she met there was a very different man from the one she’d dropped off. He was being escorted by another soldier, who had been ordered to see him home, as there had been some concerns about Nigel’s…well, his state of mind.”

  Heart aching, I thought I might know where this conversation was heading.

  “She said that when she saw him, she…she couldn’t even recognize him. She knew he’d been in some difficult combat situations, but he’d always come out of it all right. At least, that’s what he’d told her. She told me, however, that his face was scarred now, and the whole left side of it had become almost disfigured, due to burns. He’d lost two fingers, and he walked with a limp. She said…she said she had never seen something so gut wrenching in her entire life.”

  I can’t even imagine it…I thought. It must be very nearly as awful as finding out your husband has passed away…

  “He recognized Nancy, which was good. They’d spoken plenty on the phone, and through letters. But the soldier that had accompanied him informed her that he had become terribly paranoid, especially in the last month or so. The doctors feared that his mind was broken, and that he was going to need special care. So she brought him home here to Brookminster.”

  Irene adjusted the blankets over her knees, as if attempting to collect herself, yet clearly finding it difficult to do so.

  “We spent some difficult days with him. He’s become obstinate, and paranoid doesn’t even begin to cover how he is acting. More than once, he attempted to escape in the middle of the night, simply getting out of bed and leaving the house. My poor sister-in-law is absolutely beside herself, and it has positively exhausted us all.”

  She sniffed, shaking her head.

  “And then there’s all this terrible news going around about Wilson Baxter,” she said. “He certainly wasn’t the nicest man in town, but when we found out he’d wound up dead, strangled to death in the street in the middle of the night…”

  She pressed her fingers to her temples, shutting her eyes.

  “Nancy called me this morning, absolutely terrified. She’s convinced herself that it was Nigel that killed him,” she said. “I told her that it was highly unlikely, but she is insisting it must be true, because one of the nights that Nigel managed to get out was supposedly the night that Wilson was killed. And since there was no weapon, and he’d been strangled, so there’d be no blood to prove it…” she blew her nose into the handkerchief. “She tells me that if anyone would have been able to strangle someone like that, it was someone who was in the military for as long as Nigel was. And if his mind has really snapped like the doctors fear, then how can anyone know for sure whether or not he might have done it?”

  I stared at a spot on the wooden floor, where a knot swirled gracefully, just catching the sunlight on its very edge, making it seem like wet ink.

  “I can’t believe it was Nigel,” Irene said, a note of defeat in her voice. “I just cannot bring myself to think that my baby brother would have been able to commit such a horrific act, even in the mental state that he is in.”

  I let out a small, low laugh that held no humor. “To be honest, I understand that train of thought better than you know.”

  Irene shifted in the bed. “What do you mean by that?”

  I looked around at her, my throat feeling as if it were closing. “Never mind,” I said. “You don’t need to hear any of that right now.”

  “But what if I want to?” she asked. “I’m quite tired of wallowing in my own problems. Perhaps I could help you with what’s on your mind?”

  “No, really…” I said. “It’s not the right time.”

  “Well, now, you really must tell me,” Irene said.

  I picked at the hem of my shirt, debating internally. “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “I really would prefer to not think about my brother, and whether or not he…”

  “Well, you aren’t going to believe it, but what’s been troubling me actually has to do with the death of Wilson Baxter,” I said.

  Irene’s face fell. “You just got home. How could you have possibly gotten tangled up in all that already?”

  “I didn’t intend to,” I said. “It was Sam Graves who informed me of what happened, actually. Over lunch yesterday afternoon.”

  Irene gasped. “You went out for lunch with Inspector Graves? And you’re just telling me this now?”

  “It isn’t what you think,” I said. “Though I suppose I thought it might have been a romantic meal, too…But that wasn’t it at all. In fact, he just wanted to tell me about…well, what’s been bothering me.”

  “Which you said had something to do with Wilson Baxter’s death?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Yes. You aren’t going to believe this, but – ”

  A frantic knock at the door stopped me in mid-sentence.

  “Who is it?” Irene asked, leaning and looking around me to the door.

  The door was pushed open, and I was surprised to see Michael step into the room, his eyes as wide as saucers.

  Irene was out of bed in a flash. “Sweetheart, what’s the matter?” she asked. “Is everything all right?”

  She knelt down in front of him, laying her hands on his shoulders.

  His large grey eyes, the same shade as hers, were glassy. “Mummy, they took him away.”

  Cold fear pulsed through my veins.

  “What do you mean, sweetheart? Who did they take?” Irene asked.

  He sniffed, much the same way she had earlier. “Mr. Hodgins,” he said. “The police – they came to their house. We were playing in the back garden when they came out the door and started talking to him, and then they took him away.”

  Irene glanced over her shoulder at me.

  The butcher? I thought. What do the police want with –

  “It’s all right, sweetheart,” Irene said. “Were your friends all right?”

  “Yes,” Michael said. “Mrs. Hodgins sent us all home, though. She was really upset.”

  “Yes, I can imagine,” Irene said.

  A man, being suddenly taken away by the police…in the middle of a murder investigation.

  That couldn’t possibly mean that Mr. Hodgins was a suspect?

  “Irene, I need to go,” I said, rising from the edge of the bed. “I thi
nk I am going to need to speak with Sam Graves about everything going on.”

  9

  My mind was racing as I left the tea house. Everything seemed to be happening all at once, and I was having a difficult time trying to wrap my mind around everything that I had learned.

  Irene’s brother Nigel…someone who had been completely unknown to me, was now a possible contender for the murder of Wilson Baxter. I couldn’t be sure if it made me feel better, or worse about the whole thing.

  On the one hand, I realized as I forced myself to keep my pace steady and slow, it would be a great comfort to know that Sidney was not the murderer, after all. An incredible comfort. My spine tingled with the desire for it to be so. On the other hand, I hated the idea of someone in Irene’s family being responsible for such a travesty. It would scar her for life, and the way she saw her brother would be forever changed…

  No, neither of them can be the one, I thought, my hands tightening into fists as I stared at the cobbled street. It has to be someone else…for both our sake’s.

  The police station came into view a short time later, and I was pleased to see there were no protests or demonstrations happening out front this time around. After the understandable recent frustrations over the anonymous articles in the newspaper about a murderer running around the village, I knew that the police were starting to feel a little overwhelmed by the difficulties they were now facing.

  And with yet another murder, they were sure to have their hands full.

  I stepped into the foyer of the police station, the sound of phones ringing and people talking greeting me as soon as I opened the door. The heavy, stale stench of cigarette smoke seemed to cling to every surface, along with the old case files and the thousands of pages of paper that filled them.

  The receptionist sat at her desk, just like she always did. Her dark hair, which fell in thick ringlets, was pinned up at the base of her neck, but some ringlets fell down around near her face. Just like always, there was a cigarette clenched in her teeth, and a nail file hurriedly blazed across the surface of her nails, so fast it was very nearly a blur.