Reaching the wall, he rested his palms on the edge of it, swung his body over in one movement, paying no heed to the long thorn-laced roses that pulled at his clothes. His feet landed among Maggie’s pathetic little flowers on the far side of the wall, trampling them heedlessly.
There was a motorcar in the drive, down by the gate. It was empty, and he ignored it, springing for the cottage.
Seeing him coming, the goose wheeled from her stand near the cottage door and sailed toward him, wings out, neck low, prepared for the attack.
He brushed her roughly aside, and was ten yards from the door when it burst open and a man came reeling out, his face a mask of blood, his shirt torn and soaked to crimson, his trousers slashed and smeared.
It was Royston. Something had laid open his shoulder—Rutledge could see the blue-white sheen of bone there—and he plunged heavily off the steps and into the grass, hardly aware of Rutledge sliding to a halt almost in his path.
Regardless of the pain he was inflicting, Rutledge caught him by his good shoulder and swung him around, anger twisting his face into a grimace as he shouted, “Damn you! What have you—”
Inside, the screaming went on.
“Watch her!” Royston cried. “She’s got—got an ax—” His knees buckled. “The child—the child—”
Rutledge managed to break his fall, but Royston was losing blood rapidly, his words weaker with every breath. “The child—I killed—”
Without waiting for any more, Rutledge was through the door, eyes seeing nothing after the glare of the sun, but ahead of him was something, a figure barely glimpsed. A woman in black, huddled on the floor at the end of the brown sofa, two darknesses blending into one like some distorted parody of humanity, humped and ugly. A primeval dread lifted the hairs along his arms.
Reaching her, he grasped her shoulders, saying, “Are you all right? Has he hurt you? What has he done to you?”
She stared up at him, face chalk white, eyes large and wild. In one bloody hand was an ax. His own eyes were adjusting rapidly now. The room was empty except for Maggie and the assorted furnishings of a rented house.
He got her up on the sofa, and she leaned back, eyes closed. “Is he dead?” she asked breathlessly, in the voice of a terrified child.
“No—I don’t think so.”
She tried to get up, but he pressed her back against the sofa, holding her there, trying to determine how much of the blood was hers, how much Royston’s.
“I’ll have to get help—I’ll find Helena and bring her to you—she’s at the church—”
But Maggie was shaking her head, dazed but at least able to understand him. Her eyes turned toward the closed door at the far end of the room. “She’s in there,” Maggie whispered.
Rutledge felt his blood run cold.
“I’ll go—”
“No—leave her! I hope she’s dead!”
He mistook her meaning, thinking that she was saying that death was preferable to the cataclysm of rape.
“I saw her kill him,” she went on, not taking her eyes from the bedroom door. “I saw her! She shot Colonel Harris. And it was for nothing, it wasn’t the right man—she’d thought it was, but Mavers said—and then that man out there admitted it was true, that he’d killed the child.”
“What child?” he asked, thinking only of Lizzie.
“Why, little Helena, of course. Mr. Royston ran over her in his car—in Colonel Harris’s car. And the check he sent was in the Colonel’s name. So we thought—all these years we thought—but it wasn’t the Colonel. Helena got it all wrong.” There was a sudden spark of triumph in her eyes, as if it gave her some obscure pleasure to think that Helena had been wrong. “Aunt Mary and Uncle Martin always said she was better than I was, so pretty, so smart, so fearless—they said they wished the car had killed me, not Helena. I was only adopted, you see, I wasn’t theirs—” There was a lifetime of suffering in her words, a lifelong misery because the wrong child had died in an accident and she had been blamed for living. “They asked for all that money, and it wasn’t enough to satisfy them, they wanted her back again. But she was dead. And I was alive.”
He wasn’t interested in Maggie’s childhood; he had a man bleeding to death on his hands, and God knew what behind that closed, silent bedroom door.
“So when Helena discovered that the Colonel lived here, just across the wall—that he was our neighbor—”
Getting up from his knees, his breathing still erratic and harsh, he ignored Maggie and started across the room to the bedroom, forcing himself to face what had to be faced. Hamish had been babbling for the last five minutes, a counterpoint to Maggie’s slow, painful confession, but Rutledge shut him out, shut out everything but the long, bright streak of blood down the door panel, on the handle of the knob—
Somehow Maggie was there before him. “No! Leave her alone, I tell you! I won’t let you go near her—let her die!” And with such swiftness that he couldn’t have stopped her if his own life had depended upon it, she was through the door and into the room, turning the key in the lock behind her.
“Maggie!” he shouted, pounding on the door, but he could hear only her sobbing. She’d taken the ax with her. There was nothing to do but try to break the door down with his shoulder or kick it down.
It took him three tries. When it finally swung wide on broken hinges, he was into the room before he could regain his balance.
There was only one bed, narrow, neatly made, now covered in blood. And only Maggie, collapsed across the pretty lemon-colored counterpane like a heap of rags, stained and worn. The ax was on the floor at her feet. He turned wildly, surveying the small room, finding no one else, the window closed, the closet empty. Then he was beside the woman on the bed, leaning over her, lifting her gently. Black lifeblood welled beneath her, thick and pungent. The heavy, ivory-handled knife had plunged too deep. There was nothing he could do.
Her eyes were not able to see him. But she was still alive. Just.
“I had to do it,” she said. “I couldn’t stand it anymore. She knew that. She always knew things before I ever did. But for once she was wrong—about the Colonel. She’ll go to hell, won’t she, for killing him? And I’ll go to heaven with the angels, won’t I? We couldn’t share anymore. Not with that on her conscience.”
“Where did she kill him?” Rutledge asked.
“By the wall. When he came to speak to Maggie. She had the shotgun hidden there, among the roses, where he couldn’t see it. And she tried to ask him if he’d been the one driving the car that killed Helena. But he wouldn’t listen, he told her not to be a fool, that she was upset and not thinking clearly. So she shot him—she lifted the gun and shot him and his head flew everywhere, and the horse bolted before he’d stopped bleeding, and it was the most awful…”
Her voice faded. He could see the blood trickling out of her mouth. The way the body lay, graceless and heavy. It would only be a matter of minutes. There was nothing he could do to stop the bleeding, nothing anyone could do to put the torn flesh back together. But he sat there beside her until her eyes told him she was dead. Then he got to his feet and began to search the cottage.
He found the shotgun in a closet. And signs of one breakfast on the table. And only one bedroom occupied, the other with the mattress still rolled up and wrapped in a sheet. Two trunks holding clothes. He went through each cupboard and closet, looked under anything that might hide a body. But there was no one.
He wasn’t surprised.
Taking a sheet with him, he hurried out to bind up Royston’s bloody shoulder. The goose, smelling the blood, had backed off behind the car in the drive. Royston’s car. He’d come to take Helena to church….