Lost Among the Living(78)

I could have kissed him then. I had done it a million times, as easily as breathing. I could have turned and pressed my lips to his, felt everything he was thinking, understood everything in his soul. Right there in the Anningley library, with the librarian asleep in her chair. But when I turned around and looked up at him, his expression was marked with pain.

“I thought it would be easier, coming back,” he said. “But I can see now that I was naive. I have to find the traitor—I cannot stop until I find him. And I have to find Franny’s killer.”

Yes, of course. He hadn’t come home for me, not completely. I folded my book under my arm and turned away.





CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO



We left the lending library and Alex unfolded the umbrella again. “I knew Franny all of her life,” he said. “Aside from your mother, Jo, she was the most tormented person I’ve ever met. Her grasp on reality was tenuous, and she saw hallucinations. But there was a sort of vitality about her—it’s hard to explain. She was very intelligent, very alive, and sometimes very determined. She was not suicidal.”

“That’s why you believe it was murder?” I asked.

“That, and the timing of it.” He shook his head. “Something was not right about that day. I knew it from the minute I came home to find her dead.” He glanced at me. “If I believed in such things, I would say that it doesn’t surprise me that she haunts the house.”

“She wears a dark gray dress and a string of pearls,” I said. “Her hair is tied back and held with pins.”

He was silent, and I knew that I’d just described what Frances had been wearing the day she died.

“I’m not hallucinating, Alex,” I said. “I found photographs in her room—one of them was of me. The one of me as an artist’s model. It was in my trunk when I arrived, but I found it folded with two others, with a message on the back. One of the other pictures showed Wych Elm House, and there is a shadow in the window—”

“Enough.” He sighed quietly, still unwilling to believe. “We agree that Frances was murdered at least,” he said. “Let us agree on our list of suspects.”

“Very well,” I said. “It must begin with the people in the house that day. So the list starts with Dottie.”

“Add the servants, though I’m not sure what the motive would be.”

Something about those words triggered a thought in the back of my mind, a memory like an itch, but I could not recall it. “The man in the woods,” I added.

“He wasn’t in the house,” Alex reminded me.

“We don’t know that. It isn’t impossible, especially if he had an accomplice in either the family or the servants. Was Robert home that day?”

“Yes,” Alex replied. “He wasn’t in the house when it happened, but he arrived home soon after. He’d been at a neighbor’s.”

“Did he take the motorcar?”

“No, he walked. He was visiting the Astleys, half a mile away.”

“Does he usually walk to the Astleys’?” Robert had taken the motorcar every time he’d visited friends since we’d been home.

“I have no idea what Robert usually does.”

“Did anyone ask the Astleys about it?”

“As a matter of fact, I did,” Alex said. “I thought it rather convenient that he came walking up the back lane from the trees barely twenty minutes after his daughter died. So I visited the Astleys myself. Robert was there. You’re not the only one with a basely suspicious line of thinking.”

I ignored that. “Did the Astleys recall exactly what time he left?”

“No, not exactly.”

“So he could have done it, left the house, and come back twenty minutes later as if innocent.”

“Yes. I don’t like to think it, but without a firm timeline, it’s possible.”

“And you?” I asked. “Where were you exactly when it happened?”

“In the motorcar, on my way home from this very village,” Alex replied. “I arrived only minutes after it happened. One of the maids saw her fall, and was screaming.” He glanced away, his jaw hard. “It was me who took charge of the body.”

He would have had to look at her, dead on the flagstones, and cover her up until the police came. It did not bear thinking of, but I had to be hard-hearted. “That’s our list of suspects, then,” I said. “Dottie, Robert, the servants, the man in the woods, you. The only person we can rule out safely is Martin, because he was in France.”

“No,” Alex said. “We cannot rule out Martin.” He glanced at me. “If you can be cold, then so can I. If Martin wished his sister dead from his hospital bed in France, then he could have hired someone. He certainly had the means.”

“That makes no sense,” I said. “He loved her.” But I remembered Cora telling me that Martin had burned all of the letters Frances sent to him at the Front during the war. Why would he do that?

“Love and murder go together more often than you think,” Alex replied. “And you have left out one other person. By coincidence, here he comes now.”

I looked ahead. Approaching us through the rain was a familiar figure, his shriveled arm pinned into the sleeve of his mackintosh. “That’s Mr. Wilde.”