Lost Among the Living(80)

He latched the French door shut and turned to me. The rising moonlight was behind him, casting shadows, but I could see that he gave me an apologetic smile. “Well,” he said, “here we are. I assumed you’d be at supper with all the others tonight, now that Alex is home. But it looks like you avoided it, like me.”

“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s quite all right.” He came toward me. “I’m on my way back upstairs, and I’m not feeling well. Do you think you could accompany me?”

“Yes, of course.” I took his arm, which felt like a matchstick inside the sleeve of the loose sweater he wore. “You should eat something.”

“Not possible,” he said as we moved out the doorway and down the hall. “I’m not improving, Cousin. That’s the truth of it.” He was quiet for a long moment as we began to ascend the stairs. “I suppose you’re wondering who she was.”

“It’s none of my business,” I replied.

“Still, it looks very bad.” He gripped the stair railing with one thin hand and pulled himself up the steps. “The fact is, she’s the wife of a man who used to work here.”

“I see,” I said, though I didn’t see much of anything.

“He wasn’t here long,” Martin said, keeping his gaze on the stairs in front of him. His jaw was set tight, either in pain or in reluctance to tell the story. “He was one of the gardeners. He was a drunk, unreliable, given to fits of anger. Mother sacked him after a few weeks.”

“This must have been some time ago,” I said. The gardens were overgrown now, though Dottie had hired someone to try to tame them since her return.

“Near the beginning of the war, yes. The fellow didn’t take it well, but like most of us, he enlisted. He must have heard that I had enlisted as well, because while I was in the hospital he had the audacity to write me a letter, complaining about Mother’s treatment of him and asking for money.” He took a deep breath. “There,” he said as we crossed the landing and started upward again. “I’ve just told you something I’ve never told another soul. I think I might confess all of my crimes before I die.”

“Stop talking like that,” I said.

“Come now, Cousin,” he replied. “We both know if I make it to the wedding it will be a miracle. I feel bad for Mother, because she’s putting so much energy into planning the thing. And Cora, of course. But she and I have come to an understanding.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I said. “The doctors—”

“I don’t want to talk about doctors,” he interrupted. “Wouldn’t you like to hear the story about the gardener?”

“All right. Go on.”

He sighed. “He sent me a letter. He said he’d been injured in the war and been sent home. He could no longer work. Ours was the last job he’d had, and he’d been sacked unfairly, he said, with no references. He appealed to me as a fellow soldier for money. I thought the entire plea was absurd, and I was in my own hell. I wrote him back and said no.”

“I see,” I said. This was going somewhere, and I thought I could begin to glimpse where. We reached the top of the stairs and started down the corridor to Martin’s room. “And does the story end there?”

“I thought it did. I certainly never heard from him again. But I just learned tonight that the story didn’t stop there at all.” His breath was rasping from exertion on the stairs; he was in much worse shape than he’d been the day he came home, his features lined with pain. “The man’s wife just paid me a visit, as you see. She says he disappeared after coming home in August of 1917 and she hasn’t seen him since. She believes him dead.”

I stopped in front of his bedroom door. “The man in the woods,” I said. “The man who died the day Frances did.”

“Exactly, Cousin Jo,” Martin replied. “Just maneuver me to the bed over there, if you would. I’ll fix the pillows. Yes, she believes her husband died in the woods that day. She’s been waiting for our family to come home so she can make her claim.”

“Claim?”

“Money, of course.” Martin eased back on the bed against the large stack of pillows he’d piled against the headboard. “She believes that Franny’s hellhound dog, Princer, tore her husband to pieces, and she blames our cursed family—as she called it—for his death. She wants compensation. She’s starting with me, but if I don’t pay, she’s threatening to go public.”

I pulled up a chair and sat next to him. He had relaxed onto the bed, fully clothed, his hands on his stomach. “It’s a bluff,” I said. “If she truly wanted to go public, she could have done it any time in the past four years.”

“I agree. So much simpler to extract money privately from the family, isn’t it? Less publicity and more profit. No risk of ridicule over claiming a fictional demon dog killed your husband.”

“You’ll have to go to the police, the magistrate,” I said. “Now that you know the man’s identity. The authorities need to be told.”

“Except I don’t actually know it,” he replied. “I only know his disappearance coincided with the unidentified man’s death. And even for that, I have only his wife’s word.”