Lost Among the Living(97)

“It’s been horrible. I am a blotchy, overwrought dishrag,” I said, turning my head on the pillow next to him and running my fingers over his four days’ beard. It looked handsome on him, of course.

“You are gorgeous,” Alex replied, his thumb weakly rubbing the back of my neck beneath my hair. “Now tell me everything that’s going on.”

“You just woke up.”

“Yes, and the police have probably been informed already. They’ll be by for a chat anytime. So tell me everything, Jo.”

I did, surprised at how much I could recall through the haze of my panic. He stayed awake long enough to say it was all a bloody mess, and he would make everything right, and that he’d be out of bed in no time; it was just one bullet. Then he drifted off to sleep again. I disentangled myself from him and went to the women’s ward to see Dottie.

? ? ?

“Alex is awake,” I told her.

Her head was still bandaged, but she was sitting up, her hands folded on top of the coverlet. Her gaze was alert, but there was something different about it, something not quite Dottie. There was no sign of her usual sharpness. Instead, she looked at me from her dark-ringed eyes with an expression tinged with confusion.

“I have just spoken with David Wilde,” she said.

I nodded. He had visited her after his conversation with me, then. “He told you about Martin?”

“Yes.” Her hands twitched on the covers. “Manders,” she said, though the word was spoken softly, with none of its old sting. “I have been thinking.”

I sat and waited. Her thinking seemed to have slowed.

“I have told David everything,” Dottie said, ignoring my surprise at her use of his Christian name. “Everything that I heard . . . Robert say to you. Though I did not repeat what he said about Alex.”

She meant the part in which Robert had spoken of Alex coming home to investigate treason. “Dottie, there is an explanation—”

“Stop,” she said weakly. “I don’t wish to know more than I already heard. Alex’s doings for the past three years, whatever they were, are his business. It’s David I want to talk about. He has apologized to me.”

“Apologized?”

“There is a woman living in the village,” Dottie said. “A former servant of the family. Over the time we’ve been gone, David and this woman have formed a personal attachment.” A flash of her old sharpness crossed her glance. “I hope I do not shock you, Manders.”

“No,” I replied. “Though I wonder about Mrs. Wilde.”

She pursed her lips just a little. “David’s troubles are of his own making and are not for me to repeat. I’m too tired to even attempt it. However, this woman—”

“Petra Jennings,” I supplied.

“Yes.” She showed no surprise that I knew the name. “She came to David and told her Robert had threatened her.”

“Threatened?”

“Yes. When you and Alex left me that morning, you apparently went to this woman’s home and spoke to her. Robert knew of it somehow. He thought that Alex had told her his secret—what he did to Frances and why. He believed she was going to be used against him as a witness to the day Frances died and to the sketches Frances had made in her book. He told her that if she agreed to testify, he would kill her.”

I sat back in my chair and stared at her, my tired mind putting it together. “That’s why she left her home. That’s why she was gone.”

“David thought it best to get her to safety, so he accompanied her to her home and helped her pack her things. Then he moved her to a hotel in a nearby town under an assumed name. When he had finished, he fully intended to warn me.”

“But he was too late,” I said. Alex and I must have come to Petra’s house only shortly after they had left.

“Yes.” Dottie raised a hand and lightly touched her bandage, then dropped it again. “He wished to apologize to me, not only for his failure but for the embarrassment of his situation. I had no idea about the woman, of course. I would have taken him to task if I’d known.”

I thought about it. What if Alex and I had been earlier arriving at Petra’s house? What if we’d met her and David Wilde, if we’d been warned? Everything could have been different.

“What I’ve been thinking,” Dottie said, “is that you must have known about Robert. That’s why you went to that woman’s house. You and Alex must have known, and you did not tell me.”

“No,” I said. “We didn’t know. But we believed it wasn’t suicide, that someone had killed her. We thought Petra Jennings might hold the key.”

Dottie leaned back against her pillows. “You believed she’d been murdered because of Frances’s ghost,” she said, her voice tinged with confusion again. “Is that the way of it?”

“Yes. I wanted to tell you, that day in the library, but it already sounded mad. And I had no proof.”

Dottie waved a hand at me, and I noticed how the bones were almost visible beneath her pale skin. “I am not interested in more apologies. My daughter, whatever her reasons, chose you to appear to. She chose you to tell.”

She also chose me to protect, I thought but did not say. “Yes.”

“What I want . . . The only thing I want, Manders, is to know whether she is still in Wych Elm House.”