“No sisters. Just one older brother.” Leo raised his open palms and asked, with a touch of exasperation, “Why are we talking about brothers and sisters when I’ve just confessed to murder?”
“Sorry,” I said, blushing, and motioned for him to continue.
“Carry on.”
“Thank you,” said Leo, a bit tetchily.
“Lori has a point,” said Kit. “You couldn’t have killed Maurice DuCaral. He died three years ago.”
“I don’t know where you’re getting your information, Kit,” said Leo, “but it’s wrong. I was there that night. I know what happened.
I didn’t mean to kill him, but when the gamekeeper ran up, the shotgun was in my hands and Maurice’s body was stretched out in the bracken, covered in blood.”
“Are you sure he was dead?” Kit asked.
“I’m sure,” said Leo. “I dropped the gun and crawled over to him. He wasn’t breathing. He didn’t have a pulse. He was dead.”
“Hmmm,” Kit said ruminatively. “What did you do when you realized that he was dead?”
“I was too shocked to do much of anything,” Leo admitted, rubbing the back of his neck. “It was Madeline DuCaral who took charge.”
“What was Madeline doing there?” I asked.
“She’d heard the gun go off,” said Leo. “She came out to find her husband dead and me with his blood on my hands. I expected her to call the police, or to order the gamekeeper to shoot me, or to shoot me herself, but she just stood there, staring down at Maurice’s body. Then she made a deal with me.”
194 Nancy Atherton
“She what?” I said, certain I’d misheard him.
“She made a deal with me,” Leo repeated. “If I agreed to disappear, she and the gamekeeper would make the shooting look like an accident, and she’d never tell anyone what had really happened. She’d allow me to get away with murder, but only if I promised to leave England and never come back. If I stayed, I’d go to prison.”
I stared at him in frank bewilderment. “Why on earth would she let you off the hook? You’d killed her husband. ”
“Yes, and can you imagine what it would do to a girl like Charlotte, to learn that the boy she loved and trusted had murdered her father?” Leo demanded. “Charlotte was a naive eighteen-year-old.
She was an innocent. Sure, it’d be hard for her to lose her father, but it’d be a double dose of hell for her if she found out that he’d died by my hand. Mrs. DuCaral didn’t give a toss about me. She was trying to protect her daughter.”
“So you ran away,” said Kit, “for Charlotte’s sake.”
Leo dismissed the comment with a flick of his hand. “Don’t make me out to be a hero, Kit. I ran to save my own skin. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison, and with my reputation the courts would have had no mercy on me. So I ran—straight into that mad old woman, Lizzie Black. She was picking berries here, in Gypsy Hollow, when I came bursting through the trees, all spattered with blood. I was in such a panic that I blurted out, ‘I’ve killed him!’ God knows what she thought, but it didn’t matter, because no one ever believed a word she said. I didn’t see anyone else after that. I just ran fl at-out until I reached the manor.”
“My mother must have been horrifi ed,” said Kit.
“She was,” said Leo, “but she was my big sister, and she knew Charlotte better than anyone. She thought it’d kill Charlotte to know the truth, so she cleaned me up, gave me money and the keys to her car, and sent me on my way. I went up to Liverpool, got a job on a cargo ship, and disappeared.”
Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter
195
“To Australia,” I said.
“I ended up in Australia a year later,” said Leo. “I wrote to Amy, to let her know I was all right. She wrote to me from time to time, poste restante in Sydney, because I rarely had a fixed address.” He glanced shyly at Kit. “She told me all about you, Kit, sent me a picture of you when you were no bigger than a loaf of bread. When her letters stopped, I made some inquiries and found out that she’d been killed in a car wreck. I couldn’t believe it. . . . ” He ran a hand through his grizzled hair and sighed. “I’m sorry, Kit. I should have been here for you when you were growing up. But things don’t always work out the way they should.”
“You’re here now,” said Kit. “Why did you come back?”
“I wanted to see you,” Leo answered simply. “I couldn’t go to my grave without seeing Amy’s boy.”
“I wish you’d told me who you are when we first met,” said Kit.
“I wasn’t going to tell you at all,” Leo confessed shamefacedly.
“I knew you’d start asking questions if I played it straight with you, and I was afraid of what you’d think of me when you heard the answers. I killed a man, Kit. I broke a young girl’s heart. I ran like a coward because I couldn’t take the punishment I deserved. I’ve tried to become a better man since then, but I’ll never truly escape my past. I’ll understand it if you want nothing to do with me. And if you want to turn me in—”