“The wound never did heal right,” said Rory. “Which was a blessing, in my opinion, because it forced Maurice to give up shooting.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Back up a little, will you? How did Madeline convince Leo that Maurice was dead?”
“The power of suggestion,” Kit replied, looking to Rory for confi rmation.
“You’re dead right, if you’ll pardon the expression,” said Rory.
Kit turned to me. “Picture the scene in your mind, Lori. Leo was so soused that he could have lost a leg and never noticed. When he came to, he was spattered with Maurice’s blood and scared out of his wits. The last thing he remembered was grabbing at the shotgun in a fit of drunken rage. His temper had gotten him into trouble so often that he was primed to believe it had gotten him into trouble again.”
“Only much worse trouble this time,” Rory put in. “The kind of trouble that would’ve got him hanged in the old days.”
“Madeline used the power of suggestion to manipulate Leo,”
said Kit. “She told him that Maurice’s heart had stopped beating, that he’d stopped breathing. And Leo was so muddled that he believed it. Madeline was like a magician, Lori. She made Leo believe what she wanted him to believe.”
“You’ve got it in one,” said Rory.
“The only thing I don’t get,” said Kit, turning back to the old man, “is why you went along with it. Maurice and Madeline were trying to keep their daughter from marrying a good-for-nothing young punk. They may have gone about it in the wrong way, but at least they were trying to protect their child. What’s your excuse, Rory?”
“I wanted the best for Charlotte, too,” Rory said. Then he low-212 Nancy Atherton ered his eyes and gave a short, defeated sigh. “But I also knew it would set me up for life. The DuCarals paid top dollar for my cooperation. When I retired, they gave me a pension and a done-up cottage—all mod cons. What do you think I’d have got if I hadn’t gone along with them?”
“A clear conscience,” said Kit.
“It’s easy for you to say,” Rory mumbled defensively. “But we don’t all have the safety net of being Sir Miles Anscombe’s son.”
Kit flinched and turned away from the bed, but when he looked back at Rory, something inside him seemed to snap. His nostrils fl ared, and a fl ame seemed to leap in his eyes.
“Being Sir Miles Anscombe’s son isn’t a safety net,” he said, in a low, dangerous voice. “It’s a handicap. It’s a fatal disease.”
Alarmed, I put a restraining hand on Kit’s arm, but he shrugged it off angrily and went on, the words pouring out in a torrent, like a fl ood bursting from a dam.
“I would give anything to die as you’re dying, Rory,” he said, “with my mind intact, my faculties unimpaired. But I won’t get the chance, because I’m my father’s son. He hanged himself—did you know?—but he’d lost his mind long before that. He was insane, just as his grandfather was, and his great-grandfather, and so on and so forth, for six generations. I know, I’ve checked. The Anscombe men don’t show it at first—that’s why they’ve been able to breed— but it comes to them all in the end. So don’t talk to me about safety nets, Rory Tanner, because there’s nothing between me and the ground. My fall is inevitable. ”
I stared at Kit openmouthed, shaken by a lightning bolt of blinding revelation. His refusal to marry Nell, to marry anyone, suddenly made a certain sort of twisted sense. He believed he’d inherited madness from his father’s side of the family, and he didn’t want to risk passing it on to yet another generation. He was the last of the Anscombe men. He wanted the family curse to end with him.
“But, Kit,” I said, in a small voice, “you’re not crazy.”
Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter
213
“I behaved very oddly for four long years,” he said, still breathing hard and fixing his furious gaze on the floor. “I lived on the streets. I checked myself into an asylum.”
“The asylum was a hellhole,” I countered. “The only reason you went there was to shut it down. And you succeeded.”
“Do I need to remind you of how we met, Lori?” Kit asked.
“You found me lying in your driveway, half dead from self-imposed starvation.”
“You were overwhelmed with grief for your father,” I said, more strongly. “You weren’t crazy.”
“Statistics are against you,” he retorted bitterly, still refusing to meet my gaze. “As you pointed out to me just the other day, mental illness often runs in families. It’s cut rather a large swath through mine. I have no reason to believe that it will miss me.”
To my dismay and immense irritation, our pivotal argument was interrupted by a knock on the parlor door. Leave it to Henrietta, I thought, to choose the worst possible moment to deliver a fruit basket or a roast suckling pig.
“I’ll get it,” I muttered, and hustled across the room.
I flung the door open impatiently, fell back a step, felt horror rise like bile in my throat, and let loose a scream of pure, unmitigated terror.
Rendor, the Destroyer of Souls, swooped into the room.
Twenty-Two