“Logical? In what world?” I scoffed.
“In the hellish place I was living in,” he said matter-of-factly. “My whole world was falling apart around me. One bad decision led to another, then another. Not only was I fighting for my own life, my reckless actions had taken Virgil’s life, and in a sense, Hyacinth’s. Everything Idella and I ever worked for hung in the balance—a weight that was squarely on my shoulders. It was my fault we were in this situation. I had to do something drastic. I saw a way out, and yes, I took it. I had no other choice.”
“You could have told the truth.”
A wry smile played on his lips. “Right. The truth shall set me free,” he said drolly.
“Yes,” I said. “Exactly. People have the capacity to understand the truth. It’s lies we have issues with.”
“No, Carly. The truth would only have caused more pain. I had no other choice.”
He believed what he was saying, which I was actually grateful for. Because otherwise, I was dealing with a sociopath. He wasn’t that. He was just a desperate man.
A desperate man who’d already killed two people.
“Once I came up with the blackmail plan, I had to include Idella. It would be suspicious if all the Harpies but her received letters.”
“You purposely misled me when I asked you about the blackmail on Monday.”
“What else was I supposed to do?” he asked. “Confess?”
That would have been nice. “Does Idella know about all this?” I realized suddenly that she was the only one of the Harpies I hadn’t questioned about the blackmail. Haywood, yes, the blackmail, no. Was she in on it, too?
“No, she doesn’t, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
He spoke the truth, but my witchy senses were making me fidgety.
“How’d you pull that off?” I asked. “She has to know about your financial situation.”
“She’s old-fashioned, believing that the man of the house should take care of the money. I pay the bills. I do all the banking. She has no idea how big of a hole we are in. So she wouldn’t become suspicious about what I was doing, I went so far as to give her the cash to pay off the blackmailer using money I’d received from the other blackmail victims.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “And Haywood?”
“I told you your theory about the blackmailer killing Haywood was a good one,” he said. “You were dead-on, pardon the bad pun. Just substitute the gambling reference for medical bankruptcy.”
My theory.
Let’s say your wife’s a gambler. Maybe she’s racked up some debts, and you’re having trouble paying them off . . . You need cash quick. Your friends are loaded but you just can’t ask for a handout straight-out. Pride’s on the line. So you concoct a plan to use some secrets you know to bring in some money. No harm. No foul. Except what if one of the people you’re blackmailing suddenly stops paying? And threatens to track you down and expose your identity? Your house of cards is about to collapse. You panic. And you kill him.
“You thought Haywood knew who you were and was going to announce it that night at the ball,” I said.
“I’d been nervous about the announcement all week, wondering. It wasn’t until I overheard Haywood and Patricia arguing about Avery’s presence at the ball that I truly panicked. I thought Haywood had told Patricia about his plan to expose the blackmailer. I thought he’d uncovered that I had sent the letters, and I had to make sure he never revealed my identity. I grabbed the closest thing to me—a candlestick—wrapped myself in a dark curtain from the hallway, and waited until Haywood was alone . . . It wasn’t until you told me the following day that he’d been planning to announce his connection to the Ezekiel house that I realized I’d killed him for no reason at all, and I felt truly ill about it. My intent with the blackmail was to never physically harm anyone. I needed money. That is all. Those bills were my cage.”
I recalled the conversation yesterday afternoon.
“Louella shouldn’t have to spend her life in a cage. It’s not right.”
Softly, he said, “No one should. Especially when it’s not a cage of your own making.”
But, I noted that he said he hadn’t wanted to physically harm anyone with the blackmail. He obviously knew the emotional pain he had caused.
“And the fire?” I asked.
“Again, a moment of panic. I spotted you with Mr. Butterbaugh and followed the two of you. I’d bumped into him just before the murder near the restrooms, and I was afraid he would eventually realize I was the killer.”
Aha! The fire had been about Mr. Butterbaugh, after all. I couldn’t wait to tell Delia and Dylan.
And hoped I’d have the chance.
“He has no clue you’re involved,” I said.
“That’s good to know now, but on Sunday I didn’t want to take that chance. When I saw the two of you go into the basement, I threw together a plan on the spot.”