“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.”
I would have to go back to the house to see. The thought of going back there froze me to my seat. “I can’t.”
“I think you can,” Dottie said.
I felt sweat break out on my back, my palms. “And if she’s there?”
“Then find out why.” Dottie’s voice was drifting into exhaustion now. “Find out what keeps her from being at peace.”
“Dottie—”
“Please.”
She had never said that to me before. She had lost her daughter, her husband, and possibly her son, while I had Alex back. I understood how loss like that can rob you. It made no matter that I never wanted to see Wych Elm House again.
“All right, Dottie. I’ll go,” I said. I stood, but at the door I turned to her again. “May I ask you one question?”
Her eyes had drifted closed, but she waved a hand in agreement.
“Why did you come back?” I asked. “You left the house to follow Martin to London. Why did you turn around?”
She opened her eyes and gave me that confused look again, and seemed to have to search for the words. “He asked me,” she said finally, the words lacking her usual force. “In the letter he left. Martin asked me not to follow him. I disregarded that at first—I was furious. But as I drove I realized that following him would only make things worse. Martin is grown now, and married, and he did not need his mother chasing him around the country.”
“So you turned around and came home,” I said, “and overheard everything.”
“I was on the front step when I heard the gunshot,” she said. “I thought we were being robbed. I told the driver to go for the police, and then I walked around to the kitchen door to get a knife.” She closed her eyes again. “The servants were gone. I could hear Robert’s voice. You were screaming, screaming.” She paused. “I never wish to hear that sound again. But I got a knife and crept up the stairs to see if I could stop it.”
I thought of her, small and narrow, walking to the kitchen door in her oxfords to fend off whoever was robbing her precious home. How utterly indomitable she was. “Dottie,” I said, “we should have used you to win the war.”
But she had already drifted off, and she didn’t hear me.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE