“Mr. Howard, have you heard the news?” Phoebe came hustling out of the kitchen holding a tray of macaroons and tiny cut-crystal glasses of port. “The police got an anonymous call about a body and—” She stopped. Looked him over from top to toe and tittered. “Oh. My. The police have arrived, but you have your alibi. I suppose she has hers, too.” She gazed pointedly at Merida’s door.
Benedict always took pride in his ability to conceal his emotions.
Perhaps, at least at this time, it was an undeserved pride, for as he walked toward Phoebe, she stopped smiling and moved briskly out of the way.
He walked through the kitchen. Phoebe’s handyman sat at the table, hunched over a plate of macaroons, shoving them into his mouth one after another. He was one of those men Benedict automatically despised: sulky, unambitious, blaming his miserable fate on everyone but himself. He looked up at Benedict, scowled and went back to binge-eating.
Benedict walked out the back door and stepped into a different scene, one with law enforcement thick at the curb and in the yard, radios crackling, and the bright glimmer of floodlights through the hedge. He saw Merida’s friend Sheriff Kateri Kwinault talking to one of the guests, taking notes. She saw him, too, and waved.
Benedict wondered how long it would take before they traced his call. Wondered, too, how he’d been so lost to all sense that he used his own phone to make that call.
He knew the answer.
Merida made him lose his sense.
Merry. Of all the women he thought she might be, Merry Byrd had never occurred to him. By the time he woke up in the hospital, two weeks after that explosion, she was dead and buried.
They had lied to him.
Apparently, they had lied to her.
The question remained—who exactly were “they”?
A car drove slowly up the drive. The Cipres. They pulled the car in front of him, blocking his path to his cottage.
If he could, he would have walked around them. But he was barefoot. He had to step carefully and even then, gravel bit him on his heel, on the soft flesh by his toes … Next time he made a grand exit, he’d grab his shoes.
Dawkins rolled down the window and leaned out into the light of the porch. “Did you hear?” he asked. “Somebody’s dead next door. For a town this size, bodies certainly pile up. I told Elsa we should keep going down the coast, but when she met Merida she insisted we stay to help her get her feet under her. And what thanks do we get? She avoids us.”
“Yes, dear. I know.” Elsa sat in shadow. “You’re right. We can move on tomorrow. Mr. Howard, I’ve never seen you so informally dressed. Not everyone can get away with it. It takes a man of supreme confidence like you or Dawkins.”
“Thank you.” The gravel in the driveway dug into the bottoms of Benedict’s feet.
“Did you and Merida have a date tonight?”
“No.”
“But you’ve seen her?”
“I believe she is in her rooms.”
“Good. With the murders tonight, she shouldn’t be out on her own.” For the first time, Elsa leaned into the light.
Benedict saw the bruise on her jaw.
Dawkins shot her a glare.
She pulled back into the shadow.
Dawkins drove on.
Key in hand, Benedict limped his way to his cottage, entered and locked the door behind him. Then unlocked it. He’d seen the look on Merida’s face; he believed she would be along soon.
He flipped on his computer and while it came up, he made the call to the cruise ship. The connection took a few minutes; he had to explain to the bridge crew member that yes, this was an emergency and he didn’t care what time it was there, he had to speak to his aunt and uncle.
While he waited, he brought up his investigation into the business account discrepancies and once again examined the evidence.
The phone rang.
Rose answered. Naturally, she didn’t ask if he was ill or had been in an accident or been named in a paternity suit. No, not dear Aunt Rose. In her quavering voice, she said, “Dear! Did you discover what’s wrong with our spreadsheets?”
Yes. The businesses are being hacked. He’d known that already, but he’d held off giving them the information until he tracked the perpetrator or at least discovered the reason for it. As of about fifteen minutes ago, he was pretty sure he knew everything there was to know. But he ignored Rose’s question, and said, “I’m calling about the past.”
“The past.” Her voice got sharp and wary. “At this hour?”
“Did you and Albert try to kill Merry Byrd?” To hell with tact; he enjoyed this frontal assault.
“Merry Byrd?” Rose pretended to grope among unsteady memories. “Remind me, who is she again?”
“Have you tried to kill so many people you can’t remember who she is? Merry Byrd. The woman I loved.”
A silence. He could almost hear Rose sorting through her options. “You know with the death of your parents, we took you in. We cared for you, loved you as if you were our own.”
First, she was playing the guilt card. “Thank you, Aunt Rose. That was good of you.”
“You don’t understand this, because you never had a child, but when our beloved boy strayed into danger, we always stepped in to rescue you. Remember when you just turned thirteen, got mad at Albert and wanted to run away? You climbed out of your bedroom window and into the old oak, fell and broke your arm. We immediately cut that oak down.”
He did remember. That had been a beautiful oak, over one hundred years old, its broad branches gloriously flat, the perfect place for a boy to lounge in the summer. He also remembered coming home from the hospital, bruised and battered, his arm in a cast, and hearing the horror of chain saws dismantling the mighty tree.
His fault. He had known it was his fault. Albert and Rose had made sure of that.
“We did that because we loved you and couldn’t bear to see you hurt.”
“You did that to punish me for trying to rebel.”
“We would hardly be good guardians if we allowed you to roam the streets alone. You would have been hurt!”
Looking back, he thought of other manipulations, punishments, revenges on him for behavior unbecoming to their heir. He hadn’t thought of it before, hadn’t considered the ramifications on his own character or realized the swift ruthlessness of their reactions. “So you treated Merry Byrd as if she were a rebellion and eliminated her. As if she were the oak tree.”
“You were acting out of character, spending time at an orphanage—”
“A day care.”
“Coming home with vomit on the shoulder of your best suit. An Armani! You neglected the business. You were losing your edge. We had trained you to know what was important in life—”
“The business.”
“And she was subverting your character. After your infatuation faded, you would have returned to normal. Of course we knew that. But we saved you a lot of wasted time and money.”
Her gall flabbergasted him. “You murdered her.”
“If she didn’t die, it wasn’t murder,” Rose snapped in her take-charge-of-the-boardroom voice.
“Merry would have died if I hadn’t been there.”
“Exactly.” Her voice smoothed again, soothed again. “We made up an excuse to pull you away from the airport. We didn’t want you to get hurt. When we heard you were there … do you know how much anxiety you caused us when you were unconscious for so long?”