Free Web NovelChapter 38: Chapter 38 So many scary informations
_Rowena’s POV_
Lucy didn’t leave right away.
She sat across from me with her hands folded around her tea cup
I let her sit.
“That secretary,” I said after a while of silence. “What was his name?”
“Owen,” Lucy said. “Owen Marsh. He’d been with your grandfather for eleven years. And he was a good man. The kind of person your grandfather trusted with things he didn’t want to think about himself.” She paused. “He was also the kind of person who noticed things and wrote them down. Your grandfather valued that.”
“Did he write down what he saw?”
“I believe he did,” Lucy said. “Whether those records still exist ....” She stopped. The implication finished itself.
A man who noticed something, documented it, and then left the city with suspicious speed and died in a suspicious way would not have left his documentation behind. Either Alice had gotten to it before he left, or it had gone with him, or it had gone the same way he had.
“Tell me about the drowning,” I said. “Everything you know.”
Lucy exhaled slowly. “It was in late autumn. A lake two regions over, he’d apparently taken a short holiday. His wife said he never swam recreationally, and hated cold water specifically. The official account said he’d gone in voluntarily and gotten into difficulty.” She looked at her hands. “His wife didn’t believe it. She said so to anyone who would listen for about three months, and then she stopped saying it.”
“Why did she stop?”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “She moved away shortly after. Took the children and I lost track of them.” She looked up. “But the stopping itself, the way it happened quickly, like something had been resolved, that stayed with me.”
I wrote Owen in my notebook and underlined it twice.
“Who else?” I asked. “Anyone else who noticed something and then disappeared or changed behavior?”
Lucy thought carefully.
“There was a woman,” she said finally. “One of the day maids. Bess. She told me once that she’d seen Alice in the accounts room late at night, the small one off the east corridor, where your mother used to keep the secondary ledgers.” She paused. “Alice didn’t know Bess had seen her. Bess mentioned it to me in passing, like it was nothing.” A pause. “Two weeks later, Bess was let go. Alice said she’d been stealing from the stores. There was no evidence of it that I ever saw, and Bess had been here for four years without a single complaint against her.”
I added Bess to the notebook.
“And you?” I asked. “Did Alice ever, were you ever a concern to her?”
Lucy was quiet for a moment. ƒreewebηoveℓ.com
“She tried once,” she said. “About two years after your mother died. She came to me very pleasantly and suggested that perhaps I was getting on in years and the cottage was a generous arrangement and it might be time to think about a proper retirement somewhere with more support.” She sighed. “I told her that your mother had given me the cottage for life and that I had a letter to that effect signed by your grandfather and that I was perfectly comfortable where I was.”
“She backed off?”
“She backed off,” Lucy said. “I think she decided I was too entrenched to move and moving me loudly would raise questions.” A slight pause. “But she’s never been warm to me since. Which tells me she still considers me a problem she hasn’t solved yet.”
“The bitch has been systematic,” Kyra said.
Which means Lucy is one of the most valuable people in this house right now. And also one of the most vulnerable, now that I’ve started asking questions.
“Lucy,” I said. “I need to ask you something and I need you to answer honestly even if you think I won’t want to hear it.”
She looked at me steadily. “Ask.”
“My father,” I said. “My brothers. The accident.” I kept my voice even. “In everything you’ve seen over the years, in everything you know about Alice and how she operates, is there anything. Anything at all. That made you wonder.”
The sitting room was completely still.
Lucy looked at me for a long time. Long enough that I could see her deciding, not whether to tell me, I think she had already decided that, but how. How to say a thing that once could not be unsaid, to a woman who had been carrying grief for years and was now being asked to consider that the grief had a different shape than she’d believed.
“I never had evidence,” she said carefully.
“I’m not asking for evidence,” I said. “I’m asking what you felt.”
Another pause.
“Your father had found something,” Lucy said. “In the months before the accident. I don’t know what, he didn’t tell me. But I saw him twice in the account room late at night, which he never did. He was a man who kept regular hours and delegated financial detail work. Suddenly he was reading ledgers at midnight.” She folded her hands. “And I know that he had a conversation with your grandfather about Alice. A private one, in the study. I didn’t hear what was said. But your grandfather looked troubled for days afterward, and your father...” She stopped. “Your father seemed resolved about something.”
The cold in my chest had become something heavier.
“And then the accident,” I said.
“And then the accident,” Lucy said. “I said nothing, Rowena. For years, I said nothing because I had nothing solid and your mother was already destroyed and I told myself that I could be wrong. That grief makes people look for explanations.” Her voice was steady but her hands had tightened around the tea cup. “I have not stopped wondering for a single year since.”
I sat with that.
“I think Alice killed them,” Kyra rounded up immediately.
I didn’t answer her.
I didn’t answer her because I wasn’t ready to say yes yet, I needed the evidence, I needed Owen’s trail and the original accident report and whatever was hidden in those early account records before I could say yes.
But I didn’t say no either.
“Lucy,” I said. “I need you to do something for me.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Don’t change anything about your routine. Don’t tell anyone we spoke. Don’t give Alice any reason to think you’re more of a problem than she already considers you.” I looked at her steadily. “And if anything happens, if anyone approaches you, if you feel unsafe for any reason, you come directly to me or to Kasper. Not staff or my grandfather. Us.”
Lucy nodded once. “And you?”
“I’m going to find Owen’s wife,” I said. “And I’m going to find out why she stopped talking.”
She nodded in understanding.
I walked Lucy to the cottage path myself, which I had not planned to do.
