Elizabeth Napier had come to the door. “I heard voices—is that you, Simon?” She peered out into the garden, seeing only the tall man beside Aurore.
“No, it’s Rutledge.”
“I smell smoke!” she exclaimed as she stepped out the door. Her voice was still rough. She turned in the direction that men and wagons were moving up the road and saw the distant flames leaping into the night sky. “My God!”
“It’s the farm, there’6 nothing we can do. I don’t know where Simon is. Elizabeth, did he know of hiding places in the church? Behind the old altar, for one, under the altar cloth? The one that Henry used as a boy? Who else did?”
“We were never allowed to play there—I’ve never heard of a hiding place. Has Simon already gone to try to save the farm buildings? We ought to be there, helping him! Be quick, Aurore, we need the car!” She started down the walk.
“There’s a suitcase in the back of my car. Will you look at it and tell me if you recognize it?” The hurrying men had disappeared, but there were clots of women near the Wyatt Arms, some staring toward the fire, some of them packing another wagon with picks, shovels, buckets, a barrel of ale.
Aurore began to move, but he gripped her arm, holding it firmly.
Elizabeth said, “I’m not interested in suitcases! Why isn’t Benson here when I need him? Will you take me, Aurore, or not—”
“Please do as I ask.” There was an inflection in his voice that stopped the flow of words as if they’d been cut off. She stared at him, surprised by his intensity.
Then she moved through the gate and turned to look at Rutledge again with an expression that was hard to read—anger he thought, because her primary concern was still Simon. But it was his as well. She went on to the car.
After a moment she called in surprise, “I know that case! That’s Margaret’s! Where on earth did you find it? I thought the killer had taken it?”
“You’re absolutely sure of that? It belonged to her?”
“Of course I am! My father gave her this case for her birthday two years ago. It’s part of a set.” She turned and said, with sudden understanding, “It means you know who killed her, doesn’t it?”
“I think, Miss Napier, that you’d better go back into the house and telephone Inspector Hildebrand in Singleton Magna. Tell him, please, that he’s wanted here. That there’s an emergency. Meanwhile, Aurore, you must help me find Simon!”
Elizabeth stepped away from the car and looked at him with fierce passion. “What’s happened? Why won’t you tell me! Aurore, make him tell me!”
Aurore opened her mouth to say something just as the silence was shattered by the sound of a gunshot coming from the direction of the museum.
“Oh, God—” She was already running, fleet as a wraith, her skirts lifted, her body tense with fear and terror.
Elizabeth screamed, one long heart-tearing sound, a name, and was after her in a flash of skirts and flying heels.
But Rutledge, swifter, was there ahead of them, at the door of the museum, opening it, rushing into the empty room, and then the next and the next, until he’d reached the small office that Simon had used.
At the door he came to such an abrupt halt that Aurore cannoned into him, and Elizabeth was a poor third, pressing at their backs, calling Simon’s name.
“Don’t come any closer!” he said, putting out an arm to stop Aurore.
“No, I must go to him, I’ve had training, I can—oh, God, let me go!”
Elizabeth, pushing her way past both of them, reached the threshold, and for an instant Rutledge thought she was about to faint. She swayed on her feet, grasped the door’s edge, and began to whimper with soft, short breaths.
Aurore broke away and went into the room.
Rutledge knew what it held. He had seen. In that one brief, anguished glance, he had seen it all in the lamplight. Simon Wyatt, seated at the desk, a sheet of paper on the top in front of him, a pen beside it, and his blood blown across it by the impact of the bullet to his temple. The pistol on the floor beside his chair was German, a war souvenir.
The Germans, Rutledge thought helplessly, had got him after all.
And Hamish, aware of the grief and the pain and the horror of what had happened, said, “Look well. See yoursel’. If it’s no’ the Germans waiting, it will be me.”
Rutledge stood there for an instant, frozen, seeing in his mind’s eye his own shattered face lying on one arm out-flung across the bare wood.
27
Rutledge made himself walk into the room and look at the sheet of paper under Simon’s arm, although he had guessed what was written on it. It was addressed to Hildebrand. It said only, “You were wrong. I blacked out and killed them both. She didn’t know. It is better this way.” And the signature read, with a flourish, Simon Wyatt.
Rutledge softly swore, the waste of a man’s life shocking him.
Aurore was kneeling beside her husband, her arm across his shoulder, saying “He’s still warm, there must be a pulse, if I can stop the bleeding—”
Elizabeth was clinging to the door frame, sobbing heavily, her eyes unable to look away.
Rutledge bent to Aurore, touched her shining hair briefly, gently, then forced her to let Simon go, lifting her to her feet, turning her to face him. “He’s dead, Aurore. He’s dead, there’s nothing you can do.”
She buried her face against him then, and he thought she was going to cry, like Elizabeth. But she was only searching for strength, her body at the point of breaking, her mind already broken.
She said, “I was so afraid. I was so afraid that one day—And now I’ll never need to be afraid again.”
She let him lead her out of the room but seemed unaware of the chair he seated her on or the handkerchief he thrust into her hands.
Elizabeth refused to go, clinging to the door, her eyes unable to leave the crumpled shoulders, the untidy fair hair, the great black stain of blood.
Rutledge finally got her to move back into the museum, and that was when she straightened, seeming to tower in her anger, and loosed the storm of it at Aurore.
“It’s your fault, you killed him! You took him away from all he knew and all he wanted, and made him into what you believed he ought to be, and in the end, it killed him. He needn’t have died but for you and your damned, selfish blindness! I hope you’re satisfied, I hope his spirit haunts you every day of life and breath left to you and that you never, never, know what happiness is, ever again!”
Rutledge went to her and shook her hard, until she broke into tears again and sank in the chair he quickly shoved toward her. Burying her head in her hands, she began to moan Simon’s name, over and over, like a litany.
Aurore, white and strained, still hadn’t cried. She looked up at Rutledge, her eyes filled with ineffable pain, and said only, “He didn’t do it.”
“You thought he had. He thought you had. He killed himself because he couldn’t face losing you, he couldn’t face the scandal, he couldn’t face another change in his life. He was trying to protect you.”
“Hildebrand came to him today—”
“I don’t know how Simon knew of the suitcase. Whether he put it there—or found it there. If it’s any comfort to you—”
He broke off as the door opened and Joanna Daulton came through the outer rooms toward them. Her hair still pinned up, the white streak like a blazon, but she was wearing a robe over her nightdress. She looked from Aurore to Elizabeth, saying something about the fire, and then seemed to shrink into herself as she took in what their faces told her as they lifted to hers. “Simon?” she asked Rutledge. “Gentle God! Where!”