Page 47 of All My Broken Dreams

Robbie experienced the strangest feeling with Casey. Contradictory emotions of being deeply drawn in by him, anddeeply distrustful at the same time. He was too handsome, that was the problem. A god of a man tells you how beautiful you are, you are going to distrust the shit out of that.

“How did they meet?” she asked.

“Sarah came to a dance at Locksley Hall. My father was a first year student, living on campus in the dorm. He wasn’t very social; his roommates forced him to put away his books for one night and have fun. He said he spotted her right away. Of course, he didn’t know she was fourteen at the time and by the time she told him how old she was, it was too late, he was madly in love.”

Robbie did the math in her head. “She’s forty now. That means she was seventeen when she met my father. She gave birth to Harry when she was only fifteen.” She stared at Casey, astonished. “How did I not know this? I never thought about it. She was always the youngest mother in the playground, but I never thought about it. My dad was only a few years older. Harry and I never talked about how stupidly young our parents were.”

Casey nodded and sighed. “We don’t think of them as having lives before we came along. They will always be old to us.”

The library door flew open and the man Robbie knew as The Black took a lurching step forward, covered his eyes when he saw her and then spun around to close the door.

“Please forgive me,” he said. “Rowena, my name is Alastair Manderville.”

Casey half-rose from his chair. “Father, what is it? What’s happened?”

Manderville’s face crumpled, ravaged with grief. “Please. Sit down. Sit down. I have some terrible news.”

Robbie dropped the glass she was holding. She heard the crystal shatter as it hit the floor. A distant buzzing sounded in her ears and her heart stopped pumping blood.

Harry Listowel’s body had been found at the foot of Arran Tower on the Isle of Arran. The twenty-four-year-old man with so much promise was dead. An apparent suicide.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Two weeks had passed since that terrible night. Deacon had been summoned to cope with her hysterics. He had taken the news of Harry’s suicide with the stoicism of a five-hundred-dollar-an-hour therapist. Nothing rattled him. He drove her home and after consulting with Mrs. Cameron, he gave her a sedative to help her sleep. She found him sleeping in the chair when she woke up the next afternoon. Mrs. Cameron said he never left her side.

But it was Casey and Lord Manderville that Robbie relied upon in the dark days that followed. Her mother had to be informed. Funeral arrangements had to be made. Harry’s body had to be shipped back to the States once the Procurator Fiscal finished his investigation.

That was the worst day.

The PF was a natty man of middle age. He sat across a table from her in a nondescript office to deliver the awful news that Harry had jumped from a tower on the Isle of Arran to his death. The finding of suicide was inevitable. But there was more.

Harry had killed a homeless man before taking his life.

“There appeared to be a struggle. It could be that your brother was attacked and in defending himself, the other man died. We don’t have his identity at this time, but we are satisfied there was no connection between the two men.”

A solicitor for the Stewart family was present. While Robbie sat there in shock, this other man–also middle-aged–was quick to defend his recently deceased client. He asserted that the broken bones and head wound on the vagrant could have occurred accidentally from a fall down the stairs, and that there was no conclusive evidence that Harry Listowel had taken part in the beating death of the man.

“He was beaten to death?” She shook her head. “No, no, no–that’s not Harry. My brother was not violent. He played football but he was like the gentlest player they had. You have this all wrong.”

“I’m afraid the evidence is conclusive, Miss Listowel,” the official said, packing up his papers. “If the vagrant’s death was accidental then, in the absence of a suicide note, we have no explanation for why your brother took his own life. Those who knew him said he was healthy, in good spirits and had not expressed suicidal thoughts.”

“He was the sane one in the family,” she said weakly. “I don’t know why he would do this.”

“I wish I had a definitive answer for you, but based on the evidence gathered at the scene, an altercation of some kind happened with two deaths being the unhappy result. Please accept my condolences. Thank you for coming in.”

The body of her wonderful, brilliant, sweet, funny, gentle brother was released to be sealed in a coffin and flown home.

The red tape around that one act was overwhelming. Lord Manderville pulled every string he had to expedite the process.

She couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it was that she realized she hadn’t seen Deacon for awhile. He left before shewoke up and came home late. Manderville sent a car every morning to drive her to the numerous appointments she had to settle her brother’s estate.

Deacon became a ghost, a being she could hear moving through the building and spoken about, but never seen. One morning, she tried to corner him before he could leave and he deftly managed to avoid conversation.

“When can I see you?” she’d demanded. “I have so much to tell you.”

He said he had to work late and there was an excuse about how busy it got before the Christmas break, but he’d try to make it home that night.

He didn’t. Mrs. Cameron said she saw him taking his dinners in the cafe. Robbie tried not to feel hurt.

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