Page 46 of The Missing Page
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
However much sleep he had managed the previous night had been a drop in the ocean, and James struggled to clear the fog of exhaustion from his thoughts. “That’s what Gladys meant in the phone call you overheard, right? She said she had given him until that night—she must have been referring to giving Marchand that note.”
“That’s what it looks like.” Leo tossed a clean shirt and a pair of trousers on the bed for James to change into. “But then why in hell did she run off before collecting her money?”
“Unless she didn’t run off.” James dragged himself out of bed and stripped off his pajamas, shivering in the cold air before hastily dressing.
“Nobody in this house or the lodge had time to kill anyone and dispose of their body. Between dinner and the time Gladys was missed, I was with the Carrows and you were with Camilla and Martha.”
“And Sir Anthony was shocked to discover that Gladys was gone. I don’t think he could have been faking it.”
“Who noticed Gladys was gone?”
“Lilah. And she has an alibi too—she was on the telephone. That can be checked up on.” James was surprised that he didn’t even balk at this idea, but at the moment all he cared about was getting to the bottom of this mess and then getting home.
Leo frowned. “Why would Lilah have gone to look for Gladys? She didn’t even know that Madame Fournier was Gladys, did she?”
“I can’t see how she would.”
“Hmm. That tree between the house and the lodge,” Leo said, grabbing a few stray items from various surfaces and dropping them pell-mell into James’s valise. “Is it a cherry tree?”
“Yes,” said James. “But it’s new. It wasn’t there in 1927. Back then, a couple of fruit trees were in the front garden.”
“It can’t be that new. It’s quite large. I just ran into Lady Marchand by that tree.”
“What on earth was Camilla doing out of doors at this hour?”
“Drinking tea and staring at cherry trees, evidently.”
James shot an alarmed look at Leo. “We need to talk to Camilla and Martha.”
“I’m afraid we do.”
First, though, they went downstairs to use the telephone. James rang the Three Bells in the village to ask if anyone answering Gladys Button’s description had taken a room there, and when that proved a dead end, Leo rang the grocer’s wife.
“Of course Gladys isn’t here. Where’d you get an idea like that?” James heard Mrs. Mudge say, her voice loud enough that he could hear it while standing on the threshold of the telephone room.
By now, they had attracted the attention of Martha and Lilah, who hovered behind them in the hall. Succinctly, James explained that two menacing notes had been found, but left out that one had been found in Sir Anthony’s bedroom and the other in his pocket. The man had been Lilah’s father, after all, and he had died not twelve hours earlier. She could be spared the knowledge that he was apparently being blackmailed, possibly for some secret related to Rose’s disappearance.
“The cherry tree?” Martha repeated. “What can that have to do with anything?”
“When was it planted?” James asked, a realization dawning on him.
Martha stared at him, her face going gray. “It was planted during the summer of 1927 while I was away,” she said, not looking at Lilah. “I remember because it was planted in the most foolish place, quite the wrong spot for a cherry tree, and by the time I returned, it was too late to transplant. It seemed such a silly thing to fret over, considering all the other things there were to be upset about, but I was cross all the same.”
James looked at the three people around him. Martha, worried and shaken. Lilah, unnaturally serious. Leo, looking as if this were all desperately familiar. He wondered who would finally say aloud what they all must be thinking.
In the end, he spoke up himself. “We have to dig it up.”
Martha drew in a sharp breath. Lilah gave a single nod. Leo stepped closer to him.
The thought of what might be buried beneath that tree made James’s vision darken at the edges. Something worth blackmail; a secret worth a thousand pounds. Something worth twenty years of secrecy. The idea made his stomach turn. But he knew that he had to dig it up himself. Martha could hardly do it, and Lilah had on silk stockings, and they certainly couldn’t pester Carrow to do some impromptu gravedigging, or grave robbing, or whatever they were—
“I saw where Carrow keeps the shovels,” said Leo, already striding toward the door. “I’ll handle it.”
James followed him into the gray winter day. “You don’t need—”
“Bollocks on need. One of us is fine with this sort of thing and the other isn’t and that’s that.”
