Page 52 of The Missing Page
Martha looked—there was no other word for it—defeated. “That’s it, then, I suppose.” Turning to the Carrows, who still stood near the door, she said, “I beg your pardon. We’ve taken up so much of your time. Have a lovely afternoon, my dears.”
“I wonder how Trevelyan verified Lilah’s solution,” Leo murmured.
“Maybe he didn’t,” James said. “Maybe he just wanted Lilah to inherit the house.”
Leo’s eyebrows shot up, but he didn’t disagree.
“Can I speak to you for a moment?” asked Lilah after Martha, Camilla, and the solicitor had left the room.
“Of course,” said James.
“Privately.” She glanced at Leo.
“I’ll bring your luggage out to the car,” offered Leo, and shut the door as he left the drawing room.
Lilah seemed reluctant to speak, instead examining the room as if she had never seen it. Well, maybe it seemed different to her now that it was her own.
“What will you do with it?” James asked.
“If you mean the house, other than making sure that Martha is comfortable here, I don’t much care,” she said. “But if you’re talking about the money, it belongs to Will Carrow, doesn’t it? My father stole what was in that box. It seems only right to pay Carrow back.”
James wasn’t so sure that Carrow would take the money, but figured that was for Lilah to sort out. “How did you know?”
“About Carrow? Remember, I spent the winter shifting between Viola and Cesario. Maybe I’ve just got used to looking at a face without thinking much about the gender of who the face belongs to.” She shrugged. “Maybe I’ve spent years comparing my own reflection to the Bellamys and wondering at the difference. Or maybe I’ve always supposed that Rose Bellamy ran away and it wasn’t hard for me to figure out why.” She shrugged. “Or maybe it was a lucky guess.”
James nodded. “You really won’t tell your mother the truth about Carrow?”
“I’m good at keeping secrets from my mother.” She looked pointedly at James. “And she’s good at keeping secrets from me.”
“She cares about you,” James said, knowing how feeble this must sound. “You must know that the reason she let you take up acting was that she didn’t want you to run away. She had already lost someone who ran away when they didn’t get what they needed, and she wasn’t going to let that happen again. Now, what did you want to speak to me about?”
“Would my father have lived if he had got his digitalis sooner?”
“Doubtful,” James said. “In my experience, when a heart attack comes on that quickly, there’s nothing to be done.” This never stopped him, or most doctors, from trying everything in their repertoire.
Usually, families found this information comforting. When someone died suddenly, their families often wanted to pinpoint exactly what went wrong, wanted to identify that one moment when things could have gone differently. Hearing that there wasn’t such a moment often gave families some peace.
But what passed over Lilah’s face wasn’t peace. It wasn’t anything at all. She was schooling her expression into one of cool neutrality, he realized. There was no reason for that, though.
Unless. He remembered what Camilla had said not a quarter of an hour ago, about believing her husband to have as good as murdered her sister. “Did you and your mother ever find your father’s digitalis?” he asked gently.
She shook her head. “Of course not,” and left the room.
He was left alone in the drawing room, dumbfounded and unsure of whether Lilah had just confessed to attempted murder. But, no, it wouldn’t have been Lilah. He remembered Camilla insisting that she, not Lilah, would run upstairs to find the digitalis. She had been up there for what felt like ages. Had she simply decided that her husband wasn’t worth saving?
And all that while, James had been downstairs, trying to save the man. It wasn’t his place to decide who lived and who died. And in this instance, it certainly wasn’t his business to decide who was culpable. The man would have died one way or the other, and whether a person had done wrong by merely intending another person to die was a question he’d leave to philosophers.
As for James, he would go home.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Leo supposed he could leave well enough alone. The mystery he had determined to solve for James’s sake was now answered. There were loose ends, but they were of no importance to him, and likely hadn’t even occurred to James, and so Leo ought to leave them be.
But Leo wasn’t very good at leaving things be.
He thought about the cup of tea in Rupert Bellamy’s room, the comfortable chair by his bed. He thought, too, of the way Martha said “Aunt Charlotte” but simply “Rupert.”
And he realized what he should have understood as soon as he set foot in the house: Martha Dauntsey was grieving. Not two weeks earlier, she had lost the man with whom she had lived her entire adult life, and twenty of those years had been spent effectively alone with him. Leo didn’t know if what had existed between them was friendship or something different, and he didn’t think it mattered.
