Bridesmaids Revisited (26 page)

“Oh, Thora.” Jane was practically sobbing.

“Of course Hope senses something different in this house.” Rosemary’s voice lacked all expression. “A man bled to death outside in the garden yesterday afternoon.”

“Not the case,” responded an unabashed Thora. “He waited to draw his last breath until he reached the hospital. One of the few thoughtful things he did in his life.”

“I heard about it.” Hope fixed those impossibly green eyes on my face. “And not from Ted Wilks himself the moment he set foot on the other side. But that’s neither here nor there. The dark forces I speak of do not emanate from beyond the grave. This evil lives and breathes and it is directed against Mrs. Haskell.”

“But that’s impossible! It’s also wicked. I’m glad now that dear Thora was rude to you.” Jane’s glasses looked ready to take flight on their black wings. “Why would any one of us wish to hurt Ellie?” There were tears in her pale eyes as she looked at me. “She’s the granddaughter of our precious Sophia. She’s Mina’s daughter.”

“I could be wrong.” Hope pushed back her wild mane of hair. “I did tell you from the outset that I am not a professional psychic. Just a woman with a possibly overdeveloped sense of intuition, who, if Mrs. Haskell should have the misfortune to meet with an accident, as did Ted Wilks, would consider it her duty to go straight to the police. You may pass that word along to anyone you think might be interested, because—you understand—I am not making a direct accusation, just wishing to be neighborly.”

Leaving a heavy silence in her wake, she brushed past Rosemary on her way out into the hall, where a scratching could be heard at the front door. When she opened it the lean gray dog bounded inside. And after making his way into the sitting room and weaving around Thora’s and Jane’s legs, he skidded to a panting halt in front of me, rose up to place his front paws on my chest, and gazed soulfully into my eyes.

“They do say dogs know things, don’t they?” Hope’s smile did not reach her green eyes. “Come, Shadow! I think it’s safe for us to leave Mrs. Haskell.” She patted her thigh. He whimpered, but reluctantly dropped back down and with several backward glances at me wove his way back around the legs that hadn’t moved to join her with drooping head at the door. “Oh, I do have one message from Sophia.” Hope addressed Rosemary, who looked ready to crumple to the floor.

“Yes.”

“It’s for Mrs. Haskell.”

“What is it?” I moved forward on what felt like wooden legs that hadn’t been properly fitted.

“She wants you to know that she didn’t kill her father.” With that, Hope and Shadow went out the door. And I stood staring at the bridesmaids, too stunned to consider what had transpired before that shocking statement.

“What did she mean?”

“Come back into the sitting room and we’ll all have a glass of elderberry wine.” Thora had materialized at my side and was marshaling me towards the closest armchair. “What an appalling woman. Should be struck off the register, if they have such things for psychics. I’d like to write a letter myself requesting an official inquiry.”

“But she never claimed to be a professional,” Jane pointed out tearfully. “We’ve got to be fair about that, despite her wicked implications.”

“Accusations!” was Thora’s brusque retort. Rosemary had yet to move from where she stood rooted in the hall, let alone to speak.

“I don’t want anything to drink,” I said.

“Of course you don’t.” Jane stood wringing her hands over me. “You’re afraid it would be poisoned or, at the very least, drugged.”

I almost mentioned last night’s cocoa, but thought better of it. “Someone has to tell me,” I said. “It’s clear from the looks on all your faces, especially Rosemary’s, that you know what that message from Sophia was about.”

“But, Ellie, why would you believe anything we have to say after hearing what that malevolent woman said about the three of us being the dark forces of evil intent on doing you harm?” Jane slumped down on the sofa, the black bow dislodged and her hair hanging down her back now. “And now that I think about it, I’m sure she was suggesting that we might have had something to do with Ted’s accident. Only it wouldn’t have been an accident in that case, would it?”

“Got to pull ourselves together.” Thora handed her a glass of wine and did the same for Rosemary, who had haltingly made her way to a chair. “Whatever we said yesterday, that woman has to be in Sir Clifford’s pay. The man’s out to unhinge us by whatever means. Amelia Chambers went back last night and reported that she hadn’t got anywhere with Rosemary. He doesn’t have all the legal cards up his sleeve as she claimed. So this is his next move.”

Rosemary finally spoke. “That is a possibility. But what about Sophia’s message?”

“That is the part even I find puzzling,” Thora sat down and sipped at her glass of wine. “How could Hope know about that? Sophia impressed on all of us that she wasn’t going to tell Hawthorn. And she made the three of us swear that we wouldn’t either. She was afraid if he knew, he would try to talk her out of her decision to marry William Fitzsimons. She said that was the penance she had to pay for what she had done.”

“And what had she done?”

“Put sleeping tablets in her father’s tea.” Fortified by two swallows of alcohol, Jane now looked a little less woebegone. “Gladys, or sometimes Edna if she was there, always took a cup into his study after Sunday lunch. After she had agreed to marry William, Sophia saw that time as her one opportunity to get out of house and meet Hawthorn. We knew about that, but not about the tablets. She didn’t tell us about that until after he was found dead, slumped across his desk. Rosemary, Thora, and I were all in the house that day. We were there to try on our bridesmaid frocks. We were actually wearing them when Sophia came running upstairs to tell us. She’d come back from seeing Thorn, as she called him, and gone into her father’s study. And that’s when she told us everything. Her mother, Mrs. McNair, hadn’t presented a problem because she always went out to choir practice on Sunday afternoon. It was her father who was the difficulty. And Sophia decided to get round that with the sleeping tablets. But the week before, she’d had a scare. He’d been awake when she got back, and in a towering rage demanded to know where she’d been. She told him she’d gone for a walk in the garden and he appeared to believe her, but she was afraid of the same thing happening again, so on the Sunday he died, she’d doubled the dose.”

“Where did she get the tablets?” I wanted to know.

“They were her mother’s. She started taking them when Sophia was refusing to marry William,” Thora said. “But Mrs. McNair didn’t want word getting around Knells that the vicar’s wife needed sleeping tablets. Wouldn’t have done at all! She had Rosemary get them from the chemist’s where she was training.” Thora chortled without amusement. “Such a fuss! She refused to take them with a sip of water, because she said Gladys had almost died after taking some when she was drinking!”

“But surely Sophia couldn’t seriously have thought she’d killed her father by putting a couple of tablets in a cup of tea?” I protested.

“Not at first. But afterwards there was no getting her to believe otherwise, even though the doctor had said it was a heart attack.” Thora shook her head. “Her feelings of guilt completely swamped her common sense. I don’t think that even a postmortem would have convinced her she wasn’t to blame. Isn’t that right, Rosemary?”

She received no reply. The woman who had spoken barely a word since Hope’s departure got up from her chair and walked out of the room. And because my mind was in such a muddle, the only thought that worked its way to the surface was that the first Mrs. Fiddler’s death had been written off as a heart attack too, and, if Mrs. Malloy had understood Gwen correctly, that hadn’t been the case.

The bridesmaids had sounded so convincing that I’d found myself believing that Sophia’s father, Reverend McNair, had died as befitted a man of the cloth, from natural causes. And perhaps two out of the three had been speaking what they believed to be the truth. Had Rosemary left the room because she was stricken by remorse? Or because she knew that one or another had to be lying? Now, sitting on my bed a half hour later, I felt as though my mind had turned into a bog of the sort that Phoebe might have decided to amble across on her day off. But a few conclusions bubbled their way to the surface.

Someone had murdered Reverend McNair. That person had wanted Sophia to assume the burden of guilt, and had also known that the vicar was a secret imbiber. I had a flash of memory: of Frank standing in the lane with his walking stick, talking about his boyhood prank of looking in the vicar’s study window on Sunday afternoons and seeing Reverend McNair empty his teacup into a plant pot. Not all that puzzling a circumstance if Edna’s mother couldn’t make a decent brew. Even less so if there was a bottle of cherry brandy secreted in the study.

It wouldn’t have mattered how many pills Sophia put in his tea, other than to put the plant to sleep for a week. Probably the reason her father had been awake when she arrived on the Sunday afternoon prior to the one in question was that something, perhaps a visit from his son-in-law-to-be, had prevented him from getting into the booze. Or he might have discovered that Gladys had failed to replenish his supply, which would account for his bad temper.

What mattered was that the killer knew that the prescribed dosage of pills was not to be taken with alcohol. Making it almost a certainty that a large quantity ground to powder and mixed in with the cherry brandy was likely to prove fatal. If the killer was as clever as I thought, the thing to have done was to make sure that there was only one bottle of brandy in the vicar’s hiding place and that it was just sufficiently full to get the job done. No point in diluting the effect of the pills.

I could see a shadow in my mind’s eye of someone keeping watch to make sure no one else went into the study before the empty bottle could be retrieved. But from the sound of it, that risk would have been small. Mrs. McNair was out at choir practice. It would have been unlikely that the two other bridesmaids would have interrupted Sophia’s father in his study. And Gladys or Edna, whichever one of them had served lunch that day, would have finished the washing-up and gone home. Or would they? I got up and began prowling the bedroom.

Had I been wrong in so readily concluding that one of the bridesmaids was the villain of the piece? What if Reverend McNair had caved in to William Fitzsimons’s insistence that he give Gladys the sack because of her drinking? Or that he’d found out that Edna had been Sophia’s accomplice in communicating with Hawthorn Lane and had in a towering rage given mother and daughter the boot? I sat down on the trunk at the foot of the bed.

Was finding oneself out of a job sufficient reason for murder? Perhaps—if there was no other money coming in. But Edna had told me that she was doing housework for other people at the time. And even if that wasn’t true, or if it hadn’t made any difference to her or her mother’s venomous feelings towards Reverend McNair, I couldn’t get past the feeling that the killer had wanted Sophia to take the blame for her father’s death. And what would be the reason in this particular scenario? Far better for Edna or Gladys that no suspicions were raised at all.

I got up and began prowling again. Of course, the doctor at the death scene must have known Reverend McNair had been drinking. He would have smelled it on his breath and not been gullible enough to think that the man had been sucking on cherry-flavored cough drops. But he was unlikely to be shocked, or to mention the fact to the grieving widow or the daughter, who was about to marry a man known to have strong views on the subject.

The clergy, with the possible exception of William Fitzsimons, are human after all. The doctor would have seen the teacup with the dribble of cherry brandy inside and probably smiled. The cup of course wouldn’t be the one Reverend McNair had used, and the brandy would contain no residue of the pills. Oh, yes! I was sure the killer had been craftily careful about such details. Unless the object had been to get the daughter charged with her father’s murder. Was it too far-fetched to believe that either Gladys or Edna, for the motive I had ascribed to them, was so consumed with rage that she would have wanted to take it out on Sophia to the extent of seeing her imprisoned for life? Or—worse yet—hanged? So what had the killer wished to happen to Sophia? I had to be tired to pose that question. It had been answered in the sitting room this evening. To end her relationship with Hawthorn Lane, by convincing her that she now had no alternative but to marry William Fitzsimons.

It was all about Hawthorn—the handsome scoundrel named for the road where he had been abandoned as a baby. The sort of young man from whose clutches every right-thinking parent would fight tooth and nail to keep a daughter. Arrogant, willful, heedless of what people, especially in those days, would regard as the proprieties. And the young women had found him irresistible.

Which one of the bridesmaids had been in love with him? Which one had hoped that with Sophia well out the way in the Belgian Congo he would turn to her? As perhaps he had previously turned while Sophia was completing her last year at boarding school? That hope hadn’t been realized and then, years later, Sophia’s diary had turned up in a trunk and someone, an innocent party, with nothing to hide, had insisted that it be taken to my mother. And that was something the killer could not—would not—risk. Either she had read it and come upon an entry that pointed to her involvement in Reverend McNair’s death, or her guilty conscience had driven her into a blind panic.

She may not have intended to kill again, but that didn’t alter the fact that my mother was dead. Even so, she had again been lucky. No one came forward. No one claimed to have seen her push my mother down those steps at Kings Cross. Life went on until the past again reared its head. Sir Clifford Heath proved to be Hawthorn Lane and I was invited to the Old Rectory. But why use scare tactics to drive me away? I could understand Richard Barttle’s doing so. He feared for my life. But why would the killer want to stir up what was safest laid to rest? I shivered and realized I was even more chilled than I had been when I’d woken from my nap and gone looking for a blanket in that chest—which wasn’t really a chest at all. And I remembered my determination to put the trunk on top of it before I got into bed.