Home by Nightfall (29 page)

I gave her fair warning that she might not.

“I was in a savage grief after William died,” Mrs. Evans said. “You were correct about that. I had a little money, and no connections at all in the world. His family were mostly dead, my own was a father I believed had betrayed me. I decided that I could at least—at least right one of the wrongs of my life, I suppose.”

“You poisoned the sherry,” Lenox said.

She nodded. “I did. The sherry, well, he enjoyed it, of course. And he always offered me a glass—after. As if I were an adult then.”

“The scoundrel,” said Toto.

“I chalked that drawing on his steps, first, though,” said Calloway's daughter. “I wanted Stevens to know that I was back—to go in, pour a drink to calm himself, and then know, as he was choking on the floor, dying, who had done it to him.”

“How did you find out that it was the wrong house?”

“I went straight to my father after it was done, to spite him. I was exhilarated. I was planning to leave that night, return to London.”

“Did you never live in Bombay, then?” asked Edmund suddenly.

“We did, yes, for several happy years.”

“I'm sorry—go on.”

“When I saw my father, my heart broke,” she said. Next to her, Adelaide Snow gave her arm a little extra squeeze. “He looked a thousand years old to me. And then, his garden. He had always liked plants, but now, I could tell right away, it was all he had. His garden—all these years taking care of
something,
if you see what I mean, after my mother and I had both left him. I think I would have forgiven him then and there, regardless of the past. But it emerged that he hadn't even known about Stevens. Foolish child that I was, and missing my mother, too, I had assumed he was as evil as the world. I'd been wrong. And to think—he never met William!”

She burst into tears, and it was some while before she could resume. “Take your time,” Lenox said.

“No, it's better to get it out,” she replied, collecting herself. “Well, it wasn't until a long time had passed that I even told him about the sherry I poisoned. He put the pieces together and realized that I had gone to the wrong house.

“In a panic I went back. I stared at the house for a long time. For all I knew the wrong man was on the floor inside, dead—but then, the lights were off, which made me hopeful that this poor Hadley person was still alive. He might not have been a sherry drinker. Fortunately for me, he wasn't.

“The next morning, with my father's help, I lured Mr. Hadley out of town and then took the sherry and destroyed the bottle. After that, it was a matter of planning anew how to kill Stevens.”

“Your father didn't attempt to dissuade you?” asked Lenox.

“If anything, he was readier than I to do it.” She gazed toward the low blue fire. “I suppose if two people are mad together, they can talk each other into thinking anything makes sense.”

Lenox looked at Claire Adams. “You gave her the key to the town hall?” he asked.

“I did, yes,” said the maid stoutly. “I would do it again.”

“My father suggested that I visit Aunt Claire and explain—ask for her help. He was quite right.”

“We've known what Stevens was for a while,” said Claire Adams.

“Sarah Ainsworth,” muttered Elizabeth Watson.

“It's simply a coincidence that your aunt was working in Hadley's house, then?” asked Edmund.

“It's a small village,” Lady Jane said.

Lenox turned to Adelaide Snow. “Miss Snow,” he said, “tell me, how did you come to be involved in all of this?”

“I found Liza in our gamekeeper's cottage.”

“And then?”

“I asked her instantly whether she was the person who had tried to kill Stevens. She said she wasn't. I said that was too bad, because if she had been I would have shaken her hand—that I had worked for him briefly, and thought he was the devil. I only wish I'd had the courage to tell my father about him. After that we became friends. I vowed I would help her.”

The Watsons, Calloway, Adelaide Snow—a village was like that, Lenox supposed, with justice elusive for a long time, and then everyone agreeing on it all at once, and converging to help bring it about.

He was about to speak again when there was a knock on the door. It was Houghton's butler, Lane. Behind him was Pointilleux. Lenox had sent word that he would be here and told him to come to the ball if he'd finished his work.

The young Frenchman bowed to all of the ladies in the room and then said to Lenox, with some urgency, “Two things.”

“Yes?”

“First, this. I find it in his ledger.”

He passed Lenox the folded paper he had been carrying. It was the drawing—the schoolgirl, preserved all these years, its crease so deep that a gentle tug would have ripped it in two. In the bottom corner, in childish scrawl, a signature:
Liza Calloway.

“Well found,” said Lenox. “What was the second thing?”

“The victim, Stevens—he is dead.”

 

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

The reaction in the room was confused, as well it might have been. A bad man was gone, there was no doubt of that; anyone who might have been inclined to question Calloway's daughter's story had Adelaide Snow there to confirm that it was true.

On the other hand, it made this young woman, her eyes red, the dog still resting between her feet, a murderer.

“Why the dog?” asked Lenox suddenly. “I understand why you stayed in the gamekeeper's cottage—at first to avoid your father, and then to avoid being seen with him, to protect him, for of course you would have been noticed. I understand as well why you took the blankets and the books, and the herbs from your father. You wanted to stay out of the shops. The chickens I understand. It must have been easy to take the carrots when they presented themselves. But why the dog?”

Liza put a hand down and scratched the dog's ear. He growled happily. “I saw his owner kick him, the poor creature, before going into the pub. I couldn't let him stay there. He came away quite happily.”

Human beings never ceased to surprise Lenox—a person who could plot the brutal stabbing of a man in cold blood, but couldn't abide a dog being kicked. It was true that Mickelson was a very rough fellow.

“We must decide what to do,” he said.

Toto made an indignant noise.
“Do.”

“Think, Toto. Calloway is in prison now, a confessed murderer,” Lenox said, “and he'll hang for this crime unless we stop it. On the other hand, Mrs. Evans, I understand—well, no. That would be false. I cannot accept your actions, honestly I cannot. You might have gone to the police about Stevens.”

“What, to Clavering? Ten years after the fact?”

“Yes,” said Lenox. “I feel certain Clavering would have done his best by you had you gone to speak to him.”

All of the women in the room seemed to roll their eyes simultaneously. “What have I miss?” asked Pointilleux.

“Too much. I'll tell you in a moment,” said Lenox, and then, looking back at Liza Calloway, Evans, he realized he had no idea what to do. Just as he had when they were little and in the same position, he glanced at his brother. “Edmund?” he said.

The Member of Parliament for Markethouse stepped forward, and though his face was mild, his hands in his pockets, he had a certain authority in his bearing—greater than it might have been in London, though he was an important political figure there, because here his position had been sown into the soil many centuries before, and he only a season of its long existence.

“We cannot conceal the truth from Clavering, nor should we,” he said. “Mrs. Evans, your father cannot die on your behalf, whether or not he believes it to be just.”

“Edmund!” cried Toto.

“On the other hand, you are at the moment a free agent, at any rate for a little while longer. Have you any money?”

“A small legacy from my husband, and a little more from selling our house.”

“Friends?”

“Me,” said Adelaide Snow.

“No, Adelaide,” said Calloway's daughter gently. “You have already been kind enough.” She looked up at Edmund. “How long will it be until I am arrested?”

Edmund looked at his watch. “Clavering and Bunce are enjoying themselves in the kitchen. Call it—morning.”

“Morning.”

Lenox thought that Edmund was right to offer her a way out, but he also understood the feeling of hesitation in the room. Where was she to go? What was she to do?

It was Lady Jane who took charge. “Right, then,” she said firmly, “that's six or seven hours, which is an eternity. Charles, Edmund—perhaps you would go back to the ball, to make up the numbers for poor Houghton, who must be working like a dog. Take Pointilleux with you—he looks as if he could use an hour of entertainment. There are six women in this room. It would take fewer than that to run England. I'm certain we can solve this problem. The three of you will only slow us down.”

Lenox glanced at Liza Calloway. He was hesitant to leave. He knew this was his last chance to do what was proper and place her under arrest. The question he had to ask himself was whether she was capable of murdering again.

No, he thought. Or rather—yes, but not wantonly, not randomly. Stevens had ruined her life, and chance, a disease contracted by her husband, had ruined it again. He could understand how this second unhappiness might reverberate back toward the first.

“Very well,” he said, and bowed slightly toward Calloway's daughter. “Good evening.”

In the hallway again, the three of them stopped and looked at each other. Lenox picked up one of the decks of cards they'd been playing with and began to cut it into itself, feeling restless.

“Can you explain me the situation?” asked Pointilleux.

“Do you remember Lord Murdoch?” asked Lenox. Murdoch had been a Member of the House of Lords who had been brought down by similar charges two years before. “The same. But it was death, not prison, for Stevens.”

Pointilleux's eyes widened.
“Mon dieu.”

“What is it about politics?” Lenox asked, his voice speculative. “A fellow like Stevens, dry as a stick.”

The young clerk sighed. “Perhaps we should pass the evening in the ballroom, if there is nothing else to be done, then.”

“You ought to,” said Edmund, “but not us.” He took a sheet of paper, folded several times, from the ticket pocket of his waistcoat, and read from it. “Harville, Barth, Snow, Tuttle, Ainsworth, Moore, Calloway, Sather. Those are the eight young women who worked as secretaries for Stevens. Snow and Calloway are in the room behind us, Ainsworth who knows where. Still, that leaves five women. Markethouse has let them down badly. We ought to go and apologize.”

“It's too late to visit them tonight,” said Lenox.

Edmund shook his head. “I'm going now.”

Lenox paused, then nodded. “Very well.”

“Shall I come?” asked Pointilleux.

“No,” said Edmund. “It's our village, not yours—our responsibility, too, not yours.”

Pointilleux shrugged, and they walked down toward the noise of the party, where they left him in the care of Houghton. When that was done, Charles and Edmund went to the kitchens. Clavering and Bunce were having a fair time there—but Clavering, conscientious soul that he was, had stayed sober.

“How is Mrs. Evans?” he asked.

“She is returning to Adelaide Snow's house to fetch her things,” Lenox said. It was what they had agreed to tell the constable.

Clavering stood up. “If you believe she attacked Stevens, I ought to be going with her.”

“Killed Stevens,” said Edmund. “We just learned that he's died.”

“Cor,” said Bunce, and removed his cap.

“Where is she now? Already gone?”

“I believe so. But she doesn't want her father to hang. She's going to return here when she's finished.”

“Fine,” said Clavering. He shook his head. “I'd like the whole story. An ugly business, and now Stevens dead, too. The mayor!”

“Yes, the mayor,” said Edmund, his voice less impressed than Clavering's by the title. “Charles, you and I had better go.”

Together, the two brothers made five visits that evening, Edmund's carriage moving briskly through the narrow cobblestoned streets of the village, five slumbering houses roused to wakefulness again. It was the baronet who led their way in each time—apologetic, greeted in each case with puzzlement, but his well-known face enough to earn them admission.

Lenox was mostly quiet. Edmund spoke, stating to each woman at the outset of the conversation that they now had some evidence that Stevens Stevens had been guilty in his lifetime of very serious trespasses upon his secretaries; they were here to gather information, anonymous information, and also to offer the apology of the town.

The reception they received was different each time—and in truth, Lenox wasn't entirely sure at the end of their trip, at nearly midnight, that they had been right to make the visits. One woman, formerly Miss Sather, now Mrs. Berry, a bony middle-aged person, wanted no part of their apology: “Out,” she had hissed. “I only thank God my husband is away. If he knew I had entered our marriage in a state of sin he'd thrash me within an inch of my life. And I would deserve it.”

On the other hand, Miss Barth, who had worked for Stevens relatively recently, and still lived with her father on a street adjacent to Potbelly Lane, burst into tears, offered them tea, and said, in a roundabout, halting way, how inexpressibly relieved she was that it hadn't been her alone upon whom Stevens had preyed.

“I wondered what I had done to make him—to make him that way,” she said.

“Nothing at all, I am quite sure,” Edmund said softly.

There was another blank reaction from the woman who had been Miss Moore, now Mrs. Clarendon, but there was a restrained look of grief on Miss Tuttle's face, after she heard them out—and then asked them to go without responding, though she spoke politely.