A Pale Horse - Charles Todd [114]
Leaving Hill to cope with his own case, Rutledge drove to Wiltshire, to the house called Pockets where Rebecca Parkinson lived.
She was there, and he had to bang on the door for nearly ten minutes before she finally opened it to him.
Something in his face must have alerted her, for the first words out of her mouth were, “I’ve told you. I’ve had nothing to do with my father for the past two years or more. It’s useless, coming here. He put his work before his family, and now his family no longer cares. His sacrifice was in vain. The army didn’t want him either.”
“How do you know that?”
“For weeks before my mother died, he was obsessed, secretive, doing much of his work at night, making endless calculations. He hardly ate or slept. It was as if he were trying to convince himself of something—as if he’d lost his way but couldn’t bring himself to admit it. In any other man I’d have said he was on the verge of a breakdown. In his case, I think it was pride crashing. He wasn’t as clever as he thought he was, and he was about to be found out.”
“That’s a rather harsh judgment.”
“Is it? He resigned, didn’t he? If he’d made a brilliant success of his work, do you think he’d have done that? Even in contrition over my mother’s death? And the man in charge of the laboratory let him go. They’d have offered him a leave of absence, if he was so indispensable to them. The war wasn’t over in the spring of 1918, and we weren’t certain of winning.”
“You don’t know what it was he was working on?”
“I wasn’t interested in his work. It had brought nothing but grief to us, and I hated it as much as I came to hate him. It took me a long time to reach indifference. But I have now.”
He thought she hadn’t. She was still passionate about her father and anything to do with him. The hate showed in her anger at the man.
Rutledge stood there, letting her feel the silence, willing her to betray herself.
As if to fill it before she couldn’t stand it any longer, she said, “When my mother died, I hated him so much all I could think of was making him feel pain in a way he couldn’t ignore. If he’d still been using his laboratory, I’d have burned it to the ground, and wouldn’t have cared if he was there inside. When she asked that her ashes be scattered in the gardens she loved so much, I strewed them myself. I was half mad too, I think. I wanted to hurt him and I wound up hurting myself. Do you know what someone’s ashes feel like? Do you know how they blow on the wind, and sometimes into your face or cling to your fingers in spite of everything? A gray powder, that was all that was left of my mother. And I diminished it by letting it soak into the damp ground, so that the house was uninhabitable. And now I’m afraid to go there because I’m afraid I’ll see her ghost. I think, at the end, he did see her. That’s why he couldn’t stay there.”
“What will happen to the house?”
“I don’t know. I can’t sell it—not after what I did. I can’t live there. I can’t let it go to wrack and ruin. I can’t have brambles and weeds on my mother’s grave. He ruined all our lives, and I don’t really care what’s become of him.”
She turned her back to him, and he heard the catch in her voice when she added, “There’s nothing I want in that wretched cottage where he went to live. As far as I’m concerned, you can burn it to the ground.”
And then she was inside, on the point of shutting her door.
He said, “The motorcar as well?”
Her voice was weary when she finally answered. “Let them sell it. I have no need for it.”
“Miss Parkinson. I shall have to speak to your sister. There’s no way around it.”
“Did she tell you where she lived? At Road’s End, a house not very different from mine. It’s not far from Porton Down. Ironic, isn’t it? A friend offered it to her for a small rent, and she was upset with me, about the ashes. I can’t blame her for not wanting to live with me.” Rebecca Parkinson laughed harshly. “That house at Partridge Fields is worth a great deal of money. But the two of us have almost nothing to our names. A small inheritance from Mother,