A Pale Horse - Charles Todd [115]
And she was gone.
He stood there for a moment longer, staring at the closed door. If one of the sisters killed Gerald Parkinson, which was it?
He thought that Rebecca had the stronger sense of abandonment and might in a fit of anger try to assuage it by killing her father. But surely in the heat of the moment, not two years later. Unless there was something he didn’t know, some factor in their relationship that went so deep it had taken time to face. When she had, the only solution might have been murder.
And yet, Sarah, the weaker of the two, might have found she couldn’t live with her own pain and grief any longer and made the choice between killing herself, as her mother had done, or killing her father.
Rutledge turned and went back to the motorcar, driving on to the house at Partridge Fields.
He walked through the grounds to the small garden with the horse fountain. It was dappled in shade, this early, a mysterious and inviting place to sit.
But he’d come not to sit but to look at the grass that surrounded the fountain, squatting to see if there was any sign that someone had stood here two nights ago. The grass was still dew-wet, and it was difficult to judge. No one had trampled the green blades, no one had left a tidy footprint in the moist soil of the shrubbery beds. Still, he’d have given odds that walking here in the dark would lead to a misstep at some point.
It took patience and careful, almost inch-by-inch inspection, but he found something that might have been the half print of a heel just where an edge of the grass walk met the soil.
Hamish said disparagingly, “A bird scratching. A beetle trying to right itself. An owl after a mouse.”
Rutledge got to his feet. “Possibly. But why haven’t they scratched over here—or there?”
“It’s no’ solid proof.”
“No.”
He left the shrubbery and stood where he could see the windows of the master bedroom above the garden.
Here, at this house—in that room, for all he knew—lay the heart of a family’s collapse.
It was as if each of the Parkinsons gave more energy to hurting than to healing.
For one thing, why had Mrs. Parkinson wanted her ashes buried here, if she’d been wretched at Partridge Fields? The answer to that was, she intended them to be a constant reminder to her husband of everything she’d suffered.
He had no idea what she’d had in mind—an urn set on a marble square by the horse fountain, or ashes scattered in the central circle of the French-style beds where the roses grew. It had been Rebecca’s decision in the first anguished days after finding her mother dead to spread them throughout the gardens.
Neither mother nor daughter, set on their acts of revenge, had considered how difficult it might ultimately be for Sarah or Rebecca to live here. Punishing Gerald Parkinson was paramount, shutting out every other consideration, and Rebecca was left to reap the whirlwind she had sown.
Where had all this passionate need to hurt started?
There was Parkinson’s obsession with his work, putting it before his family. And his wife’s morbid fascination with the destructive nature of what he did. These must have led to violent arguments, to turn her thoughts to suicide. Or had she been unstable most of her married life?
In that case, why hadn’t her daughters spared a moment’s sympathy for what their father must have had to endure?
There must have been something else, to send a sensitive mind into a downward spiral of depression and finally despair.
Had Parkinson lashed out physically, when he’d felt his back was to the wall? Striking his wife would have erased any sympathy Rebecca and her sister might have felt.
Then why hadn’t Rebecca mentioned it in defense of her anger? Or Sarah dwell on that as she remembered a kinder father?
Rutledge thought, It’s time to ask Sarah what she remembers about her parents’ relationship, not just her own with her father.
But he spared five minutes to walk to the