A Pale Horse - Charles Todd [98]
She caught her breath on a sob, then cleared her throat.
“There was something new he was working on, some terrible new possibility, that’s why he wasn’t there with us that night. Mother died, and he walked away from us and came to live here. Alone. I told myself it was recognizing what he’d done to her and to us. But later, I thought perhaps he was afraid to go back because in her will she’d asked that her ashes be scattered in the gardens under their bedroom windows.”
18
If she had intended to shock him, Sarah Parkinson succeeded.
Rutledge had walked in those gardens, admiring them. He had seen how carefully they were maintained, and never guessed that they were, in effect, Mrs. Parkinson’s memorial.
He said, “Is that why neither you nor your sister live at Partridge Fields?”
“Would you?” she demanded. “If every time you looked out at the gardens, you felt her presence? I thought it might be comforting, somehow, but it isn’t. She’s a restless, unhappy ghost, and we’re afraid of her.”
“Yet you or your sister—or both of you—keep the gardens the way they must have been when she was alive.”
He could see her bite her lip. “I hate it. She’s there, scattered about the beds, and we’re caught up in her revenge. If we let the gardens go to seed, if they’re overgrown and ugly, we’re desecrating her grave. If we dig and plant and weed, we’re touching her ashes. It’s as if the flowers draw their strength from her bones and morbidly flourish. My father left it to us to decide what to do about the grounds. And it was the cruelest thing he did.”
She walked to the door of the motorcar. “I’m tired, I want to go home. I’ve talked too much as it is.”
“You must decide, between you, who will come to Yorkshire with me and bring your father’s body back to Wiltshire.”
“No. I’ll have no part in any such thing. Let him stay where he is, unloved and unwanted.”
She hadn’t asked why her father had gone to Yorkshire, or had died there.
Hamish said, “It would ha’ been easy for them to kill him. If he was lured to the house.”
Were either of the women capable of murder? He rather thought that Rebecca Parkinson was. Her hatred was still white-hot and ran deep. There was grief mixed into Sarah’s emotions. But she would surely have supported her sister after Parkinson had been killed. The only other choice would have been to refuse, then see Rebecca caught, convicted, and hanged.
But if the sisters had killed their father, why do it in Yorkshire?
Or had he got away the first time they’d tried, and they had gone after him?
A chilling thought.
The question was, how was he going to go about proving it?
“Did your father have enemies, anyone who would have liked to see him dead?” It was the standard question to put to survivors.
“Not that I know of. Although there was one man in London whom my father didn’t trust. He told my mother once that he’d been invited to bring us up to London to dine with this man, and my father didn’t want us to go. I only remember because Becky and I were so disappointed. But my father said that London was quite dull because of the war, and it wouldn’t have been as exciting as we’d thought.”
“What was this man’s name?” Rutledge asked, although he had a very good idea.
“I don’t think I ever heard it. My father referred to him as the Dreadnought. But that was the name of a ship, wasn’t it?”
Deloran?
In the end he let Sarah Parkinson go, after asking how to find her if he needed her to answer more questions. He had no grounds on which to keep her.
But then as she put the motorcar in gear, Rutledge put a hand on her door. “There’s been a murder in the cottages. A man called Willingham. Did he know your father, by any chance?”
“A murder? How dreadful.” She shook her head. “I don’t think my father would have come here to live if he had known any of his neighbors. He was running