A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [120]
Without waiting for any more, Rutledge was through the door, eyes seeing nothing after the glare of the sun, but ahead of him was something, a figure barely glimpsed. A woman in black, huddled on the floor at the end of the brown sofa, two darknesses blending into one like some distorted parody of humanity, humped and ugly. A primeval dread lifted the hairs along his arms.
Reaching her, he grasped her shoulders, saying, “Are you all right? Has he hurt you? What has he done to you?”
She stared up at him, face chalk white, eyes large and wild. In one bloody hand was an ax. His own eyes were adjusting rapidly now. The room was empty except for Maggie and the assorted furnishings of a rented house.
He got her up on the sofa, and she leaned back, eyes closed. “Is he dead?” she asked breathlessly, in the voice of a terrified child.
“No—I don’t think so.”
She tried to get up, but he pressed her back against the sofa, holding her there, trying to determine how much of the blood was hers, how much Royston’s.
“I’ll have to get help—I’ll find Helena and bring her to you—she’s at the church—”
But Maggie was shaking her head, dazed but at least able to understand him. Her eyes turned toward the closed door at the far end of the room. “She’s in there,” Maggie whispered.
Rutledge felt his blood run cold.
“I’ll go—”
“No—leave her! I hope she’s dead!”
He mistook her meaning, thinking that she was saying that death was preferable to the cataclysm of rape.
“I saw her kill him,” she went on, not taking her eyes from the bedroom door. “I saw her! She shot Colonel Harris. And it was for nothing, it wasn’t the right man—she’d thought it was, but Mavers said—and then that man out there admitted it was true, that he’d killed the child.”
“What child?” he asked, thinking only of Lizzie.
“Why, little Helena, of course. Mr. Royston ran over her in his car—in Colonel Harris’s car. And the check he sent was in the Colonel’s name. So we thought—all these years we thought—but it wasn’t the Colonel. Helena got it all wrong.” There was a sudden spark of triumph in her eyes, as if it gave her some obscure pleasure to think that Helena had been wrong. “Aunt Mary and Uncle Martin always said she was better than I was, so pretty, so smart, so fearless—they said they wished the car had killed me, not Helena. I was only adopted, you see, I wasn’t theirs—” There was a lifetime of suffering in her words, a lifelong misery because the wrong child had died in an accident and she had been blamed for living. “They asked for all that money, and it wasn’t enough to satisfy them, they wanted her back again. But she was dead. And I was alive.”
He wasn’t interested in Maggie’s childhood; he had a man bleeding to death on his hands, and God knew what behind that closed, silent bedroom door.
“So when Helena discovered that the Colonel lived here, just across the wall—that he was our neighbor—”
Getting up from his knees, his breathing still erratic and harsh, he ignored Maggie and started across the room to the bedroom, forcing himself to face what had to be faced. Hamish had been babbling for the last five minutes, a counterpoint to Maggie’s slow, painful confession, but Rutledge shut him out, shut out everything but the long, bright streak of blood down the door panel, on the handle of the knob—
Somehow Maggie was there before him. “No! Leave her alone, I tell you! I won’t let you go near her—let her die!” And with such swiftness that he couldn’t have stopped her if his own life had depended upon it, she was through the door and into the room, turning the key in the lock behind her.
“Maggie!” he shouted, pounding on the door, but he could hear only her sobbing. She’d taken the ax with her. There was nothing to do but try to break the door down with his shoulder or kick it down.
It took him three tries. When it finally swung wide on broken hinges, he was into the room before he could regain his balance.
There was only one bed, narrow, neatly made, now covered in blood. And only Maggie, collapsed across the pretty lemon-colored counterpane like