A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [121]
Her eyes were not able to see him. But she was still alive. Just.
“I had to do it,” she said. “I couldn’t stand it anymore. She knew that. She always knew things before I ever did. But for once she was wrong—about the Colonel. She’ll go to hell, won’t she, for killing him? And I’ll go to heaven with the angels, won’t I? We couldn’t share anymore. Not with that on her conscience.”
“Where did she kill him?” Rutledge asked.
“By the wall. When he came to speak to Maggie. She had the shotgun hidden there, among the roses, where he couldn’t see it. And she tried to ask him if he’d been the one driving the car that killed Helena. But he wouldn’t listen, he told her not to be a fool, that she was upset and not thinking clearly. So she shot him—she lifted the gun and shot him and his head flew everywhere, and the horse bolted before he’d stopped bleeding, and it was the most awful…”
Her voice faded. He could see the blood trickling out of her mouth. The way the body lay, graceless and heavy. It would only be a matter of minutes. There was nothing he could do to stop the bleeding, nothing anyone could do to put the torn flesh back together. But he sat there beside her until her eyes told him she was dead. Then he got to his feet and began to search the cottage.
He found the shotgun in a closet. And signs of one breakfast on the table. And only one bedroom occupied, the other with the mattress still rolled up and wrapped in a sheet. Two trunks holding clothes. He went through each cupboard and closet, looked under anything that might hide a body. But there was no one.
He wasn’t surprised.
Taking a sheet with him, he hurried out to bind up Royston’s bloody shoulder. The goose, smelling the blood, had backed off behind the car in the drive. Royston’s car. He’d come to take Helena to church….
Royston was very weak, but alive. Rutledge, with some experience in war wounds, did what he could to stop the bleeding, and then called his name, trying to rouse him.
Royston opened his eyes, stared at Rutledge with a frown, then groaned with the mounting pain. “In there,” he managed hoarsely.
“It’s over,” Rutledge said curtly.
“I got here a little early. I was talking to Maggie, and she began to ask me about the—accident. All those years ago. Mavers had said something, Helena had told her about it, she said. Then she went into the bedroom to fetch Helena. And Helena came out with the ax. I didn’t—there was nothing I could do. If you hadn’t come—”
“Stop talking.”
“You can’t leave Maggie here! Not with that madwoman!”
“Maggie’s dead.”
“Gentle God!”
“And Helena died with her.”
“What? She killed her cousin?”
“You killed Helena. In Colonel Harris’s car. When you were twenty. You told me so yourself.”
“I don’t understand—”
“There never was a Helena. Only—Maggie, and years of being told that Helena was better and brighter and stronger than she was—until she believed it. And tried to be Helena herself. And couldn’t. But somehow she created Helena inside herself.” He shivered, thinking of Hamish, wondering if one day in the future, he’d create the man’s image in his own flesh and be a divided soul, like Maggie Sommers. “And it was—Helena—who shot Charles Harris.”
He got Royston to his feet and somehow to the car. Then he was driving as fast as he could toward Upper Streetham, watching the man’s face, watching the rough breathing.
Someone fetched the doctor from the church, and then Warren threw them all out of his surgery as he worked over Laurence Royston. All except Rutledge, who stood in the doorway watching the gentle, swift hands moving across the savage wounds of the ax. “I don’t know how this happened,” Warren said over his shoulder. “It will