Lady in the Mist - Laurie Alice Eakes [112]
“Let them get a taste of their own search and seizure,” someone shouted to anyone who would listen.
“The village has gotten bolder,” Dominick observed.
“No one’s disappeared from right inside the village before.” She tightened her hold on his arm. “And no one’s ever been hostile to you before.”
“Except for you.” He gave her a smile that turned her knees to the consistency of the boiling strawberries.
“You frightened me.”
“Nothing frightens you, my brave girl.”
“There you’re wrong.”
Losing him frightened her. A loveless, childless future frightened her.
“Has someone set people against you? Since yesterday?” she asked.
“Either that, or the fact that I live in the village and the disappearances took place in the village, makes me someone easy to blame. But I was locked into my room, and until today, I didn’t have a key to get out.”
“Dominick, you didn’t.” She stopped to stare at him. “You took a key from Mayor Kendall?”
“I did. He had so many jumbled together in a drawer, he’ll simply think he gave it to Letty and mislaid it.”
“But he might work out why, and if something happens to someone else, you won’t have that protection.” Tabitha held out her hand. “Give it to me. I can say I took it from you for your own good, if necessary.”
“If you insist.” He removed the key from his pocket and slipped it into her hand. “There may be need for it.”
“I would never come to your room.” She glanced about, hoping no one had seen him giving her the key. They stood between the church and the parsonage. Everyone’s attention seemed to be on the square.
“Even to help me?” he asked.
“I’d be ruined.”
But he could be dead.
She inhaled with a sharp realization. “If there was no alternative, yes.”
“Oh, Tabitha.” He slipped his arm around her waist for a brief embrace. “Shall we go to the Trowers’ house and see what we can find out?”
“Yes.” Tabitha matched her footfalls to Dominick’s long stride. “I think he must have been taken from his room, though it’s at the top of the house. After all, why would he go out at midnight?”
“Why indeed?” Dominick’s jaw looked like marble—hard and pale.
Tabitha’s stomach felt like a whirlpool—swirling and sinking. “What did you find?” she asked.
“Nothing more than a list of dates and a name.”
“Was last night one of those dates?” She posed the question but knew the answer.
Dominick gave a brief nod.
“And Ral—” She choked on the name. “Raleigh’s name was listed?”
Dominick didn’t answer. He didn’t nod or shake his head. He turned along the landward side of the dunes and picked his way with care, yet quickly, through the rank grasses.
“Dominick, should we go to the Trowers if they’re going to be hostile to you?” Tabitha asked at last.
“I don’t particularly care if they are.” He sounded cold.
He sounded like she thought an aristocratic Englishman would—frosty and indifferent to lesser beings. Lesser beings like her, a schoolmaster’s daughter. A midwife’s daughter. A spinster midwife.
Though he held her hand close to his side, she felt like a chasm was opening between them.
“Are you looking for footprints?”
“Yes.”
They reached a rise of land behind the Trower homestead. The house lay nestled amidst a sea of carefully tended greenery and neat outbuildings. Chickens clucked in a fenced yard, and a cow lowed from a small pasture.
“Things would have been muddy last night,” she pointed out.
“And as long as they weren’t too trampled today, we might learn something.” Dominick released her hand. “Do you know which room is Raleigh’s?”
“Only because I know which windows belong to the other rooms.” Tabitha gave the house a wide berth in the hope that no one inside would recognize her and Dominick. “What can footprints tell you?” she asked, then answered it herself. “If he was taken.”
“Precisely.”
“How did you know that?”
He gave her his swift and brilliant grin. “As a