Wings of Fire - Charles Todd [65]
“Damn it, you’re too intelligent to put your own responses down to sentimentality, but you feel uncomfortable in the Hall. Let me describe it for you. You walk through the door, and the house isn’t benign, it’s alive with jarring forces. To some extent, it’s a subjective response, I grant you, because of the uneasiness in your own mind. Your intuition tries to point out that there’s something very wrong here, but you refuse to listen, you don’t want to believe that what you sense could be true. And you won’t help me to find the answers for the same reasons!”
Rutledge was met with a wall of resistance. But he was beginning to take the measure of it now.
“Even I have felt the emotions in that house! I was moved by O. A. Manning’s poetry, I was shocked by the manner of the poet’s death, I was personally involved in a way that an ordinary policeman wouldn’t have been. And I’m not by nature one to look for moods or—what is it that the crackpots call it?—vibrations? I don’t believe in ghosts, either. But Tre-velyan Hall is haunted, in a sense that you and I both accept.”
Chambers still didn’t answer, but his face was paler, strained.
“I survived in those hellholes they called trenches for four years. It seemed like forty—a lifetime. I learned to trust my intuition. Men who didn’t often died. I was lucky to possess it in the first place, and war honed it. I learned that it wasn’t a figment of my imagination. Nor was it a replacement for the God I’d lost. Whatever it was, you came to recognize it. An inkling, a warning, a sudden flash of caution, a split-second insight that saved your life. Indisputably real, however unorthodox the means of reaching you. It gave you an edge on death, and you were grateful. Then I lost it for a time, it doesn’t matter why. But it hasn’t failed me completely, and I can tell you why you’re afraid to go back to that house. You know that Rosamund’s death haunts you there. You can feed yourself lies down in Plymouth. But not here. Not in the house itself!”
Rutledge could see the clenched jaw. The desperate rejection. In his own head Hamish was clamoring for him to leave the man in peace—
“It was an accidental overdose!”
The words, when they finally came, seemed to be torn from the depths of Chambers’ soul.
“No.” Rutledge waited, relentless. “Rosamund didn’t make such mistakes. She was a strong woman. She was sunshine and light, not despair and darkness. It wasn’t suicide, and it wasn’t an accidental overdose.”
“I refuse to accept murder!”
“Because you believe that murder, if it was done, was your fault. For loving Rosamund. For wanting to marry her. For winning her love. Just as suicide could mean a rejection of your love, murder means someone wanted to prevent another stepfather in the house, another family. Another long wait for whatever it was he—or she—wanted badly enough to kill for.”
Hamish was saying in agitation, “Where did this notion come from? You never spoke of it before!”
In the tumult of his own emotions, Rutledge tersely answered the voice aloud. “I didn’t know before. But it makes sense now. I see the pattern!”
He did. Olivia had systematically eliminated her family— the twin sister who could pass for her and steal her grandfather’s love. The stepfathers she hadn’t wanted. The half brother who had stirred up the household and kept it on its ear. The mother who was planning to marry again. But not Nicholas, never Nicholas, who had looked after her. Not until the very end, when he no longer served any purpose—
Hamish was still raising fierce objections. Rutledge ignored them. He was angry and unsettled and—yes—bewildered by the leap his intuition had taken without warning.
Without a motive, he could keep to himself his suspicions about Olivia. He could deny, on the surface, that he believed in them because there was no real evidence except the carefully hidden trophies of the dead. It was possible—it was likely—it was practicable—But still theory. Still his own torment.
Now, it was real. Suddenly, it was real