However much sleep he had managed the previous night had been a drop in the ocean, and James struggled to clear the fog of exhaustion from his thoughts. “That’s what Gladys meant in the phone call you overheard, right? She said she had given him until that night—she must have been referring to giving Marchand that note.”
“That’s what it looks like.” Leo tossed a clean shirt and a pair of trousers on the bed for James to change into. “But then why in hell did she run off before collecting her money?”
“Unless she didn’t run off.” James dragged himself out of bed and stripped off his pajamas, shivering in the cold air before hastily dressing.
“Nobody in this house or the lodge had time to kill anyone and dispose of their body. Between dinner and the time Gladys was missed, I was with the Carrows and you were with Camilla and Martha.”
“And Sir Anthony was shocked to discover that Gladys was gone. I don’t think he could have been faking it.”
“Who noticed Gladys was gone?”
“Lilah. And she has an alibi too—she was on the telephone. That can be checked up on.” James was surprised that he didn’t even balk at this idea, but at the moment all he cared about was getting to the bottom of this mess and then getting home.
Leo frowned. “Why would Lilah have gone to look for Gladys? She didn’t even know that Madame Fournier was Gladys, did she?”
“I can’t see how she would.”
“Hmm. That tree between the house and the lodge,” Leo said, grabbing a few stray items from various surfaces and dropping them pell-mell into James’s valise. “Is it a cherry tree?”
“Yes,” said James. “But it’s new. It wasn’t there in 1927. Back then, a couple of fruit trees were in the front garden.”
“It can’t be that new. It’s quite large. I just ran into Lady Marchand by that tree.”
“What on earth was Camilla doing out of doors at this hour?”
“Drinking tea and staring at cherry trees, evidently.”
James shot an alarmed look at Leo. “We need to talk to Camilla and Martha.”
“I’m afraid we do.”
First, though, they went downstairs to use the telephone. James rang the Three Bells in the village to ask if anyone answering Gladys Button’s description had taken a room there, and when that proved a dead end, Leo rang the grocer’s wife.
“Of course Gladys isn’t here. Where’d you get an idea like that?” James heard Mrs. Mudge say, her voice loud enough that he could hear it while standing on the threshold of the telephone room.
By now, they had attracted the attention of Martha and Lilah, who hovered behind them in the hall. Succinctly, James explained that two menacing notes had been found, but left out that one had been found in Sir Anthony’s bedroom and the other in his pocket. The man had been Lilah’s father, after all, and he had died not twelve hours earlier. She could be spared the knowledge that he was apparently being blackmailed, possibly for some secret related to Rose’s disappearance.
“The cherry tree?” Martha repeated. “What can that have to do with anything?”
“When was it planted?” James asked, a realization dawning on him.
Martha stared at him, her face going gray. “It was planted during the summer of 1927 while I was away,” she said, not looking at Lilah. “I remember because it was planted in the most foolish place, quite the wrong spot for a cherry tree, and by the time I returned, it was too late to transplant. It seemed such a silly thing to fret over, considering all the other things there were to be upset about, but I was cross all the same.”
James looked at the three people around him. Martha, worried and shaken. Lilah, unnaturally serious. Leo, looking as if this were all desperately familiar. He wondered who would finally say aloud what they all must be thinking.
In the end, he spoke up himself. “We have to dig it up.”
Martha drew in a sharp breath. Lilah gave a single nod. Leo stepped closer to him.
The thought of what might be buried beneath that tree made James’s vision darken at the edges. Something worth blackmail; a secret worth a thousand pounds. Something worth twenty years of secrecy. The idea made his stomach turn. But he knew that he had to dig it up himself. Martha could hardly do it, and Lilah had on silk stockings, and they certainly couldn’t pester Carrow to do some impromptu gravedigging, or grave robbing, or whatever they were—
“I saw where Carrow keeps the shovels,” said Leo, already striding toward the door. “I’ll handle it.”
James followed him into the gray winter day. “You don’t need—”
“Bollocks on need. One of us is fine with this sort of thing and the other isn’t and that’s that.”
James strongly doubted that Leo, or anyone, was fine with the prospect of possibly digging up a body, or a skeleton, or whatever they were afraid of finding. But he probably wouldn’t faint or break down while doing it, so that put him one up on James. And there was something about the way he had looked at James while speaking, as if daring James to stop him from doing this for him.
“Thank you,” he said, holding Leo’s gaze. Leo gave him a quick nod.
Camilla was at the tree again. She wore a tweed skirt and coat and the wind whipped through her hair.
“What’s going on?” she asked as Leo stepped on the shovel and broke ground.
“Why were you out here this morning?” James asked.
“Because Rose asked for it to be planted. The old tree had stopped producing fruit and she knew how Martha and I were about cherry preserves.” Her eyes were wide and clear, and James would have sworn she was telling the truth. “And I miss her.”
“That’s all?”
“What else would it be?” But even as she asked the question, her gaze was locked on Leo and the shovel. “What’s happening?” she asked.
James didn’t answer.
“This doesn’t make sense.” She gripped James’s arm. “You’ve got this all wrong. You expect to find Rose, but that can’t be right.”
“Why don’t you go inside,” James suggested gently. “You’ve had a hell of a twenty-four hours.” And it’s not going to get any easier, he didn’t say.
“You can’t seriously expect me to go lie down while you’re out here attempting to dig up my sister’s body,” Camilla said. Her words cut through the sound of the wind and the steady slice of Leo’s shovel cutting through the dirt. James was faintly shocked that it was Camilla, of all people, who gave voice to the thing that so far none of them had spoken aloud.
“No, I suppose not,” James conceded.
“Why not just tell me what’s going on?”
“We found a note that said ‘I saw what you did by the cherry tree’ in your husband’s pocket. There’s reason to believe he was being blackmailed.”
The hole was knee deep now. James was struck by the sudden thought, both ghastly and somehow reassuring, that this was not the first time Leo had been called upon to dig a hole six feet deep.
The clouds, which had been threatening rain since that morning, finally broke. James looked at Camilla, at the raindrops landing on her face. That day when she had brought him tea and biscuits in his bedroom, she had been crying, he remembered. What had happened to make her go from tears at her sister’s disappearance to calmly saying it was none of her business? Was her change in attitude because she was covering up for her husband? Except—James found it hard to believe that she could remain married to a man she knew to have killed her sister.
“You think Anthony killed Rose,” Camilla said finally, leveling him with a challenging stare that reminded him of nobody so much as Rose herself, and maybe a little of Lilah.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “But something happened here.”
Lilah came up to them. “Should we call the police?”
“And tell them what?” James asked. “We can wait until we…” He didn’t dare finish that sentence. What had been in the family for so long could stay there for another hour or so.
Leo paused to wipe rain off his forehead, and James cursed himself for not having packed his Macintosh. Leo, at least, had his overcoat. It seemed that Leo had struck a root. He moved a few feet to the side to begin another hole. James went to him and put his hand over Leo’s on the shovel handle. “I’ll spell you.”
“Let me do this,” said Leo, a little out of breath, his hair damp with rain. In his words James heard an unspoken for you that he couldn’t, wouldn’t reject. He just nodded his head and went back to Camilla. Lilah stood by Martha, holding her arm as if preventing her from moving closer.
And toward the back of their morbid gathering, sheltered by the eaves of the lodge, stood Carrow, his cap pulled low over his forehead and his hands in his pocket.
Over the sound of the rain was a dull thud as the metal shovel struck something. James could see Lilah’s brow furrow in a confusion mirroring his own; whatever horrors were in that hole shouldn’t clank against a shovel.
Leo, now standing in the hole, crouched so low that James could only see the top of his head. “I need a spade,” he called, and it was Carrow who came forward with one.
There came more sounds of metal against metal and then, finally, Leo lifted a box of some sort out of the hole and placed it on the ground. With a hand from Carrow, Leo hoisted himself out of the hole and crouched down to examine the box.
“What is it?” Lilah asked. But James wasn’t paying attention to her. His attention was divided between Leo, who was attempting to pry the box open with a pocketknife, and Camilla, whose body was suddenly devoid of tension. Whatever was happening, this made sense to her.
James knelt on the ground beside Leo. The object appeared to be a metal toolbox, now blackened with age and dirt and covered in rust. The hinges weren’t budging and neither was the latch.
“We’ll have to break it,” Leo muttered. Then he did something with his knife that made the hinges give way. The box sprang open.
It was empty.
Behind them, Carrow burst into laughter.