CHAPTER 19
The Williams sisters weren’t, in Megan’s experience, usually harmonious, but their chorus of half-shouted, “What?” sounded as if it had been rehearsed to be pitch-perfect. The next several seconds were considerably less melodious, with all three sisters repeating variations on what in higher and more incredulous tones, with Megan trying to explain without shouting. Finally Sondra dropped her voice and blared, “Who had the DNA test run?”
“Detective Bourke.” Megan took a deep breath and waited for more shouting to subside before going any further. The dogs, agitated at all the noise, ran in circles and whined, which helped to quiet the Williams sisters more, Megan thought, than much of anything else would. “Detective Bourke thinks, like you do, that your mother’s death must have something to do with the title. He didn’t think proving it would necessarily lead anywhere, but . . .” She sighed and shrugged. “But he’s a nice man, really, and he thought you’d like to at least know for sure, so he put a priority request through to get a DNA test run.”
“You knew this?” Sondra asked incredulously. “You knew and you didn’t tell us?”
“I didn’t want to raise your hopes.”
Complex expressions flashed over Sondra’s face, ending in resigned acceptance. “I suppose it would have been just one more thing to get wound up over.” Abruptly, like she had only just realized what Bourke’s message said, she took a step back, looking faint. “We really are the heirs?”
Raquel whispered, “I knew it. Mama knew it. Oh, I wish she was here now . . .” Tears welled up and Jessie reached over to wipe her eyes like she was a child, then wiped at her own eyes.
“She’d be so happy. And—I guess we can tell Miss Edgeworth that we really are family. That priest she mentioned will let Mama be buried here in that case, right?”
“Father Anthony.” Sondra looked toward the front door, like she could see through the heavy oak to the driveway. “She said he’d come up here. I wonder where he is.”
“It could be hours,” Megan said wryly. “There’s no point in hanging around waiting for him. We might as well go upstairs and do our sleuthing.”
“At least we know we’ve got a right to the materials,” Raquel said. “That makes me feel better.”
Jessie gave her a thin smile. “Not that it was going to stop us.”
“Right.” Raquel returned the smile, took her little sister’s hand, and went up the stairs with her. Sondra, Megan, and the dogs followed a few steps behind, dust blurring under their feet. They’d left a lot of prints the day before, with Sondra’s pointy-toed high heels the most distinctive of them. They’d also taken more care to walk in each other’s footprints on the way up than down: Sondra’s points were only visible occasionally at the tops of the upward prints, but clear and distinct coming down again. The dogs’ prints were all over everything, and Megan thought if they’d been trying to sneak, it hadn’t worked very well.
“Holy crap,” Jessie breathed as they got to the top of the stairs. “Holy crap, this whole place—it’s not, but it could be ours. Like, it’s our . . . legacy. Holy crap. That’s . . . holy crap!”
Even Sondra blurted a giggle at that. “Yeah. You’re . . . yeah. Can you even imagine?”
Her sisters said, “No!” and “Yes!” simultaneously, sending them all into another giggle. “Not that we want it,” Sondra added more grimly, but like she was trying to convince herself. “The upkeep on the place would be impossible.”
“Only if there’s no treasure,” Raquel said with a sigh. The door to the odd little storage room stood ajar, and she pushed it open as Jessie lifted her torch up to light the space. They both stopped so suddenly that Megan and Sondra nearly ran into them, and the puppies did squirm between their ankles to sniff around. Raquel whispered, “Oh no,” and Jessie lowered the light as Megan and Sondra peeked around them.
The tidy piles and stacks they’d left the day before had been upended, papers and chaos everywhere. The box of Patrick’s things lay on its side, entirely empty, and his portrait had been thrown to one side, its glass broken. Raquel whispered, “Oh no,” again, and backed out of the doorway as Sondra, her jaw set, shouldered her way in and growled, “I’m gonna kill somebody.”
Megan thought she might well do it, if the perpetrator were to present themselves in that moment. Enraged colour stained Sondra’s jawline and cheekbones, and she held her hands in claws like she would tear something apart if she could. “These are ours,” she snarled. “This is our family’s history. How dare they, how—” The next sound she made was of inarticulate anger. It turned to equally furious tears in a heartbeat and, trembling with fury, she righted Patrick’s box and picked up a handful of papers to tap them together into tidiness. She put them away neatly and selected another pile to make neat again, faster this time. By the third handful, her sisters had joined her, all of them acting with the swift, strangely precise motions of rage cleaning. Megan pulled the dogs, who both wanted to “help,” back a few steps. First Sondra, then Jessie, found somewhere to put her torch, and all three of them ended up kneeling in the mess, not just tidying papers, but sometimes gently looking through them, then putting them away as if they’d become suddenly precious. Megan backed further away, whispered, “Let’s just look around,” to the dogs, and crept down the hallway, leaving the sisters to their grief and anger and cleaning.
There were more bedrooms beyond the storage room, and a narrow servants’ stairway that led both up and down. Megan looked at the dogs, one of whom wanted to go up, and one of whom preferred down. “We’ll go down next,” Megan promised Thong, and climbed the stairs, testing their strength before putting her weight on each one. Someone else had come up them relatively recently, and more than once: even her single torchlight from her phone showed a man’s footprints, or what she assumed was a man’s, from the size.
The wee small upper bedrooms managed to be damp, cold, and stuffy, as if the last summer’s heat had made the air stale in a way it couldn’t recover from. The first couple had rusting metal bed frames in them, and the next few were empty, but one at the farthest corner, where as much of the driveway as was possible could be seen, had a futon mattress in it and modern, unmade bedclothes. Megan stopped short in the doorway, staring incredulously at a pile of clothes peeking out from under a satin baseball jacket. Her heart accelerated along with her breathing and she edged forward, casting nervous glances in every direction at once. No one approached on the drive, no one came up the stairs behind her, no one leaped out from behind the door. She whispered, “That’s a little anticlimactic,” at the dogs, who were busy sniffing around and didn’t care.
Megan ought, she felt, to be able to recognize something that would tell her instantly whose room it was. The clothes fit the description that Omondi, the taxi driver, had given her, but there were no identifying features to them, and she probably shouldn’t just dig through them to find things, much as she wanted to. She did take pictures of the whole room with her phone and texted them to Paul, saying I found the bad guy’s lair in the Lough Rynn house, then tiptoed a little farther into the room, still looking for identifying objects. The unmade sheets rumpled over something square. Feeling somewhere between guilty and thrilled, Megan pushed them back a few inches.
Cherise Williams’s little blue diary lay there, proof positive that Megan was in a murderer’s room. She clapped a hand over her mouth and did a nervous dance back, then forward again, trying to decide if she should pick the book up.
The correct answer was obviously no: this was, if not exactly the scene of a crime, certainly the discovery of evidence. On the other hand, somebody had taken that diary for a reason, and there might be a clue. On the third hand, she wasn’t supposed to be investigating clues, what with being a limousine driver rather than a detective. On the fourth hand—
By that time she’d picked the diary up, curiosity being far greater than sense. She could put it back, if Detective Bourke needed it to be in situ for his purposes. Diary clutched against her chest, she scurried downstairs in a flurry of dogs. They nearly pulled her down the second set of steps, but she tugged them toward the storage room instead, and they course-corrected in little kicked-up tufts of dust. “I found it! I found the diary!”
The sisters met her at the storage room’s door, all three of them trying to crowd out while Megan and the puppies tried to crowd in. For a few seconds the air filled with excited, disbelieving cacophony. Megan fell back, giving the Williams women room, and they burst forth like chickens escaping a coop. Raquel snatched the diary from Megan’s hands and hugged it, tears streaming down her face. Sondra visibly tried not to take it from her, while Jessie all but hopped up and down, crying, “Where was it? How did you find it? What’s going on?”
“I found it upstairs,” Megan said over the noise. “We’ll have to put it back because I think it’s evidence, but I wanted you to at least see it. Someone’s living in the house.”
All three women went shockingly silent, leaving the puppies’ exciting whining the only—and very loud—sound. Raquel whispered, “Who?” while Sondra braced herself like she expected to have to defend her younger sisters from an unknown adversary.
“I don’t know, but—” Megan held her breath, wondering how much she should say. She decided against mentioning the clothes, since she didn’t think anybody had given them a description of the man who had last been seen with their mother. “It looks like they’ve been here a little while, anyway. I think we should leave the room totally alone, but I wanted—you thought you might be able to find something in the diary,” she said to Raquel. “Something that might make sense of everything.”
“A map that might match one of Patrick’s, here.” Raquel opened the diary with trembling hands. “It won’t match very well. These are Gigi Elsie’s diaries, not Geepaw Patrick’s. But he told her so many stories . . .” She turned pages with delicate fingers, her sisters and Megan all hovering over the diary and trying to restrain themselves from touching. “See, here. He talked all the time about the lakes, the big one and then the smaller one nearer to the druid’s circle. She drew a picture from his descriptions.” Raquel turned the book so the rest of them could see Elsie’s sketches.
“That’s not what it looks like, though,” Megan said. The others frowned at her and she shook her head, tracing her finger in the air over the drawing. “This is a proper standing stone circle, with—actually there are more stones here than there are in the one I saw yesterday. There are only five up there, I think, and four of them are stacked up and leaning against the fifth. This is . . .” She trailed off, whirling her finger above the sketch again.
No one could call it Stonehenge-like, but the seven stones in the drawing were placed in a circle, with three of them standing upright, two broken, and the remaining two fallen over. “It doesn’t look anything like this at all.”
“This is . . .” Raquel turned the book around again, reading the pages. “This is how he described it from when he was a child. So it’s been . . . over a hundred and twenty years, right? It could have changed?”
“It would be more surprising if it hadn’t,” Sondra said. “What else does it say?”
“I don’t know. Nothing helpful.” Raquel flipped through the pages, pausing at drawings. “More about treasure hunting when they were children. Oh. Oh! And about the evil—oh, it does say earl. I guess I didn’t know what an earl was when I was little, so I decided it said king. It talks about the bad earl and . . . I don’t remember any of this. It does talk about how the next earl tried to make things better, but he—Patrick—had decided to leave by then. He didn’t want any part of his family’s legacy.”
“He wanted enough to be remembered that he told Elsie the stories, though,” Sondra pointed out.
“But he wasn’t the heir to the land,” Raquel said in astonishment. “The bad earl left it to a cousin instead of the nephew who got the title, and the cousin said the new earl could work the land in—in Donny-gall?” She gave a quick, relieved smile as Megan nodded at her pronunciation, then went on. “And they . . . it looks like the cousin and his family, they were the ones who lived here in Leitrim, and none of the land ever went back to the earl’s ownership. So . . .” She looked up, eyebrows furled. “So Anne Edgeworth . . .”
“Anne is the heir to the land,” Megan said as the sisters tried to work through it. “You’re the heirs to the title.”
“And Anne just offered to leave the whole estate to us,” Sondra finished. “Returning the title and the land to the same holders.”
“Oh my god, could it be any more convoluted?” Jessie made a short, sharp upward motion with her hands, like she was throwing everything away, and knocked the diary out of Raquel’s grip.
Everybody shrieked and lurched for the flying diary, and later Megan thought they couldn’t have made more of a hash of it if they’d tried. Jessie, her hands already lifted, snatched at the little book and effectively punched it toward Sondra. Sondra screamed and her attempt at catching it turned into trying to keep it from smashing into her face. It flew higher and Raquel’s hand shot upward, nearly catching it, but she misjudged slightly and hit the spine instead of catching it. The book flew toward the door as if it had sprouted wings, and cracked against the frame. Megan ducked, trying to grab it before it hit the floor, and poor little Thong, in a panic, threw herself into Megan’s hands. Megan pulled her back just before the diary clobbered her in the head, and the diary splatted onto the dusty floor with an audible crack. Dip rolled onto his back and peed in the air again, making everyone scream, and Sondra, in a bid to save the book from a spray of dog urine, kicked it into the storage room. It spun across the floor, leaving a trail in the already-disturbed dust, and came to a whacking stop against one of the portrait frames.
The ensuing silence broke with Jessie’s high-pitched giggle and turned to gales of whooping laughter that bordered on hysteria. “We couldn’t have done that if we tried. Oh my god. Is the book all right?” She went forward to get it while Sondra said, “Is poor Dip all right?” and crouched to rub the puppy’s ears while he made the most pathetic puppy-dog eyes imaginable at her. “Yeah,” she said to him. “Don’t worry about peeing on this house. It’s old enough to have seen worse.”
“Still, I’m sorry,” Megan said weakly. “I’ll go out to the car and get something to clean up with.”
Sondra, rising, gave her an unexpectedly sympathetic smile. “Don’t worry about it. If we were a little less controlled we’d probably be doing the same thing. This has been a difficult week.”
“Guys,” Jessie whispered. “Guys, um, look. Look, guys.” She turned, displaying the diary, its spine now broken, and the aging cotton binding inside the front covers now split both at the glued top seam and down the middle.
Papers, the ink on them faded to almost the same colour as the folded sheets, slid from the split material, held in place by nothing more than Jessie’s grip.