I’m afraid,” she said. “The journal . . .”
Mimi conceded. “Of course. But if you change your mind, jump in the car and join us.”
Isabel, standing at the cutting board, neatly sliced an onion into rings. She felt tears come into her eyes and wiped them away with the back of her hand. “Not real tears,” she said to Mimi. “Nor even crocodile ones. Just onion tears.”
“A nice name for tears that don’t mean anything,” said Mimi.
“Yes. We’ll need to think about that.”
She looked out the window. To the west, the sky had clouded over to the west and was heavy and dark. “Rain,” said Isabel. “I hope that you’re not washed out on Skye. It has a tendency to rain over there, as you know.” She remembered a couple of lines which Michael Longley had written about such landscapes:
“I’m not put off by rain,” said Mimi. “Rain can be beautiful, don’t you think? And there’s no point becoming depressed by it. That never changes anything.”
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“That’s fine if you’re from Texas,” said Isabel. “Rain doesn’t outstay its welcome down there.”
“Perhaps,” said Mimi. “But still . . .” She played with a button on her sleeve. “We had lunch in town today,” she said. “An interesting encounter.”
“With?”
“Angie, no less. She’s moved into town and is going back home tomorrow. Just her. The engagement with Tom is over, it seems. Very dramatic news. I’ve been itching to tell you. Joe, though, has been a bit embarrassed about it. He feels that it’s indecent to crow too much, even in a case like this. I told him I wasn’t crowing.”
Isabel moved the chopped onion to the side of the board, neatly, making a small white pile. So Tom had acted. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. And she was, in a sense; it was a tale of unhappiness from start to finish—an unhappy, false beginning and now an unhappy ending.
“Yes, it’s a bit sad really,” agreed Mimi. “I felt rather sorry for her at the end.”
Isabel looked up in surprise. “For Angie?”
“Yes,” said Mimi. “She said that she felt she had to do something about it. She didn’t want to hurt Tom, she said, but she felt that it just wasn’t working.”
Isabel stared at Mimi wide-eyed. “She said that she was the one who ended it?”
“Yes. I must say that I was a bit taken aback. I’d thought of her, as you know, as a gold-digger. But a gold- digger doesn’t end an arrangement like that. A real gold-digger would have hung on in. She didn’t.”
Of course she wouldn’t, thought Isabel. She would have 2 5 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h received her pay-off. There would be no reason to hold on after that.
“Then she said something really surprising,” Mimi went on.
“She said that Tom had offered her money to end the engagement. She said that she had been quite shocked and had turned him down.”
“Turned him down?”
“Yes.”
No, thought Isabel, highly unlikely. “Did you believe her?”
“Yes, I did,” said Mimi. “She seemed completely sincere.”
Both were silent for a while. In Isabel’s case, it was a silence of indecision. If Angie was telling the truth, then Isabel had completely misjudged her. But had she been telling the truth?
Mimi, though, seemed to be in no doubt. “I’ve learned a bit of a lesson,” she said. “Or rather, I’ve been reminded of something that I suppose I knew all along—that you just can’t be certain about people and their motives. You can’t. You think you know, then . . .”
Mimi could be right, thought Isabel. And then reminded herself that she had encouraged Tom to end the engagement on the basis of her own, possibly misguided, feelings about Angie’s venality. But did that make any difference to the outcome? If Angie had ended it of her own accord, then the fact that she had urged Tom to tackle her about it was quite irrelevant. It occurred to her, though, that if Angie was not telling the truth and the break-up had really been at Tom’s insistence, then her own encouragement of Tom may have played a part in the end result.
She looked helplessly at Mimi, wondering whether she should tell her cousin about what she had done. Mimi, though, had guessed that there was something on Isabel’s mind. “You’re T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N
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feeling bad too?” she asked gently. “You shouldn’t worry about it, you know. Angie probably misjudged you too.”
“Maybe. Maybe she did. But she wouldn’t have thought of me in quite the terms I thought of her. I doubt if she thought I was up to committing murder.”
Mimi looked at Isabel in astonishment. “And you thought that of her? That she was capable of murdering Tom?”
Isabel confessed that she had, and told Mimi of the conversation in which Tom had described Angie’s reaction
