Sarah realized that Harry’s voice had stopped moments ago; did he possibly think he could leave it here, come this far and no farther? Her own voice sounded tiny and flat to her, the way it did in a theater lobby between the acts. “Where was everybody that day?”
At a local game-bird show, Harry told her, held every year by a group of fanciers who bought or traded birds with an eye to the coming breeding season. Normally only Bess and Charles and Kate Clemence went, but this time Nina’s illness, with the resultant tiptoeing and worrying and staying close to the house until she seemed to be out of danger, had given it the air of a dazzling social occasion. Even Hunter had gone, and Rob Clemence.
Sarah knew what had to come next: the fact that the show was held in a huge auction barn, that people came and went constantly; that, with babies being hoisted on their parents’ shoulders for a better view, cocks crowing militantly at each other, the wild beat of wings and crowding around as a bird was removed from its cage for point-by-point inspection, it was impossible to know where any one person was at a given time.
“Well then,” said Sarah instantly.
Harry didn’t inquire into that or even glance at her; he kept his eyes immovably on the road. “Charles came to me afterwards. He said, ‘I never meant to kill her, I swear it. I only wanted to let her know we weren’t the fools she’d taken us for, and tell her to get out.’ “
And Charles had said exactly that, Sarah knew it from the very expressionlessness with which Harry repeated it. The words weren’t so much said as pronounced. They built up a convincing scene, of Charles confronting Nina while the nurse slept in that heavy drugged sleep (there would have been two cups of tea, of course, the innocent one left); of Nina thanking him mockingly for the opportunity of washing her hair and going ahead, maddeningly, with the preparations for that.
How vulnerable she would have looked then, this woman to whom his father had left the farm and the major part of his estate, with her back turned and her head bent over the basin. So sure of herself, even knowing from his face why Charles had come, that she paid more attention to the feminine task she was bent on than to the man behind her.
Actual harm mightn’t have been intended at all, the angry thrust at her head the equivalent of a slap delivered in a moment of unthinking rage . . . No, thought Sarah, suddenly and completely sure. Charles might have done it to a man, but never to a woman. He could never, under the pressure of any rage, have left any woman with her face toppled drowningly into a basin of water under the weight of her hair.
Someone had done just that. Not Charles, although he had cleared the killer’s path—and was that where the nightmares came from? “I don’t care what he told you,” Sarah said clearly. “I will never believe that Charles killed his stepmother. Drugged the nurse—yes. The rest of it—no.”
The corner of her eye caught the quick embattled half-turn of Harry’s head, as though he would have liked to agree or even disagree with her and couldn’t quite bring himself to do either. The car rounded the corner that would take them to the house. Sarah said challengingly, “Besides, on the basis that Charles did kill Nina, who killed Miss Braceway? You’re not going to sug—”
Without warning, and with a roughness that caught her in mid-word, Harry slewed the car in to the side of the road and stopped it. His face was tenser than Sarah had ever seen it, and his eyes darker. “If you think I like any of this one damn bit better than you do—” he began, and paused with an air of weariness, as though the task of explaining was mountainous but he would tackle it anyway. Sarah shrank a little from the thoroughness of his direct stare.
“I’m not that much older, but Charles was like a kid brother,” he said abruptly. “Very young, in spots. As intolerant as an adolescent in his judgments. He never made allowances for human frailties in anyone—not even in himself. He always had to put haloes on the people he liked. I could have told him that sooner or later Nina’s was going to fall off with a bang. It wouldn’t have helped, but still I could have told him. How do you think I felt when it did, and she died, and Charles began walking around like a guilty secret on legs? How do you think I felt—Old Friend Harry—when he walked up to me with you on his arm? My God, how do you think I feel right now when we’ve got to exhume him like this?”
Sarah felt violently buffeted. She said to her hands, “I’m sorry,” realizing all over again that Harry had known Charles much better than she, possibly better than his family; that the things in Charles that had come as a surprise to her—the strength that wasn’t there, for instance, had been known to Harry all along and hadn’t affected his liking in the least.
She said, “I didn’t mean—”
“Neither did I.” Unpredictably, he was smiling at her, but there was something a little wry in the smile. “Miss Braceway . . . Well, six months had gone by, remember, and she must have worked on a lot of other cases. And she was insatiably curious; she’d have had to be to go prowling into that shack on the mink farm. Maybe there was some drunk
