“Sounds good to me. It’s enough that we know. And because of what Winsley did to Jig, I think I’ll give Georgie’s million to a dog shelter. That will teach him!”
Hugo’s laugh echoed out to them. “That will certainly rub his nose in it. But I doubt it will teach him anything. I expect he’ll start getting serious about stopping you after this.”
“Let him try!” Adie declared with confidence.
“You’ve changed a lot since we brought you to England. Minerva said you were a diamond in the rough. She was right. I should have learned long ago that Minerva usually ends up being right.”
EPILOGUE
DIGITAL FILE 7 (Success Version)
Congratulations my darling girl!
I am over the moon, as I record this video, knowing you have solved Georgie’s Mystery. How does it feel to have done something the police were unable to do? How does it feel to know how truly capable you are? Something I have always known.
You may ask how I could possibly know such a thing. It is no baseless rhetoric. I know because I have read the reports on you since you were five years old. I saw how you studied on your own, learning more than most university graduates would ever know. I saw how you stood loyally by your mother’s side, even when she didn’t deserve it. When she gave credit and her own loyalty to that awful church instead of to you. I saw how you found a way to stretch what little money she left you, finding unique ways to make a pittance enough. That is no mean feat, I can assure you.
A person who can manage a budget, and wring every useful penny from it, is someone who can see what others can’t. A person who can carry on her own education learns to put pieces together and make them meaningful. A person who has the background knowledge from years of study can use that information to understand the thoughts and actions of men. All these talents made me confident you would reach this point. And I was right!
So, again, congratulations. And congratulations for keeping that little weed of a man away from my money. I do regret my decision to involve him in any of this. I didn’t think it through. I am not, ultimately, like you, my dear Adie. I do not think things through.
Now we get down to the details of the next Mystery. As you may already know, Rory the caretaker of Beckside Farm, was in fact little Rory, the son of my dear friend, who lost his mother at ten years old. It was a terrible tragedy that only compounded the terrible tragedy of a boy taken from his mother out of spite.
Rory would have turned out to be far more damaged if he hadn’t had the love of his paternal grandmother. She mitigated much of her son’s petty cruelty. But she couldn’t make up for a mother who seemingly abandoned him. That truth he had to bear his whole life. And it destroyed all his relationships.
How do I know this? Because I kept my eye on Rory from a distance. Not quite the way I did with you. But in a smaller way. I watched from the sidelines as he was expelled from one school after another. Usually for fighting. I watched as he joined the regular army as soon as he reached eighteen, choosing not to enter officer training as his social position would have dictated. Instead, he relished rubbing elbows with the lower classes, something he knew would horrify his father.
I saw him deployed to Ireland during the Troubles and end up with a medical discharge several years later. Not for any physical injuries. They were all mental ones. What is now called PTSD, I think, although I’m not sure.
I have no idea what happened to Rory in Ireland, but whatever it was caused him more harm than losing his mother ever did. He returned to England not just a broken man, but a shattered one. All I could do to keep him from ending up dead, in an institution, or living rough on the streets, was to offer him the job at Beckside Farm.
Your third Mystery I’ll call the Troubled Man, because that is what he was. Yes, he was very probably a deeply damaged man before he went to Ireland to fight in the Troubles, but whatever happened there turned him into a lost soul. A deeply troubled lost soul. Rory didn’t deserve that. Georgie didn’t deserve to have her son destroyed that way.
I couldn’t stop what happened to him, but I want you to find out what did happen and use my money to fix whatever needs fixing. Because guilt is what cripples most good men, I believe Rory committed some unthinkable crime he couldn’t come back from. I want you to right his wrong, so his spirit can be at peace, in much the way Georgie’s soul is at peace, now you’ve found out what happened to her.
I wish Rory had lived long enough to discover his mother’s fate, and to have his wrongs righted. Even if only in a financial way. As I record this, I know he died not long before me. Such a pity. Such a terrible waste of a life.
This Mystery means even more to me than the last. I could have helped him before it was too late. When he was a teen, angry with the world and everyone in it. I could have helped. But I was too caught up in the heady business of being the beautiful actress wife of a famous director. My selfishness knew no bounds back then.
(Sadness showed on her face and a tear trickled down one pallid cheek. After
