Page 57 of An Unwilling Earl
“I think it might be my cousin.”
Jacob’s mind was running slow because it took him a moment to recall who her cousin was. At first he thought she meant Chadley, but that wasn’t right because he was her uncle.
“Lord Morris?”
She nodded. She was wringing her hands, and she looked distressed and frightened, and she kept glancing at the door as if she still wanted to run.
“Why do you think it is him?”
“Can we sit down?”
“Why don’t we go upstairs to the study where it’s more comfortable.” He wanted to shake the answers out of her before she lost her nerve, but he also knew pushing her wouldn’t help the situation.
He followed her up the steps and could see her hand shaking as she grasped the handrail. They settled onto the couch, and he poured them both a glass of brandy, thinking she needed the fortification as much as he did.
She took the glass but held it between her hands, her knuckles white, her face even whiter.
Jacob waited impatiently, trying not to show it.
“He’s an odd person, Edmund. Mainly silent. When he does speak, my aunt chastises him. It doesn’t matter what he says, even if he agrees with her, she finds something wrong either with what he’s saying or the tone of his voice. In the beginning, I tried to be friends with him. I thought that if we were a solid front against my aunt it would help. But he shied away from any overtures of friendship.”
“Considering his mother berated him so much, it’s not a wonder.”
“I feel bad for him. How horrible does that sound? Five women dead, and I think he might have killed them, and I feel bad for him. It’s almost as if his mother made him into the monster he’s become. If itishim murdering those poor girls.”
“There are many children mistreated by their parents, but they don’t grow up to kill.”
She turned her glass around in her hands. “One day, not long after I had moved in, I found Edmund in my room. I had brought a doll with me that had been my mother’s. It was the only thing left of her that I owned. Everything else had been lost or taken by my aunt. But for some reason, she’d let me keep the doll. Edmund had just been yelled at by his mother. I can’t even remember what it was about. I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible during those moments for fear she would turn her wrath on me. I think I had gone into the garden. I could hear her yelling through the closed doors and windows. A little while later I snuck up to my room in the hopes of avoiding my aunt, and Edmund was there. He had these long…” She swallowed, and her fingers clutched the glass until her knuckles were white.
“He was holding long scissors, and he was just standing in the middle of the room. I said his name, and he looked at me, but it was like he wasn’t seeing me. His eyes were blank. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
She paused to consider her thoughts or to gather more courage.
“I looked down at the floor and there…th-there was my doll, my mother’s doll. Her head had been ripped off, and he’d taken the scissors and stabbed it over and over and over…” A tear dripped down her cheek, and Jacob pulled out his handkerchief and handed it to her.
Inside he was cold.Stabbed it over and over and over.He recalled his conversation with Armbruster, who had said all of the victims by the river had been stabbed repeatedly.
“I screamed,” she whispered. “I think more because I was so surprised. And…” She swallowed and closed her eyes, squeezing more tears out. His handkerchief was bunched in her hand, forgotten.
“Those glass eyes… They were staring at me. Accusing me, likeIhad let this happen. I gathered her head and her b-body and my aunt came running in and she saw what had happened and I think it was the first and only time I’ve seen her speechless. She just stared down at me and my doll with her mouth open and then she looked at Edmund and I remember…I remember her saying softly, ‘What have you done?’”
Jacob felt like he was sitting on the edge of his seat, waiting for the next act. She was pulling so many emotions from him—anger, fear, sadness.
Stabbed. They had all been stabbed. The doll. The women.
Good God. Is Edmund the killer?
“And then what happened,” he finally asked.
Charlotte stood and put her still-full glass down on a side table before moving about the room. She touched the petal of a flower in a vase but didn’t seem to see it.
“Nothing.”
Jacob paused. “Nothing? Nothing happened?”
“Aunt Martha took the doll from me and led Edmund out of the room. It was like he was a wooden toy, in a trance. He went where she prodded him.”
“And nothing was said about it after that?”
