Page 56 of The Secret of the Three Fates
His voice cracked. “I told her I was tired, that she should go and I’d come fetch her in the morning and we could discuss whatever it was she wanted to then.” His brows raised at the memory.“I daresay she didn’t like that. She flew into a rage like I’d never seen her.”
“And then what?”
His expression flickered and he shook his head. “The next morning she was gone.” He snapped his fingers. “As if she’d never existed at all. There was blood on the bridge. At first—” His voice broke as he swallowed down a sob. “At first we thought she’d been set upon by—”
I laid my hand over his own, stomach knotted. “And they never found her body, did they?”
“Never. Malachi dredged the lake, but there was nothing there. For a while I held on to hope that she had left me—it would have served me right for failing her as I did. She asked one single thing, and I did not listen. I searched for years before finally giving up. People… people began to whisper that I’d killed her. My reputation being as it was—” He gave me a queer look. “I assume Andrew informed you about all that.”
I gave him a slight nod. “He might have mentioned it.”
“They concocted all sorts of fantastical tales of the wicked things I’d done. One more lurid than the last. The morning she left I tore the house apart looking for her. Went to her rooms and they were perfectly ordered. All the things precisely where she’d left them, and that was when I noticed that sometime in the night she must have slipped her ring on my finger. It was there, on my left hand.”
My mouth snapped shut. “The ring you had Ruan bring back?”
“She never took it off. She had to have wanted me to have it. I thought at the time it was a token of her love, a promise she would return, but what if it was not? What if there was a message in it, one I failed to heed?”
I rested my hand atop his on the table and he covered mine with his other.
“Now enough of that. Tell me how the lad is. I hear he wasshot too,” Mr. Owen said, shutting the door on that conversation and locking it tight.
Ruan.
My face must have betrayed me, as he gave my hand yet another squeeze. “He’ll mend. Don’t worry on that. It’s keepingyousafe that matters to me. I’m an old man who has lived and loved more than one could ever dream.” He cleared his throat with a crooked smile. “Besides, they haven’t hung a peer since the fourth Earl Ferrers. You need not concern yourself formyneck. And now yours is perfectly safe too.”
I rolled my eyes. Only Mr. Owen would shun his title, then rely upon it when it suited him. Perhaps it was the fact that I’d been shot two days before, or the fact that I was not a proper detective, but suddenly Mr. Owen’s words took on a new meaning. What if Mariahhadleft him the ring as a message? What if she was trying to tell him something then, and again at the séance? My blood chilled in my veins.
“Mr. Owen… the spirit said she left you the key… could the ring be the key her spirit mentioned?” I whispered half to myself.
He stared at me, open-mouthed. “What sort of medicine is Andy giving you? A ring is not a key, lass. It is a ring.”
I held up a finger, reaching into the pocket of my borrowed coat and withdrew the negatives I’d stolen. “I found these in Lucy’s room after she was killed. I’m fairly certain that the killer was also looking for them. I can’t help but think that these images… they somehow hold the answer to why Lucy was murdered.”
Mr. Owen leaned forward, looking at the negatives I’d spread on the table before him.
“Do they mean anything to you?”
Mr. Owen’s mouth curved into a slight O as he studied the photographs. A thousand memories flickered across his face as he went from one to the next.
“You know what they are, don’t you?”
He tilted his head toward the closed door behind me that led back to the public areas of the house. “Lock it, lass, if you would. It wouldn’t do for the servants to overhear what I’m about to say.”
I quickly turned the key in the lock and returned to my seat.
“I don’t know what to think.” He did not look up from the negatives in his fingers. “No wonder they shot you, lass. I suspect they’ll try again when they realize they didn’t manage the thing the first time.”
An unpleasant thought. “What is it, what is going on in them? Is this some sort of… ritual? Ruan and I couldn’t quite agree.”
“Of a sort, yes. I’d been to their gatherings a time or two with Mariah, but I didn’t approve of how they carried on.”
I blinked, not understanding, but his focus went unerringly back to the images between us.
“It’s Eurydice’s Fall.”
“Eurydice’s what?”
He waved his hand airily over the negatives. “Eurydice’s Fall. It was a gentlemen’s club.”
