Page 37 of The Missing Page
Leo said that he’d love a drink and sat where Carrow pointed him, a wooden chair at the kitchen table. “Happily, I’m not in the running. James—Dr. Sommers—is, though, and he’s an old friend of mine. I can promise you he doesn’t want to win the treasure hunt, as you put it, so much as to find out what happened to his cousin. He was here when she disappeared.”
Carrow opened the bottles of beer, his back to Leo. “He must have been a child.”
“Yes. And I gather he was fond of Miss Bellamy, and that she was kind to him at a time when he had precious little of that in his life.”
Carrow turned to the table and slid a beer across to Leo before taking a seat. This was the first time Leo had seen the man without a cap. The only light in the kitchen came from a lamp on the dresser, but Leo gauged that he was about forty or so, with a mop of dark hair that didn’t yet have much in the way of gray. He was old enough to have been an adult in 1927. He could have been the chauffeur, Leo supposed, although it was hard to discern the remnants of movie-star good looks in Carrow’s weather-beaten face. He might have been one of the other servants, though.
“And you want to help him out,” Carrow said.
Leo nearly delivered his line about James having stitched him up, but instead simply said “Yes.”
Carrow nodded, and Leo had the sense he was coming to a decision. Not wanting to put too much pressure on the other man, Leo looked around the lodge.
On the ground floor was a kitchen and sitting room. Off to the side was a door leading to what had to be Mrs. Carrow’s studio. Upstairs probably held at least one bedroom. It was a spacious home for a couple, filled with what Leo could only call nice things—vases of dried flowers, some good old furniture, a collection of dishes in a china cabinet. Between the electric fire and the warmth from whatever was baking in the oven, Leo felt warm enough to loosen his muffler.
Leo could see why the Carrows put up with being in the strange space between servant and tenant. “It’s a lovely home,” Leo said to Carrow.
“Ah, well. That’s all Miriam.”
“What’s that about me?” asked Mrs. Carrow, emerging from the back room in a paint-spattered smock.
“Only that you made the lodge livable.”
Leo stood and greeted Mrs. Carrow, who waved him back to his seat. “It was livable before we moved in,” she protested.
“Sure, for spiders, maybe.”
Leo had the sense that this was a well-worn conversation, and that Carrow often complimented his wife and she often deflected, and that they both did it with love. They looked directly at one another, as if they were alone in the room, alone in the world, with the only person who mattered.
It made something ache in Leo’s heart, made him long for something he preferred not to even think about. It made him wonder what it would be like to belong to a person, to belong to a place and a home the way these two belonged to one another, the way they so obviously belonged here.
And he knew that if he told any of this to James, he wouldn’t understand why it wasn’t possible. Hell, he’d probably think they were well on course to having it themselves. But Leo knew better. It was impossible, and not because they were both men. Well, partly because of that—if anyone caught them looking at one another the way the Carrows were looking at one another presently, they’d wind up publicly shamed at best. But the real reason Leo couldn’t ever have anything like this was that he was all wrong for it. Long ago, he’d cast his lot in with knives and shadows and other things that were sharp and dark and cold. In this warm little home, he was an intruder.
He thought of James’s house, which was warm and lovely in its own right, and cursed the entire Bellamy family, living and dead, for keeping James and him miles away from it. But even there, Leo was an intruder. Just because he had been invited in—welcomed, even—didn’t mean he belonged there. You could invite a snake into your home and that didn’t mean it was a good idea.
Not that Leo had any intention of leaving. He was too selfish for that. He wasn’t nearly noble enough to walk away.
“Mr. Page is here to talk about Rose Bellamy,” Carrow said.
The couple exchanged a look that Leo couldn’t decipher.
“I wouldn’t object to talking about Miss Bellamy,” Leo clarified, “if you have anything to say. But I’m really here to ask about Gladys Button.”
There was the tiniest hesitation before Carrow spoke. “Gladys Button?”
“A former maid at Blackthorn. Does the name ring any bells?”
“Can’t say that it does.”
“Ah, well. It was worth a try. Do you know anything about Madame Fournier? James saw you speaking to her this morning and I wondered if she said anything interesting to you.”
“I did speak with the Frenchwoman. And a lot of nonsense she had to say too, she did, all about how she knew me straight away and it wasn’t any use hiding from her.”
“What do you think she meant by that?”
“Maybe she did know me—I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t remember every girl I met in my life, begging your pardon, Miriam.”
“Who did she think you were?” Leo asked.
