“I need to talk to Ellie, and then we need to talk to Mum.” That much I knew, even if what would happen next was a mystery.
“Why Ellie first?” Edward asked, curiously, as I opened the file to return the letters. I frowned; there was something else in there. Another clipping. I pulled it out, my body shielding it from Edward’s view. Was this another wedding photo? Or something else?
“Because she’s my big sister. That’s who you go to when family stuff turns crazy.” I turned the clipping over and took in the headline. There was no photo this time, only the stark black text on yellowing paper. Murder investigation at Rosewood. Then underneath, in smaller text, Matthew Robertson, 25, was found dead after a party at the home of author Nathaniel Drury and his wife Isabelle.
This was it. This was exactly what I’d wanted – and been afraid – to find. Suddenly, Nathaniel’s last story – about the death at the first party at Rosewood – came flooding back. Was this what he’d been talking about? A murder investigation? And if so, who was the murderer?
Perhaps Mum’s secrets were only the beginning, the prologue in a long list of truths I needed to uncover. And now I knew I absolutely had to find out what happened – before I told Edward. If I told Edward.
Edward moved closer, and I slipped the newspaper clipping into my pocket.
“Even now?” he asked, and I struggled for a moment to remember what I’d been saying. Ellie. Mum. The man who might be Ellie’s father. That was what I needed to deal with first.
“Especially now. Give me the key?”
He reached into his pocket and handed me the heavy brass key. “Let me know how it goes?”
“Of course,” I replied. “Wish me luck.”
With a half smile, he reached out and brushed the hair away from my face. “Good luck.”
Of course, it wasn’t as simple as just presenting the evidence to Ellie and asking her advice. I mean, it should have been. But the last proper conversation we had involved her telling me to run away to Perth – and me following her instructions. Could we just put that aside and deal with the crisis at hand? I wasn’t sure.
“El?” I found her in the kitchen, chopping nuts. “Stress baking?” Ellie might be most like my mother in many ways, but in others she definitely takes after Dad. Baking was one of those. Was cooking ability genetic or learned? Maybe, if we found out who Ellie’s father really was, we’d have a better idea.
She didn’t look at me as she replied. “Isabelle threw out what was left of the Golden Wedding cake. So I’m making coffee and walnut cake to keep us going.” Which, I had to admit, did sound delicious.
I waited until Ellie had put the knife down and had turned her attention to blunter instruments – in this case a wooden spoon and a mixing bowl full of butter and sugar – before I spoke again.
“Look, I know we probably need to talk about a lot of stuff,” I began.
Ellie sighed into her cake mix. “Saskia, really, do we have to? The funeral’s over; you’ll be heading back to Perth soon. Can’t we just leave it?”
Always Ellie’s preferred plan of action – ignore a problem until it went away. I might run, but she hid – and I wasn’t sure that was any better.
Besides, this problem really wasn’t going away.
“What if I decided to stay?” I asked. “At Rosewood, I mean. To finish the memoirs with Edward.”
The wooden spoon stopped moving, but still Ellie didn’t turn. “Are you going to?”
“It depends.”
“On what?”
How to start… The best plan, I’d decided, was to start small. Build up to the shock and the horror. “Ellie, did Mum ever talk to you about anyone she dated before she met Dad?”
“Not that I can remember.” Ellie turned at last and looked up at me. “Is this about Duncan? Or about…”
“Neither,” I said, hurriedly, before she could say the name that would take this from a conversation between sisters to a conversation between bitter enemies. “It’s about Mum.”
Ellie tipped the walnuts into the bowl and mixed them in. “Mum’s fine.” The tone under the words suggested, ‘and I should know, because I’ve been here while you’ve been off gallivanting in Scotland.’ Which wasn’t really very fair, since I’d only left to save Ellie’s sanity. And everyone else’s.
“I know she is. It’s not that. It’s just…” I took a deep breath. “Edward and I have been going through Nathaniel’s files, to help decide whether or not to go ahead with the memoirs.” Ellie muttered something into her mixing bowl that sounded suspiciously like ‘bet that’s not all you’ve been doing’ but I charitably ignored it. “We found something this morning, about Mum. And I wanted to talk to you about it before I spoke to her. Or, preferably, we both spoke to her. Together.”
I had all her attention now, I could tell. Perfectly calm, Ellie tipped the cake mixture into the pre-lined tin and pushed it into the oven, before setting the timer. Then, she washed her hands, dried them on her apron, and took a seat beside me at the table. “Show me.”
I waited silently as she read through the letters, watching as every emotion I’d felt passed over her face. In this, at least, we were still sisters, still as one.
“How could we not know this?” Ellie placed the last letter on the pile and looked up at me, her eyes wide with confusion. “I mean…this man could be my real father. I could be…”
“You’re my sister,” I said, fast, before she finished the thought. “That’s all that matters. And this man, Mum’s husband – God, that sounds strange – he’s out of our lives. Hell, he was never even in them. He shouldn’t matter any more. Not after what he did.”
“No,” Ellie said firmly. “He shouldn’t.”
Then she met my gaze, and I knew
exactly what she was thinking. Not all sins deserve forgiveness.
I looked away.
“We need to talk to her,” Ellie said, after a moment.
I nodded. “I know. That’s why I brought these to you first. I think we need to, I don’t know, present a united front? Show her that we just want to know the truth; we’re not judging.”
“I agree.” She paused, then went on, “But, Saskia, you have to realise…she might not want this in the memoirs. She might not want to talk to you about it.”
Not to me. Because I was something less than family now, wasn’t I? I was the enemy – and for once, not because of my own actions, but because of Nathaniel’s.
The idea cut through me, but I knew she was right. This had to be what Mum was afraid of, about the memoirs. I needed to show her she didn’t need to worry.
“I’ll explain. They’re Nathaniel’s memoirs, not hers. We can leave this out.”
“How will Edward feel about that?” Ellie asked, in the sort of voice that told me she already knew the answer.
“It doesn’t matter. They can’t go ahead without my say-so.” And given everything else I’d found out about the history of my family at Rosewood, I wasn’t completely sure I’d be willing to give my approval anyway.
“Okay.” Ellie gazed steadily at me, so long I started to feel awkward.
“What?”
“This… Mum, the memoirs, Nathaniel’s death, all of it… It’s bigger than what’s between you and me,” she said, eventually, and I couldn’t help it. I started to hope.
“It is.”
“I’m not saying I can forget what you did,” she cautioned.
“Or forgive,” I guessed. “I get that. But perhaps…perhaps we could come to an agreement?” It would be a start. And a million times better than the nothing I’d had so far.
Ellie gave a sharp nod. “An agreement. We avoid the subject of the past, and everything that happened. At least until everything else is decided.”
“So we just…pretend it didn’t happen?”
“No. I can’t do that,” Ellie said. “But I can just about handle you being here, I think, as long as we don’t talk about it. And I mean it, Kia. Not a mention, not a reminder, not a throwaway comment, nothing. We live as if it never happened. And only until we get things here sorted out.”