The Villa of Death: A Mystery Featuring Daphne du Maurier (Daphne du Maurier Mysteries) (32 page)

“The attacks … in the woods and the chocolates…”

“We suspected but we didn’t know. Now we know for sure because a woman got it out of him.”

I stared at him. “Rosalie? She turned him in?”

“Precisely. It seems the little time she spent with her sister encouraged her to make a stand. Major Browning and Sergeant Heath will bring her back here.”

I stood up. “I must warn Ellen … I must prepare her. Rosalie is not the person she is made out to be.”

“No, she isn’t. I have spoken to her on the telephone myself. She says she knew little of the truth. I have enlarged it for her.”

“It doesn’t explain who killed her mother.”

The inspector sighed. “We shall never know that one, I fear. The city is too busy to bother about the case. She shall go down as unsolved.” He paused, and looked at me. “Something bothers you, Miss du Maurier?”

“I don’t like unsolved.”

“Yet in life sometimes one doesn’t know if one is good or wicked. You say you like to write books. Why not write one where we do not know if the character is good or wicked. Make the character itself unsolved. An interesting concept, don’t you think?”

It was a great concept. Leaving him, I went to jot it down in my journal. I wrote:
A widow. A rich widow. Husband died mysteriously. Is she good or is she bad? Is she innocent or is she guilty?
Beside this, I added a name.
Ellen…, no, Rachel. Yes, Rachel.

*   *   *

I convinced Ellen to come down to dinner.

Inspector James sat with us, only after posting another sergeant in Harry’s office. “I wish to make it as inviting as possible for Mr. Mainton to enter the house, so we have two men on the grounds and two inside the house. Ladies, please retire to your chambers and lock the door.”

“Why is Uncle Harry bad?” Charlotte asked her mother. “He’s always nice to me. We were going to the seashore. He said you were meeting us there, Mummy.”

Exchanging a glance with each of us, Ellen sighed. “Sometimes, darling, a person’s mind becomes sick. Harry got sick.”

Frowning, Charlotte considered this answer. “Can we give him some medicine to make him better, Mummy?”

“We can. That’s why Inspector James is here. He’ll take Harry away and make him better.”

“Oh.” Charlotte bestowed a beguiling smile at the inspector before returning to her mother. “But maybe Uncle Harry doesn’t want to take his medicine and that’s why he’s run away?”

“But darling, you know what happens if you don’t take your medicine. It’s important Harry takes his.”

“If he hates taking medicine like I do, he’ll come in through the secret place.”

Dropping her spoon, Ellen stared at her child. “What secret place?”

Charlotte looked away. “It’s our secret, Mummy. Mine and Uncle Harry’s.”

Swooping to the knees, Ellen began her appeal. “Darling, you need to take me to that place. Me and Inspector James. It’s really important we help Harry while we can. Where is it?”

Charlotte still wasn’t sure.

“You think you’re breaking a promise with me by telling us but you’re not, darling. Where is this secret place?”

“I’ll show you,” she said at last.

Filing outside the dining room, a strange calm descended on the house. While Inspector James, Ellen, and Charlotte headed down the eastern corridor, an instinct drew me west.

The dull lights guided my footsteps. It was around the dinner hour so I imagined the servants to be at their table after serving the mistress. Not wanting to leave Charlotte’s side, Alicia went along with the others and I wondered if I should have done so, too.

The uncanny quiet grew with the thickness of the summer air. It was a beautiful evening: still, warm, the only sound being my shoes on the old wooden floor. Allowing the floor to lead me, I walked on, removing my cardigan in the heat.

The west wing loomed ahead. Funny, I had always thought it the coldest part of the house. Passing the knight standing guard to the entrance, I opened the door to the ancient hall and gasped.

Fire … fire everywhere.

I tried to pull back but it was too late. Flames lashed out at me, surrounding me as they continued their merciless destruction of the library. Standing in the midst of this destruction, an acute sadness touched my bones watching the flames lick over all those glorious books. Irreplaceable books … now swept away by an infernal heat.

Heat scorching my shoes, I jumped from stone to stone. The carpet and chairs were on fire, and crackling timber began to dislodge and fall from the walls. Dodging one, I said a quick prayer.
Oh, please, please, someone, please save me …

I hid my face with my cardigan. I couldn’t breathe. There was no air. I felt faint and weak. I longed for and dreamed of water. Water, lots of water. The fire raged on, lashing out at me. I tried to get out of the room but I couldn’t find the door. Where was the door?

In desperation, I ran to the other side to hear the splintering windows. Glass shattered all about, an incredible piercing noise, and I shut my ears. I couldn’t bear to hear it.

“Daphne!”

Someone threw something wet over my head.

“Daphne, I’m here now but you’re going to have to jump.”

The major. I could have wept with relief. “Jump?” I echoed, not daring to look.

“Don’t look down. I won’t let go.”

The authority in his voice transcended into an order. We didn’t have time. He said to jump now. Trusting him completely, I wrapped myself in his coat, shut my eyes, and jumped.

Drawn out on the grass, his coat sizzling around me, I stared up at the house. “Oh no…”

Tearing the coat off me, he examined my hair, my face, my hands, my feet, indeed, every part of me. Submitting to his thorough ministrations and reading the terror in his eyes, I smiled. “You came for me…”

His face was black from the smoke. “Of course I came for you. You don’t know how scared I was … driving down the hill and rounding the bend to see the orange glow in the sky. I thought, ‘That’s not a holocaust. That’s Thornleigh!’”

“It was,” I said miserably, witnessing the fire spread from one end of the house to the other. “Harry…”

“He’s dead. I saw his body … or what was left of it.”

I shuddered. If he couldn’t have Thornleigh, then nobody else was going to have her. “The others…?”

“Are safe. Come, my angel, this is the most expensive fire you’ll ever see.”

He took me away to a clearing near the woods but I dared not watch. I looked upon the great mansion as a person and I couldn’t bear to see her suffer. Generations of history, lost. Valuables beyond price, destroyed. And home, Ellen’s home, taken from her in one night.

Thornleigh, lost forever.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

“She’s destined to become a ghost. They shall come to visit her ruins…”

A week later, sitting on the balcony overlooking the river in our house at Fowey, Ellen found the strength to accept the tragedy. “I don’t have the money to repair her. She’ll have to sit there, a desolate ruin, uninhabited.”

“I’m so sorry,” Rosalie murmured, now united with Ellen and Charlotte in their grief. Having put the past aside, Rosalie had agreed to come with us to Ferryside.

“Nothing was saved.” Ellen wiped a tear away. “Nothing.”

“You have memories,” my father reminded.

“And photographs,” Charlotte pointed out. “We have photographs of Thornleigh, Mummy. We even have postcards.”

We all shared a smile at that.

“Postcards,” Ellen echoed. “I don’t know what to do now. Thornleigh has always been my life—”

“No, Charlotte is your life,” my mother said. “And now you have your stepdaughter. You have all suffered a loss. Perhaps you can rebuild something together?”

“Oh, yes, Mummy, can we go to America? Rosalie says Grandmama’s house there is as big as Thornleigh.”

“It’s not as old,” Rosalie put in, “but it has some history and Daddy grew up there.”

“Oh, can we go, Mummy?
Please.”

Gazing down at her exuberant pleading face, Ellen smiled. “Maybe.”

“It’s the best idea in the circumstances, Ellen dear,” my father advised. “Get away from all this nonsense. When you’re ready, come back. Fresh sea air is what you all need. And you’ve got a good guide in Rosalie. She knows the town and the people.”

“And the relatives.” Rosalie rolled her eyes. “I’m afraid we can’t escape all of them, can we, Alicia?”

I looked at the two cousins. They’d formed an uneasy truce after the fire. Rosalie had changed since her time in England. Her mother’s death opened the way for her to make her own choices and putting cousin Jack, no longer Lucky Jack, in prison further freed her.

*   *   *

“So we are to America
after
the ball,” Alicia said later upon asking to see my room. Glancing out of the window, she added, “It’s a nice view. Shall you write your book from here?”

“Yes. Well, I hope to. I have so many ideas running through my head, I don’t know which book to write first!”

“You should catalogue them. Each story has its own notepad. When you get an idea, write it down but concentrate on one story at a time.”

I watched her as she stood there by the window. She was young, yet she appeared ancient. “Alicia, did you ever think it would end this way?”

“End what way?”

“With Ellen and Rosalie and Charlotte. There were so many odds against them.”

Still staring down at the river, a whisper of a smile touched her lips. “It was Uncle Teddy’s wish to have it so.”

“It seems like a miracle.”

She shrugged, and turned aside, saying, “Perhaps not” as she walked out of the room. Suddenly I had my answer. She had killed Cynthia Grimshaw. She was the female voice heard by Emmy the maid at Claridge’s.

Chilled, I recalled her lack of surprise when we read about the murder in the paper. Ellen had had Charlotte that afternoon … Alicia was free. What had been her original intention? To reason with a woman—her aunt—who barely noticed her?

I did know one thing. Characters like Alicia Brickley, intensely private, never publicized their reasons. Whatever had happened that afternoon left Rosalie free to follow her own destiny.

Alicia Brickley, a murderess.

But a murderess for the greater good?

*   *   *

“Keeping information, Miss du Maurier, is a serious offense.”

“I wouldn’t call it information exactly, Inspector James. Let’s say a logical deduction.”

“Yes, but you got the maid Olivia to talk. My sergeant failed to do so.”

“She was frightened and I am less formidable than a police officer.”

He laughed on the other end of the telephone. “Good-bye, Miss du Maurier. I hope our paths don’t meet again.”

“I hope they do. Good day, Inspector.”

I sensed the major’s proximity before he reached me. Smiling when his hand settled on my waist, I surrendered the telephone. “Jack Grimshaw will be in prison for a while … but that still leaves the mystery of what happened to Teddy Grimshaw.”

Caressing my temple, he groaned. “Does your mind never rest?”

“Not when there’s questions. Don’t you wonder, too?”

“Time, my dear girl, has a way of solving mysteries. Leave it alone. I don’t want your mother—or mine for that matter—arranging our engagement and wedding.”

“Wedding,” I murmured, slipping my hands around his neck. “That’s a pleasant business, one I could—”

He stopped my mouth with a kiss. The first of many, and for once, my mind was put to rest.

EPILOGUE

I received a letter the next year, postmarked from America.

My dear Daphne,

Thank you for your engagement invitation. Unfortunately, we are not returning to England just yet. Charlotte and I have adapted very well to the climate on this side of the world. Teddy’s mother has welcomed us with both arms and we make a curious little family—Charlotte, Rosalie, Alicia, and I. I am determined to see the girls married off, so maybe we will be back next season.

But as you know, there are unpleasant memories at home. Daily I think of Teddy, and today, my dear Daphne, I have word. Teddy wrote me before he died and left the letter in the care of his solicitors. He instructed them to release it a year after his death.

My dear Daphne, he had cancer. He found out two weeks before our wedding. “I can’t allow you, my dearest darling,” he wrote, “to suffer the indignity of caring for an old man or for my mistakes. I love you, Teddy.” By mistakes he means that if he had lived, he would have lost his fortune. He took his own life, Daphne. And Alicia knew about it. She’s told me everything now. How her uncle charged her to say nothing until a year after his death and how she purchased the hemlock for him to take on the day of our wedding.

We’re keeping the secret. There is no sense to release this news but I thought you’d like to know …

Your friend always,

Ellen

P.S. I dream of Thornleigh every night. I dream of driving through the gates, up the narrow winding path to our home. I can’t forget her. Daphne, please resurrect her in one of your books. Perhaps through those pages she will live on.

Sealing the letter and burning it as instructed, I picked up the picture postcard of Thornleigh sitting on my desk. An intense longing for the old house caused an ache deep within my heart. What a shame she did not survive the fire.

Let her live on through pages.

Taking out a fresh sheet, I drew a sketch of Thornleigh and renamed her.

Manderley.

Also by Joanna Challis

Peril at Somner House

Murder on the Cliffs

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE VILLA OF DEATH
. Copyright © 2011 by Joanna Challis. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.