I could not go to bed. No matter what Jack had said, Rhiannon was still missing, and I couldn’t just forget that fact. What I should do—what I needed to do, in fact—was write an email to Sandra. A proper one, explaining everything that had happened.
But there was something else I had to do first.
For the more I thought about it, the more Jack’s behavior did not add up. It wasn’t just the poison garden—it was everything. The way he was always hanging around when things went wrong. The fact that he seemed to have keys to every room in the house and access to parts of the home-management system that he shouldn’t. How had he known how to override the app that night when the music came screaming out of the speakers? How had he just happened to have a key to the locked attic door?
And whatever he said, he was, after all, a Grant. What if there was some connection I was missing? Could he be some long-lost relative of Dr. Kenwick Grant, come back to drive the Elincourts out from his ancestral home?
But no—that last what-if was too much. This wasn’t some nineteenth-century peasant’s revenge drama. What would Jack gain from driving the Elincourts out of their own home? Nothing. All he’d get would be another English couple in their place. And besides, it wasn’t the Elincourts who seemed to be targeted. It was me.
Because the fact was that four nannies—five if you counted Holly—had left the Elincourts. No, not left; they had been systematically driven away, one by one. And I might have believed that Bill’s roving hands were responsible, if it hadn’t been for my own experiences in Heatherbrae House. Someone in this house, someone or something, was driving the nannies away, in a deliberate and sustained campaign of persecution.
I just didn’t know who.
Somewhere behind my eyes, a dull throbbing ache had begun, echoing the pain in my hand—the light-headedness from the wine I’d drunk earlier was already morphing into the beginnings of a shocking hangover. But I couldn’t give way to that now. Slowly, unsteadily, I slid from the breakfast barstool, walked over to the sink, and splashed my face, trying to wake myself up, clear my head for what I was about to do.
But as I stood, water dripping from my loose hair, hands braced either side of the sink, I saw something. Something that had not been there when I left, I was sure of it—or at least, as sure as I could be, for now nothing seemed certain anymore.
To the right of the sink was my almost-empty wine bottle. Only now it was totally empty. What should have had a glass left in it was now completely drained. And in the groove around the edge of the waste-disposal unit was a single crushed berry.
It could have been the remnants of a blueberry or a raspberry, mashed out of all recognition, but somehow, I knew it was not.
My heart was thumping as I reached, very slowly, into the waste-disposal unit.
Deep, deep into the metal mouth I reached, until my fingers touched something at the bottom. Something soft and hard by turns, into which my fingers sank as I clawed up the mass.
It was a mush of berries. Yew. Holly. Cherry laurel.
And in spite of the water I’d sluiced down the drain, I could smell, quite clearly, the dregs of wine still clinging to them.
It didn’t make sense. None of it made sense. Those berries had not been in the wine when I left—how could they have been? I had opened the bottle myself.
Which meant someone had put them in there when I was not looking. Someone who had been in this kitchen tonight, after the children were in bed.
But then . . . but then someone else had tipped them out.
It was like there were two forces in the house, one fighting to drive me away, another to protect me. But who—who was doing this?
I didn’t know. But if there were answers to be found, I knew where I had to look.
My chest was tight as I straightened up, and I groped in my jeans pocket for my inhaler and took a puff, but the tension didn’t loosen, and I found my breath was coming quick and shallow as I made my way to the stairs, and began to climb into the darkness.
* * *
As I got closer and closer to the top landing, I couldn’t help remembering the last