endured after a broken engagement. I feel pity and outrage, too, at the thought of a young woman forced to marry a man who didn’t love her, didn’t want her, and could say nothing more than that he’d hoped she’d find satisfaction as a mother because he couldn’t provide it as a husband.
Eliza is no longer the young woman I’ll see in this photo. She’ll be middle-aged, like me, married and likely a mother. Yet I still brace for envy, knowing I’ll compare myself to this fresh-faced girl and see every deepening line in my own face the next time I look in the mirror. But that’s my problem, and I still want to see her. I want to see him even more—my William at twenty-three, midway between the boy I knew and the man sleeping across the room.
I reach for my phone to take a photograph of this picture, the substitute for a memory I missed. I turn the frame over, and my gaze shoots to the top. As in the photo of August and Cordelia, William stands slightly behind a chair. His face is rigid and unreadable. Resolute. He may not be thrilled with the marriage to come, but he wants to please his mother, and his lack of enthusiasm for the match has nothing to do with his intended bride.
I touch the line of his jaw, and the curl of his hair, and I smile. It’s William exactly as I’d have imagined him at this age, hardening into the man he’d become, but still clinging to the softer boy I remember.
As my gaze slides to Eliza, I struggle to keep that smile in place even as my insides twist. Then I see her face, and a fist hits me square in the gut, air knocked out of me as I jerk back.
It’s the woman from the moors.
The woman who died in the moors.
Not Rosalind Courtenay. Eliza Stanbury. William’s fiancé.
I wander blindly back to William’s old room, Enigma at my heels, and then, somehow, I’m on my own bedroom floor, still clutching the photograph, as if by looking at it long enough, I’ll realize my mistake.
I must be wrong. The woman in the moors has to be Rosalind. It fits.
No, I can make it fit. Use the shaky testimony of three drunken youths to tie Rosalind to Thorne Manor and the moors, so she becomes the woman I saw, when it makes far more logical sense that she died with her horse, plunging off the cliff.
The most basic description of Rosalind matches the woman in the moors—light haired and slight of build. But Eliza Stanbury is also light haired and slender.
Then there is her face.
I’ve never seen a clear image of the moors woman’s face, but I’ve seen enough to leave an impression in my mind. That’s why I wanted a photograph of Rosalind. Now, it’s a photo that confirms instead that the woman in the moors is Eliza Stanbury.
I struggle to remember William’s exact words about his fiancé. I can’t because there weren’t any. He only said that no marriage came of the engagement. I’d seen pain in his eyes, and I hadn’t prodded.
She’s dead, William. How did you fail to mention that?
Excuses bubble up, frantic excuses to explain away his omission.
Weak excuses, every last one of them.
He didn’t just “not get around” to telling me his fiancé died in the moors. He deliberately omitted that information when it should have naturally arisen.
He murdered his own bride on their wedding night. They say you can still see the blood at night when the moon hits it.
I balk at the memory of the day laborer’s words, yet cradled in this twisted legend is a grain of truth.
William’s fiancé died, and people thought he did it. When he first told the story of his scandal, I’d been outraged. How could such a ridiculous story arise when there was clear proof to the contrary?
Every story begins with a grain of truth.
That scandal wouldn’t have begun unless there was one crime against which he had no clear defense. Not that he killed Eliza, of course. Harold Shaw did. But that’s where the story started—the mysterious disappearance of William Thorne’s bride-to-be. Then other disappearances piled on later, sticking to him because they suggested a pattern that made the story so much more delicious. Not merely the killer of his bride-to-be, but the killer of three additional women who’d been part of his life.
Yet one fact remains. William deliberately omitted Eliza from his