Chapter 17
Brooklyn Sloane
Brook had been waiting in the dining room for the better part of forty-five minutes.
She’d come back downstairs after speaking with Gwenyth and found herself restless in a way that didn’t suit her.
What she wanted was to return to the greenhouse and search for an access point to whatever lay beneath it.
Check the foundation, flooring, and perimeter for any signs of a hatch, a stairwell, or a sealed entrance.
But Dale was on his way, and she wasn’t about to be caught searching the grounds when he arrived.
Their conversation needed to happen first.
So, she waited.
She ate the last of her blueberries. She reviewed the notes on her tablet from her previous conversations with Gwenyth.
And she kept one ear on the foyer. The afternoon light through the curtain gap had moved from the floor to the far wall and was now climbing toward the ceiling, marking the time in a way that somehow felt slower than the clock.
Bit was at the far end of the table, running through traffic camera footage and cross-referencing timestamps. He’d glanced at her twice in the last ten minutes, which meant he could sense she was wound tight and was choosing not to comment on it.
The front door slammed hard enough to rattle the foyer windows.
Brook was on her feet before Dale appeared in the dining room doorway. His silhouette filled the frame, backlit by the foyer sconce, and even before he spoke, the energy he brought into the house was enough to change the air pressure in the room.
“I’d like to know why you thought it was your right to tell my niece about Porter.”
Dale’s face was flushed, his jaw tight, and the careful composure he’d worn during their previous interactions had been replaced by something rawer. He was angry, and he wasn’t interested in concealing it.
“Gwenyth is an adult, Mr. Ellingham.” Brook had thought long and hard about her decision to ignore his request. After her discussion with Gwenyth, Brook had sent a text to Dale, informing him that she’d already broken the news to his niece.
“She had a right to know, and she had a right to hear it from someone who could deliver the information without an agenda attached to it.”
“An agenda.” Dale’s mouth twisted around the word. “I am her family.”
“You are. And she is a grown woman who is capable of receiving difficult news on her own terms.”
“She is obviously sick. Not of sound mind, and the fact that you people have been treating her as though she’s a reliable witness in a federal investigation is irresponsible at best.” Dale straightened the cuffs of his shirt in a sharp, agitated motion.
“Tomorrow morning, first thing, I’m having my lawyer request an emergency hearing.
Gwenyth needs to be placed in a facility where professionals can care for her, not left alone in a crumbling mansion with strangers who have no understanding of her condition.
You can finish your investigation, but after that, I’d like you gone as soon as possible. ”
Dale strode toward the staircase, his intention to go upstairs evident in every step. Brook followed him into the foyer, her flats quiet against the hardwood floor where his shoes struck with enough force to send echoes off the stone walls.
But the decision was taken from both of them.
Gwenyth appeared around the base of the staircase from the direction of the kitchen.
She was holding a plate with both hands.
On it sat a sandwich, neatly assembled, cut diagonally.
The bread was fresh, the edges trimmed, and the effort behind it said more about her state of mind than any clinical assessment could have.
She stopped when she registered Dale standing in front of her, and something in her posture shifted into a stillness that Brook was beginning to recognize.
It wasn’t fear.
It wasn’t confusion.
It was an emotional wall going up behind eyes that were more present than Dale wanted to believe.
“I know about Porter,” Gwenyth said. Her voice was even. Controlled. “You can leave now, Dale.”
The use of his first name rather than “Uncle Dale” wasn’t lost on Brook.
“Gwenyth, you can’t stay here by yourself.
” Dale took a step toward her, his hands open at his sides in a gesture that was meant to convey concern but landed somewhere closer to exasperation.
“Porter is gone. There’s no one to look after you.
No one to keep this property running. You need to come with me, and we’ll get you somewhere safe. ”
“I’m not by myself.”
Gwenyth’s gaze shifted to Brook. It was brief, lasting no more than a second or two, but the message was unmistakable. Gwenyth had chosen a side, at least for the moment, and it wasn’t her uncle’s.
“They aren’t here for you, Gwenyth.” Dale shot Brook an expression that bordered on incredulous. “They’re here to find out who murdered those women. For all we know, it could have been your father.”
Brook observed Gwenyth for a reaction and found none.
“You didn’t believe that yesterday, Mr. Ellingham,” Brook called out, taking a step closer. “Yesterday, you were advocating for the guardianship and the land sale. You weren’t suggesting that Nestor was responsible for anything other than being an eccentric and reclusive researcher.”
“I don’t know what to think anymore. Every day there’s something new. Bodies in the greenhouse, and now Porter is dead. But what I do know is that Gwenyth needs more help than anyone in this house can give her.”
“Porter was kind,” Gwenyth said, as though Dale’s outburst had been a mild interruption to a thought she was already having. “But I can take care of myself.”
“You can’t even drive, Gwenyth.” Dale’s voice carried a frustrated edge that he wasn’t bothering to soften.
“You don’t have a license. You haven’t left this property in years.
How exactly do you plan to get groceries?
Pay the electric bill? Manage any of the basic things that Porter handled for you every single day? ”
Gwenyth opened her mouth to respond, but the front door swung open before her words escaped.
Cal Brennan stepped into the foyer.
Brook recognized him from his DMV photo.
He was in his early seventies, lean and wiry, with a full head of slightly windblown brown hair and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that sat crookedly on his nose.
He wore a flannel shirt over a white undershirt, khaki pants, and walking shoes that had seen hundreds of miles.
His face was angular, deeply lined, and carried an intelligence in the eyes that hadn’t dulled with age.
He took in the scene with the quick, practiced assessment of a man who had spent decades managing classrooms full of teenagers and could read a room in three seconds flat.
At first, Brook wondered how he’d gotten to the estate so quickly, but she brought herself up short.
Sheriff Gentry had mentioned he would contact Porter’s next of kin, but in a town this small, the sheriff would know exactly who else needed to hear the news.
Cal Brennan had been Nestor’s closest friend and one of the few people who had regularly checked on Gwenyth.
Gentry would have called him as a matter of course.
His expression hardened the moment he registered Dale.
“I should have known you’d be here,” Cal said, and the bitterness in his voice was immediate and undisguised. “Porter isn’t even cold, and you’re already working the angles.”
“This has nothing to do with you, Cal.”
“It has everything to do with me. I’ve been looking after Gwenyth since her father disappeared, which is more than you can say.
” Cal stepped further into the foyer, and whatever distance had existed between the two men collapsed into something confrontational.
They were nearly the same height, but Cal carried himself with a coiled tension that Dale’s broader frame didn’t match.
“You don’t give a damn about her. You never have.
You want the property, and she’s in your way. ”
“That is not true, and I won’t stand here and be accused by a man who has no legal standing in this family.”
“Legal standing.” Cal’s laugh was sharp and humorless. “Is that what this comes down to? Paperwork? I’ve been more family to Gwenyth in the last thirty years than you’ve been in her entire life.”
The two men were close enough now that Brook caught sight of the veins in Dale’s neck as they stood out against his collar.
Cal’s hands were at his sides, but his fingers were curled, and the rigidity in his posture suggested that he was holding himself back through force of will rather than temperament.
The foyer seemed to contract around them, the high ceiling and the stone walls amplifying their voices and holding the tension in a way that a larger space wouldn’t have.
Suddenly, the plate hit the floor.
The crash was sudden and sharp, porcelain shattering against the hardwood and sending fragments in every direction.
The sandwich landed face down, and a piece of the plate skidded to a stop near Brook’s shoe.
The sound ricocheted off the stone walls and up the staircase, filling the house with a violence that neither man had managed to produce.
Her attention went to Gwenyth, whose hands were now empty at her sides.
Oddly enough, her expression hadn’t changed. There was no surprise on her face, no distress at the broken dish. She had dropped it with the calm deliberateness of a woman who had decided that the only way to stop two men from tearing into each other was to give them something else to react to.
And it had worked beautifully.
Both Dale and Cal stepped back from one another. The fragments of the plate lay scattered across the hardwood in a rough semicircle, white porcelain against dark wood, and the quiet that followed was thick enough to feel against the skin.
“Uncle Cal,” Gwenyth said into the silence that followed. “I’ll be waiting for you on the back patio.”