Chapter Twenty-Four. Now What…?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Now What…?
RUAN and I carefully transported Annabelle back to the townhome and immediately began settling her into his room across the hall from my own. It had been a dicey couple of miles thanks to the cobbled streets between there and here, but we managed all the same.
“She’s fine, Ruby,” Ruan murmured from across the room where he knelt at the bedside quietly assessing the girl. Mrs. Penrose and I had removed her blood-stained clothes and cleaned her up as best we could before dressing her in one of my spare clean, white nightgowns.
She’s safe here. Safer than anywhere in Oxford. It was a pure and simple fact. Yet I worried it had been a mistake. Oh, Ruan would tend to her better than any physician. There was no question about her medical care. But what if in protecting her, I had led the killer to our very door?
I brushed the thought away and immediately set myself to being useful.
I began to unpack the bag of Annabelle’s things I’d hastily gathered and set them into the drawers of the dresser.
Her satchel, which I’d taken as we left, was now carelessly lying upon a chair where I’d dropped it.
I rifled through it. Mostly books and her notes from the University …
and then I spied something else lying loose in the bottom of the bag.
Her reading card for the Bodleian.
My skin pricked as my conscience warred with practicality.
For a half second I almost disregarded it, leaving the card undisturbed.
But as usual, practicality won out. I tucked it into my pocket before continuing to place her other belongings in the cedar-lined drawers.
Ruan might be a good man, but I was a pragmatist. Annabelle’s reading card would do her no favors in her current condition, and if it helped me find who did this to her and who had taken Leona, then it was worth overcoming any minor moral quibbles.
Ruan’s expression grew grim. “I am still concerned she needs a real physician. Is there anyone you can send for who can keep their mouth shut?”
I wet my lips, shaking my head. “I could call for Dr. Heinrich in Exeter, but it’d take him well over a day to get here. But she can’t wait that long, can she?”
Ruan frowned, shaking his head. “We’d need him sooner than that. If she makes it to morning, I wager she’ll pull through this.”
My stomach knotted. I was gambling with a girl’s life no matter what I did. If we took her to the hospital, there was no guarantee we could protect her there. “No, I’ve seen what you can do. You’ve saved my life more times than I can count. Surely you can tend a girl after a scratch.”
“A four-inch blade is a bit more than a scratch,” Ruan corrected with a wry quirk of his lips. “But I take your point.”
“If there is anyone in this world who can keep her alive, it’s you.”
He flushed slightly pink all the way to his ears. Ruan’s fingers rested lightly on Annabelle’s wrist, counting her pulse.
“Go have a bath. I’ll watch her until you’re done,” I said absently.
His eyes followed my fingers as they rubbed over the spot where my heart pounded erratically in my chest. The worry was evident in his eyes. “I’ll be quick,” he murmured, brushing past me and out into the hall toward the bathing room.
I studied the young girl as she lay motionless on the narrow mattress.
Had Leona been taken, or had she run away?
That was the true question. Whatever Leona was going to tell me this morning had to be connected to her disappearance, and now I had nothing.
No new clues. No leads and no one I could trust beyond those dwelling in this very house—and Hari, of course—but none of that would help me find her.
I pulled the bloodied knife back out of my pocket, turning it over in the lamplight.
Drugs. Forgeries. Antiquities, stolen books, and petty academic rivalries. None of that ought to lead to a growing pile of dead bodies scattered across the city—and yet it did. All that was left now was for me to find out why.