Chapter 14
Eliza
Every nerve in my body seized as I jolted awake with a sharp gasp.
For a second, I had forgotten where I was, not recognizing the empty bed in front of me before the events of the previous night came tumbling back to me.
I stood from the stiff wooden chair, my back suddenly annoyingly itchy with the small circular indentations where the caning had pressed into my skin.
I had sat watch in the corner of the room all night.
With every step, even now, my aching body waited for something to leap out and frighten me, my peripheral vision playing tricks with shadows.
My senses were so taut, every small creak of the floor felt like a whip cracking in the still loneliness of the room.
Last night, after the ghost of Jasper’s mother left, I couldn’t settle myself enough to fall back asleep.
Every creak of the floor, every tickle of hair dancing from a draft, every goose bump that came on, I took as a warning.
Over and over and over, my mind circled with the thought of Hester in red.
Was it Hester? Why had she been crying over the letter? What did it all mean?
The only other time the ghost had appeared before me, she had also appeared sad and broken, but last night was different. Her sadness had turned to anger, and whether it was over the letter or my inability to understand what it was she was trying to tell me, I may never know.
I had thought about following the woman into the hallway, but every part of me had been far too afraid to move after she had flashed her anger in my direction.
It was a very different encounter to be in the presence of a melancholy ghost than an angry one.
Incapable of returning to sleep with the locket still oozing green in the sink, I eventually did what every other person in the world does when they can’t sleep, be it due to angry ghosts or insomnia—I got on my phone.
I needed to find out everything I could about Jasper’s family.
Initially, my search was mostly filtering through archived news articles from the last two decades, nearly every single one with bold headlines proclaiming Jasper to be the number one suspect in the disappearance of Hester and Darius Blackwood.
It gave me chills knowing that the man accused was sleeping close by from where I was reading these details.
My pulse quickened when several pictures of a young and angry Jasper appeared.
In the earliest one I found, he couldn’t possibly have been older than fifteen.
His cheeks were soft and slightly rounder; they had the look of a child morphing into a man, far from the angular profile he wore now, though his eyes had already begun to take on a hint of their hardened glint.
None of the articles seemed empathetic to the newly orphaned child but instead went into details, not only calling Jasper the son of Satan but even going so far as to say things like “at least Darius was gone for good,” and various statements proclaiming their relief that the owner of Blackwood Bladecraft was gone and couldn’t destroy any more lives.
The latter seemed fueled by enraged members of the community who had lost their well-paying jobs at Blackwood Bladecraft.
Several photos were of a fifteen-year-old Jasper in handcuffs being escorted by the police, most with the headlines “Drug-Addicted Son Murders Parents for Inheritance” or “Devil Child Pushes Parents Over Stormcrest Ridge.” Apparently, spoiled and wealthy, Jasper was into some pretty bad activity as a teen—including fighting several other kids at his school, putting one in the hospital with a broken jaw, stabbing another boy—yes, with a Blackwood Bladecraft knife—and selling drugs to a large portion of the student body, all of which were scattered throughout the many articles.
I even found a photo from when Jasper was about seventeen, with Sowerby in the background.
I stared at that one for a while. They had known each other since he was young.
The relationship between the two of them was starting to make more sense as this all unraveled.
There was an ease whenever they were around each other, so it made sense that they had known each other a very long time, though I hadn’t suspected it had been quite this long.
I also didn’t want to believe it was possible for Jasper to have murdered his parents.
Would Sowerby still be around and as comfortable around him if he had murdered the elder Blackwoods?
Logically, I had no reason to believe he hadn’t done it—in fact, deep down I believed him to be more than capable of killing anyone, but for some reason, there was a tug inside of my gut, telling me that he didn’t do it.
Then something occurred to me that made more sense: How had it not crossed my mind before that Sowerby could have killed Hester and Darius?
My immediate thought was why no one had suspected Sowerby of the murders.
It was just as obscure to imagine him as the murderer as it was a fifteen-year-old child—of course, whatever money Darius and Hester had went to Jasper when he was eighteen.
In the eyes of the public, there was no clear motive for anyone else to have done it but Jasper.
It hadn’t helped that after maids realized something was wrong and called the police, Jasper was found sitting over the ledge of the cliff, covered in Hester’s blood.
When they questioned him, he got angry and violent—so much so that they had to put ties on his arms and legs and a bag over his head.
I saw the picture of him in the seat of the cop car with blood all over the front of his white T-shirt.
They’d never found any remains, but they said the terrain of the slope made it impossible to send searchers without risking more lives.
Choppers had scanned the area, but it was too dense with debris to see.
It was awful to think that their bones could be hidden in the rocks on the other side of the cliff.
I was tempted to go look at the view from my window, but I couldn’t.
I could look up at the clouds and that was about it—at least, without having a panic attack.
I glanced at the settee still anchored in front of the balcony doors and relaxed a little.
In the end, the case was dismissed because of police misconduct and mishandling of evidence.
Apparently, Jasper’s high-powered lawyer leaned in on technicalities; the shirt with Hester’s blood on it was taken into evidence early, not logged correctly among other things.
Jasper walked away a free man. As I looked at the photos of Jasper as he grew older, my chest grew heavy.
I could see the light leave his eyes a little more in every photo as he grew older.
As I continued to dig, more articles quoted enraged, angry people of the town or nearby cities complaining that he had gotten away with murder.
When he was seventeen, I noticed that, in all the pictures thereafter, his eyes looked almost empty, and he held the harsh, unreadable, dangerous expression that he wore now. Then, the articles changed.
In a particularly disturbing magazine piece, a then nineteen-year-old Jasper was interviewed for his ingenious business strategy.
The interviewer asked a series of crass questions before teasing that Jasper was so wealthy now that no one cared who he had murdered.
Jasper had given a commanding response, putting the interviewer in their place, and from then on, the articles took on a very different tone—they seemed fascinated and enthralled by him, if not afraid.
Photos of him getting into helicopters, at award ceremonies with leggy blonds, even being mentioned in men’s fashion columns and Forbes features, it was endless.
It was a lot harder to find anything on Hester and Darius, but eventually, I found an old excerpt from a home and garden magazine.
The article itself was somewhat useless, as it mostly spoke about the inspiration for the architectural details of Blackwood Manor, but the photo they used proved more than interesting.
Standing next to a heavyset tan man with a knifelike nose and the same sharp jaw as Jasper stood the ghost woman in her living form. There was no mistaking it. She beamed up at the man as he held her tightly, unable to hide his own happy smile.
It was her.
Jasper Blackwood’s mother, Hester, was dead and haunting me; there was no getting around it. And if Hester was dead, then she was incapable of writing those letters to Jasper. Which made me wonder where the ghost of Darius was lurking.
The happy young couple stood together amidst a beautiful, abundant garden absolutely brimming with red and deep purple blooms that set off both of their all-black outfits in a beautifully artistic photograph.
Hester looked only slightly younger in the photo than she did in my room, but everything else about her felt different and would have been nearly unrecognizable if not for her strikingly beautiful features, which made you stop and stare.
Gone were the sad, hollow eyes and sallow skin of the woman who visited me.
She was gorgeous, and the glow of life radiated from her as she stood in a sun-drenched outdoor garden, her arms around Darius’s waist. She looked like a woman who had never once been touched by sadness—a far cry from the woman whose red-eyed sobs had woken me in the middle of the night.
I nearly leaped from the mattress when my eyes snagged on a shiny gold chain around her neck.
She was wearing the locket. A scream sat in my throat, needing to be released with the buzz from my new information.
But I couldn’t scream; instead, I moved to sit in the chair, alone in my room, and tried to make the puzzle pieces fit.