Chapter 4 A Nephews Sudden Return #2
"History is one way of putting it. Look, Mrs. Croft, I know what people in this village are probably saying about me. The estranged nephew shows up the moment his uncle's dead, looking for an inheritance. It's not a good look, I realize that."
I said nothing, waiting.
"But I have a right to be here," he continued, and his voice hardened, the casual indifference he had been projecting slipping away. "Whatever was between my uncle and me, I'm still his family. I'm the only one who can deal with what he left behind."
"Of course," I said. "No one would suggest otherwise."
He studied my face for a long moment, as though trying to determine whether I meant it. Then he pushed back his chair and stood, leaving his coffee cup half full on the table.
"I should get back to the bookshop. There's a lot to go through."
He paused, looking down at me with an expression I could not quite read.
"If you remember anything else about the day you found him, anything that seemed out of place, I'd like to hear it. Whatever our differences were, he was still my uncle."
I nodded. "I'll let you know."
He turned and walked to the door, and the bell chimed again as he stepped out into the rain.
The man in the waxed jacket folded his newspaper and left a moment later, and the elderly woman from the flower committee finished her tea in a hurry and followed.
Gareth waited until the door had swung shut behind them before crossing to my table and dropping into the chair Julian had vacated.
"Well," he said, his voice returning to its usual pitch. "What do you make of that, then?"
I looked at the half-empty coffee cup Julian had left behind, the dark liquid still faintly steaming. "I'm not sure yet. He's angry, that much is clear. And he's in a hurry."
"Angry enough to have pushed his uncle off a ladder?" Gareth asked, and then immediately looked as though he wished he had not spoken the words aloud.
I did not answer. The thought had already occurred to me, but it sat uneasily alongside everything else I had observed.
Julian Blackwood's resentment was real, but resentment was a long way from violence, and the man I had just spoken to seemed more exhausted than dangerous.
Still, his arrival had shifted something in the village, and I could feel the new weight of it settling over the morning, another thread in a pattern I was only beginning to see.
"Keep an eye on things for me, will you?" I said to Gareth, rising from my chair. "If he comes back, or if anyone else has anything to say about him, I want to know."
Gareth nodded, his expression more serious than I was used to seeing on his round, cheerful face. "You think he's involved?"
"I think," I said, pulling my coat back on and fastening the buttons, "that there are more pieces to this puzzle than I realized. And I think Julian Blackwood knows more than he's telling."
I left the bakery and stepped back into the rain, which had softened to a fine mist.
The high street was quiet, the wet pavement reflecting the grey sky, and as I walked toward The Yarn & Needle, I turned over everything Julian had said, examining each word for the shape of what he had left unsaid.
He had spoken of his uncle's ledgers, thirty years of records, and I remembered Eleanor telling me that Silas Blackwood had kept meticulous accounts of his rare book transactions.
If those ledgers contained something that someone wanted to keep hidden, then Julian's hurry to sort through his uncle's affairs might be about more than inheritance.
It might be about making sure that whatever was in those pages never saw the light of day.
I reached my shop and unlocked the door, the familiar smell of wool and cedar greeting me as I stepped inside.
Florence's knitting was still on the chair by the window where I had left it, the dropped stitch unravelled a little further.
I picked it up and held it for a moment, feeling the soft give of the moss-green wool between my fingers, and then I set it on the counter and reached for my telephone.
Eleanor Finch answered on the third ring, her voice warm and unhurried. "Penny, dear. I was hoping you'd call."
"Eleanor, I need to ask you something about Silas Blackwood," I said. "Did he ever mention his nephew to you? Anything about why they fell out?"
There was a pause on the other end of the line, and I heard the faint creak of Eleanor settling into her armchair.
"He mentioned Julian once or twice over the years, but never in any detail. He said the boy had made choices he couldn't abide, and that was that. Silas wasn't one to air his grievances in public."
"Did he ever say what kind of choices?"
"No," Eleanor said slowly. "But I remember once, years ago, I asked him if Julian might ever come back to Meadowbrook. He said, and I remember this quite clearly, he said that Julian would only come back if there was something in it for him. He said it with such bitterness, Penny.
I didn't press him further."
I thanked her and hung up, and then I stood for a long moment with my hand still resting on the receiver.
Julian Blackwood had returned to Meadowbrook, and he had returned in a hurry, and he was sorting through his uncle's affairs with a determination that felt like more than duty.
Whether that determination was driven by grief, greed, or something else entirely, I could not yet say.
But I knew, with the same quiet certainty that had settled over me the night before, that I would need to watch him closely.
The rain had stopped by the time I turned the sign on the door to Open, and the first pale light of a clearing sky was beginning to break through the clouds.
I sat down behind the counter and picked up my knitting, the deep blue scarf that was still only a few inches long, and let the rhythm of the needles carry me forward into the quiet morning, waiting for whatever would come next.