Chapter 21 #2
Peter frowned. “But he’s not on the main path.”
She nodded. “I was afraid he might have gone to lie in wait for you by your car. I started to run toward the farm, and that’s when I found him.”
It sounded like—felt like—the truth. On the other hand, he’d thought she was being straight with him about a whisper campaign that turned out to be far worse than he’d imagined.
“And you?” she asked him.
He told them. She nodded, but her watchful look did not ease.
“I went downstairs to discuss the problem with Rosemarie, as I said I would.” Miss Knight, still a bit breathless, sank into a chair.
“But you weren’t there,” she added to Miss Dane, “so I ran outside to look for you. I checked out front, then all around the woods, and finally I heard you calling for Beatrix. Where were you?”
“In the forest,” Miss Dane said.
“Because …?” Miss Knight prompted.
“I needed to think. I don’t think well surrounded by recording equipment.”
Miss Knight sighed.
“Lydia?” Beatrix asked.
“I walked to Senator Gray’s house to ask him to represent you. He’s a defense attorney, you know.”
Peter’s breath caught in his throat. Beatrix put a hand over her mouth. “You told him? He knows?”
“No, he wasn’t there.”
That was a mercy. But it wasn’t truly an alibi. None of them had real alibis.
“If someone here killed Garrett,” he said, “now would be a good time to mention it.”
No one said a word.
“Rosemarie Harriet Dane,” Beatrix said, “tell us whether you killed Wizard Garrett, tell us truthfully, or it will harm Lydia, her efforts with the League and the League generally.”
“I did not kill Wizard Garrett,” Rosemarie said.
Beatrix turned to her friend. “Ella Ruth Knight, tell us truthfully whether you killed Wizard Garrett, or it will harm Lydia, her efforts with the League and the League generally.”
Miss Knight, gaze steady, said, “I did not kill Wizard Garrett.”
“I know I don’t have a Vow for you to call on, but I promise you, I did not kill Wizard Garrett,” Lydia said.
Beatrix looked at him, then, and all his anxieties about whether she had done it disappeared.
Her face was twisted in anguish. She said, “Peter William Blackwell, tell us truthfully whether you killed Wizard Garrett, or it will harm Lydia, her efforts with the League and the League generally,” her voice cracking, and he knew she feared the killer was him.
He opened his mouth to assure her he didn’t do it, then closed it, shocked. “Beatrix,” he said, too rattled to keep up the pretense that they didn’t call each other by their first names, “the Vow isn’t making me answer you.”
“What?” she whispered.
“Beatrix Jane Harper, tell us truthfully whether you killed Wizard Garrett, or it will harm me, in addition to your sister, her efforts with the League and the League generally,” he said.
She stared at him, eyes widening. She would have had to answer immediately if the force of the contract had kicked in.
“I didn’t kill Garrett,” he told her. “I vow to you that I did not.”
“And I didn’t kill Garrett, honest to God,” she said. “But if our magical Vows aren’t forcing the point …”
“Then ours aren’t, either,” Miss Dane said.
“Couldn’t you tell?” Beatrix asked.
Miss Knight shrugged. “I didn’t wait to see—I just answered. So did Rosemarie, for that matter.”
Beatrix called on the women’s Vows again. Neither was pressed into speaking.
“How is this possible?” she cried.
Peter slumped into the chair behind his desk. “The Vows must not think Garrett’s death and the question of whether one of us killed him falls within the category of ‘harm.’”
“Which isn’t very surprising,” Miss Dane said tartly. “Seeing as how he was about to do great harm to all of us. And no, I still didn’t kill him.”
“Maybe none of us did.” Beatrix sat in the chair on the other side of his desk. “Maybe it really was an accident.”
“But if police believe it was foul play, I’ll be their key suspect,” he said.
Beatrix looked at him—distress in her eyes, the press of her lips, the swoop in his stomach that surely came from her—but did not argue the point. Hadn’t he been her prime suspect, too?
Lydia frowned. “Just because you’re both wizards?”
“He died just shy of my property line.”
“Which they ought to see as evidence that you didn’t do it,” Miss Dane said, “because you’re not an idiot, plus you can easily move a body.”
“—and investigators could find out a few things that would lead them to see a motive that wasn’t there.
” He hated to bring this up, not knowing how much Beatrix had shared with her sister and Miss Dane, but he saw no way around it.
“Garrett made Beatrix an offer of marriage last fall. She turned him down. He blamed me.”
“What?” Miss Dane seemed more shocked by this than Garrett’s death. She turned on Beatrix. “Precisely when were you planning on telling us this?”
“Precisely never,” Beatrix muttered.
“I’m sorry,” he said to her. “There’s more, though—Garrett asked Miss Sederey to pretend to burns she didn’t have this afternoon in order to lure me out of the house.”
Beatrix’s eyes widened. “Why in heaven’s name did she agree to that?”
“Because she wants to marry a wizard. She thought this might endear her to him. And,” he said, unable to avoid the subject any longer, “because I’d told her in no uncertain terms that she would not be marrying me.”
“Oh,” she murmured.
“So, to sum up, the police might hear about a supposed love triangle between Beatrix, the deceased and me; about his attempt to get me out of the house shortly before his death; and my panicked teleportation from the Sederey farm once I found out.” Peter rubbed his temples in a vain attempt to stave off a headache.
“Motive, means, no alibi. What are they going to think?”
After a grim pause, Miss Dane said, “I don’t suppose you’d like to put the unfortunate Wizard Garrett elsewhere and let some other soul find him.”
“What?”
“Just thinking strategically,” she said. “It’s what I do.”
“No, I won’t,” he said flatly.
Lydia nodded, agreeing with him. “We have to call the police to report it ourselves.”
“When should we? And who should call?” Miss Knight said.
“I should, I think,” Beatrix said. “I did find him.”
“But wait until tomorrow.” Peter sighed. “I need more time to decide whether to stay or run.”
He felt another lurch in his stomach. Beatrix didn’t want him to go—because he didn’t want her to want him to go, which was possibly the strongest argument in favor of going. And given what happened in her parents’ room, what on earth might he do if they continued to see each other every day?
“Running will be seen as an admission of guilt,” Miss Dane warned. “They’ll hunt for you. Wouldn’t you be better off staying put?”
That was true. They would hunt for him far harder than if Garrett had made it back to report what he’d seen.
“Do you want help deciding?” He almost didn’t hear Beatrix’s question, it was so quiet. He looked at her—at her dark eyes focused on his, transmitting stay stay stay as if her lips had formed the words—and couldn’t pull free of her gaze.
“I—I think I’d better figure this out alone,” he said.
Lydia stood. “Please tell us what we can do to assist, either way.”
“Beatrix should come here at eight tomorrow as usual,” Miss Dane said. “If we all keep traipsing in here together, it will be remarked upon. Let her know your decision then.”
The women stood and put their coats back on.
“Oh!” Beatrix turned to him. “It might not matter, but I just remembered—Garrett cast a spell as he dropped me off at home. I think he said ‘hit gewayletseth.’ Do you recognize that?”
He frowned. It sounded vaguely familiar.
He went for the lexicon, then recollected it as a classified spell the Pentagram used to protect certain areas of the New Mexico testing site once he insisted (after stealing the weapon) that they needed better security.
“Hit gewaerlaecet—a tripwire spell. It would alert him if someone went through. He cast it outside your house?”
She nodded. He winced as it struck him that had he thought to cast the spell—or, rather, had Beatrix do it—then Garrett couldn’t have slipped in without her knowing about it.
“Wouldn’t we all have set it off as we came and went?” Lydia asked.
He turned to Beatrix. “Was he touching you as he cast it?”
“No, he—” She stopped. “Yes, actually, he was.”
“Only you would set the tripwire off by crossing it, then. The rest of us wouldn’t.”
“He wanted to swoop in if he thought you might escape him,” Miss Knight said, looking disgusted.
Beatrix nodded slowly. “Then—I suppose when I did leave the house, he was already dead.”
“When was that?” he asked, hoping the timing would clarify who wasn’t, if not who was, the perpetrator.
“About ten minutes after you left.”
He sighed. Even Lydia would have had enough time to get to Garrett’s side of the forest and kill him, if she moved quickly.
“I realize this is a terrible question, I do,” Beatrix said into the silence, “but we don’t have any red leaves. Should we take his?”
Tempting. He hesitated.
“No,” Miss Knight said before he could get there himself. “It would be obvious then that he’d been robbed.”
“If we left one or two, it might just look as if he’d used them himself,” Miss Dane said.
He shook his head. “It’s not a risk we should take.”
If he ran, though … If he ran, he might as well. He would sorely need all the reds he could get.
He unwound the spell around the house and opened the door to let the women out. As Beatrix passed by, the last of the group, she looked at him and seemed about to say something. Then Miss Knight took her arm and pulled her along.
Miss Knight had told him not that long ago that he ought to leave. Perhaps she killed Garrett and knew he’d look like the culprit.