Chapter 27 #2
“I do not know what to do. I cannot tell Cal. He would insist on intervening, and I am afraid of what she might do if she feels cornered. I cannot tell Porter. He would leave, and then she would be alone with me. I cannot send her away. She is my daughter, and I love her, and I still believe that the girl I raised is somewhere inside the woman she is becoming.”
The very last entry contained only a single date.
Brook closed the journal.
She reached for her phone and texted the team.
They needed to understand how volatile the situation had become and what they could be returning to.
While the second profile fit closest, the behavioral indicators she’d built pointed to an unidentified male within Nestor’s social circle.
Someone with intimate access to the estate, knowledge of the greenhouse, and an emotional relationship with the burial site.
But the subject hadn’t been male.
And the unsub hadn’t merely been among Nestor’s social circle.
She was his daughter.
Brook amended the profile in her mind, testing each element against what the journals had revealed, and Nestor’s death.
Blunt force trauma to the left parietal bone caused by a single, heavy blow.
Defensive fractures on his right forearm.
He’d known it was coming, and he’d raised his arms, although Brook doubted he’d fought back.
Gwenyth would have been eighteen at the time.
Young, but not too young.
The blow wouldn’t have required exceptional strength.
It would merely have required leverage and surprise, and a daughter confronting her father in his own greenhouse would have had both.
Kessler had said as much during their first conversation.
Size and strength mattered less than positioning and the willingness to follow through.
The motive hadn’t been about the women or the research. It had all come down to jealousy. Nestor had chosen his work over his daughter.
He’d spent years pouring himself into the greenhouse, into the compounds, into the women who arrived seeking treatment, while Gwenyth waited in the house by herself.
She had lost her mother to cancer and then lost her father to the obsession with curing it.
The women sleeping on the cot in the hidden lab were receiving the attention, the care, the hours of devoted focus that Gwenyth believed belonged to her.
And when she told him as much, when she stood in the kitchen and begged him to love her enough to stop, he hadn’t listened to her.
He’d locked the lab instead.
Brook now understood the progression. She’d profiled it dozens of times in other cases, though never in a subject this young and never across a timespan this long.
The jealousy had calcified into resentment.
The resentment had become rage. And the rage had found its expression in a single act of violence, in a place where Nestor had been surrounded by the graves of the women who had taken a father from his daughter.
Gwenyth had made certain her father stayed.
She hadn’t disposed of a body.
She’d buried her father alongside the women he’d chosen over her, in the same greenhouse, in the same soil, with the same care he’d shown them. The burial had been an act of possession. If he wouldn’t stay for her while he was alive, he would certainly stay forever now that he was dead.
And then Gwenyth had returned to the house and begun the performance that would last three decades.
The confusion, the blank stares, the conversations with people who weren’t in the room, the retreats into silence that lasted days, all of it had been a performance designed to keep every person who entered this estate convinced that Gwenyth Ellingham was too fragile to question, too broken to suspect, and too far gone to have been the one who killed her father.
Everyone had played their part in the story Gwenyth had written for them.
And she had played hers with a discipline that Brook had rarely encountered in her career.
Brook thought back to the landscaping crew.
Dale had mentioned that the crew wasn’t supposed to start with the greenhouse.
They’d been hired to clear the overgrowth, the fencing, the areas that Porter had let go.
The greenhouse wasn’t high on the priority list, yet someone had changed the order.
Someone had directed the crew to begin their work in the one structure on the property that contained eight sets of human remains.
If Dale succeeded in selling the estate, new owners would eventually renovate the greenhouse or tear it down entirely.
The bodies would be found under circumstances that Gwenyth couldn’t control.
But if the bodies were discovered now, while she was still living on the property, while the investigation was being conducted under her roof, she could shape the narrative.
The confused, fragile woman upstairs.
The devoted daughter who had always known her father was nearby.
The victim of everyone else’s negligence.
Brook sent another message, this one to Sheriff Gentry.
He was needed at the Ellingham Estate immediately.
She would explain everything once he arrived.
In the meantime, the house was quiet above her, and the woman who had killed her father thirty years ago was somewhere on the second floor, behind a closed door, deciding which version of herself to bring downstairs.
Brook removed her gloves and set them on the table beside the journals. Her phone chimed, and she glanced down to find Bit’s response. Confident she had all her bases covered, she reached for the holster on her waistband. Right after unsnapping the small strap, she heard footsteps on the staircase.
The muted sounds began to descend with the same rhythm she’d heard a dozen times over the past week. Each step produced its own specific creak. Eventually, the footfalls reached the ground floor and crossed the foyer.
Gwenyth appeared in the dining room doorway. Her cheeks were wet. Tears had tracked down both sides of her face in thin, silent lines.
The woman’s hands were empty, though.
No pill, no ceramic dish, nothing.
She gripped the edges of her cardigan and pulled it tighter around her thin frame, and when she spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper.
“I’m out. I don’t have any left.” Gwenyth took a shaky breath that stuttered on the way in as she continued her ruse. “Can you call Owen for me? He’ll bring more. He will. I just know it.”
The tears were convincing. The tremor in her voice was persuasive.
And the way she clutched the cardigan and made herself small was beyond believable.
She even turned her bare feet inward on the hardwood.
Her gaze had swept the contents on the dining room table, and Brook realized in that moment that Gwenyth had no idea her father had kept a journal on her.
“I’m not calling Owen for you, Gwenyth,” Brook stated matter-of-factly as she stepped out from her chair. “You can drop the act. I know. I know everything.”