Chapter Eleven #3
As she flipped chicken cutlets, she sipped her wine.
“Yeah, and once more, without forensics. That seems to be the week for that shit.”
Yes, yes, it was.
Her case chasing Devon Slater hadn’t utilized forensics, and that had handicapped her.
“So, he married her to cover his gayness, and then what happened? Did his wife know he was saddled up with the stable boy since his teen years?” he asked.
Gabby laughed.
“Oh, she found out. He told her it wasn’t working out—I’m paraphrasing—and that she had to go. When he came home, she was out.”
Elizabeth stopped her.
All of a sudden, something hit her.
It was what Ceit had told her in dream.
‘Na, his heart belongit tae another. Dinnae believe the words.’
Elizabeth was starting to put this all together. In her very ADHD brain, things fell into certain boxes.
This one was doing the same.
“Wait.”
Gabby stopped.
“What?” she asked.
Elizabeth went there.
“Eventually, Ciarán gets killed because they’re gay, but something in my head that Ceit told me, and it’s a glaring red flag for me.”
They all looked at her.
“What do you mean, Lass?” Finn asked.
She went there because it didn’t fit. In fact, it was definitely something so off that she couldn’t ignore it.
“Are we saying he got hitched to a woman, stuck his dick in her to get an heir, and then when he’s returning with his side piece?” she asked. “A person who was actually so much his main piece, that he sent her away?”
Gabby nodded.
“Yeah.”
Uh, that couldn’t be.
“WHY would he do that? She was his protection. She was his cover and Ciarán’s. That doesn’t make sense unless something happened to cause it. In my dream, she said not to trust the words. I don’t trust anything, as a normal practice without verifying it. Any cop will tell you that people lie.”
Finn agreed.
“Like rugs. All of the time.”
Elizabeth glanced over at him.
“So, she’s hot and heavy in the letters about her love, and then she changes her mind?
Why? Was it a ploy? Was it a cover? Or did something happen?
Because I vaguely remember someone saying, maybe Ian, that his letters were ambivalent toward her.
Something about the letters isn’t sitting right with me. My brain is flagging it. What is it?”
Finn was staring at her, and as the two investigators in the room, they were sharing a moment.
“Wait. She’s right,” Finn finally admitted. “It didn’t occur to me before, but he was never all about her, but she did a one-eighty a couple of times. There had to be a reason he was willing to toss his protection away and go it alone. Gay was a dirty word back then for the church.”
Yes, yes, it was.
Elizabeth kept going.
“If she was his cover, even if she found out about him having a guy on the side, HE kicked her out. She didn’t want to leave because her man was all about dick. That doesn’t fit.”
Gabby considered it.
“But the letters from her were Ceit gushing over him at some point.”
Yeah, well, words weren’t always the truth.
She pointed out the facts.
“She told me not to trust the words. There’s got to be more that you don’t have, because there’s no way she didn’t know from the start that he was into the dudes—one specific one. A wife knows.”
Gabby shared.
“She was wary of his lover at one point. She didn’t want him in the castle. Maybe she found out then?”
Elizabeth didn’t think so.
“It still feels off to me.”
Ethan agreed.
“When I was in denial about my feelings about Gene, when he came back, she knew.”
“Of course, I did. How could I not? My radar was going off, and the letters are a little too much pretending that she wasn’t aware. That screams ploy. That screams…something. Maybe a threat like she’d reveal the truth?”
No one spoke.
Elizabeth continued.
“There has to be a reason he booted her if they were both mutually getting something out of it,” she said. “He’s getting an heir, a cover, and she’s out of daddy’s weird control?”
She had a point.
“Now, suddenly, he’s on a battlefield, getting laid with his man regardless, and he wants the woman who is holding up the charade to leave? That would risk Ciarán, and if he loved him as much as you all say, that’s not going to happen. I’d swallow a lot to protect my family.”
Ethan agreed.
Yes, yes, she would.
“Something definitely went sideways for him to risk that safety net,” Ethan stated. “She had to do something or say something. Maybe there was an incident.”
Gabby didn’t know the answer to that.
None of them did.
Elizabeth was curious.
“Also, does no one see how weird it is for all of those letters that she wrote him to be back here? He was off in war, and he carried them back when he was in love with a man?”
Gabby gasped.
Oh, and Elizabeth wasn’t done.
“Did it occur to anyone that the letters were written to stay here, in case the church came in? What if she didn’t send them to him?”
Finn stared at her.
That’s when he got what she was saying.
“LASS! They were in a journal and ripped out!” he said, seeing what she said. “A JOURNAL!”
Elizabeth went there.
“Then how did a letter she sent via however it supposedly got to Duncan on the field of battle get there if it was in a journal and ripped out later? When I write a letter, it’s on a piece of paper free from anything—not in a book.
A diary is a book. A letter is a letter.
What if they were ripped out at one point, not to destroy the journal, and hide the truth, but to make it more believable that those letters had been sent? ”
That hung there.
Well, damn.
Gabby saw what she was saying.
“And with what she told you…‘don’t trust the words’. We all just assumed that he wanted the nest tit-free,” she stated. “None of us realized the part about the letters being written IN a book. They were never sent to him.”
Elizabeth glanced over at Finn.
“Inspector, what’s the first rule of Investigation Club?” she asked.
He laughed.
“After not talking about Investigation Club? Don’t assume. Get facts to back you up. Oh, and if it looks off and smells off, it’s off.”
That.
It.
Was.
She put her fork down that she was flipping the chicken cutlets with.
“I’m willing to bet without seeing any of the letters, that anything she ‘sent’ was her way of staging that cover. Did he send letters back?”
Gabby considered it.
“Not to her. We saw letters from Duncan to Ciarán and from him to Duncan. They weren’t torn from the book.”
Elizabeth pointed.
“So, his letters…did he talk about his love for Ceit?” she asked, backtracking.
She shook her head.
“No, mostly they were very intimate letters between the two men. Duncan mentioned loving her, and ‘his child’, but that’s it.”
Something still felt off to her.
She just didn’t know what.
It was right there, just out of her grasp, and she didn’t have a clue what it was.
“We need to figure out what happened. I’ll bet this castle on it that something pushed Duncan to tell her to go home. IF that even happened. Remember, you only have letters from her perspective. Did he ever ask her to leave?”
They considered it.
“Not that we saw,” Graham admitted. “There was just a letter where Ceit cursed his bloodline for asking her to leave.”
Yeah, this was off.
Elizabeth needed more.
“Continue, Gabby, and work our way back to this. Let’s put a place marker in this spot for later. What else do we have?”
Gabby did.
“Well, just what was said about the curse.”
If they could trust that, but now, she wasn’t sure.
“Anything else?”
Gabby considered it.
“We know that she has her baby, and right after, she mailed her father a letter. She wanted to come home. She didn’t want to be here anymore, and he got pissed. In his return letter, he was ANGRY. He told her to bear the Lord a daughter.”
Finn paused.
“The Granndachs never had daughters. They only ever had sons. Wouldn’t he know that?” he asked.
Elizabeth shrugged.
“Got me. I’m new here.”
Ethan stirred his sauce and dropped pasta, seeing Elizabeth had finished frying the chicken cutlets.
“What happened then?” he asked.
Elizabeth knew.
“He showed up, and as she was about to take a swan dive out the upper tower window, he confronted her. When they found her body, her face was smashed in as she was lying on her back.”
Ethan made her stop.
“Uh, you can’t have both unless you hit your face on the way down. If she landed on her back, she was hit in the face. The tower isn’t that high where she could change falling positions midway down.”
She was aware.
Gabby laughed.
“She said the same thing.”
Yes, yes, she had.
Gabby shared more so they were all on the same page for now.
“Then, Oison makes his other daughter marry Duncan, and we think it’s because he knew he was gay, and was willing to blackmail him. So, Catherine moves in, raises Ceit’s child, and plays wife for a while.”
Elizabeth was curious.
“Did he know, or did Ceit tell Catherine, and she told Daddy? Because this family seems to be all up in some business here,” she said.
“Can we trust the sister? I mean, if their father was a POS, and I say that because he killed his child, would Catherine feel safe there? What if she told Daddy and he lost his cool? You’re assuming that Ceit sent a letter to her father, but you didn’t see the letter.
What you know is he showed up with his other child in tow, no? ”
They all nodded.
Elizabeth played Devil’s advocate.
“Maybe Catherine saw this as her way out. You said she was a snake, and betrayed Duncan later. Is it odd to assume she’d betray her sister’s confidence? I can’t imagine I’d tell my father jack shit if he sold me off for a dowry, but I would tell my sibling my secrets if we’d been close.”
Well, shit.
She had a point.
“Maybe she got burned too,” Elizabeth stated. “By her own sister.”
As soon as she said that, the lights flickered as if to confirm what she’d said.
Immediately, Ethan looked around.
“What was that?”
“Rats,” they all said together, making Elizabeth laugh her ass off.
Only, Ethan didn’t get it.
So, she told him.