Chapter Thirty-Seven. Rose #2
“I hit him over the head with a shovel.” Grace’s toothy smile is even more bloodthirsty with her split lip. “Then I tied his hands behind his back. For our safety. After he tried to shoot Rose.”
“He what?” Father shouts.
“Emmeline!” Harrow moans.
Grace nudges him with the poker. “Is your conscience troubling you? Any other murders you want to confess, while you’re at it?”
“Maybe you gave him a concussion,” Coop says. “You hit him pretty hard.”
The front door bangs open. “Grace? Cooper?” Martha Harrow bustles into the library in her raincoat and headscarf.
She slumps against the doorframe when she spots the twins.
“Oh, thank heavens. I took a little catnap, just closed my eyes for a few minutes while Joanie kept an eye on Maggie and the baby. When I got up, I saw that Joe’s hunting rifle wasn’t—” She gasps, her jaw dropping like a cartoon character’s. “It can’t be!”
I follow her disbelieving gaze across the room—not to her bound and bloodied husband, but to my father’s new wife.
Lena gives her an icy smile. “Hello, Martha.”
“I—but—how?” Mrs. Harrow sputters.
Joe Harrow groans. His rolling eyes focus not on his children, or his astonished wife, but on my father’s new missus.
“You!” he spits. “Am I dead? Am I in Hell?”
A terrible suspicion begins to gnaw at me.
I turn to Lena. “Have you visited the hotel before?”
A familiar smirk plays around her thin lips. “Not a visit, no.”
“I’ll ask again.” Father is accustomed to being heard and heeded the first time. “What is the meaning of this?”
I ignore his bellowing, perch on the arm of Coop’s wingback chair, and take a sip of the smoky-smooth scotch to fortify me.
“Ask your new wife,” I suggest. “Ask why she was so eager to buy this particular property. And why she wanted to race over here in the middle of a hurricane.”
“She wanted to meet my girls,” Father says staunchly. A wolf in business, but a real meatball when it comes to love. “I don’t know what you’re implying, but I don’t think I care for it, Rose.”
His wife eyes me appreciatively. “You’re clever. Your dad didn’t mention that.”
He wouldn’t, would he? He’s never noticed.
“That’s my no-good sister,” Harrow growls.
Grace sighs. “Your sister is dead. You’re concussed.”
“Missing,” Mrs. Harrow corrects. “Presumed dead. Her body was never found.”
I point at my stepmother. “You’re Emmeline Harrow.”
“In the flesh.” She gives that awful little smirk again. “I go by Lena now. Lena Thorpe has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”
I’d like to give her a good whack with the fireplace poker. Is this all a game to her?
Father frowns. “You were Lena Jackson.”
She strokes the brown tweed of his arm. “I was married before, darling, you know that.”
“The morals of an alley cat,” Harrow mutters.
He’s said that before. When Sheriff Callaway was questioning Grace about meeting Stanley in the middle of the night. I thought he was baiting Auntie, but what if he wasn’t? What if he was actually baiting the sheriff—about Emmeline?
Mrs. Harrow is clearly distraught. “Why did you let us think you were dead?”
Lena waves a hand at her brother. “I didn’t want to end up like Daisy. And what did you care? You got what you wanted from me.”
I wince, glancing at Grace. If Emmeline and the sheriff had a love affair before Emmeline left town, then …
“I cared. Of course I cared!” Mrs. Harrow says. “And what do you mean, you didn’t want to end up like Daisy? She’s a singer in New York, like you two always talked about.”
“No, Ma.” Grace points the poker at Harrow. “Daisy never left the Harrow Home.”
“Shut up,” Harrow barks.
“He killed her. Dragged her out into the field and shot her like a rabid dog. We found her body this morning, what’s left of it after all these years.
He buried her in an old steamer trunk by the tennis court.
Under the larkspur you planted this spring.
That’s why he tried to shoot Rose. Because we found out what he’d done. ”
“You found her?” Lena glares at her brother, her fury bubbling over. “I knew it. I could never prove it, but … you son of a bitch!” She crosses the library and kicks him, hard.
“Stop it!” Harrow falls onto his side. Lena kicks him in the ribs. “Help!”
“Use this.” Grace holds out the fireplace poker. Coop swipes it from her.
“Lena, stop!” Father hauls her backward as she tries to kick Harrow again. “You never mentioned that you grew up here. Or that the owner of the property was your brother. Or that you were presumed dead by your family!”
She shrugs. “So I left some things out of my personal history. What does it matter? We’ve had a good time, haven’t we?” She smirks at her brother. “London. Paris. Zurich. Vienna. I finally got to see all the places Daisy and I dreamed about. All the places you said I’d never go.”
“Zurich?” Ella’s been so quiet, curled up in the armchair in the corner, I forgot she was here. “Did you visit Mama?”
The hope in her voice undoes me. Did our father take his beautiful young wife to visit his catatonic ex-wife in the sanitarium where he had her lobotomized? Of course not.
“It didn’t feel appropriate,” he hedges. Ella’s face falls. He turns back to Lena. “Have you been playing me for a fool?”
“No, darling. I’m very fond of you. Getting back at my brother— putting an end to the Harrow Home and assuring that he now works for me—I mean, us—that’s only an added bonus.” Lena presses a kiss to Father’s cheek.
I don’t doubt that she’s quite fond of his money.
Coop bumps his good shoulder against my hip and gives me a crooked, dopey smile when I glance down at him. He takes my hand, lacing his fingers through mine. Even in the midst of all of these mad revelations, with a fair amount of Father’s good scotch burning through him, he noticed my sadness.
He notices me.
He was willing to take a bullet for me. Even when I had messy hair and muddy trousers.
Why would I go back to Washington with my father—a man who barely knows me, and has never cared to know me any better—when I could stay here with the little family I’ve built and the friends who have become everything to me?
I want to live here at the hotel with Auntie and Lou.
I want to make this a real home. Ella will want to go back to Miss Parker’s, but maybe she can come here for the holidays.
Grace would die before she admits it, but she’s going to need me to see her through this scandal. I want to be here for her and Coop.
Father looks at Harrow. “We can’t just leave him like this. We need the sheriff.” He heads for the lobby. “I’ll go. That old truck can make it into town.”
“Drive safely, darling.” His new wife waggles her fingers.
I hope he hasn’t changed his will yet.
Harrow struggles back to a sitting position. “Curtis won’t arrest me.”
“There’s a skeleton in your backyard,” I point out. The second the front door bangs shut behind my father, I can breathe more easily.
Harrow grimaces. “There’s no proof it was me who shot her.”
“I’ll testify against you. Gladly. I heard a gunshot that night,” Lena says.
“And we’ll testify that you tried to shoot Rose,” Coop adds.
“I didn’t know,” Mrs. Harrow says. “I swear to you all, I didn’t know.”
“You were with the twins,” Lena says. “But I always wondered if you suspected.”
“You’re the one who’s been sending Mrs. Wheeler money, aren’t you, Lena?” I ask, putting two and two together. The New York City postmark. The pretty handwriting on the envelope. And why the money stopped coming in May, when Lena married Father and sailed to Europe.
Lena nods. “Daisy wouldn’t’ve wanted the old shrew to starve.”
“I thought she ran away. I never understood why she didn’t take you with her. The two of you were thick as thieves,” Mrs. Harrow says.
There’s a flicker of something—sadness, and a familiar shame—on Lena’s face. I remember what Kath Johnson said: It was like Em had a crush, almost. Like how a girl will talk about her steady at the beginning. It was Daisy this and Daisy that and Daisy says …
“That girl was a degenerate,” Harrow slurs. He jerks his head toward me. “Like her. Unnatural.”
“Shut your mouth.” Coop waves the poker at him. “I don’t like to hit a man who can’t fight back. But I could make an exception.”
I have never wanted to kiss Cooper Harrow more.
“Sheriff won’t arrest me,” Harrow grumbles. “Scandal. Skeletons in his closet.”
Lena smooths her green dress over her knees. “Blackmail isn’t effective if everyone knows the secret, Joe.”
“Don’t. Please.” Mrs. Harrow steps forward. “Not like this, Em.”
“It’s Lena now,” my stepmother says icily. “I’m not a scared kid anymore.”
I glance over my shoulder at Grace, but her jaw is set, her eyes fixed on Lena. She’s figured it out, too. I grab Coop’s hand as she speaks softly. “I didn’t know, Cooper, I swear, I didn’t know this part of it before today.”
Then Grace turns to Lena. “Curtis Callaway is our father, isn’t he? And you’re our mother.”