The Midnight Estate #3
be asleep—that the whole moment might be a nightmare of his own. That he would wake in his bed with the world still on its
axis.
“I don’t know how he found us,” Marie was saying, but she was speaking as if from a great distance, and he heard her voice
through static in his ears. “But he went into Ernie’s room first, and he had a knife. I pushed him and he stumbled and I thought it would just give me enough time to go to you but it all went wrong. Or maybe
this is what I wanted. I don’t know now. How will I ever know?”
He went into Ernie’s room first.
It seemed that the one time Silas did something impulsive, inviting a stranger in desperate need to live with him, he had
also allowed a violent, potentially murderous man, not only into his home but into his son’s bedroom.
He turned from the mangled body at the base of the stairs, back to the young woman he had only wanted to help. For a moment
he was tempted to lash out at her—had she somehow contacted Rupert, exposed her location to him? But as soon as Silas opened
his mouth to fling that accusation, his conscience roared in protest.
“You pushed him down the stairs?” he asked instead.
“I just wanted to buy enough time to wake you for help. He came into the hallway and I hid behind the clock and . . .”
Silas could picture it from there. It would take nothing at all for a large man like that to gain enough momentum to injure
himself very badly indeed if he tumbled down that massive staircase. And so, from almost the first moment, he believed her story.
He sank down to sit on the ground beside her, both staring down the staircase to the body at the bottom.
“What are we going to do?” she whispered after a while.
We.
Silas had done nothing wrong. If anything, he had already given Marie far too much. There was a case to be made that he should
call the police and let the chips fall where they may. He had a feeling that if he said as much, she would understand. He
could already hear the guilt and remorse and regret in her voice.
He’d been told time and time again over the course of his life that his imagination was a gift.
There was no off switch to it though, and even in that moment of panic and fear, his mind’s eye roared to life.
Sitting on the floor of that hallway, he knew he was sitting with Marie, but something of his mother was there too.
What are we going to do? Linda whispered to him. Silas had hidden beneath dining tables and in closets and under his bed enough times to understand that it would have taken
very little for his mother to find herself in the same, desperate situation Marie was now in.
“I’ll call the police. This isn’t your problem,” Marie blurted. “I did this. I need to face the consequences.”
Silas pondered this for just a moment. He knew some of the local police officers. He could explain to them who Marie really
was, and how they wound up in this terribly confused situation. They would never believe that he had done something as altruistic
as rescuing the young woman and spiriting her away to another life on the other side of the world. It was too grand, too unlikely—they’d
assume an ulterior motive.
The minute he told them that he and Marie were not, in fact, siblings, the police would assume they were having an affair.
And if Christine knew that Marie was not his sister, she too would no doubt assume the worst of him, especially with things
as strained as they were. Hadn’t he worried about that all along? It would probably be the death knell for his marriage.
“If I explain to them, they might let me go . . .” She broke off. Silas could tell that she was trying very hard to be brave.
To do the right thing. But she couldn’t finish that last sentence, and he understood why.
The missing word was home, but where was her home now?
Even if the police believed her, even if she was allowed to go free, what was waiting for her back in America?
A brother who seemed to care little about her welfare?
Her now-dead husband’s nefarious business contacts?
“Do you want to go back to California?” Silas asked her.
She shook her head mutely. “No, but . . .”
“When I was a child, my father used to beat my mother,” he told her. Marie’s eyes widened. “Yes, he did so ferociously. He
left her bruised. Broke bones. And I know that at least once, neighbors called the police. They came to the house and told
my mother and father that it was a private matter and that they should sort it out between them.”
“I’m very sorry that happened to her.”
“And my father was an English teacher,” Silas added bitterly. “Not even a police officer, who inevitably would command more
loyalty and perhaps even sympathy from his own.”
“What are you suggesting?”
Silas looked down the staircase. He felt no sympathy for the man who lay dead at the bottom. No sense of obligation to ensure
that justice was served because in fact, to Silas, it seemed that justice had been served that night, or as close to true
justice as could ever be achieved in this life.
“Do you think you can bring yourself to walk past him?”
Marie looked at Silas in alarm, then down at the body at the bottom of the stairs. She shook her head fiercely.
“I can’t. I can’t! Please don’t make me. Please, Silas—”
Silas slid his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close for a hug. He kissed the side of her hair, then whispered, “I’ll
move him. I’m sorry I asked you that. I’ll move him away from the stairs and then we will go down and sit in the kitchen.
” She opened her mouth to protest but it was his turn to shake his head.
“We’re going to need our wits about us. Every step we take from here on must be carefully planned. Calculated. Are you with me?”
If they were going to hide what she had done, they were going to need a fully fledged plan, put in place with clear minds.
To whatever extent was possible he would carry the load of that for her, but she simply had to be on board or she’d undermine
the whole thing. Silas was willing to take another massive risk for Marie, but the reality was that she herself was responsible
for the greatest of their misdeeds to that point.
He wasn’t complicit until he touched Rupert’s body, but he was complicit in another injustice. Marie said she had no idea how Rupert had found them, but Silas had already figured it out,
and it was something he should have considered much earlier—something he could have avoided if he’d just had his wits about him the day he took her from
the home she shared with Rupert.
Of course Rupert would have interviewed half the town. He’d have interviewed Carmen and Rodrigo and Irving and Helen, and maybe they’d tell him Marie had been speaking
to a tall man with bushy eyebrows, but none of them knew Silas’s name.
But then Rupert would have interviewed his own neighbors. And Mr Peterson’s memory was failing but he still remembered everything
about Linda’s son, even the details of the little town where he lived—the one way out in the middle of nowhere with the kangaroos
and the same name as that magazine.
Silas sent Marie to the bathroom to wash her face.
“Take some time,” he said gently. “Try to calm yourself down.”
He descended the staircase very slowly. He walked with his hand on the banister, and later, whenever he thought back in that moment, he would remember the smooth glide of his hand over the polished wood and the noisy thud thud thud of his own pulse in his ears.
When he finally reached the bottom, Silas extended his hand towards the lamp switch—but then pulled his hand back, leaving
the hall in the relative darkness of the moonlit night. He didn’t expect any of the farmhouses in the area would happen to
be looking across the fields towards the mansion at 12:45 a.m., but he couldn’t afford to risk a story circulating of the
mansion lit up like a Christmas tree at suspiciously early hours.
Instead, he walked through to the kitchen and rummaged around in a drawer until he found a flashlight. When he returned to
the foyer, he flicked the light over Rupert’s body. Blood had coagulated in his exposed ear and his face was set in a blank
mask of shock, his eyes open and unblinking, both pupils blown. Even so, Silas bent and gently touched his fingers to the
other man’s neck. The warmth was already draining from the body, and there was no pulse to be felt.
Silas handled the body with as much respect as he could manage, closing Rupert’s unseeing eyes, straightening out his limbs
as well as he could manage. In doing so, Silas discovered that the man’s trouser pockets were stuffed full—his passport on
the left, and his wallet on the right. In the pocket of his shirt, against his unbeating heart, was a bus ticket from Mascot
to Forbes, and a box of matches marked with the name of a hotel near the Sydney airport.
Silas removed all of these items from the body and left them on the floor of the foyer.
He wrapped Rupert’s body in blankets from the linen press, then dragged him through the threshold into the parlour.
It was shocking to Silas how little Rupert had bled—there was only a single smear of blood on the floor right where Rupert’s ear had rested.
Perhaps his heart stopped beating even as he fell.
Silas cleaned the floor with a towel, then laid it on top of the body.
He opened the front door. There was no car on the driveway, none on the road out front.
Using the flashlight to guide his way, he went into the kitchen and put a pot of milk onto the stove. He added some honey,
then a little more. Marie had baked with Ernest that afternoon, testing Meg’s recipe for Anzac slice—oats and golden syrup
and lashings of butter. It was the kind of food he had never experienced before he came to Australia but something as common
in his new home as cookies were in his old one. He opened the Tupperware container and sat it beside the mugs of hot milk
at the farmhouse table in the kitchen.