And the book. The one on poisons. Wendy had been standing near that shelf when I’d run into her in the study.
But one thing doesn’t add up. Why would she place a foxglove in my drawer? Why would she try to provoke me when she had no reason to believe I was onto her? And then it hits me.
“You put the foxglove in my drawer, didn’t you?” I say to Hannah.
She lifts a shoulder, as if in agreement, and I swear to god, she stifles a grin. “If you don’t mind, I need to get to my room and pack my bag,” she says. “This family is nutso. Someone tried to murder me, and no one gives a shit.”
“Why, Hannah? Why did you leave the foxglove?”
“Okay, I was messing with you again. You snuck into my room, for god’s sake. Was I just supposed to let that go?”
I press my hands to my head, as my thoughts come together like the pins in a lock lining up.
“If you didn’t pick the flowers near the cottage, where did you find them?” I ask.
“This is ridiculous. Why are we still talking about it?”
“Tell me.”
“If you must know, from behind the carriage house. I happened to notice some of them there one day.”
“Did you ever see Wendy picking any from that spot?”
“Wendy? You think her first plan was to poison me?”
“Not you, no. I need to know. Did you ever see her with any? In the kitchen of the carriage house, maybe?”
“No. I—”
“What?”
“I didn’t see her, but she saw me with the ones I picked.”
I jerk back in surprise. “Did she say anything?”
“No. But she looked at me kind of weird. And I told her not to worry, that I didn’t have anything wicked in mind.”
That’s why Wendy wanted Hannah dead. Not because of the conversation she’d overheard. She probably trusted Hannah to keep her lips zipped about it because Hannah needed her. But she’d misunderstood Hannah’s comment about the foxgloves. She must have taken it as a taunt, that Hannah had somehow figured out she was a murderer.
And when she thought she saw Hannah walking alone yesterday morning, she set out after her.
29
FOUR MONTHS LATER
The second we pull into the driveway of the house on Durham Road, it’s as if a switch has been flicked to make my heart start beating faster. I’m not sure exactly why. This isn’t the first time I’ve been back since July. Gabe and I have driven out here a few times, though we haven’t brought Henry yet.
Maybe it’s due to the sudden, unexpected downpour. The raindrops pelting against the roof of the car, summoning me right back to that horrible night last summer.
“You positive you don’t mind staying in the cottage?” Gabe asks. “The heating system isn’t state of the art.”
“No, I’ll be fine. I packed flannel PJs.”
What I don’t tell him is that I’ll feel safer and more at ease in the cottage. The big, rambling quality of the main house, which I always found so appealing, so enchanting, now makes me jumpy. When I’m in one of those rooms these days, I’m always looking over my shoulder, thinking I’ve heard unexplainable footsteps or a door opening somewhere it shouldn’t.
After quickly unloading the car, Gabe and I do a mad dash along the path to the cottage, our duffel bags bouncing against our legs as we run. Ash told us he’d be lying down after lunch so we’ll see him closer to dinnertime.
Someone, perhaps Bonnie, has clearly turned on the heat in anticipation of our arrival, and we find that the cottage is actually fairly toasty. Clean and tidy, too. While Gabe carries our bags upstairs, I switch on lamps on the ground floor, fill the teakettle with water, and open the fireplace flue.
By the time Gabe returns, a few flames are already licking up the sides of the logs I’ve lit. I finish making tea, and we both drop onto the sofa with our mugs. There’s a pleasant November-y scent to the room, coming from both the woodsmoke and the bowl of fresh pine cones that’s been placed on the coffee table. Watching the fire with Gabe has a calming effect on me, slowing my pulse.
And yet . . . I can’t imagine ever feeling truly at ease out here again, even in the cottage.
It’s not that I have any reason to be scared. Wendy’s in jail and awaiting trial, and she can’t lay a hand on us. From all accounts, the police have a solid case against her for Jillian’s murder. Paul Mizel—who needless to say is no longer representing her—heard through back channels that the police searched the dumpsters behind the medical center where Wendy had her sonogram and ended up finding the murder weapon in one of them. A mini pickax. Online, it’s described as a tool that helps gardeners break up hardened surface soil, but it’s capable of puncturing someone’s skull. Wendy must have grabbed it in a hurry from the potting shed when she spotted who she thought was Hannah making her way across the lawn. Then, the next night, she returned to the shed for the tool she used on me, which I’ve since learned was some kind of small hoe, sharp enough to do serious damage. If she’d managed to strike me several times in the head, she definitely could have killed me.
They also apparently found traces of Jillian’s blood and DNA in Wendy’s big designer tote, the one I saw her clutching in the living room the day of the murder. Obviously, she won’t be seeing how much she can get for it through TheRealReal.com.
Proving that she killed Claire is going to be tougher. The police did test Claire’s body for digitalis and the results showed that toxic amounts of it were present in her system. But unless Wendy confesses—and so far she’s denied everything—we’ll never know for certain if she was responsible. We may have to take consolation from the fact that she’ll surely spend decades in prison for Jillian’s murder.
Even now, with the benefit of hindsight, I’m still staggered by what Wendy was capable of. After it became clear that it was her, not Hannah, who killed Claire, I didn’t understand why she felt so desperate to keep her affair under wraps. If she was so unhappy with Blake, why not simply leave him?
But what we learned later from Blake—who from a DNA test proved he wasn’t the father of the baby—is that the man Wendy was cheating with is a twenty-nine-year-old associate of one of her clients, and he makes about fifty grand a year. Though Wendy would have done well enough in a divorce settlement, she obviously knew things would pale for her going forward. She wouldn’t be able to count on Blake’s income, and a prenup limited her from receiving any money the senior Keatons would leave upon their deaths.
And perhaps most significantly, the investment money Ash had offered her was being paid out over years, and any future funding for her prized gallery would clearly evaporate when the marriage did.
“Wendy liked me well enough to stay in the marriage and raise someone else’s kid with me,” a shattered Blake told Gabe. “But what she actually loved was her gallery and her lifestyle. That’s what she couldn’t stand losing.”
So it was greed that drove Wendy every step of the way. And I guess panic, too. The morning after her confrontation with Claire, she’d clearly gone to the study—where I stumbled on her—to hunt down the book on poisonous plants, a title she’d probably noticed in the past. She would have already known from the garden tours she’d been given by Claire that foxgloves are dangerous. And she’d learned previously from Blake that Claire took a diuretic, which would make ingesting digitalis even more dangerous. By that afternoon, Claire was dead—silenced before she could breathe a word to Blake. It’s possible Wendy even snuck into the house that afternoon and found Claire unconscious on the floor, and it was she, not Claire, who put the book back.