“And tomato sauce,” the waitress said. This was English for ketchup.
“No!” they said. “Malt vinegar.”
The waitress gave a little smile and went away.
“So?” Sara said as soon as they were alone.
Jack motioned for Kate to go first.
“I want to say that asking for ‘something no one else knew’ worked. Clive was very pleased to be asked that.” Kate paused. “Remember how Mr. Howland said Diana wanted to breed horses?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Clive thinks Sean was stealing semen from some big-time racehorses and selling it.”
The visions that conjured made Sara say, “Ewww.”
Jack laughed in a dirty kind of way. “Bet when he showed up, the horses came running.”
“It was illegal,” Kate said.
“That’s what he was doing in the cemetery with those men,” Sara said. “Selling it to them.”
“Probably,” Jack agreed.
“I bet it was for Nadine,” Kate said. “I wonder if he did know she was pregnant? He worked with animals so he probably knew the signs.”
“Poor guy,” Jack said. “In love, about to be a father and no way to support a woman who was used to great wealth. Her daddy had even remodeled a room for a place she just visited. How could he compete with that?”
“That gives Mr. Howland a motive for murder,” Sara said. “He didn’t want his daughter running off with some low-class nobody. He was an extremely ambitious man, and this handsome stable lad was destroying his life plan.”
Kate was looking at her hands. “Maybe returning to Oxley made him remember what he’d done. Maybe he did take his own life.”
Their platters of divine English fish and chips arrived. “Keto be damned,” Sara mumbled as she shook the malt vinegar onto the fat “chips.” In the US, they’d be called home fries.
The waitress left and they were alone again.
“What about you?” Sara asked Jack. “Find out anything interesting?”
Jack smiled. “Just a little.”
“Out with it,” Kate said, her mouth full. Their drinks were lukewarm.
“Byon said he didn’t believe Diana actually liked men.”
“Hated them or liked women better?” Sara asked.
“Sex,” Jack said. “Liked women for sex.”
“Proof that she and Sean weren’t a couple,” Sara said. “Damn! But I’d like to know what happened to her. What else?”
“Byon said that after that night, Nicky changed.”
Sara closed her eyes for a moment. “I sometimes forget how good carbs taste. Anyway, how did he change? From what I gather, Nicky didn’t have many friends, so after everyone left, he was alone with his father. He must have been depressed.”
“Byon said that for the first year, he used to drive up from London every weekend, but Nicky was always angry and drunk. Byon stopped coming. Oh! And he said they missed Clive.”
“But then, they were united in their hatred of him,” Kate said. “It’s a kind of bonding. Too bad. Clive seems like a nice guy.”
“Asked you out yet?” Jack asked.
“Repeatedly.”
“If he—”
Sara cut him off. “What about Nadine?”
“We had a nice heart-to-heart. She said this place is making her remember the truth,” Jack said. “She told me about Sean and her.”
Kate and Sara leaned forward, ready to listen.
“Tell us every word,” Sarah said. “In detail.”
Sixteen
“Sean was a great lover,” Nadine said. “All those years of currying horses...” She raised her hands and moved them in a sensuous way. “He took his time. I’ve never...” She sighed. “No one since, if you know what I mean.”
Jack nodded. “Losing him... I can’t imagine how it hurt.”
Nadine took her time before replying. “At the time I thought I’d die. To have it all taken away in an instant... I didn’t know how to go on living. Willa had everyone’s attention because Clive had dumped her, so I was alone. They didn’t know about Sean and me.”
“It’s hard for me to see how you kept that a secret.”
Nadine shook her head. “It wasn’t easy. Damned Puck was everywhere. Sneaking here and there. But thanks to me, no one went to the cemetery house. Bertram was too cheap to hire a caretaker or to repair it. But that was good because it gave us a place to meet in secret. I came up with the idea of making people believe the house was haunted. Sean and I laughed as we set up the ghost equipment. We used the bathtub to—” She drifted away in memory of those days of the two of them together. Hands and soap and hot water.
Jack interrupted. “Puck found your hiding place.”
Nadine came back to the present. “She did. She seemed to have fallen through a door. Knocked it over. Sean was very upset. We met in the woods after that.”
“And in the chapel.”
She looked startled. “How do you know about that?”
“Just a guess. And you were going to have a baby,” he said softly.
She sighed. “I had been looking forward to telling Sean. Now that I’m older I see my stupidity, but back then, all I thought was ‘Now Sean can’t leave me.’”
“Did you believe he wanted to?”
“Yes and no. He’d said he couldn’t see how it would work between us. We were pretty sure that when we told my father he’d disown me. He used to be...” She looked away as tears came to her eyes. “This afternoon I have to choose his coffin.”
Jack put his hand over hers. “I’m sorry for all this. I liked the man.”
“Even though he tried to kill you?”
“Especially because he tried to kill me.”
For a moment, they smiled at each other in memory.
“It wouldn’t have worked,” Nadine said. “Sean and me. I can see that now. We wouldn’t have lasted more than a few years—if that. Marriage is serious business. All he and I had was wonderful, fabulous sex. We looked at each other and clothes came off.”
“Sounds good to me,” Jack said.
Nadine didn’t smile. “When I was with him, I couldn’t see reality. He had a very quick temper. And he hated all of us.”