And yet, she felt a fresh hunger surge within her. She was going to do this.
Lillie waited to ring Vera Lackey’s front bell until Grace was out of sight. From this angle, it was apparent that the house was in worse shape than Grace had first thought. The roof, at the very least, needed replacing. She could smell a lilac bush blooming just beneath the rotting window.
The white curtains flicked, and then the door hesitantly opened.
“Miss Carter?” Vera asked with surprise. “What are you doing here?”
When Grace appeared next to Lillie, she paled.
“I’m Grace,” Grace said. She smiled thinly. “But I think you know that already.”
“Come in,” Vera said, looking furtively over their shoulders at Theodore’s waiting carriage. Its presence provided Grace with a comforting sense of protection. “We can have tea.”
The shifty look she gave them was less than assuring, but Grace followed her into the dim hallway anyway. There were knickknacks on every surface, cluttered but immaculate, and Grace examined them on the way into Vera’s small parlor. Wallpaper was peeling around framed baby silhouettes and through the window, Grace glimpsed a small vegetable garden.
Vera sat. “What is this about?” she asked.
“We need to speak to you about Harriet Forbes,” Lillie said.
Thankfully, the woman didn’t try to play dumb.
“What do you want to know?” she asked. Her eyes shifted from Lillie to Grace and back again.
Grace’s neck prickled as she felt something watching her. She turned her head to see a cat, staring at her from the basement stairs.
“You were following Harriet Forbes,” Lillie said. “Spying on her.”
“Oh, come,” the woman said with a nervous titter. “‘Spying’ is a little sensational.”
“I disagree. Not when that same woman was murdered not long after,” Grace said.
When Vera remained silent, Lillie prodded, “Did my mother hire you?”
Vera cleared her throat. She seemed young for the gray beginning to streak through her mousey brown hair. “Yes. I was hired by your mother to watch Harriet and Oliver.”
“Why?” Lillie asked.
Vera clasped her hands. “She suspected there was something going on between them, despite their claims to the contrary. I was merely to follow them and report what I saw.”
“And then she wound up dead. On a night you were there,” Grace said.
Lillie shot her a look from the corner of her eye, and Grace backed off.
“Mrs. Carter didn’t hire me tokillher, if that’s what you’re inferring,” Vera said coldly.
“I just think the timing is interesting,” Grace said. “Do the police know about this arrangement?”
“You think turning suspicions from one family member to another is going to help your case?”
Vera laughed and stood, picking up the cat. It slunk beneath her, rubbing its face along her neck and purring. There was a doll in the corner, looking at them with dead glass eyes.
Lillie touched Grace lightly on the hand, and Grace knew she had to tread carefully. Her cousins wouldn’t want to see their mother wind up in jail, either.
“When you were following Harriet, did you see her go into the Tunnels at all?” Grace asked.
Vera shook her head.
“Did you see her meet with her sister, Penelope Forbes?”
