He nods. “Will you excuse me for a minute? I need to call my sister, Jean, and break the news, and I want to get it out of the way while I’m still standing.”
“Of course.”
I follow him down the corridor and as he veers right, probably pointed toward his study, I head to the dining room, where Gabe’s brothers are milling around with Wendy, Keira, and Hannah, who’s surfaced again, now wearing a somber look. A few people have helped themselves to food, others just to wine. I embrace each of my brothers-in-law, without bothering to stifle my tears. Marcus and Blake seem to be trying hard to hold themselves together, while Nick’s eyes are rimmed with red. As soon as I release him from ahug, Hannah snakes an arm possessively around his waist again. Maybe I should remind her I already have a Keaton and I’m not in the market for a second one.
Still, I have to applaud her acting skills. The corners of her deep brown eyes are turned down, and so are the ends of her mouth, as if she’s devastated on Nick’s behalf—and her own, too. And her straight-backed posture suggests she feels she has every right to be standing smack in the middle of our group, grieving, even though most of us have known her for only two days.
Does she have any idea, I wonder,that the stress she subjected Claire to might have played a role in her death?Doubtful. Hannah’s got too big of an ego for a thought like that. She might even be secretly gloating over the fact that she’s been handed a get-out-of-jail-free card after her stern talking-to by Claire last night. There must be just one niggling worry: that Ash is wise to whatever Claire threatened her about.
“Here you go, love,” Blake says to Wendy, handing her a large glass of sparkling water. “You need to stay hydrated.”
“Thanks,” she says. She looks not only sad but tense, making me wonder if she’s second-guessed her decision to have accompanied people to the hospital. That kind of stress can’t be good when you’re newly pregnant.
“How’s Henry doing?” Blake asks, directing his attention to me.
“Gabe’s telling him now. I’m sure he’ll be really upset.”
“She was an incredible grandmother. It’s terrible to realize that our own child will never meet her,” he says, looking at Wendy.
And neither, I think,will the ones I hope to have with Gabe.
“I’m glad she learned about the baby, Blake,” I say. “It must have made her so happy.”
“I only wish I’d gotten to her sooner today,” he says, taking the conversation in a different direction. “God knows how long she lay there while we were all outside the house, including my dad and the dogs.”
“I saw her around two thirty in the kitchen, and she said she was going up for a nap. So maybe she’d come downstairs right before you found her.”
He nods soberly.
“I should probably force myself to eat a little something,” Wendy interjects. “And then go to bed.”
“Yes, sweetheart, I think that’s best,” Blake tells her. “Make sure you get some protein, and let me know when you’re ready to head to the carriage house.”
Wendy starts off toward the sideboard, and my phone pings again. When I see it’s a text from Gabe, I excuse myself and step aside to read it.
H is pretty upset. Gonna stay for a while, help him fall asleep. Can you relieve me in a bit so that I can head back over to the house?
Of course. I’ll be back soon.
I say good night to everyone, and after smearing a wedge of blue cheese onto a piece of bread to go, exit the way I came. It will take Gabe a while to get Henry to sleep, so I linger in the dusk along the path, admiring Claire’s large garden near the boxwoods. The landscape people who work the property will continue to maintain everything, but as certain plants die, they’ll be replaced with less imaginative choices, and these gardens are bound to lose their uniquenessbefore too long. Over the next day or two, I decide, I’ll take pictures of them with my phone so I can capture them as they are right now.
When I reach the cottage, I round the building to the little patio in the back. The border garden here is much smaller than others on the property, but no less enchanting. I pause in the fading light, admiring the ingenious mix of bold and subtle colors, soft and thorny textures.
There are definitely some flowers missing from it, though. I stare at a small, ragged gap in the garden, one, I realize, that a hungry deer couldn’t actually be to blame for. As Claire always told me, deer usually gobble blossoms, not the stalks, too. The missing flowers appear to have been clipped off at the very base.
I step closer. The flowers surrounding the gap are foxgloves, tall stems lined with purple, trumpet-shaped blossoms. Which means the missing ones must be foxgloves, too.
How weird, though. Because as I heard Claire tell Hannah, foxgloves shouldn’t be used in bouquets. They’re deadly to animals. And to humans, as well.
11
In the fading light, it’s hard for me to see. Slipping my phone from my pocket, I activate the flashlight and direct it toward the stumps of the missing flowers, then run the beam over the surrounding clusters of foxgloves to get a closer look at their stalks. It’s pretty clear that they match up.
Since Claire would never have picked the foxgloves herself, someone else must have. But why? They’repoisonous. Unless... My skin crawls. Unless someone picked thembecausethey’re poisonous.
That’s crazy, I tell myself. No one here at the house would choose to hurt someone else. Unless they secretly despised that person, or felt threatened by them.
Well, Hannah has surely felt threatened lately, right?You do the right thing—or I will.
