“No one could think they’re responsible,” Keith said, horrified. “They didn’t even go into the Council House until after you’d found Lady Marianne.”
“No, no, I don’t mean that. Even if someone loathes having outsiders around, they’d have to admit that there’s no way your friends could be guilty of anything. But what if the timing isn’t just a coincidence?”
The furrow between Keith’s brows made another appearance. “I don’t know how it could be anything else. It’s not like I invited them here because Lady Marianne died. So the only other option—” The furrow deepened. “The only other option would be if she died because I invited them.”
“Not because of you,” Iris said hastily. “But just because they were coming. What if someone didn’t want outsiders in Purity? You know how people here feel about that.”
“Would anyone even know?”
“Oh, yeah,” Iris said without hesitation. “Lady Marianne would’ve had to notify the rest of the Council, and they all could have talked to their friends and families, who could have talked too. Around here, secrets don’t stay secret for very long.”
“If that’s the case, then Lady Marianne and the killer were both in the reception chamber because it was an actual reception. Which makes more sense than anything else we came up with.”
“Right. She was meeting with a concerned citizen, and things got out of hand.”
Then whoever she’d been with had shifted and gored her straight through the heart.
It was an extreme reaction, and Iris couldn’t imagine who would leap to that kind of violence, no matter how much they felt provoked by a visit from a bunch of strangers. But fury on behalf of Purity’s, well,purity, like Keith had said, made more sense than anything else they had come up with.
“I’ll pass this on to my team,” Keith said. “Even if we’re wrong, we should keep them in the loop. And, ah, I’m not sure they’d jump to the conclusion that ‘I’m mad about tourists’ is a valid homicide motive.”
That was an excellent point. This place really was broken.
Someone needed to fix it. Not her, like she’d said. But someone.
She just didn’t know who.
16
Cooper had acceptedthe need to keep Keith out of the investigation, or at least out of the public side of it, but—to Keith’s admitted relief—he flat-out refused to spend the duration of it shunning himorIris.
“Everyone knows we’re here because you’re here,” he said firmly. “We told them that much. And everyone already knows you’re marrying Iris. I don’t know how they all know, unless you hired a sky-writer, but they do.”
“No sky-writing necessary, I promise,” Iris said, wheeling in a little drinks cart covered in glasses of sparkling fruit juice, their equivalent of post-dinner cocktails. “Gossip spreads like wildfire around here. The Council probably talked, for one thing. And we told my sister and brother-in-law, and they told everyone else. I mean that. They knoweverybody.”
Keith started to explain that Blake was an Abbott, but then he realized that no one else would know what he was talking about. It wasn’t like the Abbotts were a famous family outside of unicorn circles.
