Page 72 of When We Touch

“I’m your brother,” Justin reminded her.

She couldn’t find the words to explain why that made the whole conversation all the more uncomfortable. Instead, she sighed with impatience. “I don’t understand what’s so difficult for anyone to understand! We were alone. We were getting ready. And he was anxious. There. Period. That’s it. He suddenly constricted, froze, I guess . . . and lapsed into unconsciousness.”

“I’m sure it will be all right,” Justin said.

“Of course,” Mireau agreed.

Neither of them eased the tempest in her mind a bit.

* * *

“Arianna! Let me in.”

The door flew open and Jamie gazed at the young girl’s tear-stained face. “I thought you might be her,” she said.

“Arianna, Maggie didn’t kill your father,” Jamie said.

“Even Mrs. Whitley believes that she killed him!” Arianna insisted. “That woman married my father, and murdered him, all for money!”

“Arianna, you know that I inherit the estate.”

“Ah, but she inherits a fair amount, nonetheless!”

“You inherit a personal fortune as well. That doesn’t mean that you killed him.”

“Jamie, what a wretched thing to say!”

“The point is, people don’t murder people they care about for money. There are people who wouldn’t commit murder under any circumstance.”

“I am my father’s daughter. I truly loved him, and he was generous to a fault. She didn’t love him.”

“I believe that she did.”

“What an absurd lie, Jamie!”

“Not as she did her first husband, not passionately. . . perhaps not even as a wife should love a husband. But since they first met, they were together frequently. They talked endlessly and shared many views.”

Jamie entirely understood how Arianna felt, because as the hours had gone on, he had found himself going through many stages of grief. He remembered how Charles had been there for his father when his mother had died, and how he had come for Jamie himself when his father had passed away as well. Walking through his uncle’s library, he had thought of the way that Charles had loved books and learning, and enjoyed contemporary fiction as well as old classics. The shelves were lined with texts that were hundreds of years old, priceless, antiquarian tomes by the likes of da Vinci, Dante, and Dafoe, works on astronomy, geography . . . a half dozen tomes by or about Charles Darwin; poetry by Shelley, Keats, stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, Lord Byron, and even romances by the Brontes and Jane Austen.

The newspapers he had kept regarding world events were neatly filed in one corner. He kept dozens of journals. He’d read about medical breakthroughs, faraway cultures, military achievements, and even breakthroughs in the pursuit of police work and investigation. He’d been an amazing and well-educated man.

And like so many others before him, he had been determined on a young and beautiful wife when he had felt the pall of age creeping upon him. Jamie believed he knew, as most would suspect, that the actual realization of nearly possessing his bride had brought on the seizure of his uncle’s heart. There would be scandal, and certainly mockery, to come.

But that didn’t make the beautiful, too-young bride a murderess.

“Arianna, I’m so sorry, but please!” he said to her softly. “Your father’s death is a tragic loss, but he was an old man. Arianna, he might well have been a grandfather the year you were born. He was well into his seventies.”

“She knew it! Knew he was old, with a poor heart, when she married him.”

“No one ever suggested he had a poor heart, Arianna.”

“She knew it! Somehow.”

“Arianna, please. Harboring these thoughts will not help you with your loss and grief.”

“But hating her does help me, Jamie. Hating her, and . . .”

“And what?” he asked sharply.