Page 47 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
“Becky,” I say, dropping my hands. “There’s no proof—we can’t know that—”
“I do know—”
“Just because we know Ralph was a bad man doesn’t mean he murdered my mother. My dad says Ralph loved her. Loved her. She was his Domme. And she was coming back to Thornchapel or to him—why would he have killed her? We all want her death to make sense, to have some kind of reason behind it—God knows, I want that above anything else—but I can’t just believe it because my dad hates him. I need proof and there isn’t any.”
“I saw him with the body, Poe,” Becket says gently. “With her body.”
I stand up so quickly that Sir James bolts up too, spinning in a circle as if to find some danger to protect me from. I step past him in the aisle and then I turn back to face Becket. I’m
not even sure what my hands are doing or what shape my mouth is making, but it makes Becket get to his feet too with a face full of love and shared hurt with me, like he’s hurting just as much as I am, like he’s hurting because I’m hurting.
“No,” I say, unable to listen to this any longer. “You didn’t see him with the body. You couldn’t have. It was twelve years ago, you were fourteen, you were in Virginia.” I’m all practical-librarian now; I’m purely about quality of information, purely about checking sources and vetting facts.
Becket doesn’t come any closer, but I know he wants to, I know he wants to tell me this while holding my hand or hugging me, and I can’t decide if I think that’s kind or if I don’t want to be touched by anyone ever again. I face away from him, wrapping my arms around myself as if it will shield me from his words.
“We came to spend a week with my grandmother for her sixtieth birthday,” he says. “She let me borrow her car because I said I wanted to drive it down the lane and back. I drove it here instead.”
“No,” I say to the tabernacle. “No.”
“Dusk comes early on Samhain—it was dark by late afternoon. I could only see the ruins by firelight—and the light of the lantern circle surrounding the altar.”
I want to clap my hands over my ears, I want to beg him to stop. I want to say no as many times as it takes to will the world back to normal.
“Ralph was digging by the altar. He was alone, except for the body, and she was wrapped in a sheet close to where he dug. I watched him dig it, Poe, and I watched him put her in there.”
“Why didn’t you do anything?”
“What do you mean?”
I turn—I’m not angry because I’m not anything—I’m instead every emotion in its infancy, I’m the primordial soup of emotions. “You didn’t try to stop him? You didn’t call the police? You didn’t tell me before now—” even as I speak the words, the real horror of them snatches me up and tosses me between its teeth. “You knew,” I say slowly, a scream welling like a bubble in my throat. “You knew she was dead and you knew Ralph Guest killed her and you never said a fucking word—”
Becket is to me before the scream escapes, but his quickness is balanced with gentleness as he cups my elbows to look down into my face. Outside, the rain picks up enough to spatter and roar against the stone and glass walls of the church, echoing everywhere. “I didn’t know it was her, Poe,” Becket says. “How could I have? I had no way of knowing beforehand that she’d also come to Thornchapel for Samhain. And after that, my parents never spoke of her, they never talked about her disappearance. It wasn’t until you came back, until you told me your mother had disappeared here, at Thornchapel, and on that day, that it all came together for me. I’ve been trying to decide what to do ever since.”
I look up at him. Even though I haven’t been crying, my eyes feel hot and swollen. “Have you told the police?”
“I am going to. But I owed you the truth first, before I owed it to them.”
The scream dies in my chest unscreamed, but I’m still shaking, I’m still wildly angry and upset and disturbed and also weirdly guilty that Becket has carried this burden for so long. Because even if he didn’t know it was my mother . . . “You’ve known for years that Ralph Guest killed someone,” I say. “How—why didn’t—”
Becket’s face is both rueful and kind. “We’re not all Sagittari, Poe. I wish I were as fierce as you, as certain about what to do. But I was scared. Terrified, in fact—I’d always been terrified of Ralph, and knowing he was capable of murder only made it worse. I had to stay hidden in the trees for hours until he finally left so that I could sneak away safely because I thought he’d kill me too. I thought he’d kill me if I ever told the police.”
“You would have been safe,” I insist, but it’s a rote insistence, automatic, because the truth is I don’t know that for sure.
Becket shakes his head. “You were young that summer, so maybe you don’t remember him the way I do because I was old enough to see the kind of man he was. And when my family left after whatever big fight they had, they told me that Ralph Guest had more money than I could ever count in a thousand lifetimes, and that he’d use it to hurt us if we didn’t leave right away. If that’s what he’d do to us for not leaving, what would he do to us if I told the world what I saw? What if no one believed me, because I was just a teenager who’d stolen a car and he was Ralph Guest of Thornchapel? What if no one believed me and I got hurt? What if no one believed me and my family got hurt?”
He stops for a breath, and then lets go of me.
“I’m so sorry, Poe. When you came back, and everything made sense, I should have told you. But by then, Ralph was dead and I wasn’t sure—I didn’t know what the right answer was until Saint found her bones, and even then I wasn’t sure what possible good it could do to tell you. That night has haunted me for twelve years. I didn’t want it to haunt you too.”
“It already does,” I say, and I close my eyes tight for a minute, wishing I could squeeze out the last ten minutes like I can squeeze out the light.
But I can’t. It’s there now, it’s already catalyzed, it’s already burned into my memory like an acid etch.
Becket saw Ralph burying someone that Samhain night. That someone was my mother.
Ralph killed my mother.
God. Why? Why?
