Hush Now, Don't You Cry(101)

“Sam,” I said cautiously. “When your cousin Colleen died, you weren’t on the lawn with everyone else. Your cousin Eliza said you came running up, looking guilty.”

His young face flushed bright red. “How did you know about that?” he said.

I ignored the question. “So what had you been doing?” I asked. “Why weren’t you with the others?”

He grimaced. “All right, if you really want to know—I’d been in the kitchen, helping myself to cakes,” he said. “She told me not to touch them, that they were still cooling, but I snuck in when everyone else was sitting on the lawn. Then I heard this awful scream and everyone was yelling. It was horrible. I really liked my little cousin. We used to play together. I’ve always felt, you know, that I might have been able to save her if I’d been around.”

“You believe that Kathleen pushed her, do you?”

He looked up, surprised. “Of course. How else could she have fallen backward over the cliff? And Kathleen never said a word after that. That had to mean she was guilty, didn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’d like to find out.”

“She pushed Mrs. McCreedy today,” he said. “Nobody else could have done that.”

That was true enough. I wanted to believe Kathleen innocent, but nobody else knew that she had been hiding up in the tower.

I left him to his eating and made my way across the grounds. Two policemen were standing at the door to the house. They barred my way. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but nobody is to go in at the moment. The chief and the doctor are still up there.”

“And my friends are still with the young girl?”

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “I just know that I have orders that nobody is to go inside. You’ll find the rest of the family out on the lawn, I believe.”

He folded his arms, making it quite clear that he was not going to let me past that door. So I had no choice but to go to the lawn and join the family. I wasn’t sure they’d welcome an outsider at a moment like this, but they appeared almost jolly as I approached them, chatting away and passing food. Eliza looked up and spotted me.

“Mrs. Sullivan, do come and join us. Have you heard the latest news?”

“I’ve been out all day,” I said. “I just returned to find more newspapermen and the police won’t let me in the house.”

“That’s because poor Mrs. McCreedy was found dead,” Eliza said. She motioned to the maid to pull up a chair for me. I sat. “And you asked me about our cousin Kathleen. Little did we know that she’s been in the house all this time. My uncle Brian had a suite of rooms made for her up in the tower and apparently Mrs. McCreedy was taking care of her, until now.” She leaned closer to me. “I can tell you it’s a load off everyone’s mind.”

“That your uncle has been providing for her so well?”

“No!” she said scornfully. “That it’s now obvious who killed Uncle Brian. She pushed her sister over the cliff, and then her grandfather, and now her caregiver…” She paused. “Poor little thing,” she added. “She’s obviously out of her mind. Uncle Brian left a large sum of money for one of us to take care of her, but now, after this, she’ll have to be locked away, won’t she? She’s clearly not safe.”

I looked around the group. Irene’s eyes were red as if she’d been crying, but other than her I could read the relief in their faces. It wasn’t one of them, it was a deranged person. Life could return to normal. I accepted a cup of tea from a maid.

“You’ve heard the shocking news about Brian’s granddaughter Kathleen, I suppose,” Joseph Hannan said as he noticed I had joined them. “What was he thinking to keep a dangerous lunatic here in the house, where she could have escaped and done harm to her brothers? We are just debating what should be done with her. She’s obviously not responsible for her actions but the police will want her locked away.”

“I was about to suggest that there was a very pleasant nursing home in my former parish in Cambridge,” Father Patrick said.

“I didn’t know you had a parish in Massachussets, Uncle Pat,” Terrence said.

“No, not Cambridge, Mass,” Father Patrick said. “A little town in the Hudson Valley. I was also once in Salem, New York—not a witch to be seen.” And he smiled.

I had taken a mouthful of tea but couldn’t swallow it. I forced it down, burning my throat. Now I remembered. On the night when Daniel was close to death and Father Patrick had chatted pleasantly to distract me from my worry, he had mentioned his little church in Granville.