Chapter 306 Murder Mystery
ADRIANA
Elijah told me I needed to rest and I agreed and then went to the dungeon.
To be fair to myself, I had been horizontal for several hours and the wound had stopped throbbing at a volume I found distracting, and the specific restlessness of having a partially resolved situation and nothing productive to do with my hands was worse for my recovery than a walk through the lower corridor. This was the reasoning I applied to myself. It was not the reasoning I applied to Elijah, who I simply did not tell.
The cells were quiet at this hour. I walked slowly, taking my time, and the faces I recognized called out to me in the particular chorus of people who had been sitting with their choices for long enough that the choices had lost their appeal.
I acknowledged none of it.
At the end of the corridor, in the room we’d moved him to, Tim was sitting at the small table doing nothing. He stood when he heard the door.
“Sit down,” I said. “I just wanted to check on you.”
He sat back down slowly. He was thinner than he should have been and the months showed in him, in the careful way he moved, in the slight uncertainty of someone who had been in a confined space long enough to have forgotten how to inhabit open ones.
“The woman who was Lucy’s best friend,” I said. “Clara. Is she likely to tell me the truth?”
Tim looked at his hands. “She was afraid,” he said. “When everything happened. She’d told me about the cabin and then afterward she was frightened — I think she was afraid of whoever had killed Lucy. Afraid they knew she’d talked to me.” He paused. “If she feels safe, I think she’ll tell you what she knows.”
“I’m going to make sure she feels safe,” I said. “That’s not difficult to arrange.”
I left him and went back upstairs and found Elijah in the courtroom.
He was not alone. Lana was with him, which was startling because Lana had been with the day nurse and I hadn’t known he’d collected her. She was in his arms and he was showing her the room, walking slowly around it, pointing at things, talking to her in the low continuous narrative he used with her that was somewhere between explanation and conversation.
“And this is your mother’s seat,” he was saying when I appeared in the doorway. “It’s the same height as mine because your mother made that point very clearly when the furniture was arranged. She said a smaller seat implied a lesser position and she was right.”
Lana grabbed his collar and made a sound.
“I agree,” he said.
He turned and looked at me and I looked at him and neither of us said anything about the fact that he was giving his infant daughter a tour of the courtroom or the fact that I was not in bed where I was supposed to be.
“I want to hear Tim’s case today.”
Elijah looked at Lana instead of me. “Today.”
“I’ve been thinking about it since I released him from the cell. He’s been waiting months for a proper hearing.” I moved to my seat. “And I think his case might connect to something larger. I’m not certain yet but I want to hear it.” I sat down and held out my arms for Lana and Elijah transferred her to me. “Will you sit with me or do you have something else?”
He sat in his seat.
We had the guards bring Tim up.
He came in blinking slightly in the courtroom light, and I had the chains removed before he reached us because I found them unnecessary and the sound they made on the floor was unpleasant. He sat in the chair across from us and straightened himself and looked at me with the expression of someone who had been waiting a long time for this and couldn’t fully believe it was happening.
“Tim,” I said. “Tell me everything. Your own words, your own order. Take as long as you need.”
He took a breath.
He and Lucy had been married for nearly ten years, he said. Good years for most of it — not perfect, but good, the kind of ordinary steady happiness that didn’t make dramatic stories but was the actual content of a life well lived. Then something shifted. She became closed off, distracted, on her phone at odd hours, coming home later than she should have been, giving explanations that were technically plausible but felt wrong in the way things felt wrong when you knew someone well enough to hear the difference between truth and construction.
He had given her space. He had told himself she was going through something she’d share when she was ready.
She told him she was taking a holiday with friends. He had agreed — she needed something, he could see that, and if time away would help then he wanted her to have it.
He called her friends when he couldn’t reach her and needed her help finding his anxiety medication.
The first friend said she hadn’t seen Lucy in months. Then the second. Then the third.
The last one, after considerable pressure, told him about the cabin.
Their honeymoon cabin. The place where they had spent their first married week, the place that meant something specific to their history. She had taken whoever this was there, to that place, and something about that detail had stayed with Tim in the way that particular betrayals stayed.
He drove there.
By the time he arrived she was on the floor. Throat cut. Blood already spread wide and dark across the boards. He had gone to her the way you went to someone you loved even when the evidence was overwhelming, and in the shock of the moment his hands had found the knife, and that was when the coast guards arrived for their routine check.
He stopped talking and looked at the table between us.
Lana, in my arms, made a small sound. I shifted her slightly.
“You were never questioned?” I said. “Before they arrested you?”
“They saw what they saw,” he said. “That was enough for them.”
“Who do you think killed her?” Elijah said.
Tim looked up. “Her lover. He killed her. I don’t know why — I don’t know what happened between them. But I know she was frightened of him by the end. I heard her once on the phone — she didn’t know I was near — and she said ‘he can’t find out.’ At the time I thought she meant me. That I couldn’t find out about them.” He paused. “But afterward I’ve thought about it differently. The way she said it. She was frightened. Not secretive — frightened. Like she was the one keeping a secret from him, not from me.”
I looked at Elijah. He looked at me.
“Do you know who the lover was?” I said.
“No. But Clara does. Lucy’s best friend. She met him once and she told me there was something wrong about him — she couldn’t say what exactly, just that he made her uncomfortable.” He paused. “She was afraid to say more after everything happened. But she knows.”
“I’ll bring Clara in,” I said. “Tomorrow.” I turned to Elijah. “Today I want Tim moved to a proper guest room and given access to the kitchen. He’s done nothing to justify continued confinement.” I looked at Tim. “You’re not going anywhere without telling us first. But you’re not in a cell.”
He looked at me for a long moment with the expression of someone recalibrating their expectations of how this was going to go.
“Thank you, My Queen,” he said quietly.