“I told her a week before my death when we met up at your shop to collect some of her brews.” She glanced down, embarrassed. “I even bought one of your family’s love potions.”
“You intended to use it at the dinner.”
“It was only to remind him of what we once had,” she said a bit desperately. “Once it wore off, he could make his own choices. I-I just wanted to give us another chance.”
Charles Bingley. Lydia. Possession potion. A sickness gathered in my stomach. No, I must be wrong. I wanted to be wrong. But all the pieces had come together in mymind. I shut the diary with trembling hands and returned it to my bag. “Thank you, Isabella,” I said in a calm voice. The books in my bag rustled as I rose on shaky legs.
“Mary, are you okay? You look pale.”
I tried to force a smile but failed. “I need to go home.”
She gasped. “You know who it is, don’t you? ItisLydia, isn’t it?”
But I couldn’t stay. “I must go and check something, I have to…”
And with that, I rushed from the cemetery, hurrying home.
I walked into the shop, trying to calm the painful pounding of my heart. The tables remained largely unoccupied, save a couple of patrons in the corner. I heard a noise coming from the kitchen. I slipped into the back to find Lydia there. Flour covered most of her chestnut brown hair and was smeared over half of her face. Her movements, sharp and rough, pounded the dough with a rolling pin, as if she had to beat it into submission.
“Lydia?”
Her eyes flashed to me, then refocused on her cooking. “No time to talk,” she muttered, snapping up a mixingbowl. “I’m baking pies for tomorrow’s bake-off. Where’s the sugar?” She grabbed a jar of a white powder-like substance.
I eyed the perilous stacks of pies that extended almost to the ceiling. How long had she been at this? “I think you may have enough,” I offered.
“Don’t distract me. I’m concentrating,” she said.
“Is that why you are about to add salt instead of sugar?”
She froze, the scoop in her hand, before replacing it in the container with a huff. I eased over to the counter and lifted the jar of sugar and handed it to her. It was very much like my youngest sister to stress bake when a problem bothered her. The easiest way to get her to talk was to join her in her cooking mania.
“Like I said. I’m busy so—”
I gently removed the phone from my pocket and placed it on the counter. “Why did you send me this text?”
She frowned, pouring too much sugar into the bowl. “I understand you wish Frank to be innocent, but you need to let go of this childish fantasy that he didn’t kill Isabella.”
I set my bag on the floor and moved to the sink, rolling up my sleeves. “But Frank didn’t kill Isabella. And we both know who did, don’t we?”
A trace of fear flashed in her eyes, and she mixed the ingredients of the bowl faster. “I have no idea what you’re referring to.”
“I was lost until you sent me this.” After wiping my hands on a towel, I pushed the phone across the flour covered counter. “Why did you send it?”
“I-I wanted you to understand that your actions are pointless. That he—”
“Frank was about to turn himself in for a crime that he didn’t do.” I gripped the dough she’d been pressing too thin and folded it, taking up the rolling pin.
Lydia’s expression sparked with relief and her frantic mixing slowed. “He was? You didn’t stop him, did you? Don’t you see that everything would be resolved and she…”
“She?”
“It doesn’t matter.” She waved a flour covered hand. “Frank needs to confess. After all, he’s the monster, theone that’s illegal. If he hadn’t been around, none of this would have happened.”
I stopped rolling to look at her in disbelief. “He intended to admit to a killing he did not commit, Lydia.”
“He did do it, Mary.”
Now it was my turn to press the dough a tad too thin. “Somebody else was in control of him.”
