Page 43 of The Vanished Sister

“And your father?” asked Mrs. Watson.

Everett Carstairs walked in then, and with him came a whiff of that strange burning smell. Mrs. Watson was so distracted by the bits of ash that still clung to his daycoat that it was a moment before she could greet him and begin her account.

Ever since the body in the rowboat had been taken to Ilfracombe, she had sought for evidence that her sister had not died but had only run away. Accompanied by Penelope, she had searched one station after another along the railway line, and the towns and villages attached to those stations.

Today they had at last reached Taunton, where Justina would have needed to change trains if she was to go any farther. As luck would have it, they came across a man in his sixties who sold ginger beer outside the station. He had been tasked by a beautiful woman to purchase a ticket to London and she’d given him such a large tip that he’d taken himself to gamble for the next forty-eight hours, and his place had been nearly usurped by some upstart selling cockles.

And this man didn’t even need to look at Mrs. Carstairs’s photograph. He’d said to Mrs. Watson, She looked a great deal like you. When I first saw you, I thought it was her again.

His good fortune, as verified by those who had stalls around him, had indeed happened on the day Mrs. Carstairs had been found missing, and she had come through at roughly four o’clock in the afternoon.

The Carstairs men listened with rapt attention. Charles Carstairs asked what the other hawkers recalled of his mother. Reginald Carstairs, wiping away a silent tear—which moved Mrs. Watson more than she thought possible, as Justina had been only his stepmother—wanted to know whether and how much farther Mrs. Watson had gone on from Taunton.

And Everett Carstairs, after his sons had exhausted their inquiries, said simply, “I’m sure you must have asked the ginger beer seller and others around him whether she seemed well.”

“I did indeed. They said she was unsmiling, but in good health.”

“Then that’s all that matters,” said Justina’s husband with a sigh.

But was it?

At the end of her visit, he walked her out. In a moment of relative privacy, waiting for a carriage to pull up, he said, “You wish to say something to me, Mrs. Watson?”

She studied this brother-in-law, a perfectly matched physical specimen to her sister, who had been just as unknowable.

“What Justina did, having others buy tickets for her on two separate occasions—on the face of it, they appear to be evasive moves. But I think she’d have been much less memorable if she’d walked up to a ticket booth and made her own purchases. Many ticket clerks scarcely look up.”

Not to mention these days there were various veiled hats for riding in open carriages and automobiles. In such headgear, Justina could have bought her own tickets without revealing her appearance. Or she could have worn one while speaking to the hawkers. Instead she’d allowed herself to be seen, outside the railway stations at Ilfracombe and Taunton.

“You imply, madam, that she intended for people to know that she’d gone off somewhere on her own?”

The light from the house cast Everett Carstairs’s features in chiaroscuro. The harsh contrast underscored the loss of elasticity in his skin and the spread of crow’s-feet. When she first met him, he could have passed for a man still in his forties. But now he looked a solid decade older.

“I posit that she explicitly did not wish you to be suspected for her disappearance,” said Mrs. Watson.

“Very kind of her, don’t you think?” He smiled ruefully. “And here I am, burning a few of her favorite dresses, being much less kind.”

Goodness, so that was the smell, not hair or feather but costly silk and wool turning into cinders. Mrs. Watson shivered. The anger of the gesture. It was violence in everything but name.

“Why did she leave? You know, don’t you?”

She did not intend to get an answer from him, merely to apply pressure. And he replied in kind. “I think I do. I hope I do. But your sister, if you haven’t realized yet, is not a woman who reveals her true thoughts to others.”

Did he mean to make her doubt everything Justina had said to her of late? To question, Oh, I have loved him. I might still love him, for all I know?

And then, with a pang in her heart, she remembered, How I love you, Jo.

That was the one thought she wanted to hold on to, the one expression she wished would fossilize into immutable truth.

“Do you know,” said Everett Carstairs, “when she told me that she’d invited you to join us, she said that the two of you had a brief conversation on the terrace of Sans Souci.”

They’d indeed exchanged a few words on the terrace, mostly about how Justina could prove the sincerity of her invitation.

“And then she told me there was a terrace rather like that at Eastleigh Park.”

Mrs. Watson sucked in a breath. “She’d been to Eastleigh Park?”

“Apparently so, during the years when you were its de facto mistress. The grounds were open to the public and she applied for a tour. She said she saw the youngest son of the house drawing on a terrace overlooking a man-made lake.”