Page 2 of Her Last Refuge

Douglas,

I’ve spent thirty years telling myself I imagined it—that grief makes people see things that aren't there, and that a sixteen-year-old girl standing in a field looking at her father's body is not exactly a reliable witness to anything. But I did NOT imagine the state of him, and I did not imagine what I found in the barn two days later. And I do not think I imagined what you told my mother in this very office when you thought I had already left the room.

I have started writing this letter more times than I can count. I don't know how to say what I actually believe without sounding like I've lost my mind, so I will just say it plainly. I don't believe what happened to my father was an accident. I believe someone made it look that way. And I believe I know who. And I believe you know much more than you are saying.

The letter ended there.

No name. No accusation spelled out. There was only the promise of one, dangling at the bottom of the page, and then nothing.

Rachel had started looking for Douglas Farrell within just a few hours of reading the letter for the first time. It hadn't taken long. He'd practiced law in the county where the Lewises had lived for close to forty years. He’d handled wills and land disputes and, according to one clipping, the Lewis family's affairs going back at least two generations. He'd died in 2006, according to an obituary Rachel had found archived on the local paper's website, survived by a wife who'd passed six years after him. There'd been nothing dramatic about his death. A stroke, the obituary said. He was seventy-eight.

But his name turned up more than once in Eleanor's collection. A newspaper clipping about a land sale from the seventies had him quoted as the attorney of record. Another clipping, this one about Victor Lewis’s death, mentioned Farrell had been the one to handle the estate. And Eleanor's timeline referenced him twice more, in shorthand notes that didn't explain themselves: D.F. at house, night before. And later, underlined twice: D.F. lied to Mama.

Rachel picked the letter back up and read the last lines again.

I believe someone made it look that way. And I believe I know who. And I believe you know much more than you are saying.

She'd been circling the same question for days now, and it hadn't gotten any less strange with repetition. If Eleanor believed she knew who'd killed her father, and if she'd gone as far as drafting a letter to say so to the family's own attorney, why stop short of naming him? Why write the accusation and then fold it into an envelope that never went anywhere?

Unless the person she suspected was Farrell himself.

It would explain everything about the scope of the letter, she supposed—the careful, glancing references to what he'd told her mother. The unnamed someone she claimed to know. If Eleanor believed the family's attorney had a hand in her father's death, she couldn't very well send him a letter accusing him outright, not without giving him time to bury whatever was left to find. So maybe that’s what the final line was supposed to suggest.

And if that were the case, maybe Eleanor had never intended to send the letter at all. Maybe it had been a kind of test, something drafted and set aside and revisited over the years as she tried to summon up the courage to send it. And though she’d never actually sent it, she had given her friend in the FBI a key to unlock the box she had kept it in. Surely that wasn’t incidental.

Rachel knew that her theory that Eleanor believed Farrell had something to do with her father’s death was a strong one. But it was also built on old evidence accrued by a grieving daughter. And now here she was, building her theory out of gaps and undated pages written in a dead woman's shorthand.

She was so wrapped up in the puzzle of it all that she didn't hear Jack come down the hall. She noticed him only when she looked up to reach for her glass of water and found him standing in the doorway of the kitchen. His arms were crossed loosely as he watched her with an expression she recognized as a cute sort if impatience.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey." She looked back down at the letter.

"You've been out here a while."

"I know. I'll come up soon."

He didn't move from the doorway. "Paige asleep?"

"Should be. I made sure she went up before I brought all this out."

"Good thinking." He came in and stood behind the chair across from her, not sitting down. "Have you found anything new?"

"No. I’m just going over the letter again." She turned the legal pad slightly so it caught more of the light. "Trying to figure out why she never sent it."

"Any theories?"

"A few." She didn't elaborate, and after a second she felt him watching her instead of the paper, which was somehow worse. She felt bad because while she enjoyed the fact that he was trying to stay updated with what she was working on—even when it wasn’t anything for work—it did annoy her when he sort of hovered.

"Rach."

"Yeah?"

"You've read that letter probably fifty times since we got it. I don't think reading it a fifty-first time tonight is going to unlock something new."

"Maybe not." She reached for the timeline instead, running her finger down the column of dates. "But you never know. There’s a…almost a pattern, I guess. Farrell's name comes up four times if you count the shorthand notes, and every single time it's tied to something that doesn't add up. He's at the house the night before. He tells her mother something Eleanor didn't believe. He's the one who handled the estate afterward, which means he'd have had access to whatever paperwork existed on the property, the equipment, all of it."

"Okay." Jack pulled the chair out this time and sat, though his eyes went to the clock on the stove before they came back to her. "So he's connected. That's not the same as him doing it. He was their attorney, right?"