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“Everything about that fits, gorgeous,” Morrie said. “Except for one thing. Motive. What possible reason would Jonathan have for killing Hugh?”
“I’m still figuring that out,” I said. “But I think it has something to do with the history of the castle that Donna has written. By her own admission, Donna hardly spent any time at the castle. She didn’t care about the writers in her parents’ circle. She was down in London. But Jonathan has worked here most of his life, and he loves this castle. Think of how many stories he’s told us while we were here. I think he might be the real author of the book, but I don’t understand why—”
“Well done, Mina Wilde.”
I gasped as a shadowy figure appeared in the secret passage. Jonathan. And Fergus was by his side, growling. Jonathan had something huge and heavy in his arms. He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. “I wondered if you’d figure it out.”
CHAPTERTHIRTY
Jonathan lurched toward us. Instinctively, I shrank away from him, pressing my back into Heathcliff’s chest.
THUD.
The heavy object dropped from Jonathan’s arms onto the floor. Morrie rushed forward, no doubt going for his sword since Heathcliff’s was stuck in the wall and now useless.
His body stiffened as he regarded the object in Jonathan’s hands.
“This is Donna.” Morrie’s voice remained steady. “Is she dead? There’s blood on her face. What have you done to her?”
“Don’t come any closer.” Jonathan raised his arm. Morrie froze. “Get back beside the others.”
“Mina, he’s holding a gun.” Morrie backed away to stand in front of us, his body shielding mine and Heathcliff. “And he’s just dropped Donna’s body on the floor. I can’t tell if she’s alive or not.”
“She’s still alive,” Jonathan said. “For now. All of you, move to the center of the room, closer to Hugh.”
Heathcliff growled low in his throat as he reached down and gripped his belt so his trousers wouldn’t fall down. It would’ve been hilarious if not for how terrified I was. Even though I couldn’t see the gun, I could sense it, the coldness of the barrel sucking all the life from the room.
“I knew from the moment I met ye that ye were a clever lass, Mina Wilde,” Jonathan said as he moved back toward the passage with Fergus in tow. “I didn’t want to have to hurt ye. If you’d just stayed in the dining room, then everything would be okay. But you had to go and discover the passage and ruin everything.”
“Jonathan, I don’t know what’s going on,” I said. “But I think I understand a little. You wrote the manuscript that Donna was passing off as her own. That wasyourstory. Your love letter to Meddleworth House.”
“Aye. It was my father’s book. When he worked here, he was looking at the history books in the library, filling in the details to build a history for the house and grounds. I’ve been adding to his stories, checking facts, compiling dates and names. I’ve worked on that manuscript every spare moment when I’m not running about after ungrateful guests.” He made a rude gesture at Hugh’s body still slumped forward in his chair. “The annual writer’s retreat was the absolute worst. All these intellectual snobs talking out of their arses and Hugh Briston lording it over all of us while he felt up the maids in the supply closet. I wanted to publish arealbook – a piece of history so that people could finally see that this house meant something, that it should be preserved and celebrated, instead of used as a den of sin or aspa.” He spat the word.
“To be fair, the mud wrap is exquisite,” Morrie said.
“Not helping,” Heathcliff hissed.
“I hand-wrote that manuscript, every last word, fact-checked and sourced with the castle’s library. Last year, while Hugh was setting up for his first lecture, I snuck in and told him about it. I said he might like to look at it if he wanted a real story for his publishing company. And do you know what that bastard did?” Jonathan’s voice was as stormy as the wind howling outside. “He laughed. He laughed in my face.”
Fergus growled again, sensing his owner’s anger.
“He told me that he didn’t even have to look at the book to know that there was no way he’d want to publish it. He said that no one cared about a pile of stones in the middle of nowhere.”
“I was so upset that I threw the manuscript in the trash. But then I went online and I heard about this thing called self-publishing, where I could get the book edited professionally and then publish it myself. So I thought I’d give that a go. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bestseller, but I could offer copies to the guests and maybe make a few bob for my retirement. But when I went to collect the manuscript, it had disappeared. I didn’t have a copy, and I thought it was gone forever, but then Donna announced that she’d written a book. It was my book, only she’d taken out chapters of history and replaced them with silly stories about writers and ghosts. And now that there’s a pretty lass attached to it, Hugh Briston wants to publish it. But how did you figure it out?”
“I’m also interested,” Morrie said. “That was one hell of a guess, gorgeous.”
“It wasn’t a guess,” I said. “I finally figured out something that was niggling at me. Donna gave me a couple of chapters to read. I noticed that the same types of errors kept popping up in her manuscript – for example, the word ‘prick’ instead of ‘pink.’ Those errors happen because she had to use OCR scanning software to get the book into a digital format. It scans the handwriting and tries to guess the letters to create a digital file. I have to use software like that sometimes to scan documents so I can read them on my Braille note. They often get the same letters wrong.”
“That’s right. Clever girl to spot that,” Jonathan said. “By the time I found out that Donna must’ve been the one who took my manuscript, she already filled it with salacious stories from her childhood and the writer’s events and made the deal with Hugh. I confronted her about it, but she said that if I ever breathed a word to anyone, she would fire me and I’d never be able to set foot onto the Meddleworth estate ever again.” His voice trembled with emotion. “My da is buried here, in a grave on top of the ridge. I can’t leave him. I can’t leave this place. She had no right to take that away from me.”
“So why kill Hugh?” Quoth asked. “Donna was the one who stole your manuscript.”
Jonathan snorted. “Hugh had no respect for Meddleworth. He treated it like his personal playground. And he wouldn’t even look at the book when I handed it to him, but he saw a pretty skirt and changed his tune. He had to go. I thought I’d come up with the perfect plan – kill Hugh and ruin Donna’s plans for making her millions off the book. None of her fancy London toffs would want to come to a spa where someone had been brutally murdered. No, Donna would be forced to leave Meddleworth in the hands of someone who knew how to take care of it.”
“Someone like you,” I breathed.
“Aye. I would give this castle the care she deserves. I’ll tear out the poxy spa and free the ravens and make the grounds beautiful again. So I came up with my plan. The storm gave me the perfect excuse, and when Donna announced she was going to lock the room, it made everything even more perfect. Hugh Briston had bespoiled the name of Meddleworth, and he had to die. You should have seen his face when I stepped in front of him. He was so surprised.”
