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“Well, if you had, you’d know he came to a different conclusion than I have. He concluded Rose killed Dorothy, and that night, Rose was wearing an orange dress.”
I sunk back into the couch.
There it was. That was it.
Decisions my subconscious was making about what I was feeding it were filtering into my dreams. I wasn’t seeing what actually happened. My mind was making it up.
Maybe Ian was right. Maybe we needed to stop talking about this.
Even as I thought that, Ian kept talking about it.
“Clifton was fascinated by Rose, Joan, David’s first wife, and Virginia, almost more so than Dorothy. But he betrays a healthy dose of misogyny, because not simply did he pin all the dirty deeds on women, even if he dedicated the book to her, he was derisive of Dorothy’s lifestyle, the power she wielded through her sexuality, and looked down on her bisexuality. He even tried to argue it was vile conjecture when it wasn’t. Several of her female lovers’ letters and diaries made it clear she enjoyed her own sex as much as the opposite one. And he surmised that Virginia did away with Joan, which is ludicrous. Joan was tall and stately, country stock. I believe she was five eight. Virginia was petite and reed thin, as flappers tried very hard to be. She couldn’t hoist Joan up in a noose from a twelve-foot ceiling.”
“He thought she did the deed herself?”
He nodded. “In the dead of night during another, smaller house party. The problem with his theory was, at the time, Virginia was engaged, supposedly to a man she cared for very much. He got scarlet fever, which led to meningitis, and died. Some say she married David in a fugue state, such was her grief she lost her fiancé, this coupled with the fact she couldn’t have William, her first love, and was being married off to David, who she did not love. David certainly capitalized on it one way or another. He had his ring on her finger within months of Virginia’s fiancé’s death, which was within months of Joan dying.”
He took a sip of coffee and then kept speaking.
“Many women then had little say in who they married, especially those who were highborn. The story goes, the love sprung up between her and William, under the jealous eye of David. He was taken, but her parents put a stop to any hope William had of being with her, and Virginia with William. In the meantime, William found Rose. Virginia’s parents found her a fiancé they approved of. He then found himself dead. David, in my opinion, found a way to rid himself of his wife. He approached Virginia’s parents, and she was married off unceremoniously to her first love’s brother, and forced to live in a house with him, and his wife, and at times her husband and lost love’s paramour.”
I thought of the dates on the portraits, painfully did the mental math, and they didn’t add up.
Particularly when David was deposed as earl.
“Was Virginia pregnant when she married David?”
“No. They didn’t have any children. The earldom was inherited by David’s only child. A son he had with Joan.”
Holy crap!
“So you’re a product of Joan, not Virginia?”
“I am.”
“Whoa. This is making Daniel and Portia and Brittany look tame.”
“Agreed, however, what I’d like to talk about now is, do you always dream like this?”
I shook my head.
“Only here?”
I nodded. “I dream, and I’ve had a few nightmares along the way, but I don’t dream every night, or I don’t recall them. And I do here, and I could tell you everything that happened in them.”
“So tell me,” he ordered. “Now.”
I opened my mouth to do that, or I’d get to it, after I asked about his current intensity, but I didn’t get any words out.
Because, regrettably, he said his next.
“But also, although I doubt you can answer this query, I’d like to know why that photograph was in the safe. It’s not kept there. Aunt Louisa had a meticulously organized filing system with all the history of Duncroft she kept in a room on the top floor. That picture was in it. The only reason Adelaide and Augustus’s letters are down here is because I want them to have privacy, and when we allow outsiders access to our papers, I don’t want them read. That room is locked. Temperature controlled. Has an expensive air filtration system, so the pictures, papers, daguerreotypes, slides and photographs in them will be preserved, as will Aunt Louisa’s tireless work on them. And, for the most part, unless a historian contacts us, that room remains untouched. In fact, I think the last person Dad let in there was Steve Clifton, when he was researching his book.”
Cue another chill gliding over my skin.
Before I could react to it…
“So it’s about the money!” was shrieked from down the hall.
