BODY ON THE ISLAND a gripping murder mystery packed with twists (Smart Woman's Mystery Book 2) by VICTORIA DOWD

Author:VICTORIA DOWD [DOWD, VICTORIA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Joffe Books crime thrillers and mysteries
Published: 2021-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17: SKULDUGGERY

Inside was dead. This whole house was dying but here seemed to be where all the rot stemmed from — this place. I could smell it, the ripe decay growing through everything, rotten tendrils infesting every crack and pipe. The house occasionally let out a resigned groan as another part of it perished. On the far wall, an old spinning wheel stood silent as if abandoned at the end of a dark fairy tale, banished to this broken room until some foolish traveller might lose their way and find themselves opening this door.

Two old banister ends leaned in a corner. A cold fireplace was framed by a blackened mantelpiece. Its iron fireguard was bent and bulging out as though something had pushed hard against it from inside the fireplace. As I looked closer, I saw tiny porcelain-white bones clustered in the hearth in small piles. They were chalky with age, falling to dust at the edges. A small smattering of dry, crumbling droppings and ragged feathers betrayed that there had once been birds in this room too, lost and frantic with life, exhausted from battering at this cage. Finally, they’d succumbed to this strange new world. Nothing lived here anymore.

I looked back towards the landing, where all the voices had gone silent. Spear watched me from the door. He didn’t speak.

There was a sadness in here, a confusion, as if this room, this house, could not understand why it had been left behind. What had happened? One day there was life — beds that were warm with sleep, fires burning pockets of light into the dark cold. But the flames had flickered and grown weak, dwindling into loss. And then they were gone. No one was left and there was no explanation. Something took those last two sisters away — death or a life elsewhere. Spear knew something about it. Could I trust he’d tell me the truth? This house, though, would never know what had happened or why it now echoed to the sound of so much desolate emptiness.

The rain tapped incessantly at the window. It had been left half-open as though the old women had just deserted the place and fled for the hills with no care for securing the place from the weather. A cruel little draught scuttled through the room making it seem even more bleak.

Outside on the landing, Angel was murmuring about how he’d been the victim of a theft and nobody cared. Bridget and the others were talking as if they’d forgotten I was there. Their muted voices seemed to drift further away.

Only tokens of life remained in this room, in the superstitions nailed up in more dolls and tangles of hair above the door frame. Over the mantelpiece was an old etching of some joyful Victorian scene, a man playing with three children, one child pulling at his coat insistently. I could hear the room ring with their broken laughter.

It stopped, as if they’d seen me watching, as if they’d been painted into that moment and all they could do was turn their eyes to look at me.

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