The Unkindness of Ravens M. Hilliard (popular novels txt) 📖

The only other news item that mentioned Marjorie Douglas was a brief paragraph in the local paper a few years before her death. She had placed some land bordering the manor grounds in a trust. This land, along with a parcel from another relative, was to be used for future expansion of the village library “where she spent many happy hours.”

There was nothing else.

I flipped through the pages again, lingering over the last item. Joanna’s notes had mentioned a trust of some sort. What had it said? James Family Trust. Felicity’s maiden name was James. Had to be related, but how? Another thing to look into, but I could do that in the reading room. I needed to get back to reference.

I pulled out my phone and sent Jennie a quick text.

Got articles. Sal Cosmopoulos officer on scene of drowning. Retired, still alive and in town, I think. Pete’s Pizza connection? Also, James Family Trust important?

I stuffed everything back into the envelope and taped it shut. I wasn’t letting it out of my sight, but neither did I want to draw attention to it. I grabbed a request card and scrawled Jennie Webber’s initials and cell phone number across it, then stapled it to the envelope. If some evil befell me, the packet would go in the queue of requested materials and someone would call her. I grabbed some similar items from my desk, buried the envelope in the middle of the stack, and went out to reference. My phone buzzed in the hall. Jennie.

Thnx. Will check. Stuck downtown. Talk later.

I now knew everything Joanna knew. More, if she had never seen these articles, and I was sure she hadn’t. If she had gotten any further with her research there was no evidence of it, and she was a thorough investigator. There would be something. But could the little she had known have gotten her killed? I considered the large life insurance policy and the feud with Ed Dexter. For all I knew, checking up on Dexter was what took Jennie downtown. But those things seemed more and more unlikely. No, everything seemed to center around the Prentiss family tragedy. The answer was here, between the manor and the banks of the Ravens Kill. Vince, Felicity, and Matthew, in some combination, were the only people who kept turning up. Who else knew all the players and had spent their life in and out of the manor?

Millicent?

Millicent disliked Joanna’s push for progress. Based on the argument I’d heard between her and Vince, she felt she was being blackmailed. Her passion was local history and the Ravenscroft legacy. Would this trust for a potential library expansion have threatened that? Millicent and Marjorie Douglas would have been close in age, and both had spent plenty of time at the Manor. What was the connection? Who was the other relative who had donated land? I couldn’t make anything fit, but I couldn’t rule it out. There were too many blanks, and no way to dig into the legal documents from where I sat.

I eyed Mary Alice. She wasn’t a lifelong village resident, but she’d been here for decades and her husband was the local doctor until he retired. I trusted her. Still, I thought, glancing around the reading room, I needed to be circumspect. Within minutes, I had trundled a full bin from the book drop over to Circ and started checking them in.

“I ran into Felicity this morning,” I said. “We had coffee. She’s very upset about Joanna. Says it’s just too much on top of everything else. I hadn’t realized there was so much tragedy in the Prentiss family. Going back quite some time, I gather.”

Mary Alice shook her head.

“She was ahead of Carol Douglas in school, but still. It’s a small town. She took Marjorie’s death hard. Blamed herself. I was hoping she’d got past it, but I guess losing a friend has stirred up bad memories.”

“Why did she blame herself? The woman had dementia, didn’t she?”

“Marjorie was living with them at the time. She needed care but didn’t want to leave her home. The old Prentiss place was huge, so Matthew and Felicity and the kids moved in. They were renovating it. The place hadn’t been touched in years. Anyway, the youngest was just a baby, and colicky. Felicity wasn’t sleeping much. At first Marjorie was able to help with the older child, but the dementia got worse and then Felicity really had her hands full.”

“Marjorie started to wander, didn’t she?”

Mary Alice tsked. “It was heartbreaking. She kept trying to get to the Ravens Kill. She thought Carol was calling to her for help. Felicity told me once that everything would seem fine, and then she’d find Marjorie staring out the kitchen window, mumbling how she should have known, she had seen it, she should have done something, and soon after she’d slip out of the house. They put new locks on the doors, some kind of complicated deadbolt. And Marjorie got paranoid, too. She didn’t want to leave the grandchildren alone with anyone, and then she didn’t want Felicity out of her sight. I think in her mind they all became Carol, and she was trying to save them. She was frightened all the time. I remember Dave prescribed some kind of sedative so she would at least sleep through the night, but I’m not sure it was effective. Felicity looked to be on the edge of a breakdown.”

“But how was any of this her fault?”

“Well, as I said, she hadn’t been sleeping well for a while. As the baby’s colic got better, Marjorie got worse. There was a terrible storm the weekend Marjorie died. Heavy snow one night, and the next the temperature dropped and the wind picked up. Felicity had taken a turn shoveling, and was exhausted. She slept like a log all night. And I gather she’d been forgetting things, which is understandable, but there was some discussion of whether everything