Page 30 of Scarred By Sin

“Good afternoon, Gwenyth.”

No response. Gwenyth’s hands remained on the railing, her gaze directed downward but unfocused, as though she were searching for something that existed several layers beneath the surface of the hardwood floor.

Brook didn’t push. She placed one hand on the banister and began to ascend, taking the steps slowly enough that Gwenyth could track her movements without feeling rushed or cornered. The wood creaked beneath Brook’s weight, each step producing its own specific groan, and the sound seemed to register somewhere behind Gwenyth’s eyes, though her expression didn’t change.

When Brook reached the first landing where the staircase split, she lowered herself carefully onto the top step and sat down. It wasn’t the most dignified position for a woman eight months pregnant, and the process of getting back up would require more effort than she cared to think about, but she’d learned a long time ago that the fastest way to get someone to come to you was to stop moving toward them.

She rested her hands in her lap and waited.

The house was quiet in the way that only old, large houses could be, not silent but filled with the small, involuntary sounds of a structure breathing around them. The tick of the clock from deeper in the house. The faint settling of pipes in the walls. The barely perceptible hum of Bit’s equipment from the dining room below, muffled by the stairs and the distance.

A full minute passed.

Gwenyth eventually shifted her weight from one bare foot to the other. She released the railing with one hand, then the other, and took two tentative steps toward the landing where Brook waited patiently. Gwenyth stopped several feet away, close enough to hear a conversation but far enough to retreat if she needed to. It was the same boundary she’d established at the threshold of the dining room the night before.

Brook accepted the distance without comment.

“I want you to know that I’m truly sorry for your loss, Gwenyth.” Brook kept her tone conversational, as though they were two women sitting on someone’s front steps rather than occupying the staircase of her home. “I lost both of my parents, and I can tell you from experience that nothing ever truly fills the hole they leave behind. You learn to live around it. You build your days on either side of it. But the hole stays.”

Gwenyth’s gaze had drifted from the floor to Brook’s stomach. She didn’t speak, but her attention was steady, and that was enough.

“I know that trying to remember things from thirty years ago isn’t easy,” Brook continued, letting the words flow at a pace that matched the quiet of the house. “Half the time, I can barely recall what I did last week. But your father spent his life in that greenhouse, and the people who came and went from this estate during those years might help us understand what happened to him. If you could recall some things from back then, even the smallest of details that might not seem important, they could tell us where to look.”

Gwenyth remained standing for several more seconds before something in her posture gave way. She lowered herself onto the bottom step of the right-side staircase, the one that led up to her private wing, and drew her knees toward her chest. She wrapped her arms around them and rested her chin on top, making herself as small as the cardigan would allow. The position was childlike and protective, making her appear far younger than her forty-eight years. The light from the corridor window fell across her bare feet and the hem of her sweater, leaving her face in shadow.

“Uncle Dale came around more when Mama was alive,” Gwenyth said, her voice quieter than it had been the previous evening. It was stripped of the authority she’d shown when she’d directed her uncle to leave the estate. “He and Daddy used to argue about money. Always money. Money, money, money. Dale wanted Daddy to sell off part of the property, saying it was too much land for one family. Daddy said the land wasn’t Dale’s to sell.”

Brook listened without interrupting.

“After Mama died, Dale stopped coming as much. I think he was afraid of Daddy’s sadness. Some people are like that, you know. They don’t know how to be around grief, so they stay away and pretend it isn’t happening.” Gwenyth’s fingers tightened around her knees. “But Uncle Cal was different. Uncle Cal was always here.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Kind.” The word came with a simplicity that carried more weight than any elaboration could have. “He brought me books from the school library. Science books, mostly, because he said I was smart enough to understand them. He’d sit with Daddy in the greenhouse for hours, and when he came out, he’d find me and tell me what they’d talked about, but in a way I could follow. He made it sound exciting. Like Daddy was doing something that would change the world.”

“Were he and your father close?”

“They were best friends.”

Gwenyth’s chin settled deeper against her knees.

“I’m curious,” Brook said as she shifted and rested one hand on the landing behind her. The baby had once again settled over her bladder. “Do you know what happened to your father’s equipment? The microscopes, the instruments he used in the greenhouse, his journals?”

Gwenyth’s expression didn’t change, but the rhythm of her breathing shifted almost imperceptibly.

“It’s in Daddy’s lab.”

The answer was delivered with the same quiet certainty as everything else Gwenyth had shared, as though the existence of a lab were common knowledge rather than information that hadn’t appeared in any of the files, records, or interviews Brook’s team had conducted since their arrival.

“Where is the lab, Gwenyth?”

“Daddy loved his greenhouse.”

Brook turned Gwenyth’s response over in her mind. The greenhouse had already been searched. The worktables were bare, the shelves held nothing but ceramic pots and hardened soil, and Dr. Kessler’s team had been working in the space for days without finding any equipment. If Gwenyth was pointing her back to a place that had already been examined from top to bottom, then maybe the answer wasn’t in the greenhouse itself.

Maybe it was beneath it.

A cellar, a basement, an underground space that Nestor had built or converted without anyone else knowing.