Page 59 of Scarred By Sin

“Gwenyth changed.” Dale’s jaw tightened. “I don’t even know when it started, to tell you the truth. I’d come out to the estate, and it was as if she didn’t even know me. Not every time, but enough to concern me. She’d have conversations with people who weren’t in the room. She stopped eating for days at a stretch. Porter would call me, and half the time he’d sound more frightened than she did. It was one of the reasons he started taking on additional duties in the house. There used to be a housekeeper who came once a week, but she ended up quitting soon after…”

Brook figured he was referring to when Nestor disappeared, but he finally picked up the mug and took a sip. Probably to give himself some time to collect his thoughts. The coffee was still hot, and the steam curled upward between them.

“I consulted an attorney three years ago. He told me that without a medical diagnosis, a guardianship petition would be difficult to push through. Gwenyth has never been evaluated by a physician, and she refuses to see one. Without documentation, the court has no basis to determine incapacity. I’ve been trying to build a case using testimony from the people who interact with her regularly, but Cal has fought me at every turn.”

“Cal believes she’s capable of making her own decisions.”

“Cal sees what he wants to see.” Dale’s voice carried a bitterness that he didn’t bother to soften. “He’s been coming here, playing the role of the devoted family friend, and not once has he done the one thing that would actually help her. Get her to a doctor. Get her evaluated. Get her the kind of care that Porter and a bottle of vitamins were never going to provide.”

Brook drank her coffee to give herself time to mull over his reply. Outside the kitchen window, the morning was bright and still, and she could see the hedgerow and, beyond it, the edge of the greenhouse, where Dr. Kessler’s team was already at work.

A world of buried secrets.

“Have you considered that Gwenyth might have been capable of making that decision for herself? That instead of filing a petition, you could have sat down with her and had a conversation about what she wanted?”

Dale’s expression tightened.

“I’ve tried. She won’t engage with me. She hasn’t engaged with me in years.”

“That’s not the same as being incapable, Mr. Ellingham. Choosing not to speak to someone is very different from being unable to.”

Dale stared at his mug. Whatever he’d expected from this conversation, it wasn’t Brook dismantling his reasoning piece by piece while drinking decaf at his dead brother’s kitchen table. She witnessed the frustration working through him, the kind that came from a man who believed he was right and couldn’t understand why no one else agreed.

“I don’t know what to think about those women.” Dale rubbed the back of his neck. “My brother was conducting experiments on dying women in a hidden room inside his house. He buried them in his greenhouse when they died. And somehow, that’s supposed to be better than murder?”

“It’s not better. It’s different. What Nestor did was illegal, and it robbed those women’s families of whatever time they had left. The distinction only matters for the investigation, because it changes who we’re looking for.”

“Looking for?”

“Someone killed your brother, Mr. Ellingham. That hasn’t changed. Those women succumbed to their disease, but Nestor died of blunt force trauma.”

Dale absorbed her response in silence.

“There’s something else I’d like to discuss with you,” Brook said, lowering her voice slightly. “I have reason to believe that someone may have been giving Gwenyth medication. Not vitamins. Not prescribed medication. Something administered without her knowledge or understanding, something that could be causing or contributing to the episodes you’ve described.”

Dale’s hand stilled on the mug, and he lifted his gaze, studying her. It was as if he wasn’t sure she was being serious with her accusation.

“What do you mean?”

“Gwenyth keeps pills in a ceramic dish on her nightstand. No prescription bottle, no label. She’s mentioned needing medication on more than one occasion since we’ve been here, and she associates it with Owen Pruitt’s visits. Owen has admitted that he brings her vitamins. Supplements. And my colleague is inclined to believe him. That said, they are currently reinterviewing him and his wife. But if the pills that I noticed aren’t vitamins, someone else is providing them.”

“You think someone has been drugging her. For decades?”

“I think it’s a possibility that needs to be investigated. If Gwenyth’s episodes are chemically induced rather than organic, then the entire basis for your guardianship petition collapses. She wouldn’t be mentally ill. She’d be a victim.”

Dale opened his mouth, closed it, and then sat very still. The implications were working through him in real time, and he didn’t like the outcome. If Gwenyth wasn’t sick, then every argument he’d made to the court was built on a false premise. If someone had been medicating her, then the years of decline that had driven his petition were manufactured. And if that were true, then the woman he’d been trying to have declared incompetent might be more competent than anyone had given her credit for.

“Who would do something like that?” Dale asked in disgust, his voice stripped of its usual authority.

“That’s what we’re trying to determine.”

The shuffling sound of bare feet on hardwood reached them from the hallway. Brook turned in her chair to find Gwenyth standing in the kitchen doorway, the gray cardigan pulled tight around her frame, her dark hair falling past her shoulders. She didn’t acknowledge Dale in the least. Her gaze swept the kitchen, her expression focused and purposeful, as if she had come downstairs with a specific task in mind.

She walked past both of them without a word, opened the refrigerator, and retrieved a carton of eggs, a block of cheese, and a small bunch of green onions. She set everything on the counter beside the stove, then reached into the cabinet above for a bowl. In no time at all, she collected a skillet and placed it on the burner with the practiced ease of someone who had performed the act a thousand times.

Brook observed Gwenyth as she cracked three eggs into the bowl, whisked them with a fork, and sliced the green onions with a paring knife she’d pulled from the drawer without searching for it. She grated cheese directly into the bowl, turned the burner on with a confident twist of the knob, and flicked a pat of butter in the skillet. The butter hissed and slid across the heated pan, eventually filling the kitchen with a rich, warm scent that mingled with the lingering aroma of the coffee.

There was nothing confusing about her movements. Nothing hesitant or disoriented. She was making herself an omelet with the easy competence of a woman who knew her way around her own kitchen and didn’t need anyone’s help doing it.