Page 65 of Scarred By Sin

The sound of rumbling engines reached them through the stone walls, muffled but unmistakable. Multiple vehicles, arriving in quick succession. Doors opened and shut in rapid beats that carried through the windows.

“Give it your best shot.” The corner of Gwenyth’s mouth lifted into something that wasn’t a smile. “The second that door opens, I go back. I’ve done it for over thirty years, and I will do it for thirty more. They’ll believe me. They always have.”

The front door swung open.

The transformation was instantaneous. Gwenyth’s shoulders collapsed inward, and her chin dropped to her chest. Her hands found the edges of the cardigan and pulled it tight around her body, and the tears that had been drying on her cheeks were replenished by fresh ones that spilled over her lower lids and tracked down her face in thin, convincing lines. Her bare feet turned inward. Her breathing became shallow and uneven. She was, in the space of a single heartbeat, the woman the entire town had been pitying for three decades.

Sheriff Gentry stepped into the foyer with two deputies behind him. His broad face conveyed to Brook that he'd driven here expecting one thing and was trying to assess whether he'd walked into something else entirely. His gaze moved from Brook, who was standing beside the dining room table with her weapon at her side, to Bit, who was positioned near the staircase, to Gwenyth, who was now trembling in the space between them with her arms wrapped around herself.

One of the deputies moved closer to Gwenyth. He was young, mid-twenties, and the concern on his face was immediate and unguarded. He reached out a hand to steady her, and she immediately grabbed his arm.

“Do you have my medication?” Gwenyth’s voice was barely audible, broken and pleading. “Please. I need my medication. I don’t know what’s happening.”

Brook holstered her weapon.

She met Bit’s gaze across the foyer and gave him a single nod.

“Sheriff Gentry, I need you to place Gwenyth Ellingham under arrest for the murder of her father, Nestor Ellingham.”

Gentry’s expression tightened as he continued to take in the situation.

“What you’re seeing right now is a performance,” Brook announced, not about to be undermined by a cardigan and a pair of tears. “Gwenyth Ellingham has been faking her mental illness for over thirty years. She killed her father out of jealousy, and she has manipulated every person connected to this estate into believing she was incapable of the very thing she did.”

The young deputy’s focus continued to shift between Gwenyth and Brook, uncertainty written across every feature. Gwenyth pressed closer to him, her fingers tightening on his forearm, and the performance was so complete that Brook could witness the deputy’s resolve wavering in real time.

To everyone’s surprise, Bit crossed the foyer to the grandfather clock that stood against the wall near the entrance to the hallway. Brook had walked past the antique every day since their arrival without giving it a second thought. It was part of the house’s architecture, a tall, dark wooden case with a brass pendulum. Nothing special, yet Bit opened the case’s front panel and reached inside. When his hand became visible, his fingers held a compact wireless camera, the same model he’d used for the exterior surveillance feeds. He then walked across the foyer to stand beside Brook, holding the camera up for all to witness.

“When I set up the security feeds on the property, I didn’t limit the coverage to the exterior,” Bit advised everyone as he handed the device to Brook. “The interior of this house has been monitored since our first day on the estate. The conversation that just took place between you and Gwenyth Ellingham, including her admission of guilt and her stated intention to continue deceiving law enforcement, was recorded.”

In a split second, the fragile woman disappeared. Her tears stopped, and she no longer hunched her posture. All of it dropped away in a single instant, and what remained was rage. Pure, undiluted fury…and it was aimed directly at Brook.

Gwenyth wrenched her arm free from the young deputy and lunged, attempting to cover the distance between the foyer and the dining room threshold in two strides. Her bare feet slapped against the hardwood, but Gentry moved faster than a man his size should have been able to. He caught Gwenyth around the waist before she’d reached the corner of the dining room table, wrapping one arm across her midsection and pulling her backward. Her feet left the floor, kicking, and the sound that came out of her was not a scream. It was something lower, guttural. A compressed fury finding its way out through a throat that had spent decades whispering.

“He deserved it!” Gwenyth’s voice filled the foyer, climbed the staircase, and echoed off the stone walls. “He chose them! Every single time, he chose them over me!”

Gentry did his best to constrain her movements. The deputies closed in on either side, and between the three of them, they brought Gwenyth’s arms behind her back. The handcuffs clicked into place, and the sound caused Gwenyth to go still. Her breathing was ragged, her hair falling across her face in dark tangles, and the cardigan had slipped off one shoulder, exposing the sharp ridge of her collarbone. She stared at Brook through the curtain of her hair, and the expression on her face was one that Brook recognized all too well.

She’d observed it before.

On the front porch of her childhood home in 2004.

A teenage boy with his hands in his pockets, delivering a smirk that existed only long enough to be registered before it vanished behind the mask. The same cold satisfaction. The same detached cruelty. The same absolute certainty that what he had done was justified because the world had failed to give him what he believed he was owed.

Brook held Gwenyth’s gaze.

Gentry and his deputies eventually guided her toward the front door. She didn’t resist. She walked between them with the same unhurried gait she’d used to cross this foyer a dozen times before, her bare feet leaving the hardwood floor for the last time as they stepped onto the portico and down the stone steps. The front door remained open behind them, and the July air pressed in, warm and heavy and carrying the scent of the grounds that Gwenyth Ellingham would never walk again.

Brook slowly lowered herself into the nearest chair. She placed both hands on her stomach and held them there, the baby shifting beneath her palms. For the first time since they’d arrived at this estate, she allowed herself to feel the full measure of what she’d been carrying.

“No more field work,” Brook said quietly. “Not until this baby is here.”

Bit was standing near the window. He reached out and pulled back the drape, allowing the morning sun to flood into the foyer. He stared out through the glass, and when he spoke, his voice was stripped of the humor that usually defined it.

“I’m on board with that.” He was quiet for a moment. “I can’t believe someone would keep that up for decades. Every single day, pretending to be someone she wasn’t. Never slipping. Never breaking character. That’s not just deception, Boss. That’s commitment to a lie that most people couldn’t maintain for a week.”

Brook pushed herself up from the chair and crossed the foyer to stand beside him at the window. One of the deputies was opening the rear door of his cruiser, and Gentry was guiding Gwenyth toward it, one hand on her arm and the other on the car's roof. Gwenyth ducked her head and disappeared into the back seat, and the door closed behind her.

“She would have gone to any length to keep her father near and her life intact,” Brook murmured, her eyes following the deputy as he walked around to the driver’s side. “When you think about it, all she needed to do was hide in plain sight.”