Saturday evening, after the dinner dishes are washed and Agnes has retreated to her sitting room with a book she isn’t reading, I go back to the conservatory.
Davenport released the scene this afternoon. She was thorough — I watched her work through the kitchen, the conservatory, and the garden for three hours, taking photographs and measurements and samples. She dusted the tea tray for fingerprints. She collected the remaining biscuits in a plastic bag. She examined the conservatory door — both the interior handle and the garden-side exit — with the kind of focused attention that reminded me of me with a tricky pie crust: patient, methodical, unwilling to miss a single detail.
Now the conservatory is empty. The wicker settee has been straightened, the book removed, the tea tray taken as evidence. But the orchids are still here, glowing softly in the last light of the day, and the room still smells like flowers and something I can’t name — a wrongness, maybe, or just the memory of what I found here yesterday morning.
I don’t know why I’m here. Cleaning, maybe. Processing. The way I used to knead bread dough when Ryan’s betrayals started adding up and I needed something to do with my hands that wasn’t throwing things.
I start with the settee. I plump the cushions, straighten the throw blanket that Agnes keeps folded over the back. I pick up the cushion on the left side — Victor’s side — and something falls out from between the cushion and the frame.
A scarf. Silk, deep auburn, with a subtle paisley pattern. It’s fine quality — the kind of thing you’d buy at a gallery or a boutique, not a chain store. It smells like jasmine perfume and paint thinner, which is a combination I’ve smelled once before, three days ago, in a gallery on the harbor boardwalk.
Lily’s scarf.
I look at it where it has fallen. I remember Thursday evening — Lily arriving at the B&B at 6:15, asking to see Victor, walking past me through the kitchen to the conservatory. The argument, the raised voices, the tears. Lily leaving at 7:10, clutching something in her hand.
She wasn’t clutching this scarf. She left it behind.
I photograph it where it fell before lifting it by one corner. Then I stop. I’ve already touched it; I’m not going to improve matters by carrying it around in my apron.
The greenhouse area of the conservatory is through an archway at the back — a small room with a workbench, potting supplies, and a collection of tools that Agnes uses for the orchids. It’s where George kept his gardening supplies, Agnes told me once, and she’s maintained it exactly as he left it. I’m straightening a stack of terracotta pots when I notice something behind a large fern in the corner.
Gardening gloves. Workman-style, leather palms, well-worn. They’re large — too large for Agnes’s hands, too large for mine. They’re the kind of gloves a man with big hands would use for heavy garden work — pruning roses, hauling mulch, digging holes.
I think of Hank Purcell’s hands — massive, capable, the kind of hands that could palm a basketball. These gloves would fit him.
I leave the gloves where they are and photograph them too. Beside the settee, something gritty catches the light.
Crumbs.
They look different from my shortbread: darker, with an oily sheen. I lean closer without touching them. The smell reminds me of nut biscuits from my old bakery, but a smell is not an ingredient list.
Walnut, perhaps. I can’t be certain.
I don’t use walnuts in any recipe at Hawthorn House. Agnes doesn’t either — I’ve been through every pantry shelf, every ingredient jar, every recipe card in her collection. For Victor’s visit, Agnes and I have kept tree nuts out of the guest preparation area. The pantry contains no opened nuts. That tells me about our precautions, not about everyone who has entered the house.
So where did walnut crumbs come from?
I call Davenport and tell her where I found everything, including what I touched. She asks me to leave the room undisturbed. Harding arrives with a camera and separate containers; he collects the scarf, gloves, and crumbs, and takes my account of the discovery.
I go back to the kitchen. Agnes is at the farmhouse table, nursing a cup of chamomile tea. Clover is in her lap, and for the first time since Thursday night, the cat isn’t hiding or hissing or making that awful distressed sound. She’s just… sitting. Heavy and warm and present, the way cats are when they’ve decided the crisis is over.
Later, I sit across from Agnes and show her the photographs on my phone.
“I found these in the conservatory,” I say.
Agnes looks at the scarf. “That’s Lily’s. She’s had it for years — I bought it for her birthday.” Her eyes narrow. “She was in the conservatory Thursday evening. I heard them arguing.”
“Did she tell you she left it behind?”
“No. She hasn’t mentioned it.” Agnes enlarges the picture of the gloves. “Those have been in the greenhouse for ages.”
“Whose are they?”
“George had a pair. Dale keeps a pair here too.” She hands back the phone. “Ask before you decide whose hands fit them.”
I tell her about the walnut crumbs. I tell her about Davenport’s question — did you use any tree nuts? — and about the possibility of an allergen in Victor’s food.
Agnes listens. Her face doesn’t change, but I can see the calculation happening behind her eyes — the same careful, precise calculation she brings to everything.
“Walnuts,” she says.
“I found crumbs on the floor near where Victor was sitting. They weren’t from anything I made.”
“Who has access to the kitchen?”
“I was going to ask you that.”
Agnes is quiet for a long moment. Clover shifts in her lap, and Agnes strokes the cat’s fur absently.
“I have keys,” she says. “So does Dale. And Lily. And Marina Delacroix — the librarian. George gave her a key years ago, when she started the archives project. She needed access to the book collection in the parlor. I never asked for it back.”
Four people with keys. Four people who could have walked into the kitchen at any time — including Thursday night — without anyone knowing.
“One more thing,” I say. “Does the conservatory garden door actually lock when it closes?”
“No. It catches. The latch is worn and the frame has dropped. It looks locked if you don’t know how to lift it.”
“Is there any way to open it from outside?”
“Lift the handle to clear the catch and push. George meant to replace it. I kept meaning to have it done.”
“How many people know the trick?”
“Me. Dale. George, God rest him.” She pauses. “And anyone George showed over the years. It wasn’t a secret — it was just a quirk of the door. But it’s not the kind of thing you’d know unless someone told you.”
I think about a door that looks secure and isn’t, and a plate of biscuits that looked familiar. Both depend on people accepting what they expect to see.
And I think about Lily’s scarf, abandoned in the conservatory on the evening a man died.
Agnes reaches across the table and covers my hand with hers. Her skin is papery and warm and dry, and her grip is surprisingly strong.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she says. “Don’t. This is police business, Tess. Let them handle it.”
“I know.”
“But you’re not going to let them handle it, are you?”
I look at her. She looks at me. The kitchen is warm and smells like chamomile and bread dough and the ghost of yesterday’s scones, and outside the window the fog is coming in again, thick and soft and full of things I can’t see yet.
“No,” I say. “I don’t think I am.”
Agnes squeezes my hand once and lets go.
“Then bake something,” she says. “You think better when your hands are busy.”
She’s right. I pull out the flour and the butter and the blackberries from the garden, and I start a crumble pie — the one my mother taught me, the one I’ve been making since I was twelve years old, the one that tastes like home even when home doesn’t exist anymore.
As I work, I think about the scarf. About Lily, standing in the conservatory with Victor, arguing about something that made her cry. About Lily, leaving at 7:10 PM without her scarf.
Lily was in the conservatory Thursday evening. She was there before the dinner, before the tea tray, before whatever happened to Victor in the dark hours of the night.
And she never mentioned it.