Killer
That explanation made the rage well up inside of Meg again. “She needed help—so you dropped everything to help her? Where were you when my uncle was carrying me up the stairs?” She was shouting now, and she glanced back at Charlie to see he’d taken a few steps in her direction. She shook her head at him to let him know she was all right.
“I tried to follow him, I really did,” Ezra said, moving closer to her himself. “Your mother stopped me. She said… she said if I did anything to intervene, she’d let my father go. Meg, what was I to do? My father was so ill. He needed the money he earned here to pay for his medication. Now… he’s on his deathbed, Meg. If I had tried to stop your uncle, my father would be out on the streets and likely dead.” He had tears in his eyes; his voice was imploring. He looked the picture of a son in misery, unable to help his father.
“So you chose to leave him behind when you took off with Charlotte—and my money, and my uncle’s auto—instead?” Meg questioned, clearly not buying his bleeding heart story.
“I told you, I didn’t have a choice, Meg. Charlotte came to me in tears. She didn’t know what to do.” He took a step closer and lowered his voice. “She was pregnant Meg—she is pregnant, I mean.”
Meg’s eyebrows shot up at both his admission and the way he had originally made the statement. She decided to focus on the former for now. “Was this your doing?”
He ran a hand through his blond hair and took a step back, looking down. “I don’t think so. We were always careful—I mean the one time that it happened, we were careful.” Meg shot him a look of disgust that should’ve let him know she didn’t believe his “one time” explanation, though his intellect was quickly falling into doubt now that he’d slipped up twice.
“Even one time wouldn’t be all right, though, now would it, Ezra? You and I had been pledging ourselves to each other for months by the time we decided to leave.”
“I know, Meg, but I thought—as long as you were engaged to… him—what difference did it make if I was having a little fun with Charlotte?” He nodded in Charlie’s direction, and even though Meg knew Charlie couldn’t hear the comment from that distance, it made her stomach knot up. Perhaps Ezra had a valid argument.
Except that he didn’t. “You, more than anyone, except for maybe Kelly, knew I had no plans to marry Charlie. You knew I was only writing to him, and that was only because my mother wanted his money. You cannot blame your lack of self-control on me, Ezra Bitterly.”
“No, I’m not trying to, Meg, I promise you,” Ezra replied, stepping toward her again. “But I didn’t know if it was my child or not. There was a chance, a small chance, it was mine, but it could’ve also been your uncles, Meg.”
Meg’s eyebrows shot up again. “What do you mean? Was my uncle taking advantage of Charlotte as well?”
“No,” Ezra said, dropping his eyes once more and pushing at the soft grass with the toe of his work boot. “She did it for other things—money, little trinkets, that sort of thing. She thought that as long as your uncle liked her, she’d be able to stay employed here and still have a bit of freedom. She wouldn’t have to work so hard. Of course, your mother thought differently….”
“I don’t really care how my mother felt about Charlotte, Ezra,” Meg said, crossing her arms. She couldn’t believe Charlotte had been prostituting herself out to her uncle. It made her detest the girl even more, though it didn’t lessen her insistence on discovering what really happened to her.
“She knew if your mother found out she was carrying your uncle’s child, she’d lose her mind. She’d likely kill Charlotte, the same way she killed….” He stopped talking, and Meg felt all the blood rush out of her face.
“The same way my mother killed… whom?”
His mouth was hanging open, and his eyes were wide. It took a long time for him to say anything at all, but when he did, he was shaking his head slowly from side to side. “No one.”
“Ezra?” She took a slow step forward on an unsteady foot. “Whom do you say my mother killed?”
“No one,” he repeated.
She stared at him, her eyes repeating the question, but even without an answer, she knew what he had meant to say. “What do you know?” she asked, quietly, her voice just a whisper.
Ezra cleared his throat. “I don’t actually know anything, Meggy. I only know what I’ve heard, and what my father says he saw.”
“And what’s that?” Her voice was uneven, and she could feel her hands shaking where they were folded against her sides.
He licked his lips. “My father says, when we were younger, your mother used to take trips to the local druggist nearly every other week to procure arsenic. She used it on her face, like most women do, but she used… a lot of it. Then, my father said, after six months or so of that, your mother seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time pruning the oleanders.”
Ezra’s eyes darted over her shoulder and then returned to her face. Meg could feel large tears sliding over the wells of her eyes and bounding down her cheeks, but she didn’t move to wipe them away.
“There was never any proof, no investigation. It could’ve been… someone else. There were other servants working here then. Kelly’s mother. Your uncle even. My father didn’t know for sure. He said he’d never accuse her because he didn’t know. When the police questioned him that night, they only asked him if he saw anything suspicious, and they didn’t pay him much mind, what with his thick accent and the fact that he was only a gardener.”
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