“Perhaps in his way, he was. The blood. Our tears. My outcry.” Ruby leaned against her pillows, closed her eyes, and was silent for so long Kellen wondered if they should leave her to rest. When Ruby spoke again, her voice was weary. “I had no way to report the crime, so I told my father to get out. He blustered. He said it was his house, and he was still in charge. Then he noticed Alfred had gone. Marriage to me, the daughter of a murderer, had lost its luster. My father’s dreams of power ended that day, and for five years he sat downstairs in his chair in his study, brooding, eating, growing fat—fatter—and bitter. When he died of a heart attack, I had the chair burned. I had his body removed to the mainland, and buried under a simple stone with nothing more than his name and the dates. I’ve never visited him. No one has. No one cares about Gerard Morgade. He made sure of that.”

Max leaned his elbows on his knees. “I guess there was no happy ending, no eventual marriage to Patrick?”

“I never heard from Patrick again. My mother died—”

“Was murdered!” Rae said fiercely.

“Yes. She was murdered in 1948. My father died in 1953. As soon as the vile man passed on, the servants let me know. I came down from the attic to search for Patrick. I had heard nothing from him since ’43, and I had to know…” Ruby rested her hands, palms up, on her lap, and stared out her window at the horizon. “I knew his hometown, you see, and I hoped to go there, to find him settled with a wife and children.”

“You wanted that?” Rae asked incredulously.

Ruby switched her attention to the girl who had rooted for the young couple who had lived long ago. “I loved him. Wasn’t that better than the alternative?”

Rae gave a short jerk of a nod.

“By then, I hadn’t been out of the attic for years. But I had money, so I made my way to Butte, Montana. Butte was a mining town, and the Irish moved there to work in those dangerous mines. Patrick had told me about his father, how he supported his family going down in the hole every day for years. His last name was Sullivan, his father’s name was John. Patrick had told me he lived on Franklin Avenue. When I got to town, I went to the library, and looked up John Sullivan on Franklin Avenue in the yellow pages. There were three John Sullivans.” She laughed. “I went to the first house, but that family of John Sullivan said no, they had no son named Patrick. Same at the second house. By the time I got to the third house, the whole Sullivan family stood in the yard, four sons, five daughters, countless grandchildren, and John and Aileen Sullivan.”