Mrs. Blaine moved away from the sink. “You’ll not hang my daughter. She’s the victim here. Betrayed by her own husband, watching that woman suck him dry of any feeling for her, and not satisfied with that, he turned my daughter out of her own house. The constable will tell you, he saw Cobb coming into Hobson with the mark on his face where my daughter had to defend herself from his brutality. He said straight out that he’d kill her if she touched Florence Teller. Do you think she’d dare?”

“Cobb walked out, he didn’t turn her out.”

“He’s a murderer. He’d have come back in the night and stabbed her in her sleep. That bit of cane was found in his things. Not hers.”

“The parrot. The head of the cane. The box of letters,” Rutledge said again. “You took them all. Shall I bring the parrot back to Hobson?”

“I thought I was protecting her. It turned out I was protecting her worthless husband. And who will listen to a bird?”

“If you’d believed it was Cobb, you wouldn’t have needed the parrot or the box. And you’d have left the cane where it was. Didn’t it bother you that she lay there two days while you hoped someone else would find her? Two days—I call that inhuman.”

She whirled, her hands closing over the heavy whetstone that was used to sharpen knives, and she flung it at Rutledge with deadly aim.

But he was expecting it, and she narrowly missed him. With a cry of fury, she turned and was on her way out the door, just as her daughter came into the kitchen from the yard.

Mrs. Blaine burst into tears. “I’m a mother. I had to protect my daughter. I killed her, not Betsy. It was never Betsy.”

Betsy, barging into her mother, spun her out of the way. “I heard all of it,” she said, her face flushed and her eyes bright with her fury. “I heard what you were saying. Well, I’d do it again. If I had the chance, I’d do it again! You don’t have any idea how much I hated her.”

Chapter 29

Chapter 29

It took some time to arrange matters. The two women were shut up in the pantry by the kitchen door, where the windows were too small to allow either of them to escape. Satterthwaite was left to guard them while Cobb and Rutledge went back to Thielwald to bring back help.

On the way, Cobb said, “How did you know?”

“Betsy wouldn’t throw a handful of earth on the coffin. You left her a rose.”

“You knew then?” Cobb asked in disbelief.