A Lonely Death by Charles Todd Page B

those terrible dry heaves that went on for hours.”
    “Your brother lived with you?”
    “When he first came out of hospital. There was no one else. Mum and Dad were gone, and Mary and the baby died of the Spanish influenza before ever he was wounded. That must have broken his heart, but he never mentioned them when he came home. He went to the churchyard by himself, not even asking me to come and show him where they were. And as soon as he could, he went back to the farm and lived there alone. It wasn’t a working farm anymore, but it was our home. He felt comfortable with his memories. That’s what he said. Comfortable. As if he could talk to them somehow. Mum and Dad, Mary and the baby.”
    “How was the relationship between your brother and your husband?”
    “Not very good,” she told him with resignation in her voice. “Theo didn’t want me to marry Virgil, you see. He thought it was pity I felt, and not love.” She hesitated, and then asked, “Was it quick? How my brother died?” She waited, braced for his answer.
    “Quickly enough,” Rutledge said. “You know about the other deaths?”
    “Oh, yes, it’s all over Eastfield, that’s all anyone talks about. I expect they’ll be gossiping about poor Theo now. I feel guilty, I’ve done my share of the gossiping, and now I see it wasn’t right.”
    “Did your brother have enemies? Did anything that happened in the war seem to worry him?”
    “He never talked about the war. Not to me. He just came home, put away his uniform, and got on with his life. I asked him once if it was very bad, being wounded, and all he said was, it was the ticket out.”
    “Was he closer to someone in particular? A friend in the Army, someone here in Eastfield?”
    “There’s no one I know of who would harm Theo. Why should they? He was a good man, he never was any trouble growing up. He helped his father at Kenton’s and never complained. They liked him there. They did from the beginning . . .” Her voice trailed off as she stared into space, reliving another time and place. “I can’t see any point to killing him. I mean, there’s no money to speak of, although he was never in debt.”
    “When he came back from France, was he on good terms with the men he’d served with? Did he have any problems with Anthony Pierce?”
    “I don’t know. I mean, he never spoke of trouble. He never went looking for it, for that matter. They’d all changed—they didn’t sit about talking over what they’d done in the trenches. It was as if it hadn’t happened, in a way. But of course it had, hadn’t it?” She frowned. “Theo was given a medal. He must have been brave. But I don’t know what he did.”
    It was something Rutledge had heard often enough since his own return to England. Censorship, of course, meant that letters home could say very little about where men were or what they were doing. And many of those at home in England had no means of knowing what war in the trenches—or on board ships for that matter—was really like. The images they had were often so far off the mark in many instances that no one would recognize in them the reality of France. He had spoken to a woman who had told him quite proudly that her dead son had had a good bed and clean sheets every night he was away from home. He’d told her so himself. Rutledge hadn’t disabused her of the notion—one her son had no doubt cultivated for her sake. And to her question about his own situation on the Somme, he had assured her that he too had slept well. He’d been rewarded by a smile and a nod, as if she had been happy for him. Of course many families had known the truth of the savagery their loved ones were caught up in, but even they had sometimes preferred lies.
    Hamish said, “What we did was to die. For naught.”
    Rutledge flinched.
    Mrs. Winslow misconstrued it. “Should I have asked him about the fighting? Was it important?”
    “No,” he answered her. “It doesn’t matter at