Legacy of the Dead by Charles Todd

if it had grown over the years with the family living there. The windows had been set with some eye to symmetry and style, lending a faint touch of grace.
    The inn looked rooted in its earth, tidy, freshly whitewashed in the past year, the door to the bar hidden behind a climbing rose that had spread with age to cover the porch it had been intended to adorn. It was a hardy rose to survive in this climate, and the small garden at its feet showed some care for the impression the inn made on passersby. The bar parlor, on the side facing the narrow lane into the inn yard at the rear, had a green door, and crisp white curtains showed behind the windows next to it.
    Time could have turned this into a rowdy pub on the outskirts of town, but the inn had managed, somehow, to retain a certain dignity. Because two women had had the care of it?
    “I canna’ think why they’d persecute a lass with such a dowry as the inn,” Hamish was saying. “They’d be more likely to want their sons to wed her.”
    And that, too, was a question worth considering. It all kept coming back to that: Why had the town united so easily against this woman?
    On impulse, Rutledge shut off the engine and got out, crossing the road and walking down into the inn yard, where the stables and outbuildings stood.
    They were in a fair state of repair. With little work done during the war and no money after it to tackle major improvements, upkeep spoke well for the management.
    He was poking about in the stable, looking for the cabinet where Inspector Oliver had discovered the first set of bones, when a loud voice said, “Here! What do you think you’re doing!”
    He turned to find a tall, heavy-shouldered man of middle age standing in the doorway, arms akimbo, staring at him with harsh dislike. Shadowed by the doorway, his face was dark and ugly but had a strength to it as well.
    Rutledge, well aware that he was trespassing, replied peaceably, “I’d heard that the inn might be for sale.”
    “There’s no decision been made to sell or not sell,” the man said.
    “I see.” Rutledge turned, having found what he was looking for, the part of the wall pulled down to bring a skeleton to light. The cupboard, deep enough to start with, had been made shallower to conceal the grave behind it. A careful bit of work—a hundred years ago trouble had been taken to make the spot seem ordinary, unsuspicious. It must have been quite a shock for Inspector Oliver to discover that his “corpse” was nearly as old as the inn.
    Rutledge began to walk toward the man blocking the exit. It made him uneasy to have his way closed—even in the relative spaciousness of the stable, he could feel the claustrophobia it invoked. The air seemed thick, suffocating—
    “Tell me about the owner—” He broke off. After being buried alive in the impenetrable mud of a shell crater, weighed down by Hamish’s body, Rutledge had come to hate being shut in—confined in any fashion. Traveling on trains, sleeping in a small room, seeing himself cut off from escape through a door or down a stair—the need for space was so urgent that it ignited a rising panic. Even here he could feel the sudden dampness of sweat on his face, the difficulty breathing, the awareness of hideous danger—
    “You’ll be wanting to speak to the police, then,” the man told him bluntly but didn’t elaborate. His stance was intentionally threatening now, belligerent, as if he sensed Rutledge’s sudden uneasiness. Rutledge felt his own muscles tensing.
    Rutledge replied, “A woman, I understand. What has she done to find herself of interest to the police?”
    “None of your affair, is it?” At last the man moved out into the sunlight, and Rutledge followed, his breathing still uneven.
    Damn this,
he swore, fighting the claustrophobia.
Keep
your mind on what you’re doing, can’t you?
    But Hamish, too, was responding to the man’s aggressive stance, asking if he had believed the innuendoes and the