Free Wicked Gentlemen by Ginn Hale Page B

unlikely to me.
    "The fire starting in Joan's room?" Harper took another drink of his coffee. "I don't know. I've been too tired to think about it."
    I didn't believe him. I hadn't noticed exhaustion keeping him from thinking about anything else. Still, if Harper wanted to keep his thoughts to himself, that was his right.
    I had my own suspicion as to why the Prodigal girl had burned Edward Talbott's house. She wanted to punish Joan, to make the woman pay for abandoning the members of Good Commons. I wondered if the girl had believed, as Peter Roffcale seemed to, that Joan Talbott had some protection she could offer them.
    "So, were you up all night?" I asked.
    "Yes," Harper sighed. "After finding Thomas Mills and the fire, I couldn't sleep. I just spent the rest of the night going through old records."
    "Perhaps you should try to get some sleep now." I set my cup of coffee down.
    "No." Harper shook his head. "I managed to find one thing last night while I was looking through the records on Thomas Mills."
    "He was in Good Commons?" I guessed.
    "Yes, he was," Harper said. "But he also had a legal counselor by the name of Albert Scott-Beck."
    The name meant nothing to me. I let Harper go on.
    "Scott-Beck counseled Roffcale also. In fact, he visited him in his cell just an hour before you and I arrived."
    "Do you think he murdered Roffcale?" I couldn't keep from leaning a little closer to Harper. The prospect of a solution drew me.
    "Perhaps. I couldn't find any direct connection between Scott-Beck and Lily or Rose, however both women received legal counsel from his firm. Scott-Beck's partner, Lewis Brown, defended Lily when she was brought up on charges last spring. Brown also advised Rose a few months before that."
    Harper drank a little more of his coffee.
    "The firm takes on a good number of charity cases, mostly Prodigals who have no other means of legal defense at their trials. Almost every Prodigal in Good Commons has been defended or given counsel by Scott-Beck or Brown."
      "Did either of them know your sister?" I asked.
    "Joan?" Harper shook his head. His light hair was beginning to dry into loose curls. "She was never involved in any demonstrations or public readings. No charges could ever have been brought against her."
    "So she had no connection to this Scott-Beck or his partner?"
    "None," Harper replied. "To be honest, I don't even know that we're following the right trail to find Joan. But I can't just let these killings go on."
    "It all seems too interlaced for your sister not to be somewhere in it," I commented.
    "Perhaps."
    There was something in the way Harper said the word that caught my attention. I wasn't sure if it was his tone or the word itself, but it reminded me of the night when we had first met and I had thought that Harper knew more than he was saying. I tried to study him, but the brilliant morning light burned at the fine details of his expression as well as the subtle scents that might have drifted off his lips. Some nights, if I concentrated, I could taste lies in the cool air.
    This morning, all I had was a feeling of unease. I knew little about Harper, less about his abducted sister. The fact that she was abducted, while other members of Good Commons had been out-rightly murdered, should have meant something. Yet I couldn't figure it out. There was something, a simple word, a small fact, that kept the matter from making sense.
    I wondered if that word had been on Harper's lips when he held it back and offered me an oblique "perhaps."
    I doubted that Harper was the only person who knew. I re-called the Prodigal girl's cracked eyes, her bleeding tears, and the smell of her. It was a horrific scent in comparison to the perfumes that had lingered on Joan Talbott's letters. Her hair had looked like it had been hacked off in a blind fury. Her clothes had been filthy ruins. I knew she hadn't burned Edward's house for nothing. She had known something about the murders and about Joan Talbott.
    "So,