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“I-I…didn’t mean to...” he said in a regretful voice.
He dropped the spade and took off from the stables. I ran after him to find him crouched on the grass by the tree, heaving his breakfast.
“Millie...” he said, tears trickling down from his face, he looked down at his hands, “He was trying to hurt you…I…I…” he tried to form the words, swallowed and continued, “I couldn’t watch...”
I wiped his face with my dress. “We have to let your brother know about this.”
“Nooooo....” Castle said loudly, “Devin, he...he would get angry and punish me. He’ll give me those awful medicines…please, Millie...he killed my previous caregivers and tried to blame me…we can’t tell Devin about this.”
Castle was getting hysterical as he clenched his hair, tears trickling down his face. “I…I…didn’t mean to…”
The way I saw it, Ollie was a lecherous asshole and reported every single detail to Devin. Castle had saved me from being molested. He’d rescued me and returned me to my room after weeks of confinement in that basement.
If I didn’t utter a word, no one would find out.
I cupped his face in my hand. “We won’t tell anyone.”
Sometimes when I sat alone in the room, I wondered if I would wake up and this would all be just another nightmare. Maybe the Montgomerys were a wonderful family and everything that had happened until now was part of my morbid imagination.
But that wasn’t true. I was living the nightmare.
Whenever I tried to close my eyes, all I saw was Ollie’s face.
I’d helped someone cover up a murder.
No matter how bad he’d been, no matter what he’d done, murder was still murder.
There were flashes of Castle digging and the two of us lowering an almost headless body of the stable boy into the ground. Castle threw mud over it to cover it up and we buried him deep into the woods.
We also had to get rid of the blood on Castle’s shirt, so I sneaked back to the house and washed it in the sink. I went through everything on Ollie’s phone. We pulled it apart and disposed of it in the lake.
This time, I was mindful of any bear traps laid out in the area. I would not fall for that shit again.
Castle and I turned up at the dinner table as if nothing had happened, but when I saw the medium-rare steak on my plate dripping in sauce; I had to excuse myself to throw up because my mind couldn’t stop conjuring up images of Ollie’s face, especially his crushed eyeballs. Castle seemed to do a lot better than I.
Devin asked Winston if he’d seen Ollie and kept muttering under his breath about how he was going to kill the stable boy when he found him.
I wanted to tell Devin that we’d done the job for him.
I buried my face in the pillow, muffling my cries.
I’d covered up a murder!
I was startled by a shadow, moving behind me, a silhouette of a person. I sat upright and turned to see a tall figure standing at the door.
How long had he been standing there?
My heart was racing, “Castle, you scared me!”
“Millie…” he whispered.
“Please don’t do that again, and you’re supposed to knock on the door before entering.
I was probably too preoccupied with the afternoon’s events to lock the door before sleeping.
The time on the clock was one-thirty-six a.m.
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “Come inside.”