“Do you think Mr. Williatte will be able to find the culprit again?”
Miss Lawrence strolled over to the fireplace to join the conversation, a tea tray in her hands. She waved away Hathaway and Miss Mikhail as they started to rise, setting the tray down on the small table in front of them before taking a seat herself.
As she glanced down, she saw Chocolate batting at a tal block with its paw. It was a square, silver piece of tal, its surface covered in raised, root-like protrusions and vein-like patterns. It was a truly exquisite work of art; even though Miss Lawrence couldn’t discern its purpose, she was captivated by it.
“Jenkins gave that to Chocolate to sharpen its claws on.”
Miss Mikhail explained, though in truth, she wasn’t sure why such a small cat would need to sharpen its claws on tal. But Jenkins’s explanation had sounded so reasonable that she hadn’t given it a second thought.
“In my opinion, it would be best if Jenkins didn’t run into that criminal. Who knows if he’s ard?”
Miss Mikhail held a pessimistic view on the matter.
“You don’t need to worry about that.”
Miss Lawrence leaned forward conspiratorially toward the two of them. “The day Mr. Williatte rescued from the snow, he had a pistol in his hand. The Church, concerned for his safety, insisted he carry it. I heard it’s even a new model from the Church of Creation and Machinery.”
“But isn’t it even more dangerous if both sides are ard?”
Miss Mikhail was still worried. She reached out and picked up a pastry from the plate, but instead of eating it, she just held it in front of her, studying it.
“Perhaps the best outco would be for Jenkins to find nothing, and for the police to arrive as soon as possible. The servants left this morning. The butler said the earliest they could get around the mountain is tomorrow evening.”
“Tomorrow evening...”
Hathaway’s voice held an indescribable worry. As a Benefactor, her intuition was quite strong. Ever since setting foot on this estate, she had been intermittently struck by a faint sense of crisis, but she couldn’t pinpoint its source. It felt like an illusion, yet also like a warning from her intuition. Even after encountering the Mysterious Realm, the feeling hadn’t vanished; instead, it grew stronger with each passing mont.
She, too, desperately hoped they could all leave this place as soon as possible.
The three young won chatted idly by the fireplace, while Miss Ricke and Garcia lingered by a bookshelf on the other side of the lounge. The two of them no longer hid their relationship; it seed their ordeal in the snowy woods that night had only deepened their feelings for each other.
Regarding this, Miss Mikhail and the other two could only offer their blessings. But from what they knew, there was so animosity between their two families. While it wasn’t enough to cause an outright feud, it would certainly complicate the young couple’s union.
Bang~
Just as they were speaking, a loud bang suddenly echoed from upstairs.
Hathaway froze, instantly recognizing it as a gunshot. Her first instinct was to run outside, but then she rembered her mission was to protect Miss Mikhail.
Everyone in the room shot to their feet, their heads snapping up toward the source of the sound. Before anyone could react, another shot rang out. Hathaway, with her keen hearing, could tell that the two shots had co from different guns.
“Nobody go outside! Stay calm!”
As the only surviving man in the tour group besides Jenkins, Garcia had to take responsibility for protecting everyone.
He hurried to the fireplace and grabbed the nearby poker. Along with the terrified servants, he went to the door and pulled it open a crack to peer outside. The hallway was empty.
The sound of sothing heavy hitting the floor ca from overhead, followed by two more gunshots. The butler’s angry shouts were audible even on the ground floor.
It was quiet upstairs for a few minutes. Everyone in the lounge held their breath, listening. A short while later, there was a knock on the door.
“Who is it?”
Garcia noticed that his own voice was trembling.
“It's , Jenkins Williatte. It’s over. You can co out now.”
His voice was laced with exhaustion. The person they had just unexpectedly found was not the Benefactor they’d anticipated, but rather a very old man.
That's right. The other party in the gunfight had been the elderly key keeper, K. Audley. He was now dead, having suffered a fatal gunshot wound to the forehead.
The bullet had struck him squarely in the forehead. Even if Jenkins had wanted to heal him, it was unlikely he could have been saved—to say nothing of the butler and two manservants watching his every move.
They had originally intended to tear down the wall blocking the passage. But while discussing their plan, they unexpectedly discovered soone spying on them from the hallway.
The group imdiately gave chase, but the person jumped right out of a window and fled outside. Following the footprints in the snow, Jenkins and the others arrived at the steam boiler room behind the manor. There, they found a trail of wet footprints leading to a tal tool cabinet. While searching for a secret passage, they finally discovered a small compartnt partitioned off by a straw mat and a large stone slab.
The place had clearly not been entered for a very long ti; the floor and walls were covered in a thick layer of dust and cobwebs. The walls were plastered with a dense collage of old photographs and yellowed newspaper clippings, pinned up with nails and string. All of them were related to the serial murders from fifty years ago.
“Mr. Audley was the serial killer?”
Miss Ricke couldn’t believe it, but this was indeed the truth they had uncovered.
“The materials in that little compartnt prove it. A young Audley was the sa killer wanted by the Kingdom of Cheslan for half a century. Over twenty years, he murdered fifty people, then vanished without a trace. In reality, he t Mr. Mandela, the owner of the manor, and has been living and working here ever since.”
At this, Jenkins glanced back at the butler, Joel Mangus. The middle-aged man was crestfallen.
“Audley made that compartnt himself. According to a diary we found, for the first ten years he worked here, he scoured old newspapers for reports and investigations about himself. But as more and more ti passed without anyone discovering him, Audley began to relax. He abandoned the place, only returning intermittently to update his files.”
This was why keeping a diary was such a dangerous habit. Jenkins himself never kept one.
The butler was so dejected because he had deeply respected the old man, who had served the manor for nearly thirty years. It was because of his brief shock upon learning the truth that, when the group located their target in the key keeper's room, the old man managed to escape into the manor. He’d shown agility no less than that of a robust middle-aged man; when the four of them, guns in hand, had cornered him, he had smashed through a window and jumped out in an instant.
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