The Secrets of Whitelea

|Chapter Eight|

Chapter Eight

Bella stared at Douglas. She opened her mouth to speak but closed it again. Douglas had begun to collect the letters and the photos up again. "But there is no Gabriel Hamilton?" Bella finally said. Douglas didn't answer and instead hid the letters back on top of his wardrobe. "Gabriel Hamilton..." Bella mused. Her mind was scanning over the pictures on the wall. There had been a couple of men called Gabriel but they had been around in the eighteen and early nineteen hundreds. The Gabriel Hamilton of the letters couldn't possibly be any of them. The picture of Gabriel Seymour came to her then. There was a chance it could be him – no one had explicitly said what had happened to him and maybe he had changed his name to Beatrice's.

"What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking that whoever it is, is doing it to confuse us. There are no possible Gabriel Hamiltons that could have written this. Unless you think a ghost could have come back and decided to threaten an entire village."

"We don't know that it's the entire village."

"Okay well maybe not the entire village..." Bella trailed off. "What if we asked Pippa what she thinks? Have you asked her?"

"Asked her what?"

"I'm assuming she would have also gotten a letter that had his name on it?"

"I'd also assume so."

"And your first instinct wasn't to go and ask the only other person you know getting the letters what she thinks it means?" Douglas shrugged. "Didn't you say that Pippa heard a lot of secrets? Maybe someone's come into the shop and said something?"

"I can't ask her."

"Why not?

"Because it's not something you can casually drop into a conversation!"

"She managed it."

"That's Pippa. When she wants to tell someone something she does."

"She didn't tell Elizabeth she hated her."

"Pippa doesn't hate Elizabeth."

"Maybe it's just a very intense dislike. Either way, there was some definite death glares."

"Words were exchanged when they broke up. Pippa said all she needed to say then."

"And yet she still clings to that little bitter seed of hatred towards my sister."

"Look, I can't just waltz into her shop and just drop this load of information on her."

"It won't be a surprise if she got one too."

"And what if she hasn't?"

"Oh, this is clever..." Bella said. "Whoever is doing this knows what they're doing."

"How is it clever?"

"Because they've made it so that you feel like you can't talk to anyone about it! They're isolating you!" Bella cried. Douglas raised his eyebrows.

"I'm not isolating myself." It was Bella's turn to raise her eyebrows.

"Do you just want to go over the conversation we just had?" Bella said. "Oh, I can't possibly go talk to Pippa! What if she hasn't got a letter! I can't just talk about something effecting both of us casually!" She mocked him in a high voice. Douglas frowned.

"I don't sound like that."

"You might do soon if you don't grow some balls." Bella retorted. "Look, I'm calling James and Lizzy and I'm telling them what we know."