"Gladys? Are you awake?" Marcus asked, knocking on the door a second time. The sun was still low in the now mostly cloudless sky but the village of Amdell had seen a brief burst of activity as people rose and went about their labors.

"Could she have gone out to work in the fields?" Alexander asked after a moment of silence passed.

"Possibly." Marcus replied, again knocking on the door and calling out to the widow.

"Good morning, Inquisitors." A voice called out. Alexander and Marcus turned and saw Hattie approaching with another bowl presumably filled with food. "Gladys not awake yet?" she asked as she came to a stop next to the two men.

"She's not answering." Marcus replied.

"Wouldn't surprise me if she was still asleep, I doubt she's gotten much rest ever since her boy died. I came over last night with some tea to help her sleep and to check on her and she was very distraught, very. Grief is worst a few days after a loss, I say. At first you're too surprised to feel it, I mean really feel it. Folks come over to comfort you and mourn with you but they get distracted by their own affairs and stop comin' around and then you're just left by yourself in an empty house haunted by their ghosts."

"Not real ghosts!" Hattie added quickly. "I'm not talking about any kind of afterlife, Inquisitors, I mean their memories. All the little things that remind you of the ones you lost, the feelin' that you should be able to turn around and they'll be standing there but they're not and it's just you, alone. I'm hoping she moves out of the house and in with one of her relatives, so's she's not so lonely. Might not have a choice, depending on what Bernard's brother wants to do with the house."

"Probably for the best." Marcus said as he knocked again on the door.

"Here, I'll go in and check on her, call you two in when I'm sure she's decent." Hattie said as she walked around Marcus and pushed open the door, closing it most of the way behind her. A moment later Alexander heard the sound of something clattering against the floorboards.

"Gladys? Gladys!" Hattie cried out from inside. "Inquisitors!"

Marcus pushed open the door and entered the small home, Alexander following close behind with his hand on his dagger. Hattie was standing with her hand covering her mouth, wooden bowl at her feet with its bread and cheese scattered on the floor.

Alexander could see Gladys on the bed, her right arm dangling over the side, a cut beginning at her wrist and ending halfway up her arm. A dark pool had formed on the floor beneath her bloody hand, a knife resting just under her fingertips.

Marcus knelt beside Gladys and felt her neck for a pulse for a moment before shaking his head. "Body's cold to the touch," he said before gently pulling on her left wrist. "Stiffness is setting in so she's been dead for a few hours, at least."

"When were you here last night?" Marcus asked as he stood and turned to Hattie.

"I came by just after you two turned in for the night. Sat and talked with her a bit, she was telling me stories about her Bernards before she said the tea was working and she needed to rest."

"Thank you, Hattie. Please go and tell whoever needs to know about this but keep them out of the house until we say to let them in to tend to her body."

"Yes, Inquisitor." Hattie replied with one last glance at Gladys' body before hurrying out the door.

"I'm going to guess you don't think this was suicide if you want people to stay out of the house?" Alexander asked when he and Marcus were alone.

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"I don't, I believe someone wants us to think it was suicide, though."

"What makes you think that?"

"Cut's on her right arm, which mean's she would have had to hold the knife with her left hand. Even if she did have a preference for her left as a child it would have been beaten into her to only ever use her right."

Alexander stood next to Marcus and looked down at were Gladys' body lay. Apart from her bloody arm the woman looked as though she was merely sleeping.

"She's also on the side of the bed nearest the door." Marcus added as he took a couple of steps toward the entrance of the small house.

"Is that significant?" Alexander asked.

"Possibly, it's customary for husbands to sleep nearest the entrance so that he can defend his family from intruders." Marcus replied.

Alexander looked from the door to Gladys and furrowed his brow. He wondered if this was something that everyone but him knew or if it was something he would have known if his parents had lived and he had not spent most of the life he could remember in an all-boys orphanage and then as a member of the Inquisition, with its mandatory celibacy for the first twenty years of service.

"The door wasn't barred when we arrived." Marcus said as he walked the rest of the way to the entrance of the house. He closed the door and rotated a wooden beam on a peg across the door. "Hattie simply pushed it open."

"Maybe Gladys doesn't bar the door usually."

"Perhaps, but the woman was alone after her son and husband murdered days apart, if I were her I would want to make use of any protection I had available to me."

"If she did kill herself to escape her grief, she might not have cared if her home was secured." Alexander suggested.

"True." Marcus replied. "Search the house for anything that looks out of the ordinary."

Alexander nodded and began looking through Gladys' belongings. "What am I looking for?"

"I'm not sure." Marcus replied as he rifled through the few belongings the now-deceased family owned.

The door to the home clunked against the bar as someone tried to push it open.

"Inquisitors? Is everything alright?" Hattie called out from the other side. "I've told Bernard's brother about Gladys, and brought some of the ladies to see to her body."

"We'll be done shortly, please wait outside." Marcus called back as he lifted up a man's tunic from a basket in the corner of the house. It was covered in blood down the front and beneath it was a pair of trousers, similarly bloody.

"Presumably what Bernard was wearing when he was murdered." Marcus said quietly. He pulled out a second tunic, blood covering its front as well. "This must have been what he was wearing when he carried the body of his son home."

Marcus lifted up a pair of trousers and Alexander saw a brief glimpse of something fall back in the basket. Marcus bent over to look at the object.

"Alexander," Marcus began quietly, "return to our room and fetch my bag."

Alexander nodded and lifted the bar from the door. He stepped outside and walked past Hattie and a small group of women from the village carrying linens and supplies needed to prepare Gladys' body.

"Keep out until I give you permission to enter, please." He heard Marcus say in a stern voice. Hattie began to protest only to be scolded further. Alexander entered the room and retrieved Marcus' bag and returned to Gladys' house. He walked pass Hattie who tried to ask him what was going on.

"Close the door, please," Marcus instructed as Alexander entered the home. "Bar it as well."

"What do you need?" Alexander asked as he returned from the entrance, Hattie and the other women's voices coming from beyond the barred door.

"This." Marcus said as he pulled out the bloody knife they had found by the spot the younger Bernard was killed. Marcus lifted a belt from the basket. Attached to the belt was a simple, empty leather sheath. "Fits perfectly." Marcus said as he slid the knife into it.

"Eh?" Alexander said as he walked over beside his mentor. "Was the boy killed by his father?"

"Possibly, or he was killed by someone who used his father's knife, or maybe the knife was used on someone else entirely, or maybe this wasn't Bernard's knife at all and it's just a coincidence that it fits." Marcus said in a frustrated tone as he removed and inserted the knife into the sheath a few times, inspecting it closely as he did. "There's a simple decorative pattern etched into the handle of the knife and on the sheath as well. I am fairly certain that they go together."

Marcus placed the knife and sheath in his bag. "More happened the night the younger Bernard was killed than we've been told about, I'm sure of it."

"Could the father have murdered his own son, Gladys found out and killed her husband, then herself out of grief or guilt or both?" Alexander asked.

"Possibly, but if that's the case then Gilbert the hunter would have seen it, unless he was involved. Come, we need to talk to him again. Keep your helmet on and your hand on your weapon at all times, anyone in this town could be the killer."