The Death of Mrs Westaway by Ruth Ware Ch 8 - 50

Which is, if you have read this book, the end.

So I've been busy and exhausted and I'm trying to knit a baby blanket and also I decided to knit a scarf for a friends birthday but with cabling and I have never done that before so I've been concentrating on that and my *minor* perfectionism problem may make it very important that I concentrate super hard on not dropping a stitch or, and this is what happened with my nephews baby blanket, I rip the whole thing apart and start over. That blanket could have been ready months before it was if I'd just learned to be cool with fixing the problem like a normal human.

But anyway, so I hadn't read much of the book over the last couple of weeks and then um, I binged it last night.

So.

Hal gets into town with something like thirty pounds to her name, and it is, of course, raining because it is a funeral in a murder mystery. Mr. Treswick (the lawyer) lets Hal into the church and we get through Hal's awkward knowledge that she is definitely doing something wrong, but again, she is desperate to not get her everything broken and I cannot blame her.

There's no room in the 'official funeral cortege' so Mr. Treswick drives Hal to the house and honestly it wouldn't be out of place in a ghost story. Then again I just finished watching the Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House (LOVED IT) and so maybe creepy houses just need ghosts right now.

Also I keep misreading the name of the house as 'Trespassen' not 'Trepassen' but that's just me.

We meet Mrs. Warren, who would put Mrs. Dudley to shame (Haunting of Hill House for the win) for cranky and uselessly obscure statements and Hal's 'uncles'. There's Harding, his wife Mitzi and their kids, then Abel (who is gay and whose husband is a doctor) and Ezra, who lives the high life out in France. Because Europe.

There's scotch and talking and meeting everyone and no one seems to think much of Hal except oh, yes, her mother was their sister who disappeared (Ezra's twin, BTW) and then Mr. Treswick gets to the reading of the will and oh, hey, that little legacy that Hal thought would solve all her problems turns out to be the whole damn estate.

Harding mildly loses his shit - as the oldest and the one that sort of stuck around, he seems to have thought that he would inherit, and also, in fairness, who the fuck is Hal?

Hal passes out, which, same.

She's stressed, hasn't eaten, is cold, and just got told she's maybe a millionaire? I mean the house is in shitty condition but you can 100% sell it and there's other monies. I too would pass the fuck out.

Anyway.

Hal wakes up and gets shoved into the attic equivalent of Harry Potter's cupboard under the stairs, which is to say that this is a giant fucking house you cannot tell me that there were not guest rooms. Mrs. Warren is just....so mean.

Mrs. Warren continues to be not the actual worst person in this book, but she's pretty bad.

Hal, through snooping and context clues, figures out that she is related to the family, but it's more like a cousin to the main family than the long lost granddaughter. Turns out the missing daughter, Maud, her real name was Margarida and the cousin, who went by Maggie, was also really named Margarida.

And the diary entries that are peppered throughout the book are from Maggie, who was living with the family after her own parents died and got pregnant while she was there when she was 18. But Hal thinks she's figured out where the mistake by Mr. Treswick came from.

She tries, really, she does, to like reject the will but her uncles are the executors of the will and they don't all want to let her do that, and it's mostly Ezra who is just like, 'NAH'. Which, in hindsight, makes sense because we go through this whole song and dance and Hal really likes the family (for the most part) and decides that she can't do this to them - ALSO SOMEONE TRIES TO MURDER HER by that whole thing where they put some string over the top of the stairs so you trip and goddamnit that is a Poirot call back. It's from Dumb Witness. Anyway.

I want to know who the hell else got tripped down those stairs - when Hal examines the nails they are old and rusty and HAD CLEARLY BEEN THERE A WHILE.

So Hal nopes the hell out in the middle of the night and we find out that Mrs. Warren 100% knows that Hal is not Maud's daughter, and just wants her gone, but Hal then feels bad for just running away and also she knows that they are not going to just let her vanish they literally know where she lives. So she calls and comes back and she's poking around and finds the maid who used to help smuggle letters between Maud and Maggie who was locked in the attic while she was pregnant because Mrs. Westaway was a monster and Maggie won't tell her who got her pregnant.

Hal tells Lizzie the whole story and she knows that she's going to have to confess the whole thing to the family but it also helps her figure out that Maud and Maggie ran away together and were living together but since Hal doesn't know Maud she vanished for real before Hal was old enough to remember her.

Hal confesses, sort of. She tells the family that she was confused like everyone else, but she's figured out that she is the daughter of Maggie, not Maud, and the names are the same, yada, yada. And Harding thinks this solves everything, and Mr. Treswick is like...nah....but that sort of gets brushed aside because there's a storm and everyone is getting the heck away from Trepassen and Ezra gives Hal a ride to the station but then there are no trains and they wind up having to go back to the house.

And this is where I was actually shocked.

So Hal, Ezra and supposedly Mrs. Warren are alone in the house and Hal has this nagging feeling that she is so close to figuring out something - she wants to know who her father is, but her mother had removed any mention of his name from her diary so there's no clue there.

She wanders down to this library that she had found earlier and there's a photo album that she takes to look through and as she's flipping through she realizes that Maud is, in fact her mother.

And I shrieked, 'SHE WHAT?!?!' at like 1 am.

SO.

Hal, not having labels or any knowledge of these people, had figured out that she was the Maggie daughter by dint of this picture that Ezra had given her of himself, Maud, and this other girl who was Maggie.

But I guess he didn't use his fucking finger to point to anyone, because it turns out that the girl that Hal knew as her mother, who she assumed was Maggie, was, in fact, Maud. But Maud was not the one who was pregnant!

*deep sigh*

SO.

Maggie and Maud ran away when Maggie was pregnant and they lived together and Hal was born and they were raising her together for a little while. And then Maggie marched her happy blond ass back to the mansion to demand that Hal's father support the baby. And Maggie never came back.

So Maud raised Hal.

Hal is the daughter of BOTH Margarida's.

And also Ezra, who is garbage and I did not see that coming.

Turns out nice uncle Ezra is actually human garbage father Ezra who murdered Maggie when she came up demanding that he support his daughter and he hid her body in the lake and then he years later murdered Maud - he's the one who ran her over in the street, his own twin sister, because Maud was going to tell Hal the truth when she turned 18 and then he murdered Mrs. Warren and was going to murder Hal because MONSTER.

But Hal gets away, gets onto the lake which is iced over, and while Hal is a tiny slip of a human being, Ezra is not and he falls through the ice and drowns which is how he killed Maggie, so good.

End result - the will was accurate, Mrs. Westaway knew who Hal really was, and left her everything. Questionable whether she did it because she felt any shred of guilt for harboring a monster for decades or whether she just was such a monster she wanted to kick things up when she was unable to suffer any consequences. Mrs. Warren also knew that Ezra was a monster, but he was her favorite too, so whats a little murder?

Hal inherits all the things, and it seems like the rest of the family is actually embracing her and I'm pleased with everything.

She also tells them where she thinks Maggie's body is - the reason Ezra didn't want to let her give away her inheritance was likely because any work at the house would include dredging the lake where he had hidden Maggie's body.

I loved this book, and I did not see the whole 'it was Ezra' thing coming. Which is nice, since I normally at least have an inkling of what the secret twist is.