Page 26 of The Seven Rings
It would work, Sonya thought. It would not just slide right into the campaign already begun but boost it up.
“They should finalize wardrobe next week, and ship it. Here. Corrine and I will sort through. Meanwhile, I’m shutting down early. I’m going up to the attic, start that full-house search at the top.”
“Give me a half hour and I’ll pitch in. While we’re searching, we can find what we’d like to set up the guest office.”
“Already there—thinking-wise.” She smiled when she heard the sound of a ball bouncing down in the main hall, and Yoda’s scramble after it. “And it looks like Yoda’s occupied, thanks to Jack. I’m going to grab some sticky notes. I can slap one on pieces and places I’ve been through.”
“That’s an organized and efficient plan, as usual. I’ve got some bankers boxes in the studio. We can put a couple together just in case.”
Sonya got her sticky notes, a pen. They walked up to the third floor together, and Sonya paused on the landing to look past Cleo’s studio to the Gold Room.
“She’s been quiet since the big bad wolf.”
“In there spinning her webs,” Cleo muttered. “Like the toxic spider she is. Hardly any banging around in there the last day or two. All right then, about a half hour.”
While Cleo walked down to her studio, Sonya continued up to the attic.
Dauntingwas her first thought when she scanned the large and crowded area. And hadn’t she put off really dealing with it for that very reason?
“Pick something,” she told herself. “Start.”
She chose what she thought Cleo would call a chifforobe. And a huge piece Owen would, no doubt, identify by period and type of wood.
She opened the doors first. And found absolutely nothing.
One side had a series of drawers. All empty. As were the two larger drawers at the bottom.
She closed the drawers, put a sticky note on one of the doors.
Still, maybe she’d move the piece down to one of the bedrooms. Once the house was fully hers—with no Hester Dobbs looming.
“It makes a statement.”
She moved on. Nightstands, a small dresser, an elegant little slant-top desk.
She backtracked, and instead of just leaving the notes, wrote possible destinations for each piece.
She started to move through to the trunks for a change of pace, then pulled off one more dustcover.
Another desk. Handsome, she thought, and just a little feminine with the way it curved. Drawers in both sides, one in the middle. She’d need Owen for the type of wood, but it had a kind of brindle finish to her eye.
Like Yoda.
She opened a drawer, and to her surprise found a box of stationery. The pale pink pages had a flowing script header.
Miss Lisbeth Anne Poole
“Lissy,” she whispered. “This was your desk. You sat here, right here, writing letters. And surely dreaming of your wedding day.”
Sonya lifted out the stationery, set it on top of the desk, opened another drawer.
“Oh! They never cleaned it out. Owen and Moira. Couldn’t bear it, I guess.”
She found notepaper where Lisbeth had drawn hearts with her name and Edward’s inside. With their initials inside. Where she’d practiced writingMrs. Edward Whitmore,Lisbeth Poole Whitmorein perfect cursive.
She found hairpins and clips, pencils, a fountain pen and a bottle of ink. A small box holding theater stubs, playbills, a pretty pink stone.
Then the photographs. A framed one of Lisbeth and the young man Sonya recognized as Edward in a tarnished silver frame. Oneof Lisbeth with her parents, one with friends—Sonya recognized the woman who’d been in the music room the night she’d seen them. The woman in the blue dress.
