Page 33 of The Missing Page
“Half an hour, give or take.” Leo raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
James made a beckoning gesture. “No reason in particular,” he said, but Leo was already in his arms, letting himself be pulled down to the bed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“We ought to get dressed,” James said, making no effort to get out of bed.
“Two more minutes.” Under several blankets and with his head resting on James’s chest, Leo was warm for the first time in what felt like weeks. He had no urge to return to the cold, even though James was right. Someone could knock on their door at any minute and he’d rather not have to scramble to make himself presentable. He reached an arm out from under the covers and blindly groped for the cigarette case on the bedside table. James got there first and a moment later passed him a lit cigarette.
With a groan, Leo sat up and took the cigarette. “Downstairs they’re using a Ming vase as an ashtray but I can’t find so much as a lump of coal in this house,” he complained.
“Perhaps Martha doesn’t have any money? That’s the only explanation I can come up with for the state of things.”
“The lawyer would have released some of the estate funds for housekeeping. That’s standard.” At least Leo thought it was standard among people who had both funds and estates.
“Maybe Martha simply didn’t want to go to any trouble on this gathering? It’s rather hard on her to have to entertain a house full of guests after two decades of being a recluse, only two weeks after her sole companion died.”
“She’s grieving,” Leo mused. “Can we look at those photographs you found?”
They got dressed and neatened up, then sat on the edge of the bed with the album open between them. Leo turned the pages slowly, watching a decade pass before his eyes. There was nothing in the photographs that he hadn’t already guessed, but looking at them gave his mind space to assemble what he knew. When he got to the last page, he shut his eyes and thought.
Camilla and Marchand had apparently tried to make it look like Rose had drowned. At the time of Rose’s death, Camilla and Marchand might have believed they stood to inherit a small fortune from Rose.
Gladys Button, the thief turned lady’s maid, had disappeared at the same time Rose did. Twenty years later, she had traveled to Blackthorn in disguise.
Meanwhile, someone was blackmailing Marchand—or possibly Marchand meant to blackmail someone.
He could arrange those facts into a logical—and ordinary—enough pattern: Gladys knew something about Marchand, possibly the role he played in Rose’s death—and meant to profit off it, but used a disguise so no danger would follow her home. That seemed plausible enough.
But that story, however likely, didn’t account for all the stray bits of oddness that he had gathered over the past day. There was the question of where Rose’s money had gone. There were the circumstances surrounding Lilah’s birth. And what had happened to the chauffeur?
Most infuriating of all was the absence of a body. There would be no satisfying answer to Rose’s fate without a body, living or dead.
“I wonder,” Leo said, closing the final album, “if you could steer conversation to a few topics this evening.”
“I could try.”
“It might involve being terribly rude,” Leo cautioned, and explained to James what he needed to find out.
James listened attentively as Leo counted off the salient points on his fingers. “Don’t try to be sly,” Leo cautioned afterwards. He could give James the tools to do this—his own tricks of the trade but adjusted for James’s personality and comfort. “Just be cheerfully oblivious and plow through any awkwardness. You’d be amazed how many people will just give in when the alternative is looking like they have something to hide. The goal is bluff good humor.”
“You want me to be boorish.”
“Not quite, because nothing you say will be rude on the face of it. You’re asking things that anyone might ask, but utterly failing to notice that the people you’re speaking to are trying to avoid answering.”
James nodded. “I can do that.”
Out of seemingly nowhere, Leo was beset with a wave of—gratitude, maybe? James trusted him. He trusted Leo enough to risk permanently alienating his only family.
And there was also something else, a fierce satisfaction at being allied with James, at facing this with him, together.
“There’s another thing I need you to do,” Leo murmured as they descended the stairs. “I want to look around in the library. Can you watch the door for me?”
“I’ll hoot like an owl if anyone approaches,” James said solemnly.
Leo jabbed him with an elbow. “Just knock on the door like a normal person. I don’t much care if anyone sees me going through your uncle’s papers. We’resupposedto be snooping this weekend, even if nobody seems to remember it. Damn it, you’re all so polite.”
“Disgusting, I know.”
