When the Colonel Came to the Estate

Choice.

I looked at Wesley. He was watching me, not pleading, not assuming. Just waiting.

Then I looked at Charles.

“Does this have anything to do with my daughter?” I asked.

Charles’s gaze dropped to June.

“I don’t know.”

That was the only answer that could have kept me there.

“All right,” I said. “Then we open the desk.”

The desk was not in Margaret’s dressing room.

It was in the east wing, a section of the estate I had rarely entered. The hallway smelled faintly of lemon polish and old wood. Portraits watched us from gilded frames, generations of Pembrokes posed in dark suits and satin gowns, their painted eyes following us as if offended by the intrusion.

Mr. Hale led the way.

His steps were slow but certain.

“I dusted the room every Thursday for thirty-one years,” he said quietly. “Mrs. Pembroke never asked me to stop. She only asked me never to open anything.”