Chapter 3: The Lawyer at the Door
“No one is leaving,” Richard said.
Vanessa blocked the doorway.
“You’re choosing a servant over your wife?”
“I’m choosing an answer.”
The groundskeeper handed me the photograph.
His fingers closed gently around mine.
“My name is Samuel Hale,” he said.
“I drove your mother away from this house twenty-three years ago.”
“You knew her?”
“I watched her grow up.”
Footsteps sounded on the staircase.
An elderly man appeared beside a silver-haired woman carrying a leather case.
Richard straightened.
“Father.”
Arthur Caldwell looked at my uneven hair, then at the pendant in Richard’s hand.
“Where did she get that?”
Vanessa hurried toward him.
“She brought it here to support some ridiculous claim.”
“I said my mother gave it to me.”
The silver-haired woman stepped between us.
“I’m Miriam Shaw, the Caldwell family attorney.
May I see the pendant?”
Richard placed it in her palm.
Miriam opened it and examined the initials.
“E.C.,” she said.
“The jeweler’s records describe a hidden date beneath the hinge.”
She pressed the clasp.
A second engraving appeared.
Arthur gripped the stair rail.
“June seventeenth.”
“My mother’s birthday,” I whispered.
Vanessa held out the photograph.
“A pendant proves nothing.
Neither does an old picture anyone could have written on.”
Miriam turned the photograph over.
“This came from a sealed envelope in Arthur’s study.
I placed it there myself.”
Richard looked at Vanessa.
“How did it reach your dressing room?”
“You gave it to me.”
“I have never seen it before today.”
“You forget everything after two glasses of wine.”
Richard’s jaw tightened.
“Do not lie about me to escape this.”
Arthur raised one trembling hand.
“Enough.
Eleanor left this family.
She made her choice.”
“She was nineteen,” Samuel said.
“She stole from me and disappeared.”
“My mother never stole anything,” I said.
Arthur’s eyes settled on my face.
“You did not know her as I did.”
The words struck harder than Vanessa’s scissors.
I reached for the wall, but my fingertips slipped against the polished wood.
“Grace?” Richard moved toward me.
“Don’t touch me.
All of you are talking about my mother as if I’m not standing here.”
Miriam opened her case and removed a folded document.
“Arthur, Eleanor did not steal the estate.
Your own father placed it in trust for her and her lawful children.”
Vanessa laughed once.
“Grace is not Eleanor’s daughter.”
“That can be established,” Miriam said.
“Until then, no estate property may be sold or transferred.”
Vanessa’s smile returned.
“You won’t need to wait.”
She crossed to the dressing table, opened a drawer, and took out a white envelope.
“I became suspicious weeks ago.
I had Grace’s hair tested against Richard’s.”
I stared at her.
“You took my hair?”
“You left it on a brush.”
Vanessa handed the paper to Arthur.
“The result says there is no biological relationship.”
Arthur read the page, and his shoulders lowered.
“That settles it.”
Samuel shook his head.
“Something is wrong.”
“What’s wrong,” Vanessa said, “is that a stranger nearly stole this family’s home.”
Miriam took the report.
Her eyes moved from the laboratory seal to the date.
“Vanessa, when did you collect Grace’s sample?”
“Three weeks ago.”
Miriam turned the page toward us.
“This report was issued three weeks ago, but it lists the sample as hair cut from Grace Miller in Vanessa Caldwell’s dressing room.”
Nobody moved.
Miriam looked at the locks still lying on the marble floor.
“These were cut less than twenty minutes ago.”
Vanessa’s lips parted.
May you like
Miriam folded the report slowly.
“So whose hair did you send to that laboratory?”
