Total pages in book: 127
Estimated words: 127368 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 509(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 127368 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 509(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
On top of them was the flute case, currently shut.
A now familiar shiver snaked down my spine.
He pointed at it. “That was open in the Music Room downstairs?”
I nodded. “A couple of days ago. I saw it. The velvet inside is blue.” I took in an unsteady breath and asked, “What’s going on, Ian?”
Ian moved to the filing cabinets and carefully inspected the flute case and its surrounds.
“Ian?” I pressed.
He straightened and looked at me.
“This is my great-grandfather’s flute,” he said.
“Okay,” I replied.
“Joan and David’s son.”
I started trembling.
Ian kept talking.
“He stopped playing it as a child. It’s said he stopped playing it the day after Dorothy Clifton died. He’d loved it and was good at it, some even contend he was a prodigy. He practiced all the time. But the day after she died, he never touched it again. He put it in here himself when Louisa was doing her work and confiscated this space for cataloguing. And that flute never leaves this room.”
Fucking.
Hell.
We were all gathered in the Music Room, including Lady Jane, and a fucked-out looking Daniel and Portia.
We were waiting for Richard.
This, an audience demanded by Ian, who I’d trailed after when he went down to the Robin Room, pounded on the door and ordered them to get their asses up to the Music Room, then he texted his mother and father.
Ian had returned to prowling, this time back and forth across the room like a lion in a cage.
Understandably, this didn’t give me glad tidings.
Lady Jane was watching him carefully, and her concern was evident. Daniel and Portia appeared foggy and confused.
I was silently freaking out.
Richard arrived, demanding, “Why in bloody hell have I been commanded to the second floor?”
“Close the door,” Ian ordered tersely.
Even Richard had nothing to say in the face of his son’s mood. He shut the door and fully entered the room.
“The maids, they clean up here…what? Once a month? Every other month?” Ian asked his mother.
“I don’t know. Christine makes the schedule,” she answered.
“Text her. Ask her. Now,” Ian demanded. “I want to know when someone was last in this room cleaning.”
She pulled her phone out of her cardigan pocket.
Ian waited until she was done, and we all waited with him.
After she put her phone hand down, he said, “Over on that table, it’s faint, but you can see the dust pattern is disturbed. Something was lying there. Now it isn’t.”
I was too far away to see from where I was, but since I’d seen the flute, there and gone, I didn’t need to look.
Daniel went over to look.
“Don’t touch anything,” Ian warned.
Portia asked, “Oh my God. Has something been stolen?”
“Moved,” Ian told her. “Out of the History Room and into here, then back out again. I don’t know when it was moved in, but it was moved out sometime in the last…” He looked to me.
“I don’t…it’s all cobbling together, but I think three days?” I told him.
“Three days,” Ian said.
Portia turned accusing eyes to Daniel. His face got red.
“It wasn’t Brittany,” Ian decreed. “It was taken from a locked room. She doesn’t have the code. No one does, but Stevenson, Christine and members of this family.”
“Stevenson would never,” Richard proclaimed.
“Christine neither,” Lady Jane said.
“Someone’s been in this house and they’re moving shit around,” Ian told them. “A photograph that was also housed in the History Room was put in the safe in Brandy.”
Lady Jane went white as a sheet.
Richard’s face got splotchy.
As they would. I didn’t see much else but what looked like more historical papers in that safe, but if someone was availing themselves of secured spaces, it’d cause anyone alarm.
“Why would someone do that?” Daniel asked.
“That’s what I’d like to know,” Ian replied. “And I’m going to find out. So, before I embark on that, if anyone in this room has anything to say…”
He trailed off but didn’t take his attention from Daniel when he said those words.
Daniel morphed straight to fury. “You think it’s me!”
“You and Portia started this week at home with games,” Ian pointed out.
“I don’t know anything about any History Room!” Portia exclaimed.
Ian didn’t even look at her.
He raised his brows to Daniel.
Daniel exploded.
“Fuck you, Ian! I may have fucked about and screwed up, but I’m not stealing things from my own damned house.”
“Nothing has been stolen, at least not that we know. And I’ll be doing an inventory with Stevenson as well,” Ian told him. “They’ve been moved.”
“And why would someone do that?” Lady Jane repeated after her son, still looking more than mildly troubled.
“I don’t know that either, but the photograph was the one of everyone at the party where Dorothy Clifton died, standing in front of the house. And the thing that was in here, but is now not, that Daphne saw, was great-grandfather’s flute,” Ian explained.
“That’s just odd,” Lady Jane murmured.