Chapter 7: The Cut Hand

"Somebody took it at the bus stop," I said. "A hand brushed my side."

"Or somebody in this car," Matthias said, "since you kept it in your bag until you sat next to me."

"Is that what you think?"

"It's what you think," he said. "I'm saying it out loud so you don't have to."

That was the first time he made me want to laugh, and I did not.

The page was gone, and Brigitte's steward now knew exactly what the jeweler had given me.

But the photograph on my pillow had told me something else.

Someone in the Kell house had let that photograph in.

That afternoon I stood in the third-floor hall with three sealed envelopes.

Each one held a sheet of plain paper marked in my handwriting: Copy of the jeweler's page.

I told three people three different hiding places.

I told the driver the envelope was under the mattress in my room.

I told the young footman who carried the coal that it was in the library, behind the green atlas.

I told the gray-haired housekeeper while she poured my tea.

"It's in the linen closet on the second floor," I said. "Behind the winter blankets. I don't trust my own room."

She set the pot down very carefully.

"That's an odd place, Mrs. Kell."

"Nobody would look there."

"No," she said. "I don't suppose they would."

Before I hid each envelope I had rubbed the seam with a stick of blue tailor's chalk.

The dressmaker had left it in the pocket of the green dress.

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Saw the Ending Before My Wedding from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.