Chapter 16: The Second Paper

Rowan's POV

The detective took the bottle at noon and the roses at one.

By dinner, Edmund Penhallow's lawyer had called the detective twice to say the bottle had been planted by my wife.

I sat in the dark of my study that night with the lamp off and the Harbor Road file in the top drawer.

It was a copy.

The original was in a bank vault, and I had told Faye so at supper.

I had also told her I expected a visitor.

She said I was a terrible host and went to bed, but she left the door to the hall open.

At ten past two, the lock on the garden door turned.

A man came in very quietly, in rubber-soled shoes, with a small flashlight in his teeth.

He went straight to the desk and opened the top drawer.

I let him take out the folder.

I let him put it under his arm.

Then I switched on the lamp.

He spun around and the flashlight fell out of his mouth.

I knew his face.

He had stood at my gate at seven that morning with a crystal bottle in his hands.

"Good evening," I said. "You delivered something to my house."

He bolted for the door and ran straight into the chest of my driver.

It took my men only a moment.

They turned his pockets inside out and laid his things on the desk.

A phone.

A wallet.

A long brown envelope with a clasp.

I opened the clasp.

Inside were three sheets of heavy paper with a law firm's name across the top.

The first was a motion in a family court, asking that Faye Penhallow Peverell be placed in her father's care because she was of unsound mind.

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