Chapter 25: Square Blue Capitals

Cordelia straightened and turned to the room with her smile still on.

"What a lovely frame," she said. "Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to copy my hand."

Nobody laughed.

Lachlan came down from the dais and crossed the floor to her.

I walked beside him.

"Nobody copied you," he said. "Write it yourself."

He took a pen and a blank place card from table four and held them out to her.

"Write Thursday, four-fifteen. Write it where four hundred people can watch your hand."

"This is absurd," Cordelia said.

"Then it will only take you a second."

She took the pen.

She bent over the card and wrote one square capital T, and her left hand slid up to cover the page.

Then she stopped.

She had seen what everyone else saw, which was that the T was the same T.

She dropped the pen on the floor.

"I won't be tried at a party," she said.

"Then try me first."

Daphne stood up from table twelve.

She wore a plain black dress, and her small hands were shaking around a blue folder.

Cordelia's head snapped toward her.

"Daphne, sit down."

"No," Daphne said.

She walked to the dais, and she took the microphone with both hands.

"My name is Daphne Rhodes," she said. "I was Imogen's roommate in college, and three years ago I lived in this family's guest room."

The ballroom was so quiet I could hear the glass cases hum.

"Cordelia Merrick paid my rent for eleven months. I have the statements, and they are in her name."

She held up the folder, and the old director from the board took it from her fingers.

"She asked me every week where Imogen went and who she saw. She showed me hundreds of photographs her driver had taken."

Daphne swallowed.

"On the anniversary she told me to say 'He'll be home by ten.' Nobody had called him. I said it anyway."

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