Chapter 5

The door opened halfway. Adelaide Crowe was sixty-five, white hair pinned back, reading glasses pushed up on her forehead. She looked at Lennox, and something moved behind her eyes—a flash of recognition she caught and buried before it reached her face.Lennox introduced himself, said he was looking into his mother's employment history at the Beaumont estate.Adelaide's expression closed like a window shutter. "I don't discuss my former employers," she said. "I signed an agreement." She started to close the door."Please, I just need—"The door shut. The lock turned.Lennox stood on her porch holding the locket his mother gave him, staring at a closed door. It was the second time in his life a door had told him he didn't belong: first the mansion, now this.He came back three days later. This time, he didn't explain. He didn't introduce himself again. He held up the half-heart locket through the screen door and said one sentence: "This was my mother's. Her name was Rosalyn Preston. She died when I was sixteen. I'm not here to cause trouble. I just need to know who she was."Adelaide stared at the locket. Her hand moved to her mouth. She had seen the other half of that pendant before: on Garrett Beaumont's desk, in a drawer he thought no one knew about.Her eyes filled. She blinked hard. Twenty-two years of silence pressed against the back of her throat. She opened the door."Come inside," she said. "Sit down."Adelaide spoke carefully, slowly, like someone walking across ice. Yes, Rosalyn worked at the estate—three years. Yes, she left suddenly. Yes, there was an incident. But Adelaide was told never to discuss it; she had signed papers, and she could lose her pension.But there was one thing she couldn't hold back."Your mother did not steal anything," Adelaide said. She said it looking straight at Lennox, her voice unwavering. "I was there. I know what I saw."

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