The plush cushions of the relaxing armchairs and sofas on the other side of the room were empty, save for Tickletums, the hedgehog, napping against an embroidered pillow.
Marjorie looked up as they entered. Her eyes sparkled. “Miss Henry! A pleasure to see you… and Jacob are getting on so splendidly.”
Jacob glared at his sister. Miss Henry’s iron fingers were still locked on to his arm, as though she fully believed that if she weren’t latched on to him like a barnacle, he would forget about her and her cousin altogether.
It wasn’t a romantic embrace. He was a means to an end.
“What are you working on?” Miss Henry asked.
He tensed. This was a trick question. She wasn’t curious about their other cases. The only answer that would be acceptable to her was if every single Wynchester had foregone food and sleep altogether in order to devote twenty-four hours a day to finding the cousin who increasingly looked as though he was missing on purpose, and did not wish to be found.
“Whataren’twe working on?” Tommy answered with a groan. Which, in the scheme of things, was not only true but also a replydifficult to find fault with, even for prickly Miss Henry. “A hundred cases at once, plus one that doesn’t even have a client—”
“Olivebury’s robbery?” Jacob stepped forward. This would be the perfect segue into the latest Quentin development. TheonlyQuentin development.
Miss Henry’s free hand tightened on the satchel she’d retrieved from her quarters before they’d left her home. Best guess of its contents: wooden stakes with which to stab the Wynchesters through the heart if they failed to find her cousin before midnight.
“What did I do with the map I drew of Olivebury’s street?” Tommy stood over the table to rifle through stacks of parchment. “If we can put an infiltration team together—”
“Wedon’t have to break in,” Jacob reminded her. “The thief already did.”
“It might help to walk through how it was done.” Tommy plucked a map from the pile with a flourish. “The account in the paper was woefully scarce on details. We all know where to find pies, but can you acquire a whooper swan for me?”
“We’re not going to re-create the robbery,” he repeated in exasperation.
“Only because we don’t know how!” Tommy shook out her map. “How did the thief even come up with a plan so unlikely?”
Miss Henry’s grip on his arm threatened to shatter his bones, though it now felt less like anger and more like embarrassment and worry. Almost as though she were holding on to Jacob for strength.
“The swan sounded believable when I wrote it,” she muttered. “I thought it added a certain comic flair.”
Tommy and Marjorie stared at her.
“What?” came twin voices from the entranceway.
Jacob pulled Miss Henry aside to allow Graham and Kuni to enter the room.
“You may recall Miss Henry is a playwright,” Jacob began. “What might surprise you to learn…”
Quickly, he ran through the essentials, from Miss Henry’s alternate identity as Ask Vivian, to the letters from the morally questionable advice-seeker, to the burglary play he had inspired.
“You wrote an instruction manual?” Tommy looked thrilled. “Can I read it?”
“She doesn’t have it anymore,” he reminded her. “Quentin sent it to the burglar.”
“We don’t know that he…” Miss Henry began, then trailed off unhappily. The delivery of her play into the wrong hands might not have been deliberate, but there was no other explanation. “I admit, none of this appears to be a positive development.”
Tommy glanced down at her endless stacks of maps. “Sometimes it feels like we haven’t had a positive development in months.”
“I don’t know about that.” Marjorie’s calculating gaze snapped to Kuni and Graham. “Someonemighthave good news, if they wished to share it.”
Kuni shot her a sharp glance. “Are you using your colors on us?”
Marjorie fluttered her eyelashes. “Did I err?”
Kuni and Graham exchanged soft smiles, then clasped hands.
“I knew it!” squealed Marjorie.
