Jacob explained, “Before our adoptive father, Baron Vanderbean, passed away, he created a fictitious heir called Horace Wynchester, who has now become the current Baron Vanderbean. Or would be, if there was one.” He dropped to his knees before the unlit fireplace. “I’ll find the original letter.”
“Wait… Horace Wynchester is Baron Vanderbean?” Viv repeated in horror. “Then how didn’t you know Quentin had been kidnapped? We’ve been wasting time following other cases while my adolescent cousin—”
“Wasting time!” Marjorie threw her hands up. “Every case is a priority, and there are more of them than there are of us. Even a middling effort to juggle all the open threads simultaneously is unsustainable—”
“Mixed metaphor,” murmured Philippa. “But accurate.”
“You know what isn’t accurate?” Viv drew a folded letter from her bodice with shaking fingers. “Your false claim that Quentin wassafe.”
“When Graham’s informant interviewed Newt—” Jacob began.
“Why didn’t Graham go himself?” Viv demanded.
“Because he’s assigned to fifty other cases! Why didn’tyougo yourself, Miss I-Can-Deduce-the-Truth-in-One-Glance?”
Viv’s teeth clicked shut. She’d almost snapped that she would have gone if she’d known the address, but there was no doubt the Wynchesters would have escorted her straight to Newt’s door if she’d bothered to ask where he lived.
Jacob was right. If Viv’s great talent was her ability to see right through people, then the only explanation for her oversight was that she subconsciously couldn’t handle the possibility of Quentin’s blithe assurances of his safety being horriblywrong.
With him gone, Viv had been sliding close to a state of debilitating panic. She’d really, really needed it to be true that Quentin was all right.
That was her excuse. But what was theirs?
“You never told me Baron Vanderbean had been kidnapped!”
“Why would we?” Marjorie said, baffled. “There is no Baron Vanderbean.”
“The rest of the world doesn’t know that. That’s what makes it a good disguise. I told you, Quentin sometimes used that identity.”
“You didn’t tellmethat,” Jacob burst out. “Pertinent information I could have used from the first day!”
“I did tell you,” she protested. “I said he was dressed as a baron earlier in the day, though his friends assured me that mission had ended.Ididn’t know the ruse was relevant, butyou…”
Jacob made a pained expression and scrubbed his face with his hand.
Viv poked his chest. “We had an entire conversation about Quentin’s disguises, and how his secret society longs to be exactly like all of you. A club whose members you exhaustively interviewed. The same day I came for help, those lads must have given you every detail of the Baron Vanderbean mission and more. You lot would’veknownBaron Vanderbean was Horace Wynchester!”
“We… didn’t actually… interview his friends that day.” Graham didn’t meet her eyes. “I do recall you mentioning the clothing he’d been wearing the day of his disappearance—”
“She did,” said Marjorie. “I included the blue frock coat and waistcoat in my sketch. Vivian said Quentin thought it made him look Balcovian, though his clothing didn’t once make me think of Baron Vanderbean. Tommy never wore anything like that when she was pretending to be Horace, either.”
Viv nodded. “That’s essentially what Kuni said, when I mentionedQuentin’s antics to her, too. Graham, you were right there when we discussed this! Your wife said a real Balcovian baron would wear pink.”
Between the club members swearing Quentin’s mission was long over, and the costume itself being laughably inaccurate, Viv had no reason to think anyone believed her young cousin to be a baron.
If only she’d known about the kidnapping!
“None of us were thinking about the hoax,” said Adrian. “We’d already dismissed it as nonsense well before we met you. We were juggling so many real cases, there was no room left in our brains for extraneous details.”
Viv’s volume rose. “Extraneous?”
Even if they at first believed the kidnapping letter was a hoax, one of the Wynchesters should have connected the two together.
Her voice shook with fury. “You all knew Quentin had been pretending to be your imaginary brother! I also mentioned his disguise to Tommy and Philippa when we were talking about costumes. I reminded them my cousin often dressed like a Wynchester, and said to go ask Graham for the particulars. Although Quentin’s club members are too loyal to him to tell me anything, they wouldn’t hesitate to give the mighty Wynchesters every detail of Quentin’s mission. Where he went, what he was wearing, what he was trying to accomplish…”
Jacob and Graham exchanged stricken expressions. Viv’s heart stopped. “You didn’taskhis friends for the information I didn’t have about the mission Quentin had been undertaking before he disappeared?”
“We didn’t interview them at all,” Graham mumbled. “You had already done so, and seemed to think no one but Newt had any notion of where Quentin might be—”
