I touched the torchère with the reverence a possible Chippendale piece deserved, saying, “But man, I’d kill to dig through this mess.”
“First things first, Vivi,” Prue advised. “I promise not to do anything with this stuff until you have a look at all of it. But you keep at your book.”
Ah, my Prue.
I just knew she’d been guarding my book time.
She continued, “In the meantime, I’ll make a few calls. And I’ll definitely ask Scotty and Harry to help me move some things out so anyone who wants to look at it can get around better. But I have this crazy feeling there’s something in this house somewhere that you need. I just can’t seem to find it, and since I can’t get to half this stuff because the other half is piled on or in the way, I can’t get my hands on it.”
“Not that you won’t, but please, you and Harry and Scotty need to handle all of this with the utmost care. I think this may be a treasure trove, honey.”
She beamed. “I thought so too. And since we probably won’t keep most of it, we can auction it off and augment The Fund!”
Again with The Fund.
I didn’t ask.
I said, “Listen, I came to find you because Gingerface and Snowball want to come out to the studio with me. Can they come?”
“Oh, sure,” she replied breezily. “They aren’t outdoor cats, but they won’t do anything but follow you. Sometimes Floofy gardens with Chassie. She never leaves her side. But she does like to snooze in the sun.”
And that was my conversation with Prue and my introduction to the attics before Snowball, Gingerface and I went to the studio and got to work.
She was right.
They pranced through the turf and along the walkways right behind me all the way there.
And now I was studying the butler’s ledgers from 1946.
Primarily, two weird entries for two footmen.
Okay, we’ll begin with the fact that The Downs still had footmen in 1946, which, for that time, was very rare.
Sure, they had Scotty and Harry now, and even though they served dinner, like a footman would, I still thought they were around more to look after the occupants of the house than to serve food and tend fires.
But that wasn’t the weird part.
Bonuses, the line item in the ledgers denoted them. But when I kept going back and forth, there were no other bonuses listed for any staff that I could find.
Ever.
And they each got three hundred pounds, and once I adjusted that number for inflation, it made it over ten thousand pounds in today’s currency.
That was a massive bonus.
Especially since the footmen made the whopping amount of forty pounds per year.
And if that wasn’t enough, it was dated the day after Marie’s entry about something dire happening at The Downs.
“Bribes to be quiet? Or bribes because they were asked to do something they shouldn’t have to do, and they also had to be quiet about it?” I whispered to the ledger as my phone vibrated on the desk beside me.
I knew the number, it was my soon-to-be future landlord, so, feeling despondent at this reminder I was shortly going to leave this studio, the house, and the people I cared about in it, I took the call.
“Hello, Mr. Atkins.”
“Miss Dupree, how are you?”
“Great, and ready to move in on Monday,” I lied.
