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than a hundred years.
    Faye saw trunks spilling over with yellowed silk dresses. She saw moth-eaten buffalo heads and the tusks of elephants. Tucked among the junk were boxes of file folders, probably the complete tax records of a wealthy family, dating to the time when the 16 th Amendment first turned the Bureau of Internal Revenue loose on an unsuspecting public. Most of this stuff would probably be worth a few dollars at one of the antique stores on San Marco Avenue, but no more.
    Still, Faye would have sold her mother for a chance to plunder through it. And her history-loving mother would probably have understood, if she were still around to be sold. Maybe if Faye exercised a little salesmanship, she could get paid for this work that she was dying to do anyway.
    “We could curate this material for you, Daniel. Some of the papers might be worth archiving, and there could be artwork that you’d want to display for your guests.” She pointed at a pile of ornate frames sitting in a dormer.
    Daniel was silent longer than he needed to be.
    “Maybe.” Daniel seemed to waver. “I’m not sure Suzanne and I can afford such a large project yet—not until you finish the one you’re working on now, anyway—but I do have one thing to ask you. I mean…” He swallowed hard. “I have something to show you.”
    He waved vaguely in the direction they’d been moving. Then he started walking briskly down the length of a huge room in an attic so big that there was yet another door in the far wall. Faye looked lovingly at the door—what could be behind it?—but forward progress stopped when Joe opened the door behind them.
    “You were gone for awhile, Faye, and I got worried. Glynis told me where you were.” He looked at Daniel. “It’s a powerful long hike downstairs from here for a pregnant lady. Maybe you’ve got a freight elevator we can use to get her back down?”
    Great. Her handsome and sexy husband was talking about her in the third person, and he was saying that she needed to be hauled around in a freight elevator. Was the romance truly that dead?
    “Oh, I can do the stairs,” Faye said, though her hips were arguing with her.
    “Didn’t you use the elevator to get to my office, Faye?” Daniel asked. “There’s no way to get up this far without that last flight of stairs, but we added an elevator that serves the guest areas on the three main floors.”
    Faye’s back was yelling at her, saying, Idiot. You should have known a place this luxurious would have an elevator.
    A tiny bit of irritation seeped into Daniel’s habitually calm voice. “This house was built with a freight elevator. A dumbwaiter, too. But the freight elevator wasn’t good enough for the government, so we installed a passenger elevator in the turret on the right side of the entrance hall. We did it right, too. We hired a historic restoration firm to design one that wouldn’t destroy the aesthetics of the house. That atrium is featured in architecture textbooks, you know.”
    The restoration architect must be really good, because Faye had never even noticed the elevator. Clearly, it was damn near invisible.
    Joe looked behind him, through the open door, obviously looking for the easiest way to get his elephantine wife safely downstairs. Faye could see that she had no choice but to clamber back down the attic stairs. After that, though, it couldn’t be far to the elevator.
    An odd quiet hung in the air. Faye took it on herself to break the awkward silence.
    “You said you had something to show me?”
    Or had Daniel said he had something to ask her? Which was it?
    Logic said that Daniel had wanted to show her something, because he could have asked her a question downstairs or outside in the rear garden. He could have asked her a question on the telephone or by email. He could have even texted her a question, now that Faye knew how to answer it. No. Daniel had asked to see her face-to-face.
    Daniel eyed Joe for a second. Why did Faye have