“Besides Toby?”
“A pretermitted heir who didn’t come crawling out of the woodwork after the will was read?” Zara responded archly. “With billions at stake?
Hardly likely.”
“Then what are we missing?” I asked, more desperation in my tone than I wanted to admit.
Zara considered the question. “My father liked to say that our minds have a way of tricking us into choosing between two options when there are really seven. The Hawthorne gift has always been seeing all seven.”
“Identify the assumptions implicit in your own logic,” Grayson said, clearly citing a dictate he’d been taught, “then negate them.”
I thought about that. What assumptions had we made? That Toby is the prodigal son, Tobias the father. It was the obvious interpretation, given Toby’s history, but that was the thing about riddles. The answer wasn’t obvious.
And on that first phone call, Toby’s captor had referred to himself as an old man.
“What happens if we take Toby out of the story?” I asked Grayson. “If your grandfather isn’t the father in the parable?” My heart drummed in my chest. “What if he’s one of the sons?”
Grayson looked to his aunt. “Did the old man ever talk to you about his family? His parents?”
“My father liked to say that he didn’t have a family, that he came from nothing.”
“That was what he liked to say,” Grayson confirmed.
In my mind, all I could picture were the three chess pieces. If Tobias Hawthorne was the bishop or the knight… who the hell was the king?
CHAPTER 37
We need to find Nan,” Jameson said immediately, once Grayson and I had reported back. “She’s probably the only person alive who could tell us if the old man had family that Zara doesn’t know about.”
“Finding Nan,” Xander explained to Eve, in what appeared to be an attempt to cheer her up, “is a bit like a game of Where’s Waldo, except Waldo likes to jab people with her cane.”
“She has favorite places in the House,” I said. The piano room. The card room.
“It’s Tuesday morning,” Nash commented wryly.
“The chapel.” Jameson looked at each of his brothers. “I’ll go.” He turned to me. “Feel like a walk?”
The Hawthorne chapel—located beyond the hedge maze and due west of the tennis courts—wasn’t large, but it was breathtaking. The stone arches, hand-carved pews, and elaborate stained-glass windows looked like they’d been the work of dozens of artisans.
We found Nan resting in a pew. “Don’t let in a draft,” she barked without so much as turning around to see who she was barking at.
Jameson shut the chapel door, and we joined her in the pew. Nan’s head was bowed, her eyes closed, but somehow, she seemed to know exactly who had joined her. “Shameless boy,” she scolded Jameson. “And you, girl!
Forget about our weekly poker game yesterday, did you?”
I winced. “Sorry. I’ve been distracted.” That was an understatement.
Nan opened her eyes for the sole purpose of narrowing them at me. “But now that you want to talk, it doesn’t matter if I’m in the middle of something?”
“We can wait until you’re finished praying,” I said, properly chastened —or at least trying to look that way.
“Praying?” Nan grumbled. “More like giving our Maker a piece of my mind.”
“My grandfather built this chapel so Nan would have someplace to yell at God,” Jameson informed me.