“Your mother’s?”
“No.” She brushed off the question in a way that distinctly discouraged follow-up questions, but I had to ask at least one.
“What about August third, nineteen-seventy-five,” I said. “Was that the day they got married?”
“No, it was not,” Zara replied. “Now, if you could please take that ring and see yourself out, I would greatly appreciate it.”
I walked toward the door, then hesitated. “Didn’t you wonder?” I asked Zara. “About the inscription?”
Silence. I started to think she had no intention of replying, but just as my hand closed around the doorknob, Zara surprised me. “I did not have to wonder,” she said tersely.
I glanced back at her.
Zara shook her head, her grip on her mother’s wedding ring iron-tight. “It’s a code, obviously. One of his little games. I’m supposed to decode it. Follow the clue wherever it leads.”
“Why didn’t you?” If she’d known that there was meaning to this bequest, why hadn’t she played?
“Because I don’t want to know what else my father had to say.” Zara pressed her lips together, and something about her expression made her look decades younger. Vulnerable. “I was never enough for him. Toby was his favorite, then Skye. I was last, no matter what I did. That was never going to change. He left his fortune to a total stranger rather than leaving it to me. What else could I possibly need to know?”
Zara didn’t seem so formidable now.
“Nan said to tell you something.” I cleared my throat. “She said to tell you that ‘we all do what we have to do to survive.’”
Zara let out a low, dry laugh. “That sounds like her.” She paused. “I was never her favorite, either.”
The tree is poison, Toby had written. Don’t you see? It poisoned S and Z and me.
“Your father left Skye a clue, too.” I didn’t know why I was telling her this. I shouldn’t have been telling her this. Grayson had been very clear in his warning: Zara and Skye couldn’t find out that Toby was alive.
“At True North, I assume?” Zara really was Hawthorne. She’d seen the meaning in the will. She just hadn’t cared. No, I thought. She cared. She just wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of playing.
“He left Skye a picture,” I said softly. “Of you and her and a guy named Jake Nash.”
Zara sucked in a breath. She looked like I’d slapped her. “Now would be a good time for you to leave,” she said.
On the way out, I placed her father’s wedding ring on an end table. I’d committed the date to memory. I’d gotten what I needed.
There was no reason for me to take this from her, too.
CHAPTER 53
Late into the night, the five of us dug into the Hawthorne family history, looking for meaning in those dates. August 3, 1975. September 7, 1948. Tobias Hawthorne had been born in 1944. Alice had been born in 1948—but in February, not September. The two of them were married in 1974. Zara was born two years later, Skye three years after that, and Toby two years later, in 1981. Tobias Hawthorne had filed his first patent in 1969. He’d founded his first company in 1971.
A little before midnight, I got a phone call from Libby. I answered the phone with a question. “Did you find something?”
We might have hit a wall, but Libby had spent hours in New Castle. She’d had time to ask about Harry. Time to look for him.
“No one at the soup kitchen has seen him for weeks.” My sister’s tone was hard for me to place. “So we tried the park.”
“Libby?” I could hear my own heart beating in the silence that followed. “What did you find?”
“We talked to an older man. Frank. Nash tried to bribe him.”
“Didn’t work, did it?” I asked. More silence. “Lib?”
“He wasn’t going to tell us anything, but then he looked at me for a minute, and he asked me if my name was Avery. Nash told him it was.”
I should have been there myself. I should have been the one talking to Frank. “What did he say?”
“He gave me an envelope with your name on it. A message from Harry.”
The world came screeching to a halt. Toby left me a message. I wanted to stop the thought there, but I couldn’t. My father… left me… a message.
“Take a picture of the envelope,” I told Libby, recovering my voice. “And the letter. I want to read it myself.”