Jake’s call came through at eleven. Margot had been in the library since dinner, waiting for it and reading, or at least going through the motions of doing so.
The Tylers, after coffee, had excused themselves and gone upstairs. They had gone, as Margot hoped, either to bed or into some tightly knit family huddle with no one knew what depths of mutual clinging and washing away of the secret barriers that had been holding them apart.
They had not, she hoped, gone into a dread-ridden session to plot with amateur strategy how best to save any one of the three of themselves from the legally grim results of Forrest’s murder. And yet this legitimate possibility could not be erased from Margot’s thoughts. Certainly, she knew, it could never be absent from Buran’s.
Fleury, as during the previous
