Agatha shook her head. "No. No notes."

“I’ll do a bit of preliminary investigating, but I suspect we won't learn anything until you receive another letter."

"You think there will be another one?"

James nodded grimly. "Blackmailers don't know how to quit while ahead. It's their fatal flaw. In the meantime, I shall play at being your new estate manager. But I do wonder how you expect me to do this without being recognized."

"I thought not being recognized was your particular forte."

"It is," he replied easily, "but unlike France, Spain, and even the south coast, I grew up here. Or at least I almost did."

Agatha's eyes suddenly lost their focus. James knew that she was thinking of his childhood, of all the times she'd faced his father in silent, angry showdowns, insisting that James was better off with the Danburys. "No one will recognize you," she finally assured him.

"Cribbins?"

"He passed on last year."

"Oh. I'm sorry." He'd always liked the old butler.

"The new one is adequate, I suppose, although he had the effrontery the other day to ask me to call him Wilson."

James didn't know why he bothered, but he asked, "That wouldn't be his name, would it?"

"I suppose," she said with a little huff. "But how am I to remember that?''

"You just did."

She scowled at him. "If he's my butler, I'm calling him Cribbins. At my age it's dangerous to make any big changes."

"Agatha," James said, with far more patience than he felt, "may we return to the matter at hand?"