The Dark Glamour (666 Park Avenue 2)

never been the sentimental type, but her harsh exterior had hidden a fierce and abiding love for her granddaughter. Jane felt her eyes sting at the possibility of finding one more tangible shard of that love. ‘What’s in it?’
    ‘I didn’t open it, dummy – you were missing. There was a manhunt and a reward. I wasn’t thinking,
Oh, maybe she wants Gran’s old sweaters, wherever she is with her murdering druggie of a new husband.’
Elodie’s voice was a fierce whisper, but Jane still looked around furtively. The linen-suited men and large-hatted women around them, however, continued to ignore them thoroughly, and no one seemed to be in earshot at all.
    ‘Good point,’ Jane whispered back. She dug around in her purse until she found one of Ella Medeiros’s calling cards, printed with the number of her suite at the Lowell Hotel. ‘Can you forward it here? To Ella,’ she added for extra emphasis.
Not Caroline Chase . . . or Jane Boyle . . . or Amber Kowalsky from the Milwaukee passport, with her crazy facial piercings. No wonder I’m not sure who I see when I look in the mirror any more
.
    ‘Sounds good.’ Elodie pocketed the card and twirled her croquet mallet casually in the air, nearly knocking over a tray of drinks from a waiter who ventured a little too close. When the frightened-looking man was safely out of range again, she smiled conspiratorially at Jane.
She totally kills this spy stuff,
Jane thought enviously.
    ‘Want to come back to New York with us?’ she asked hopefully. She let herself imagine it for a moment: she and Elodie holed up at the Lowell, giggling over room service and plotting Jane’s next move. But deep down she knew she had already taken up about as much of her friend’s time as Elodie could afford to spare. Besides, Malcolm had met Elodie a few times, and who could guess how much Lynne had learned from him before Jane had rescued him? ‘Don’t answer that,’ Jane said, impulsively leaning in to give her friend a long, close hug. ‘You’ve already done so much.’
    This close to her goal, Jane couldn’t afford any kind of mistake . . . and she could carry out the last few steps on her own. She had to.
    By the time she got back to her hotel room, Jane was feeling tentatively optimistic – almost confident. Her plan was hardly foolproof, but it felt right to tell Anne as much of the truth as she could without putting herself in certain danger.
We orphans have to stick together, after all,
she thought, sliding off her cork-heeled wedges and kicking them towards the closet.
    She even felt optimistic about Anne’s ultimate fate at the Doran mansion. True, Lynne was currently pretty evil. But it was hard to imagine her
staying
so evil once her prized daughter was safely back home. Surely she would be grateful for such an unexpected gift . . . or, at the very least, she wouldn’t need to scheme so hard once her legacy was secured. According to Malcolm, the shock of losing Annette had driven his mother half mad with grief. In her desperation, she had risked a dangerous last-ditch pregnancy, helping it along with dark magic . . . which had backfired and damaged the brain of the child, who had turned out to only be a son, anyway. Fully deranged from this second loss, Lynne had hidden little Charles away in her attic and concocted ever-more-sinister plots to secure her family’s legacy. It might be too late for Lynne to really change who she had become, but undoing that first loss might steady her a little, and give her back some of her lost peace, Jane reflected absently, flipping open a folded piece of paper on her nightstand.
    ‘Dearest Ella,’
she read in André’s bold, sinuous, precise cursive.
‘I’m sorry to tell you that I must leave for France rather sooner than I had hoped. Although I would love to continue to share London with you, I will be leaving tomorrow evening. Sadly, I cannot rely on seeing you before then, so I hope you will forgive my saying good-bye this way.’
    ‘Passive-aggressive,’ Jane muttered: although the note was superficially pleasant, clearly André had not forgiven her in the slightest for refusing to share her information with him. He would have to stick with his original plan of heading to France and turning Saint-Croix-sur-Amaury upside down looking for clues.
    But so much the better, she decided. Everything that mattered to her was safely out of her tiny hometown – including the one last box she hadn’t even known about. She