The Lakeside Inn, Leeanna Morgan [rosie project TXT] 📗

in Polson. She sounds happy. I wonder if that was real or if she was being positive for her parents’ sake?”

Penny picked up a different envelope. “If she was as courageous and determined as Grandma told us, she probably was happy.” She looked at the envelope she was holding and frowned. “This letter was sent to her parents about a month after her husband was supposed to have died.”

When Penny read the letter, the same level of emotion didn’t spill from the pages as some of the earlier ones she’d read. “Do you remember Grandma talking about spending a lot of time waiting on the dock?”

“I do. She said her mom met each steamboat as it came from the other side of the lake.”

Penny hunted for another letter she’d read a short time ago. “I always thought she was grieving for her husband and hoping he would return. But I don’t think so. Look at this.” She moved closer to Diana. “Margaret’s telling her parents how well she’s doing. The sewing business she started is attracting a lot of wealthy clients and her daughter is happy. Does that sound like a grieving widow to you?”

“Maybe she put his death behind her and was moving on with her life? If she hadn’t, she would have starved.”

“But it just sounds so positive. As if her husband’s death had never happened.”

Diana looked up from the letter she was reading. “Do you think she knew her husband was still alive?”

“I don’t know what to think. It was the 1920s. She was a single mother with a young daughter, living in a small town in Montana. Her life should have been one struggle after another, but she started her own business and it was successful. She must have been getting financial support from somewhere, and it definitely wasn’t from her family. Grandma said they were as poor as church mice.”

Diana placed the letter she was reading in its envelope. “Let’s pretend that she knew her husband was alive. What did she have to gain by pretending he was dead?”

“Her independence. A chance to be herself for the first time in her life. A chance to make actual money that she could spend on anything she wanted.”

“They’re all big things, especially for a single mom.”

Penny knew she was talking about something that was impossible to prove, but she was at a loss as to how the blue enamel snuffbox had ended up in Margaret’s chest—and a letter in a set of drawers that could have been written by Abraham Lincoln.

“Did you know our great-grandfather had gambling debts?” Diana looked up from the next letter she was reading. “This letter is dated about a month before he supposedly died. Margaret’s worried about their safety. Her husband must have been in trouble with someone important.”

Penny looked up. “Grandma said he had issues, but she wouldn’t say what they were. I thought she meant he had a quick temper and got into a lot of fights.”

Diana bit her bottom lip. “What if we’ve just found a motive for our great-grandfather’s disappearance? He might have owed someone a lot of money and needed to disappear.”

Suddenly, Penny remembered something she’d seen the last time she searched through her great-grandmother’s chest. “Why didn’t I think of this sooner?” She scrambled across the room to a small pile of postcards her great-grandmother had kept. “A woman called Jane wrote these. I assumed she was a friend.”

Diana looked at the postcards. “They’re from all over Europe. What was she doing there?”

“Visiting all the tourist hot spots. She went to Switzerland—”

“And Germany”—Diana turned over two more postcards—“France, and Spain.”

Penny studied the signature at the bottom of a postcard. “Our great-grandfather’s middle name was James.”

Diana’s eyes widened. “And Jane and James are similar names. What if he called himself Jane in the postcards? No one except his wife would have known they were from him. Do you think he sent Margaret the snuffbox as a present?”

“If we’re right, he was in Switzerland, so he could have.”

“What about the key? That was inside the box.”

Penny frowned. “Maybe not at the beginning. Margaret could have put it there later on. She told her daughter that, as long as she had the key, she’d never need anything else.”

“Do you think she knew about the letter and how valuable it was?”

“I’d be surprised if she didn’t. Abraham Lincoln died eighteen months after he wrote the letter. Even then, anything of his would have been worth a lot of money.”

Diana sighed. “We could be descended from a family of opportunists and imposters.”

Penny smiled. “At least they were lovable imposters. But, if we’re right, Mom will be upset. If our great-grandfather staged his own death to get out of trouble, he wouldn’t have been as wholesome as Mom wants everyone to believe.”

“And then there’s the letter,” Diana said with a sigh. “If our great-grandmother had anything to do with putting it in the dresser, she could have been just as bad as her husband. It’s no wonder Margaret didn’t tell Grandma about her dad and what he was like.”

Penny looked at the postcards. If the letter from Abraham Lincoln to his son was authentic, the people from the Smithsonian would want to look at the dresser and everything in the chest. And maybe, with the resources at their disposal, they might be able to tell them exactly what happened to their great-grandfather.

Three days later, Wyatt parked his truck in the parking lot beside the tiny home village. He was no closer to deciding what he would do about the residency in Berlin, but he still had a few days to think about it.

His agent, as expected, couldn’t believe he hadn’t said yes. But Wyatt wasn’t ready to commit to living overseas for twelve months without talking about it with Penny first.

And that was the problem. It didn’t matter how often he rehearsed what he wanted to say, he still couldn’t bring himself to talk about it with her.

Someone knocked on