“ ‘I’m way ahead of you, angel face,’ she replied. ‘I’ve drunk two cans of relatively innocuous lipids, as Cindy can verify, so I have had enough food to feed an entire Hindu village for one day. Now sit down. I have a translation here of the inscription on the island. This just arrived.’

“I wanted to snatch the pages out of her hand, but she wouldn’t allow it and read out the words,

“ ‘Here sleeps Petronia, whose mortal hands once made the most beautiful of cameos, even for emperors and kings. Guard me, ye gods and goddesses whose images I rendered so well. A curse on those who attempt to disturb my resting place.’

“She gave me the page of the letter. I read it over and over. ‘Petronia,’ I whispered. ‘What can all this mean?’ I gave the page back to her. ‘Who translated it, Aunt Queen?’ I asked.

“ ‘A man I want you to meet, Quinn, a man who’s going to change the course of your life the way Lynelle changed it, a man who’s going to accompany you and me on the Grand Tour you should have had a long time ago. The man’s name is Nash Penfield. He’s an English professor from California, and I like him very much.’

“ ‘But what if I don’t like him, Aunt Queen?’ I asked. ‘Aunt Queen, I don’t want to go to Europe yet. I don’t want to leave here. What’s going to happen to this place? Aunt Queen, Pops just died. We can’t be making plans.’

“ ‘We have to make plans, my dear boy,’ she said. ‘And Nash Penfield is flying here Friday. We’ll have a nice dinner together and we’ll see how you like him, and if you don’t care for the man, which I truly cannot imagine, then we’ll find someone else. But you need a tutor, Quinn, you need someone to take up where Lynelle left off.’

“ ‘All right. We’ll make a bargain. You get up out of bed, eat three square meals tomorrow and I’ll meet Mr. Penfield. How’s that?’

“ ‘I’ll go you one better,’ she said. ‘You check into Mayfair Medical tomorrow for a series of tests, and I’ll get up, eat breakfast and go with you, how’s that?’

“ ‘What tests?’ I asked. But I already knew. They’d do brain scans on me, MRIs, electroencephalograms, whatever they called them. They’d be looking for lesions on the temporal lobe—something physical to account for what I claimed to see and hear. I wasn’t surprised, even with all the verification that Rebecca Stanford had been real and had been murdered, I wasn’t surprised.

“If anything, I was surprised that it hadn’t come sooner. And I thought to myself, Well, we’ll get this over with and I won’t have to think about it anymore.