She slit through the top of another envelope with the point of the letter opener. With something resembling boredom, she said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. And if you don’t leave my home now, it won’t be Sheriff Quinn you’ll have to contend with. I sense his kind doesn’t stir you to action.”

“There is no trust, is there?” Darren said. “It’s a shell organization, a lie you created to get Leroy to sell to you.”

“It’s a rapprochement,” she said before licking the seal of an envelope with the pink point of her tongue. She wrote her name in careful script across the front. “His family stole from me, and I forgave him, and I promised his Indians would be safe.”

There was so much wrong with what she’d just said that Darren took a step back and cocked his head, as if to see her from a different angle. Was this woman insane, bloated with beliefs that made her as dangerous as her once violent son? Except that Rosemary’s were contained within the gentility of this Victorian mansion. “His people didn’t steal from you,” Darren said. “They saved their own lives.”

“Thereby obtaining property that rightly belonged to my relatives.”

“They obtained themselves?”

“Who knows what my great-great-grandmother could have accomplished if she’d had a chance to cash out on her slaves before the war ended.”

“And Margaret Goodfellow and her people, they don’t belong to Leroy Page any more than his people ever truly belonged to you. They are family to each other. And you used that to try to steal the land right out from under them.”

“They are getting their sovereign corner of it. I don’t know why that’s so hard for them to understand. The whole community, tribe, whatever you want to call it is down to fewer than twelve people. How much space do they need? A lakefront casino with novelty rides from Jefferson on an old-fashioned steamboat, this could be a boon for everyone. Rising tide and all that. There’ll be jobs for them at the casino if they want. I will personally make sure of that.”

“But it’s not going to happen, is it?”

“We’ve still got time,” she said.

“Your son, Rosemary, he said to call it off. He’s not going through with parole. In fact, just yesterday he confessed to ordering a hit on a fellow ABT.”

Now Rosemary stood, pushing her chair back with such force, its front two legs briefly left the ground. They landed with a scrape on the stone floor. “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” Darren said. “It was his idea…and Marnie’s.” He knew that would make her blow her top, and he wanted her this way, rage snipping at the thin membrane that held her tongue in place. “He’s not getting out, Rosemary.”