The Heir Affair

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, incidents, and dialogue, except for incidental references to public figures, products, or services, are imaginary and are not intended to refer to any living persons or to disparage any company’s products or services.

Copyright © 2020 by Well Played, Inc.

Cover design by Elizabeth Turner Stokes
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First Edition: July 2020

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020933671

ISBN: 978-1-5387-1591-8 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-1592-5 (ebook)

E3-20200507-DA-NF-ORI

To our mothers,
for their strength, their wisdom, and their love

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ACT ONE

A clear and innocent conscience fears nothing.

—Queen Elizabeth

CHAPTER ONE

Pardon me, lass, but could you help me with a wee spot of murder?”

I jumped. I hadn’t heard anyone enter the store. The peeling P. G. Wodehouse hardbacks I’d been alphabetizing tumbled onto the floor.

“Absolutely, just one second,” I said over my shoulder. Could I help with murder? Please. It had become my specialty. P. G. could wait.

I knelt, ostensibly to reorganize my pile of books so that I could return to it easily, but mostly to take a stabilizing breath. That had become my pattern: Whenever I had to interact with someone for longer than a moment, I caught myself pausing first, wondering whether that second of anonymity was my last. All it would take to blow my cover was one keen eye or ear. One person whose tabloid habit meant they’d recognize the contours of my face, one person to hear through the shaky upper-crust British accent I’d adopted. Assuming a new identity was thrilling, but the accompanying dread never fully went away.

My customer turned out to be a stooped older gent in a thin beige cotton cardigan, his hand wobbling on a cane, light age spots making a mosaic of his balding pate. Not the archetype of a Hello! addict, though if there’s anything I’ve learned over the last eight years, it’s that you can never tell. But from what I could see through my own (fake) glasses, there was no spark of recognition behind his.