Walter Teller no longer looked like the child in the photograph with his brothers. Edwin still resembled his youthful self, but Peter too had changed. War and mission work had etched new lines where there had been none and honed down the soft fullness of a child’s face to the harsher bone structure of maturity. Edwin, sheltered of necessity, had changed the least.

The resemblance didn’t make Walter Teller Timmy’s father. But it opened avenues of thought that gave Rutledge a different perspective on what he thought he’d understood unequivocally.

After a time, he put the frames back where he’d found them, and searched cursorily through Jenny Teller’s desk. There was little of interest to him. A few letters, stationery and envelopes, stamps, and a clipped packet of paid household accounts for May.

Satisfied, he went downstairs to the study.

Walter wasn’t there. Rutledge locked the door, crossed to the desk, and methodically went through it.

Nothing there to shed light on what he was asking himself.

And then he found, among folders of mission travel records and other related material, a single folder marked simply wills.

He took that out, opened it, and scanned Jenny Teller’s last will and testament. It was, as he would have expected, very straightforward. Money inherited from her family was to be held in trust for her son, her jewelry for his wife on their wedding day, and a sum for servants past and present, another for the church in Repton. The remainder of her estate went to her husband.

Rutledge set that aside and looked at Walter Teller’s will, though he had no right to do so. It too was straightforward. The greater part of his estate went to his son, with a sum set aside for his wife until she remarried or her death. Bequests to servants, to the Repton church, to the Alcock Society, and for the upkeep of the rose garden at Witch Hazel Farm in memory of his wife. But no mention of a woman in Lancashire or St. Bartholomew’s churchyard where she and her son lay buried.

Rutledge read the last bequest again. “For the perpetual upkeep of the rose garden at Witch Hazel Farm in memory of my wife.”

And in his mind he could hear the parrot, Jake, pleased with his new if temporary quarters in Frances Rutledge’s breakfast room, overlooking the garden. Roses . . .

He put the folder back where he found it, shut the desk, and unlocked the door.

Not a moment too soon. Mollie was there, telling him that breakfast was set out in the dining room, if he cared for any.