Finally I had a chance to finish my text to George:

I’m in the ballroom. Where are you?

Three dots appeared at the bottom of my screen. George was typing. Then the dots disappeared.

I sent a question mark but didn’t get a response.

A clock began to chime eight o’clock. It was time for the Duchess to reveal herself and tell us all why she’d gathered us in her mansion for the first time in a decade. Mr. Gatewood stood beside the throne with his arms tucked neatly behind his back. The crowd fell silent.

A string quartet began a dignified processional, heavy on the cello. I heard a breathy tune rising in accompaniment from somewhere in the crowd. The four flute players from Mona Pearl and Diana’s performance appeared on the throne platform. They must have been mingling with the guests until the appointed moment.

Mona Pearl was definitely here in the room. But where? I hung back near the doorway, trying to scan the crowd in a methodical way, examining one head after another for Mona Pearl’s distinctive dark hair, parted down the middle. Everyone was looking past me, toward the grand staircase outside the ballroom doors, where the Duchess would make her entrance.

We waited another long moment, every onlooker tense with anticipation. But when the Duchess appeared at the top of the staircase, she did not descend alone. She had an escort, a handsome young person in a blue tuxedo.

My friend George Fayne was holding the arm of River Heights’s legendary Duchess Strickland. The two descended the grand staircase, one step at a time, slowly, and then crossed the gallery floor. The Duchess wore a dignified gown and a long green satin cape embroidered with curling vines around the edges. She really did look like nobility. I couldn’t imagine how the two of them had met. George had probably been getting into mischief somewhere upstairs. Maybe she’d been caught in the act, and playing the Duchess’s escort for the evening was her penance.

But George looked so pleased with herself—I knew she couldn’t be in trouble. Either way, she still hadn’t replied to my text!

The crowd parted as the Duchess and George entered the ballroom. I caught a flash of bright green wool in the shifting crowd. Zeke was just across the room from me, huddled in conversation with someone who wasn’t Diana. I didn’t see the woman’s face, but by her willowy dancer’s build, her graceful arms and hands, her bizarre feathered breastplate, and most of all, her center-parted black hair, I knew she had to be Mona Pearl. From the way they bent their heads together, Zeke and Mona Pearl looked like old friends, like two people who’d known each other a long time. But just as soon as I’d seen them, the pair of artists melted away into the crowd.

The Duchess and George were passing before me, nearly to the platform. Close-up, the Duchess wasn’t as grand as her named suggested. In reality, she was a tiny, hunched old lady with a twist of gray hair. Her wrinkled brown face lit up with a kindly smile as she looked out at her guests. She held up one knobbly hand and waved like royalty, but I saw that her fingers were covered in colorful splotches. How strange. Had the Duchess forgotten to wash her hands before her own grand party? That wasn’t very elegant.