My Dearest Bianca,
My darling daughter, as I lie here writing this letter, there are so many things I wish I could go back and change.
First, let me apologize to you. I spent too many years carrying around my grief at your mother’s death, and there were many times I didn’t fully appreciate how alive we both still were.
Your mother meant the world to me and I see her living on in you. She would be so proud of the historian you’ve become. Stay inquisitive and beautiful, my darling. I’m so sorry that I wasn’t able to leave you anything in my will. I wasted my life and there are many things I wish I had told you before today.
There’s one thing I think you should know, one thing I’ve agonized over telling you. I don’t think your mother’s car crash was an accident. As I’ve gone through my papers and recalled various conversations from the days before her death, it occurs to me that there may have been people who wanted to see me incapacitated. People who knew that your mother’s death would change everything.
My darling, I may not be able to leave you riches in the bank, but go through the papers in the box and you might find the truth. The truth will provide for you and your children and bring justice for your mother’s death. Writing this letter and knowing how strong you are is giving me great solace in the sadness of my last days. All I ask is that you be careful of who you trust. Friends can be foes and foes can be friends. Remember that I love you and I’m sorry.
Fight on like your beloved Mary, Queen of Scots.
All my love,
Papa
I read the letter three times in a row and then dropped it onto my lap in shock. I could barely understand what my father had written. He thought Mom been murdered? How could that be? Who would want my father incapacitated, and who was ruthless enough to kill an innocent woman to do it? And why had he mentioned Mary, Queen of Scots? True, I was a historian, but my real passion was old movies, not Elizabethan England.
I knew that Queen Mary had been executed by Queen Elizabeth because Mary had claimed she was the legitimate sovereign and of England and Elizabeth had seen her as a threat to the throne. Had someone seen my mother as a threat or—if the name was my father’s way of issuing a cryptic warning—did someone see me as a threat? I closed my eyes and tried to calm my thoughts. Oh, how I wished that I was able to talk to my father now! I was angry at him for not giving me more information. I looked into the boxes again and sighed. There was so much paperwork to go through. It was a daunting task, especially because I didn’t know what I was looking for. However, I was a historian—I knew how to research and I knew how to look for clues. My studies required me to make assumptions and draw conclusions from facts and patterns that I saw in my research. This would be no different.
I thought back to the lateral thinking games my father and I would play when I was younger. He always wanted me to be aware that word choices were clues, even if they didn’t appear so at first. There were many reasons why people couldn’t say what they wanted to say and you had to look beyond the words, he always told me. Many people talk in code and he often liked to test me in that way. I knew that the last sentence of his letter had to be a clue. “Fight on like your beloved Mary, Queen of Scots” meant something deeper. I just had to figure out what.
In fact, I needed to figure out what was going on with everything. What did his whole letter mean? Who would have had my mother killed? Once I came up with some answers, I could decide what to do next. I stared at the papers in the box and sighed again. It was going to be a long day.
two
Shock affects different people in different ways. It can set you back or it can spur you forward. My father’s death and the mystery he’d left behind ignited something in me, a curiosity and a deep desire to find out the truth about my mother’s death. I’d taken a leave of absence from my job and had dedicated myself to figuring out exactly what my father had been hinting at.