Bernard Tate was seventy, and he answered his own phone.
“Mrs. Fenton,” he said, before I had finished saying my name. “I’ve been hoping you’d call. I’ve been forbidden to call you.”
“Forbidden by whom?”
“Spencer’s counsel. Pending the custody matter. But the custody matter is decided, and you’ve called me, and I’m an old man who’s tired of being told who he can talk to. Can you come to the office?”
His office was on the second floor of a brick building in Old Town Alexandria, with a window that looked at the river and a desk that looked at nothing but him.
I put the card on the desk.
He looked at it for a long moment and then took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
“So she did it,” he said. “The clever girl.”
“Celia?”
“Celia set it up. Eli delivered it. I told her it would never get past Spencer. She said, ‘Bernard, you underestimate my grandson.'”
