Silas walked across the kitchen, stopping beside where Eleanor stood near the stove.
“**Because as of eight o’clock this morning,**” Silas said, turning his cold, flint-gray eyes directly onto his cousin, “**Eleanor isn’t my hired cook.
She holds the master power of attorney over the entire Montgomery valley.**”
Julian gasped, but before he could protest, Eleanor quietly reached into the pocket of her faded calico apron.
Her fingers did not pull out a grocery list.
She withdrew an antique, circular piece of hand-machined naval phosphor-bronze—a surveyor’s transit pin stamped with micro-graduations that looked like an artillery fire-control dial—and laid it flat atop the kitchen table.
