Adele put a hand on her heart. “Mercy sakes. You don’t say.”

“And from what I can figure out, that lady up there is my great-great-great-grandmother.”

“Great…Let’s see now.” Adele did some figuring in her head. “Artimas and Evalyne had a boy and two girls. The girls married men from Savannah-brothers, they were-and moved away, but the boy stayed on to run the family business, which was a savings and loan outfit until the crash of twenty-nine. He had two boys, Cecil and Merlon.”

“My grandpa was called Cecil.”

“Well, there you go. Cecil had two boys, as well. Your dad must have been Gibson, because your Uncle Roy is on the board of the Ashmere Trust and I know both his girls.” Eve nodded. “I was so sorry about your parents, dear. Such a tragedy.”

“It happened a long time ago. But thank you.”

“When you’re as old as me, ‘a long time ago’ is relative,” Adele said with some asperity. Then her voice softened. “So you’ve come back to Atlanta and have a television show, do you? I’m glad to hear it. Your aunt and uncle will be glad you’re home, too.”

“They are. Do you know them well?”

“Roy and my husband did some business together. A start-up, I think you call it. I never pay much attention to that kind of thing. It’s much more interesting to learn about lace-making patterns and how to preserve quilts, in my opinion.”

Eve laughed. “My aunt might agree with you. She tried to teach me to sew when I was a kid, but I was never very good at it.”

“Your mother wasn’t, either, poor thing. But lands, she was a beautiful woman. Talk about the belle of her generation. The family had fallen on hard times by the time she married into it. Your grandpa had to give up this property and they moved to a place in town when your dad and uncle were boys. In fact, I babysat them when I was a teenager. Now, that was a long time ago.”

Mitch had to smile at her truthful but self-deprecating humor. Then she took Eve’s elbow and led her to the main staircase in the hall.

“I really shouldn’t do this, but since you’re a member of the family, I’d say you have the right. There are some pictures and things upstairs that you might be interested in.”

As they followed her up the staircase to the second floor, Mitch asked, “There are family pictures still here? Didn’t they go when the family moved away?”

“The originals did.” Adele waved a hand at the open rooms they passed. “These are the children’s bedrooms. The photos are in the master bedroom, here at the end. When the trust took this place over, Roy Best gave permission to make copies of some of the portraits. The walls were bare, you see.”

She led them into a huge room with ten-foot ceilings and narrow windows that had to be six feet high. A canopied bed occupied one end, and a fireplace the facing wall. On the wall to the left of the door, more portraits hung in a cluster. Some of them, Mitch was sure, had to have been taken right after the invention of the camera.

“Here’s Evalyne and the children,” Adele said, pointing. “That’s Cecil and his bride in the forties, just before he went off to England to fight in the war. And Eve, here’s your mother and dad and your Uncle Roy. This was taken in the early seventies, I think.”

“Belle of her generation is right,” Mitch murmured to Eve. “I see where you get your looks.”

“Not really.” Eve studied the picture. “I might have her chin, but not much else. I’m surprised how much I look like Evalyne, though. My niece Emily does, too. She’s fourteen.”

“Roy’s daughter?” Adele asked. “She does, now you mention it. It’s the mouth and the eyes. Very distinctive. Evalyne was said to be a woman of, shall we say, a very firm character, too.”

“That definitely describes my niece,” Eve said with a smile. “Much to her mom’s dismay.”

“You, too,” Mitch put in. “Not every woman could step onto a set and have a couple of hundred people in the palm of her hand within a few minutes.”

Eve shrugged modestly, then turned to Adele. “I don’t suppose there’s a copy of this picture, is there? I would love to have one. I don’t have many photos of my parents, and I’ve never even seen this one.”

Adele’s forehead creased as she thought. “I’m not sure. Let me check in the office, all right? Feel free to ramble around. I’ll come and find you.”

Mitch waited until he heard Adele’s footsteps on the stairs before he spoke. “I hope she finds a copy for you. If she doesn’t, maybe you can ask your relatives for one.”

“Nana didn’t have it in her belongings when she died.” Eve’s voice sounded puzzled. “I hardly have any pictures of my family. It’s strange, don’t you think?”

He considered this. “Maybe they were all sent to your uncle when your folks passed away.”

“Not even when I was a kid,” she said, as if he hadn’t spoken. “You’d have expected my parents to talk about the family like Adele does. All proud, with tons of detail that would bore to tears anyone who wasn’t related. But they never did. And the only pictures I remember seeing were Nana’s wedding photo and the ones I got of myself at school.”

“Some people just aren’t pack rats.” What was she getting at? And what was with that odd, tense look around her mouth, as though she’d turned over a rock and found something ugly under there? “I wouldn’t upset yourself over it.”

“I’m not upset. I’m confused. This isn’t the first time I’ve wished I could ask my mother questions about her life. Like this picture, for instance.”

He looked at it again. Three people. Two guys in lightweight suits with shaggy hair, a young woman with long hair parted in the middle, wearing platform shoes and a miniskirt.

“What about it?”

She pointed at one of the men. “That’s my dad, the blond guy.” Her finger moved to the other man, the one with his arm around the young woman. “And that’s my Uncle Roy.”

“Okay.” He let his voice rise a bit, giving her room to go on.

“So why does my Uncle Roy and not my dad have his arm around my mom?”

Why did anybody do anything? “Maybe they were goofing around for the camera. Maybe Uncle Roy was trying to get your dad’s goat or something. I have friends like that. Everything’s a competition, a contest to see who can one-up the other.”

“They look like they’re together, don’t they?”

“Huh?” Mitch blinked at the picture.

“Look how he’s holding her. How his hand is on her waist, how she’s snuggled up against him. A Southern girl from a good family, even in the seventies, would only let a boy hold her like that if they were serious about one another. Engaged, even. And look at my dad. He isn’t smiling, but the other two are.”

“And this means…?”

Her shoulders drooped. “I don’t know what it means. All I know is that I’ve never seen this picture before, and there isn’t one like it at my uncle’s place.”

“It could be packed away. My mom has boxes of old family pictures in albums, stacked in the closet under the stairs.”

She glanced at him. “You probably noticed that all the family pride missing in my folks came out in my Uncle Roy in spades. If it was there, I’d have seen it, trust me.”

Mitch heard Adele coming up the stairs, slower than she’d gone down them. A lady would have to be in good shape to act as docent around this place. No elevators.

“I still think you’re reading something into it that isn’t there.”

She would have answered, but Adele came in holding a photograph in a plastic sleeve. “Well, this is a funny thing. Good for you, Eve, but funny all the same.”

Eve took the photo and turned it over. “Oh?”

There was nothing written on the back.

“This is the original,” Adele said. “It must be a mistake. Roy said that all the photos he donated to the trust were copies, except Artimas and Evalyne’s wedding picture. That one’s the real thing.”

“Adele, did you know Roy and my dad? When they were teenagers, I mean. Like in this picture.”