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them a blow-by-blow description of our two-year construction war.”
    “Oh, that,” Charlie said, taking a small sip. “It’s not over a moment too soon. They’ve only just finished painting the nursery, and the baby’s due in less than a month.”
    Leland blinked at that bit of news. He took a quick sip of his drink, leaving Ali to field the ball Charlie had casually whacked into the air. “You’re having a baby?” she asked. Looking around that elegant room, she wondered how the gorgeous furniture and the exquisite wallpaper would survive assaults from an active toddler, but neither Jeffrey nor Charlie seemed dismayed in the slightest by the prospect of raising a kid who might turn out to be your basic human wrecking ball.
    “Not us, of course,” Jeffrey interjected. “We’re using a surrogate. It’s a boy. We’re naming him Jonah, after your father,” he added in Leland’s direction. “We haven’t broken the news to all the relatives yet, especially the aunties. We’re planning to unveil him officially at the family reunion in Cheltenham next summer.”
    “The aunties?” Ali asked.
    “That would be Leland’s cousins, the twins—Maisie and Daisy, Adele’s sister’s daughters. You’ve yet to meet them,” Charlie said to Ali. “They’re the family’s self-appointed resident busybodies. Rather than telling them about Jonah in advance and letting them get all hot and bothered about it, we decided we’d spring him on them as a fait accompli this summer and count on the baby to provide enough charm to win them over.”
    “The twins,” Leland repeated, shaking his head. “I had almost managed to forget about those two. Whatever became of them?”
    Jeffrey turned to Ali. “Are you familiar with the family tree?” he asked.
    “Not really.”
    “Maisie and Daisy Jordan,” Leland explained. “My mother, AdeleMathison Brooks, and theirs, Beatrice Mathison Jordan, were sisters. The twins were about ten when I left home. Their family was somewhat better off than ours. Whatever became of them?”
    “They both married,” Jeffrey said, picking up the thread of the story. “Maisie is Maisie Longmoor now, and Daisy’s married name is Phipps. Their younger brother, Billy, was never quite right in the head. He was a late-in-life baby with Down syndrome. He lived at home with his parents his whole life and died of pneumonia in his twenties.”
    “I didn’t know there was a brother,” Leland said.
    Jeffrey nodded. “It was a tragedy. He was never able to look after himself, and taking care of him was a terrible burden on his parents. They died just a few years after he did, in their late sixties, and within a few months of each other. When their parents died, both twins happened to be at loose ends. Maisie had recently divorced her husband, and Daisy was widowed. When they inherited their folks’ place in Bournemouth, they decided to pool their resources. They changed the place into a B and B—using the term loosely—and call it Jordan’s-by-the-Sea. Guests stay in the main house, while the two sisters live in the carriage house out back and oversee the running of the place.”
    “What a shame,” Leland said. “I believe we’re booked into the Highcliff up on the bluff. If we’d known about this, we could have stayed there.”
    Charlie laughed aloud. “Don’t give that idea a moment’s thought,” he said. “To hear the aunties tell it, Jordan’s is everything in luxury, but don’t be fooled. It’s not. I’ve read some of the online reviews. Dreadful is more like it. That’s one of the reasons we’re having next summer’s family reunion in Cheltenham, home to the Mathisons, rather than in Bournemouth. We didn’t want having to stick visiting guests in Jordan’s-by-the-Sea.”
    “And we didn’t want to have to explain to the aunties why no one wanted to stay there,” Jeffrey added.
    Charlie looked down at his watch. “It’s probably about time,” he said. “I’ll go