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subconsciously blocking out some traumatic experience by returning to a time before it happened. You should get her to a shrink.”
    â€œYeah. I know,” replies Trina. “But she’s so scared she’ll probably run if I take her out of the house. Anyway, I have some ideas.”
    Trina’s first idea involves Daphne Lovelace, a long-time resident of Westchester, England, with a propensity for getting involved in situations that should properly be left to the authorities. But in a way, Daphne still considers herself to be a part of the authorities, and despite more than thirty years on the pensioner’s list at Whitehall’s Ministry of Defence, she has never fully retired. A twenty-five-year stint as the cleaninglady at Westchester police station before her compulsory departure from the workforce merely reinforces her belief that she is still a servant of Her Majesty. The Order of the British Empire, awarded to her for unspecified acts of national importance during and after the Second World War, proves conclusively, in her mind at least, that despite her advancing years she has the full backing of the British government.
    â€œJanet Thurgood from Dewminster,” Daphne muses aloud once she’s digested the information from her Canadian friend. “Doesn’t ring a bell, but it’s only about ten miles. I could get a bus over there tomorrow afternoon and make some inquiries. What was the address again?”
    â€œYes! Lovelace and Button are back in business,” shrills Trina in delight as she punches the air, and Daphne laughs at the younger woman’s exuberance.
    â€œJust don’t tell David what we’re doing or he’ll have me arrested by Interpol for interfering in international investigations.”
    â€œRoger, wilco,” says Trina in a passable English accent, knowing that Daphne’s friend Detective Chief Inspector David Bliss of Scotland Yard has good reason to complain about civilians meddling in police affairs. He still walks with a limp from a flesh wound inflicted on him the last time that Daphne and Trina decided to do a little sleuthing on their own and wound up uncovering a CIA operation in the mountains of Washington State.
    Bliss is not in a position to complain about any extra-judicial inquiries this time. Despite several attempts to resign from London’s Metropolitan Police Service to begin his writing career, and to avoid further confrontations with a slippery senior officer named Edwards, Bliss is still firmly listed as a serving officer. However, a full year’s sabbatical on half pay — a reward for services above and beyond the call of duty — has provided him with both the time and the means tocomplete his great historical work, and it’s no coincidence that he has chosen the faded Mediterranean resort of St-Juan-sur-Mer as his
pied-à-terre
.
    From his Provençal apartment’s balcony, David Bliss looks across the beautiful azure bay to the fortress on the island of Ste. Marguerite, the one-time residence of Louis XIV’s legendary prisoner
l’homme au masque de fer
— the Man in the Iron Mask — and wraps himself in the ambience of the Mediterranean as he attempts to recreate the intriguing world of the French aristocracy at the end of the seventeenth century.
    Three months, and Bliss’s first draft of the true account of the legendary masked man,
The Truth Behind the Mask
, is already half complete. However, he is growing concerned that his schedule is slipping, and bubbly real estate agent Daisy Leblanc isn’t helping, though he doesn’t complain as he hears her key in the apartment’s door.
    â€œI ’ave brought you zhe dinner, Daavid,” Daisy calls in her Gallicized English as the door closes behind her, and Bliss is drawn from the balcony to a sight more pleasing than the vermillion sun setting over the aquamarine bay and verdant islands.
    â€œWhat would I do