Chapter 30
LAURIE
Mrs. Simon, Laurie declared to himself at Saturday dinner, deserved to own her own Delmonico’s.
Another Waldorf Astoria. Come to think—did he know anyone at the Waldorf?
Maybe not. But he knew cooks, and cooks were manic perfectionists, workaholics.
Terrors upon the rest of the staff when bored and underused.
Surely, someone would snap her up at the Waldorf if there were openings.
He looked down at his plate, teetering with boiled trout, potatoes Parisienne, buttered early beets, fresh bread…
Maybe even if there weren’t openings. Sam probably knew someone.
“Did Mrs. Simon follow you from New York?” he asked Chary.
He was seated across from him, calmly absorbed in this week’s mail—he was currently down to the Police Gazette—nibbling on a blueberry kolache.
He was still vigilant for any kind of exposé, rather rightly so.
Laurie had begun to be suspicious himself.
Raberding didn’t seem the type of man to let a threat go so long unrealized.
“Hm? The cook? No,” Chary said. “Mrs. Leonard hired Mrs. Simon locally. She’s the wife of an offshore fisherman, out of Milbridge, as I understand.”
Laurie grunted his surprise, mouth full of potato. “Poor Mr. Simon.”
“Why?” Chary asked. He turned the page in one careful sweep.
“Why? If you ever move back to Gotham, you should offer her the townhouse spot; that’s why. You’ll be sought after for the queens’ brunches.”
Chary shook his head. “It’s kept empty, since August’s…
” He trailed off. “And… I’ll never again live in the city.
I’m selling it. I let the staff there know yesterday.
” He said it frowningly, like the words were automatically formed by his brain and passed his lips as formality only.
He got like that when reading. And indeed, his eyes and focus were still intent upon the paper.
“Oh.” Laurie looked back down to his plate.
He hadn’t meant to probe for that answer.
He hadn’t even wanted to ask the question.
But he had, and that was that, it seemed.
Chary loved Maine. His only family was there—if conspicuously absent at present.
Why would he live in New York past giving up the job at the glassworks?
“Did you see the Gazette of two weeks ago?” he asked, buttering the bread. “The bodybuilder on the front page? Abdominals for a mile?”
“What?” Chary sat back, pushed away the magazine. “No.” He exhaled.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. Still nothing. Lord. I wish it would just come out.”
“Have you talked to your brother? He’s been sleeping in the house, hasn’t he?” If he had, Laurie hadn’t noticed. They hadn’t left the library much since yesterday; twenty-four, indeed.
Laurie hadn’t blamed August for slipping out of the cellar when he had.
Mere hours with Raberding had made Laurie feel defensive, unmoored against the truth, not knowing what next to expect.
He couldn’t fathom spending months of intimacy with the man, but he could see what doing so might do to one’s ability to endure conflict.
Chary nodded. “I think so.”
“Even last night?” Laurie pondered this, conspicuous and obvious. “Maybe the man just prefers a quiet sleeping environment.”
Chary’s glumness broke, and he laughed. “As though I didn’t endure many nights of the same—” He cleared his throat. “No. I think it is only that… August always sought me out,” he explained. “Despite whatever consequence it might’ve held. It’s my turn.” He waved. “Give me a metaphor, will you?”
“The ball’s yours? It’s in your court?” Laurie teased. “Despite consequence… like being found out by an infamous reporter? You were sneaking around behind my back last week. I knew it.”
A tiny smile. “Yes, of course. How good of you to have ignored it.”
Laurie laughed. “It was for a good cause.”
“But not…” Chary hesitated. “Not only that consequence. Before as well. Raberding never liked me, remember.”
The bastard Raberding again. Laurie immediately regretted his choice of words. “Shit. No, don’t worry about me. No consequences here. Go find your brother. It’s still blueberry season, isn’t it? When in doubt, find me in the kitchens. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Thank you.” Chary stood. He came over, glanced to the door, quick, and then leaned in and kissed him.
Laurie grinned through it, vowing, if nothing else, he’d convince Chary men damn well did kiss openly in their own damn house, even in the middle of nowhere, Maine, where one had to remain perfectly venial for the parish priest. Then he changed his mind and pulled Chary in, so as to convince him on the spot.
They ended up in the hall, Chary sequestering him into a discreet corner, breathing hard.
Eventually, Chary said, with a regretful groan, “I really must.”
“Sorry. Go.”
Chary departed up the wide foyer stairs, face flushed, his steps quick and light. Unburdened.
Honestly, Laurie thought—leaning against the wainscoting (for reasons), watching Chary climb—if there’d been more light left to the day, Chary might’ve ended up finding him in the barrens instead.
He wanted to know more about the foreman Herbert, his ways and means of hiring his seasonal pickers—where, exactly, they were being housed and what they were paid.
Professional curiosity, nothing more. He hadn’t had time to check it out last time he was there.
And Brasher might’ve turned out not to be a cop, only a fancy kind of butler-bodyguard-turned-lover for August, but he’d been lifted from the police station by suits with stars on.
Feds. Civilians didn’t get that kind of treatment.
Civilians didn’t take butler jobs in the middle of nowhere for no reason, either.
Hiram’s “sabbatical” from his office was mysteriously unexplained, Sam suspiciously tight-lipped about it.
Tomorrow, he resolved.
“Best of all,” Laurie muttered to himself, “it’s not a damn whodunit.”
Chary didn’t come straight back down the stairs, so August must’ve in fact been in residence in his reclaimed northwest balcony room.
A door shut quietly in the distance. Laurie figured that was enough confirmation for him.
Sure as hell he wasn’t Raberding, jealous of a man’s relationship with his own brother.
He had his priorities, though. He did go down to the kitchens.
There he briefly cleaned up from their dinner—Saturday night began Mrs. Simon’s Sunday rest—and was rewarded: under some heavy bowls he found a number of carefully-wrapped Eccles cakes: pastries stuffed with currants.
They had Hiram’s name practically written upon them.
“Can’t hide from me, H,” he said thickly. “Knew you were here somewhere.”
He pocketed three or four more cakes—restraint, because he was actually fond of his office partner and didn’t wish him to starve—and walked out, through the breakfast room, into the foyer.
He contemplated stopping by the not-a-butler’s wooded cabin to deliver them, dusk or no dusk.
Zero professional curiosity there, all taunt.
But Chary, of course, was a greater draw. However long he took.
At the foot of the front stair, he had to stop abruptly; he was nearly bowled over by Sarah, the housemaid, coming down in a hurry. Chary would’ve called it a frightful hurry.
With a mouth full of Eccles cake, Laurie stared. He hadn’t known she was still there. She ran with the tiny, mincing steps women seemed to have perfected: around the newel post and toward the carriage entrance. She had a hand shoved deep into an apron pocket.
“Sorry, Mr. Tulley!” she called over her shoulder.
He swallowed, then narrowed his eyes. “Hmm.”
He knew he was a good share more observant than most. A whole life of changing his behavior according to surroundings had done that. He also knew it made him more careful than most.
It had nothing to do with the fact that the cellar entrance was in the back of the greenhouse nave—and the entrance to that was just through the carriage entrance. And certainly, pockets didn’t hold keys, no. Keys that would make telltale noises when running if not held.
Housemaids did not get keys. She was there very late.
Unless he was leaning in to his bias yet again. What little interaction he’d had with Sarah had been pleasant. There was really no reason.
And yet.
Yes, there: the groan of a hinge. Hinges on the door to the glass greenhouse nave, perhaps. Only two somebodies had keys to the greenhouse nave: Chary and Brasher.
And now Sarah?
He followed, quick and quiet.
She’d left the greenhouse door open. That wasn’t surprising; it was heavy, nothing but leadlight glass and iron, and would’ve shattered if she’d slammed it in her haste.
Now it flapped in the wind that gusted through the tunnel of the carriage entrance, swinging wide and back again with long, loud complaints.
Laurie steadied the door carefully in its threshold. He didn’t latch it.
In the greenhouse nave, streams of setting sun threaded in from behind him, making leafy, monstrous shadows splay upon the leadlight. Chary would know the name of the one that looked like daggers. He was sure it was innocuous.
The steel cellar door she had not left open, but the padlock was opened and tossed aside.
Bias or no, that was plenty damning. She was somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be, at the frantic behest of someone else who surely wasn’t Chary. In the presence of something both brothers wanted kept safe.
Laurie crept over. He picked up the lock, hooked it through the fastenings, and clicked it shut.
The woman wasn’t trapped—the cellar had a second fire exit that latched from the inside only, because though Chary was a millionaire industrialist, he was the rare one with a thought for safety—but it might buy him some time in confusion.
With his theory practically confirmed, he stamped down remorse, turned, and ran. He had his priorities, and neither the cellar nor the machine inside it was one of them.
They were, however, Tjofabier Raberding’s. And given a choice of leverage between Chary and Brasher—August’s brother versus August’s lover—he knew which Raberding would choose. From whence those keys had come. Upstairs.
Laurie jogged through Chary’s beloved greenhouse, across the mansion foyer. His thoughts screamed speculation at him as he went.
Raberding, being known to be “hands-off” in the business but in truth wanting the rival glass heir, wanting trade secrets, wanting a merger, wanting the semiautomatic bottle machine. Raberding, who was not actually “hands-off” at all. Not in the least.
Raberding, negotiating with the flint glass workers’ union: a union beneath the heading of the biggest federation of labor in the country, a union with practically a monopoly of labor on every glassworker he needed to stay in business.
Raberding, being the first one he’d interviewed, the first one to know he, Lawrence Tulley, was looking into August’s death.
Irving Sawyer and his “odd jobs.” Irving knowing Laurie on sight, his surname, his occupation; Irving being conveniently at a Brooklyn haunt for normal workingmen.
Irving feeding him information that wasn’t false but wasn’t quite true.
Irving, not working on behalf of the Local #68 but instead as a labor spy, working for Raberding. Doing the rich man’s bidding.
If Raberding was a murderer this whole time.
If Laurie hadn’t been completely off base with his theorizing in the original article.
If Raberding had had those men killed, for whatever self-serving reason, and then had tried to have Chary killed, too, not as a gaffer of Wright Glass, trying to unionize, but as Chary himself? As August’s brother?
Chary paying off police to fake a man’s death; Raberding paying off police to cover up Irving’s death, to make it look like a crime. Rich men’s solutions, learned by example, by precedent.
“Shit.” Laurie shouldn’t have asked when the gaffers had begun disappearing but when they’d stopped.
Because the timeline did match up, after all: the last gaffer to disappear had been last October.
Right around when Raberding must’ve found out about August’s automatic machine.
Just as soon he’d had his realization that he might no longer need to negotiate with unions at all.
He could have his lover and his machine, too.
Until August had died to say, for once and for all, that he couldn’t have either.
Chary had said he didn’t know which came first, Raberding’s want of August or his want of Wright Glass, but it didn’t matter, because they were indivisible.
And it was seemingly true: maybe they had been for months.
At least until August had opened his mouth and confided in his lover about his genius innovation. Maybe even beyond that.
Indivisible motivations. Were they still?
No need for skilled workers—no need to negotiate with trade unions—thus no longer any need to undermine the formation of unions in his closest competition. No longer any need to spur industry distrust in Wright Glass, to convince his lover and everyone that a merger would be beneficial for all.
Why hadn’t Raberding pushed the article exposing August, destroying his reputation, Chary’s reputation, and his business?
Maybe because it was no longer needed.
“It’s still unpatented.”
Eventually—eventually—maybe even no need for August himself.
“Oh, Christ.”
And if Raberding’s motivations were no longer indivisible, and August had refused him as his lover for once and for all…? Spat in his shoes, humiliated him, told him he wasn’t needed?
It was undeniable. The only question left was this: whether he’d get to the northwest balcony room in time—and just how far Raberding would go.