Chapter Eleven
MRS. KIMBERLY HAD MADE it exactly forty-one miles.
They found her at her sister's bungalow off the interstate on Tuesday afternoon, Louis freshly collected from school and left in the car with the driver, a juice box, and instructions to guard both, and when the old woman opened the door and saw who was standing on the welcome mat, she made the kettle sound again and tried to close it.
The door met Valerio's hand and stopped being a door in any meaningful sense.
"Mrs. Kimberly," Aislinn said quickly, stepping in front of him, because they'd discussed this in the car, they'd agreed on an order of operations, and looming came second. "Please. Nobody's here to hurt you. I just want to understand."
It had taken his people less than a day to find her. It took Aislinn's face less than a minute to break her.
The old woman sat them at her sister's kitchen table, put out three cups with shaking hands, gave up on the tea entirely halfway through, and cried into her own sleeve while the whole thing spilled out of her in one long unraveling thread.
The calls had started four years ago. A woman's voice, very polite, very sure.
She was to keep an eye on the nice little family in 3B, that was all, just an eye.
When Aislinn worked late. Who came by. What the boy got up to.
Whether they seemed like they were settling in, or getting comfortable, or making friends.
"And you told her," Aislinn said.
"There was money." Mrs. Kimberly's voice cracked down the middle.
"Every month, regular as a pension. I'm seventy-three, my husband left me a mortgage and a bird, what was I supposed to, it was only talk, it was only ever talk, I never thought talk could—" She stopped.
Her eyes went to Aislinn's face and couldn't hold it.
"Then last week there was a man at your door with a knife, and the day after that, half the city was saying your little boy belonged to Valerio Le Sabre.
And I thought, that's it, that's what the talk was for, all these years somebody's been building something out of my talk, and whatever it is, it's finished being built. So I ran."
"They paid her for gossip," Aislinn said to Valerio, faintly, as though saying it plainly might make it make sense. "For four years. They pay for gossip?"
"Good gossip," Valerio said, "is the cheapest surveillance there is."
"I kept one." Mrs. Kimberly was already shuffling toward the hallway sideboard, glad of a task, any task, that wasn't being looked at.
"You'll think I'm a wicked old woman, and maybe I am, but you don't take strange money for four years without keeping something in a drawer. Insurance, my husband used to call it."
The envelope she brought back was ordinary. Plain, white, her name in laser print, cash long gone. Valerio turned it over once, and went still.
"Aislinn."
She leaned in. In the corner where a stamp should have been sat a red machine-printed marking, a franking stamp, the kind offices used for bulk mail, and its little inked ring of text was as ordinary as the envelope and so much worse.
She'd seen it a hundred times, on permission slips and fundraising letters and strongly encouraged invitations.
It belonged to the school.
"Envelopes again," she heard herself say. "Dominguez got envelopes too."
"Same buyer." Valerio was looking at the franking mark the way he'd looked at Louis's list. "But Dominguez's caller claimed to be from the school.
Anyone can claim. This," he tapped the red ring, once, "was posted from inside it.
Through the front office machine. Whoever they are, they don't just know your school, ma belle. They work there."
The kitchen went very quiet, except for the sister's bird, somewhere down the hall, cheerfully saying a word it shouldn't know.
They left Mrs. Kimberly with three conditions and one mercy.
The conditions were Minna, a full statement, and her signature.
The mercy was that Aislinn, at the door, took the old woman's shaking hands in both of hers and said she hoped the bird was good company, and that seventy-three was too old to spend running, and Mrs. Kimberly cried harder at that than she had at anything Valerio said, which Valerio, privately, understood completely.
In the car, Louis surrendered the juice box evidence and read their faces with one sweep.
"Item five went well?"
"Item five is resolved," Valerio said. "And it came with information."
"The kind of information where I should put my headphones on?"
"The kind," his father said, pulling out his phone, "where you should teach your mother the rules of chess, because this call is boring and she'll need the skill by Thursday."
Aislinn blinked. "What's Thursday?"
Valerio put the phone to his ear. Somewhere in the city, Minna answered on the first ring.
"Clear your Thursday," he told his cousin, watching the school's red ink dry on eight years of questions. "We're going to a parent council meeting."