Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Nancy
M y fingers curled gratefully around his, and a rush of sustaining energy flooded into my body through his hand. He was so solid. An oak that would never bend or break.
The romantic metaphor almost made me smile.
It was lifted right out of the haunting ballad that Enid had just cut for the album, a song I had finished mixing in the studio only a few days ago.
Of course, the oak in that particular folk song did break, in the end.
The girl was left barefoot in the snow, an illegitimate baby in her arms.
Just a little something to think about.
I stared down at the ruined table, thinking about the vast sweep of history that it had seen. Lucia’s family line and this historic table had both come to an abrupt, violent end right here in this room, within a week of each other.
As if the table could not continue to exist without Lucia.
One thought kept coming back to me, circling around and around in my mind. I opened my mouth and voiced it. “He wasn’t satisfied the last time. He’s still angry.”
Liam slanted me a cautious glance. “You really think it’s the same person?” he asked, his voice even. “From what the cop said, it’s a very different kind of crime.”
I shook my head, reluctant to speak. Anything I said was just going to sound like grief-stricken rambling.
I pressed my hand hard against my mouth as I stared at the ruined table, painstakingly crafted by some nameless artisan hundreds of years ago—smashed to splinters by a brain-dead hoodlum.
It was as if someone had defaced Lucia’s grave. Ugly, vicious, and very personal.
I shuddered, and Liam’s hand tightened. “Want to go outside and get some air?”
I snapped myself to attention and shook my head.
“I am so sorry,” he said. “It was such a beautiful thing.”
I nodded, swallowing hard. “Yes, exactly. A thing. On the one hand, it’s a precious heirloom full of history and memory. On the other, it’s just an inanimate old thing, carved from ancient wood. I just don’t know how to feel about it.”
“You don’t have to choose,” he suggested gently. “Both things can be true at once.”
I was moved by the comprehension in his eyes. I looked away quickly, but there was no place to rest my eyes in that entire room that did not hurt to look upon.
“I, uh ...” He stopped himself, looking doubtful.
“What?” I demanded.
“I could try to repair it,” he said carefully.
“I’ve done a lot of furniture restoration.
It’s a thing I really enjoy. My mother was heavy into antiques, and I’ve been working on wood joining for years.
I wouldn’t expect payment for the labor.
It would be a privilege to work on it. Even so, you might be better off contacting a specialist.”
I stared at him for the briefest of moments. “I accept,” I said.
“Hold on,” he warned. “Not so fast. I couldn’t make guarantees. It’ll never be the same as before. There’s a lot of damage, and it would take a long time. With something like this, I’d go one splinter at a time, in my off hours. You’d better talk it over with your sisters first and see if you?—”
“Yes,” I said. “They’ll agree. I want you to do it. Only you. No one else.”
He studied my face, looking worried. “Well, fine, then. I’m willing to try, but I won’t hold you to it. Not until you talk to your sisters.”
“I’ll hold you to it.” I glared at him, daring him to rescind his offer.
“Uh, okay,” he murmured. “My pleasure.”
I realized I was clutching his fingers. Heat flooded into my face, and I whipped my hand away. “Sorry.” I headed toward the kitchen. His light footfalls followed, broken glass crunching.
The kitchen was just as bad. Cupboard doors had been torn off their hinges, their contents hurled to the floor with a violence that had shattered the floor tiles.
The table was upended, the chairs were tossed, every dish was smashed.
The garbage we’d forgotten about had been dragged out from under the sink, the plastic bag slashed open, its contents spread out over the floor.
“Guess I won’t have to go looking for packing boxes,” I said.
That was when I saw it. A crumpled piece of white bond paper, and something written on it, in Lucia’s elegant, slanted handwriting. I snatched it up, heart thudding.
“Nancy, hey. You’re not supposed to?—”
“I know, I know,” I said impatiently, shaking coffee grounds off the paper. The page was covered with scribbled handwriting, marked with small edits, some words crossed out, others scribbled in:
…will come as a shock to you girls, and no doubt you think me Machiavellian and foolish for creating this elaborate system of checks and balances, but after what happened to my father, after what this thing did to my marriage, I feel I cannot be too careful.
Just please know this: I made these arrangements not because I do not trust you, but because I love you, and because you love each other.
Love, like any precious thing, should be protected by every means possible.
The older I get, the more I understand that it is the only thing worth protecting.
Then a couple of lines, both of which had been savagely crossed out, as if Lucia had been frustrated, searching for the right words:
The necklaces are the key to
You must use the necklaces together to discover the secret of
It continued with a new paragraph:
You are each in your own unique way great lovers of beauty—music, literature, and the visual arts, and so I devised the key to reflect
And the page ended. I could hear Lucia’s soft, accented voice echoing in my head.
“What is that?” Liam picked his way across the rubble.
“A draft of a letter.” My voice wavered, then broke. “To us, from Lucia.” I held it up.
He scanned it rapidly and met my gaze, his mouth grim.
“Wow,” he said. “That’s intense. Any clue what she was talking about?”
“None,” I said. “But it was just a first draft. Of a letter to the three of us.”
“Right.” He paused, thoughtfully. “But if this is the draft ...”
“Then where the hell is the finished version?” I finished.
We stared at each other. I wanted to grab his arm, to steady myself. The ground beneath my feet had become the thinnest crust of apparent normality, and beneath it churned an abyss of dangerous, shifting possibilities.
“Why didn’t we find the finished letter?” I asked. “Why?”
He pondered that. “Could she have mailed it to you? Could it still be on its way?”
“Eight days have gone by,” I said. “It takes two, four at most, for a letter to get to the city. This was an extremely important letter. She was putting a lot of thought into it. Writing and rewriting it. This did not get forgotten or lost in the mail. No way.”
He finished the thought. “You think it got lost in some more sinister way.”
“After what this thing did to my marriage’?” I quoted softly. “What thing? What marriage? What the hell is this thing that she’s talking about?”
“Maybe it’s what she installed the safe for,” Liam suggested.
I glanced up at him, freshly startled. “Safe? What safe?”
His eyes widened. “She didn’t tell you about that?”
My blank face answered his question, and he whistled silently. “A few weeks ago, she hired me to install a hidden safe in her upstairs closet. That’s how we met in the first place. I’m so sorry I didn’t say anything. I assumed you knew about it.”
The woman from the forensics team came into the kitchen and frowned at me. “Miss, I asked you not to touch anything,” she scolded.
“I found something important.” I held out the letter. “The investigating officer needs to see it. Please, be on the lookout for more possible pages of this letter, okay?”
The woman snatched the sheet of paper out of my fingers with her latex-gloved hand and tucked it into a plastic envelope. “I’ll bring it to her attention. And since you can’t keep your hands to yourself, could you please wait outside until we’re finished?”
She sternly herded the two of us out onto the front porch. We looked at each other, eyes still full of awed wonder. Too boggled to be embarrassed by the scolding.
“I want to look at that safe,” I said. “Not that I could open it. I don’t have the combination. I don’t imagine you…?”
He shook his head. “No. Lucia had to choose the combination herself.”
I chewed my lip. “I wish I had a copy of that letter. God knows when they’ll let me see it. I need to show it to Nell and Vivi.”
“One second.” Liam went to his truck and pulled a sheet of paper from the dashboard. He plucked a pencil from his shirt and began to scribble against the hood of his truck.
He handed it to me. It was the text of Lucia’s letter, transcribed in a bold, angular cursive script. “It’s not word for word, but that’s the gist of it,” he said.
“That’s incredible! What, do you have a photographic memory?”
“Not really. In an hour, I wouldn’t be able to write more than a rough paraphrase. And it has to really interest me. Otherwise, I don’t retain a damn thing.”
I broke eye contact and busied myself by folding the paper into a neat little square. “Well, thanks for being so interested. I, um … appreciate that.”
“Anything having to do with you or Lucia interests me. You don’t have to thank me for something involuntary.”
“Involuntary?” I let out a self-conscious snort. “Like a sneeze?”
“No. More like breathing.”
His quiet response abruptly halted that very bodily function to which he referred. I shoved the folded paper into my pocket. “Um, great. Okay. Thanks.”
“The investigating officer’s going to want to talk with you,” Liam said. “I told her you were on your way over here. But you haven’t had breakfast yet, have you?”
I floundered, thrown off course. “I, ah … what?”
“Breakfast?” His subtle smile flashed. “First meal of the day? Familiar with it?”
“I’ve had coffee,” I offered.
“You’ve got me beat, then. There’s that diner downtown. We could get some food into you before you talk to the detective. Might not be a bad idea.”
I started groping for excuses. Calm down. At mealtimes, normal people get food. They don’t read hidden significance into it. Lighten up.
“Some food would be great,” I said faintly.