21. Dane #2
“The first year I was twenty-four. I hadn’t been at the Globe for a full year yet. Eleanor’s daughter was getting married for the second time. My mother and Eleanor went to the same boarding school, Miss Porter’s. That was enough for that first invitation.”
“It went well?”
“Maria fed me a sandwich at midnight that first summer. I’d skipped dinner.
She found me in the kitchen and made me a sandwich of ham and butter on a kaiser roll.
She told me Eleanor’s third son had eaten the same sandwich on the same counter at twenty-four, and that he’d become a lawyer.
That made her think it would be good luck for me. ”
“And it was?”
“Until Maria—”
He didn’t finish the thought. Three minutes later, he spoke again. “I’m about to walk into a room and tell an old woman that the woman who’s fed her every meal for forty years has been planning to kill her family for at least five.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“Then I’m going to sit at her kitchen table and watch them take Maria out a service door.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know how to do both at once: the friend and the reporter. I don’t know how to be in the room without seeing the room.”
“Then don’t do both,” I said. “Eleanor doesn’t need a reporter today.
She needs a man she’s known for fourteen years who’s going to tell her the truth.
The reporter gets to come back in March.
He can write the long piece for the Globe and win a prize for it.
None of that is in the room today. Today, you walk in and you sit down, and you tell her. ”
My phone buzzed against my hip. I turned a quarter into the wind and pulled it out.
Farrow: Wiley and Samuel made me eat leeks. Send help.
I laughed. It was a relief. I held the phone out to Cabot. He laughed too.
I thumbed back.
Dane: Enjoy the leeks.
***
Eleanor’s morning room ran along the southern face of the main house. Light came in through five tall windows that opened onto dune grass, a slate terrace, and the ocean beyond.
The orchid corridor was twenty feet to my left through an open doorway.
Eleanor wore a soft grey wool dress and a long cardigan the color of bone. There was a coffee service on a low table, and she had her hands folded in her lap.
She looked at Cabot first.
“Stanley.” She held out both hands, and he offered his.
“Eleanor, good to see you.”
“Please sit.”
He sat across from her. I took the chair to his left, with a sightline through the doorway to the corridor. Reed took a chair to his right, with a sightline to the inner door and the catering vestibule beyond.
She looked at Reed and then at me.
“Not taking photographs today?”
“No, ma’am.”
She looked at Cabot, and he drew in a sharp breath. “Tell me,” she said.
“Eleanor, there is a threat to the wedding tomorrow.”
She didn’t look away.
“Early this morning—five o’clock—federal agents arrested three people in the Boston area. All three were scheduled to be here for the wedding, working with your staff. They had been placed there by someone inside the household, working over a long time."
One hand reached out to grip the arm of her chair.
“At a fourth address in Auburndale, federal agents recovered an explosive device. It had a cellular trigger, and a charge designed to be placed against a structural joint in this property. The device has been disarmed. It will not come here.”
Eleanor didn’t move or speak.
“The person who arranged the placements has been inside this household for forty years.”
He stopped. Eleanor closed her eyes for a beat and then reopened them.
“It’s Maria,” Cabot said.
Eleanor looked at the coffee service. Then back at Cabot.
“Where is Maria now?”
“In your kitchen, Mrs. Harcourt,” I said.
“At this moment?”
“At this moment. We don’t think she knows federal moved this morning. We believe she’ll know inside two hours, based on a missed call from one of the men taken in Boston.”
“And then?”
“Federal will be here at three p.m. or earlier to take her into custody. Agents are staged at Edgartown PD. They will come here when they receive my call.”
“And what do you want from me?” Eleanor asked.
“We would like your permission to make the arrest on your property. The agency doesn’t require it, but we would like it as a courtesy.”
She looked at her hands.
“And I’m to be where?”
“On the terrace with Stanley.”
“No,” she said.
I waited for her to say more.
“I will be in my kitchen. I will pour coffee for us at two, as I have every afternoon I’ve been on this island for thirty-eight years.
I will sit at the small table under the south window, in my chair.
Maria will sit in hers. We will not speak about what is coming.
When the federal agents come through the service door, I will be in my kitchen, in my chair, with my coffee. Not on the terrace.”
“Mrs. Harcourt —“
She addressed Cabot. “Stanley.”
“Yes?”
“Tell this man you’ve known me for fourteen years. You have never argued with me on a matter of how I’d receive information inside my own house. We won’t begin today.”
“Absolutely not,” Cabot said.
She turned her attention to me. “Mr. Fletcher, you are not a photographer.”
“No, I’m not. I’m with a personal security firm called The Guardians. I’m assigned to Stanley.”
“You are keeping him safe?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She inclined her head toward the coffee service.
“Stanley, pour the coffee.”
He stood, moved around the table, and lifted the pot. He poured three cups, and he knew which was hers without being told. He set it in front of her with the handle at the correct angle, then placed cups in front of himself and me. Reed remained at his post.
Eleanor lifted hers and sipped.
“Maria came to me in nineteen eighty-five. She was twenty-three. Her father had been killed at the docks eight months earlier. She had two younger brothers; the older was at Boston Latin and the younger was only nine. The position was for an assistant in the kitchen, under a woman named Bernadette who ran my kitchen at the time.”
She glanced at Cabot. He didn’t move.
“Bernadette retired in nineteen ninety-three, and Maria has run the kitchen from that day. I have not interviewed a person to enter this household in thirty-two years. Maria has done all of that.”
She set her cup down.
“Stanley, the morning I spoke to you on the terrace about Henry. The morning after the luncheon.”
“Yes.”
“Maria brought me my coffee at seven, the way she had every morning for thirty-eight years, and she mentioned that you had sat next to Henry at lunch the day before and that you had seemed taken with him. She said it the way she said anything to me. As an observation, not a request. I delivered the message to you on the terrace forty minutes later in my own words, and I believed they were my own words. They were not.”
She looked at her hands.
“I have been carrying her voice for forty years and calling it mine. She has been making plans for some time now?”
“At least five years,” I said. “Possibly longer.”
Eleanor folded her hands in her lap once more. “I want one thing.”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“The wedding goes forward—tomorrow. I will not cancel a family wedding—a joyous occasion—because a woman in my house decided forty years ago to use it as the place where she would make a statement.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Will you be on the property tomorrow?”
“With your permission, yes. Federal agents will be here as well.”
“Yes, I want you to be here. Please disrupt the wedding as little as possible.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good.”
She picked up her coffee again.
“Stanley, you will be here as a guest as always. We have added a single white rose to the floral arrangements in memory of Henry. I trust that you will not rush writing a story about this. I trust you will let me read the draft. I will not change a word, but I will read it before publication.”
“Of course,” Cabot said.
“You’re a fine young man, Stanley, and you trust Mr. Fletcher with your life. That is the only reference for his character that I require.”
He exhaled. “Thank you, Eleanor.”
“You will both meet me at two o’clock in my kitchen.”
She drank the rest of the cup in one steady swallow and set it down.
“Now, I will go upstairs and change. I’ve been in this dress since six o'clock. I’d like to be in something else when she comes through the door at one forty-five with the afternoon coffee.”
She stood. We stood.
***
We took our seats in the kitchen at one fifty-five. Eleanor was in her chair in a dark navy dress, wearing a strand of pearls. A small leather household book lay open in front of her, with grocery lists and menu notes written by hand.
The kitchen smelled of fresh-baked bread. It sat on the counter under a linen cloth.
At one fifty-nine, Maria came through the service door from the dining room with a French press in one hand and a small porcelain pitcher of cream in the other.
She saw me and didn’t stop walking. Maria set the tray on a table and took her seat. Eleanor rose to pour coffee for each of us.
Maria lifted her cup. “Eleanor.”
“Maria.”
“It’s a cold day.”
“It is.”
“The bread I baked is from the new flour.”
“Is it good?” Eleanor asked.
“It’s very good. Try it later.”
Eleanor lifted her cup. She lifted it the way she had lifted three thousand cups in this kitchen, and she lifted it a half-count slower than usual.
Maria saw it.
Her expression did not change, but she set her own cup down.
The service door opened.
Two federal agents appeared; the lead was a woman in her forties in a charcoal coat with her badge on a lanyard at her throat. She crossed the kitchen at a walking pace and stopped three feet from Maria’s stool.
I read the letters FBI on her coat.
“Maria Aguirre?”
“Yes.”
“I am Special Agent Jane Weber. I have a federal warrant for your arrest on charges including conspiracy to commit a terrorist act and conspiracy to commit murder. I’m going to ask you to stand and place your hands on the counter where I can see them. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“Stand up.”
Maria stood. She put her hands on the counter, palms down.
The lead moved behind her. The second agent took a position at Eleanor’s side without touching her, hands clasped in front of him.
The lead read the rest of the warrant. We all listened. I didn’t move.
Weber cuffed Maria’s hands behind her back.
She turned her head a quarter turn toward Eleanor, and held her gaze. Eleanor didn't blink.
The lead turned Maria toward the service door. She stopped at the threshold.
“Eleanor.”
“Yes.”
“Tell Sofia I’m sorry I won’t be here tomorrow.”
Eleanor closed her eyes and didn’t answer. I watched a single tear roll down her cheek.
She didn’t answer.