Chapter Four
Present
The young man waiting for her in the foyer couldn’t possibly be the detective, Florence thought. He looked too young to be in charge of a case like this. He was practically a child.
“Detective Church?” she asked tentatively, and the man turned to face her.
“Mrs. Talbot,” he said warmly, reaching out a hand.
Florence shook it. “Senator Towers informed me you’d like a tour of the house,” she said.
“Yes, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” Church said.
“It’s no trouble at all,” Florence said. “We can begin with the ballroom, if you like? It’s right down the hall here.”
“Lead the way,” Church said.
Florence turned, and Church followed her down the foyer and to the left.
“May I ask, Mrs. Talbot,” Detective Church said as they walked, “how long have you been the housekeeper here?”
Florence had to think a moment. “Let’s see,” she said. “I believe Nixon was president.”
“You’ve been with the family since the 1970s?” Church asked, sounding shocked.
Florence laughed. “Detective, I’ve been with the family since 1941.
I was born here,” Florence went on quickly.
“Quite literally. My mother was a scullery maid; she was hired on during the war. Nobody knew she was pregnant with me until she went into labor while stacking peach preserves in the cellar. Gave the cook quite the scare.”
“I can imagine,” Church said. “Did your father work here as well?”
“No,” Florence said wistfully. When she was a little girl, her mother used to show her a picture of a man in uniform that she wore in a locket around her neck.
Blond hair, bearded face, a steady gaze.
John Talbot was his name. Florence used to look at that photograph and try to puzzle out which parts of her belonged to him, but she never could settle on a likeness.
“He died in the war,” Florence said, which is what she always said when someone asked about her father, though no one had asked about her father in a very long time.
The truth was Florence didn’t know if he died in the war, or if his name was John Talbot, or if he really was her father.
The only thing she knew definitively was that he never came back.
“I’m sorry,” Detective Church said.
Florence paused in front of a set of large wrought iron doors with glass inserts. She fiddled with the key ring she wore hooked to her belt until she found the right one.
“Here we are, then,” she said, inserting the key into the lock and turning it. “The ballroom.”
“Let me get that for you, Mrs. Talbot,” Detective Church said, stepping forward to open and hold the door for her. “It looks heavy.”
“Thank you,” Florence said, a little taken aback. It had been ages since someone had held open a door for her. Once a routine gesture but nowadays a rare one, and it meant something to Florence.
The room was dark, and when Florence flicked on the lights, it took them a minute to come on—they sputtered and flickered across the space, as if they had been asleep for a long time and were slow to wake.
The room was long—at least a third of a football field in length, with a ceiling soaring over thirty feet high above them.
It was empty, save for a stray round table scattered here and there, unadorned, and stacks of chairs.
There was a chandelier in the center, at least twenty feet in circumference, lowered for cleaning so that it hovered just inches from the floor.
A step stool and a bucket sat absently next to it.
Across the room were floor-to-ceiling windows and two sets of large French doors leading out onto the terrace.
“I’ll get the handyman to take a look at that,” Florence said, glancing up at the one light directly above them that still refused to come on, leaving them standing partially in shadow. “It’s been a while since the room has seen any use.”
A while was a generous statement—the last time the room had been used was for a charity ball when the senator was still a congressman. There was so much dust in the air that it made Florence’s eyes water, her nose itch.
“Do you mind if I take a few pictures?” Detective Church asked.
Florence shook her head. “By all means.”
She watched the detective intently as he meandered around the room, stepping back into this corner or that to take a wide shot.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” Florence said, “how long have you been with the sheriff’s office, Detective?”
Church clicked his camera and then glanced down to examine the shot on the digital screen. “Oh, about ten years now,” he said.
“Ten years, my,” Florence said.
“I started as a deputy straight out of the academy,” Church went on. “Then moved up to detective in the Major Crimes Unit a few years later.”
“And what year was that?” Florence asked.
Church smiled. “If there’s something you want to ask me, Mrs. Talbot, you can.”
“I hope I’m not being impertinent, Detective,” Florence said. “But how old are you?”
“I’m thirty-eight,” he said.
“Thirty-eight,” Florence repeated. Not a child, then.
Older, in fact, by nearly a decade than Detective Vance had been when he’d first taken on the case.
Florence noticed, now that Church had stepped out of the shadows into the more brightly lit parts of the room, the specks of gray peeking out of his well-manicured beard.
“My apologies,” Florence said. “I hope I didn’t cause you any offense. That’s the thing about growing old, I suppose. Everyone looks like a child to me now, even grown men.”
“At my age, I’ll take it as a compliment,” Church said. “In truth, I’m probably closer to a hip replacement than I am to puberty.”
Florence laughed, and the gesture caused her to sneeze, roughly. She felt around in her pocket for her handkerchief, but her pocket was uncharacteristically empty.
“My, I’m never without my hankie,” she said.
“Here, take mine,” Detective Church said, retrieving a handkerchief, neatly folded, from his inside jacket pocket.
“Thank you,” Florence said, taking it. It was cotton and embroidered with his initials on the edge. “Are you sure you’re only thirty-eight, Detective?” Florence asked. “I haven’t had a man offer me a handkerchief for at least three decades.”
Church laughed. “I’m a bit old fashioned in some ways, I suppose,” he said. “I got my manners from my granny. She’s the one who raised me, mostly.”
“I see,” Florence said. “You must be very fond of her.”
“Granny’s my favorite person in the whole world,” Church said without hesitation. “I just spent this last Saturday with her at the nursing home, actually. Jell-O molds, canasta, and episodes of Gunsmoke. Don’t threaten me with a good time.”
He smiled, and Florence smiled back at him. He was a good seed, this one. Florence liked him immediately.
“If you wouldn’t mind,” Church said, “I’d love to get a sense of how the room was set up that night. I know it’s been ages, but anything you can remember would be helpful.”
“Not at all,” Florence said, for she had spent months planning that party, and then for years, and then decades after, she had replayed the moments of that night, again and again, in her head.
She took him through how the room was set up in great detail, as if they had only just taken down the tables and dismantled the dance floor.
She showed him where the dinner tables had been—twenty-one tables in all, with some seating ten and others a dozen.
There had been a bar on either side of the room and one outside on the terrace.
The dance floor had been set up next to the stage where the band had played.
“And how many guests were there?” Church asked.
“Two hundred and thirty-four,” Florence said, the number still sharp as a tack in her mind.
Two hundred and thirty-four RSVP cards with the box next to “Accepts with Pleasure” checked.
Two hundred and thirty-four place settings.
Two hundred and thirty-four party favors in the form of gossamer bags stuffed with candied almonds—she had stayed up until nearly two in the morning the night before, tying the bags with ribbons.
“There are diagrams and seating charts,” Florence went on. “I still have them, in case they would be of any use.”
“Really?” Church said, as if he couldn’t believe his luck. “Yes, that would be very helpful, thank you.”
“I keep everything,” Florence said. “I’m a creature of habit, I suppose.”
“This must have been quite the event to plan,” he said, looking around at the vast, empty room, as if he couldn’t imagine all the work it took to fill it.
“Yes,” Florence said with a deep, satisfied sigh. “Three months of planning.”
“And what do you remember from that night, Mrs. Talbot?” Church asked. “I suppose you must have been very busy. Everywhere all at once.”
“Yes,” Florence said. “I was back and forth between the kitchen and the ballroom, mostly. The staff will say I was everywhere at all times. Omnipresent. The guests won’t have seen me at all.”
She smiled pleasantly to herself. Despite everything that had happened, everything that had gone wrong, at least that was a mark of a job well done.
“And what about Saoirse?” Church asked. “Did you see much of her that evening?”
“Sporadically,” Florence said. “From a distance, mostly.”
“You didn’t speak with her?”
“I told her when it was time to cut the cake,” Florence said. “She was having a drink with Mr. Mountbatten in the ballroom. She looked distressed, so I was glad to intervene.”
“Teddy Mountbatten?” Church asked. “Her ex-boyfriend?”
Florence nodded. “That’s the one.”
“Did she tell you why she was upset?”
“Well, she was speaking with Mr. Mountbatten, so I figured he was the cause.”
“Yes, I heard they had a volatile relationship,” Detective Church said. “Did you know Mr. Mountbatten well?”
“Well enough to know that he was not what he seemed,” Florence said.
“How do you mean?”