45. Mat
MAT
The Oglethorpe brownstone is on East Seventy-Eighth, between Park and Madison. I climb the limestone steps and stand under a black funeral wreath.
I check my watch. Seventy-one hours and change.
I knock.
It takes a long time for anyone to answer. As I wait, I start to consider whether this whole stop is a waste of the time I do not have. Every idle second, my thoughts conjure up an image of Cass in a dingy cell a few miles south of here, slowly figuring out how to despise me.
The door cracks two inches. A chain stays bolted across the gap, but I recognize the sliver of face I see.
“I’m not doing visitors today.” Caroline’s voice is hoarse, soaked through with tears, and utterly exhausted. “Or any day this week. There’s a sign-up sheet for casseroles on the church website. I can text you the link.”
“I’m not here for a casserole.”
“Then I’m definitely not interested in talking.” The door starts to close.
“Caroline.” I set my hand against the wood just hard enough to stop her from sealing me out quite yet. “Your father told me something before he died.”
The door stops. I take that as an encouraging sign and keep talking.
“In the woods at the Crispin, the morning of the pheasant hunt. He told me Raymond Snyder was not a good man. He started to tell me something else. And then he was dead by sundown.”
Through the two-inch gap, her eyebrows arrow downward. “Who are you, again?”
“Matvei Satyrin. I work at your father’s firm.”
She sighs. But then the chain rattles and the door swings inward. “Wipe your shoes.”
Inside, the kitchen table is piled high with a precariously balanced stack of condolence cards.
A wool coat hangs on a hook by the door, too big for Caroline, but just the right size for Bill.
Caroline doesn’t look at it as she walks past, but her posture stiffens, and that subtle little twinge is sadder than if she’d stopped and sobbed into the sleeve.
She leads me into a small library off the foyer. She sits, gestures at the other chair, and pulls her cardigan tighter at the throat like she’s cold from the inside out.
“You have ten minutes,” she tells me. “I have a man from the funeral home coming soon. He wants to talk about the urn.” She laughs and wipes her nose with a tissue.
“Do you know there are catalogs for urns? Like they’re just oh-so fun to shop for.
Matte finishes and pebbled leather options.
There’s a Tiffany one. Can you imagine?”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say robotically.
“Everyone’s sorry. I’m so fucking sick of sorries.” She folds her arms over her chest and settles back in her seat. “I’d rather have some goddamn answers. Is that what you’ve come to give me, Mr. Satyrin?”
I nod. “I’m looking for the same thing.”
“Then talk,” she says.
I give her a bare-bones rundown. Most of my story is spent detailing what Bill told me about the files that Raymond kept on his partners. Things they’d signed. Things they’d looked away from. Things they’d swept under the rug.
“That’s funny,” she says softly. “Daddy was the same way. He kept files on everything. The man wouldn’t throw out a parking stub.”
I lean forward eagerly. “Do you know if he had anything concerning Raymond?”
She gets up and paces to the window. Her socks don’t match, I notice.
One is the heather gray of a Bonpoint cashmere set; the other is a tube sock with three blue stripes at the cuff, the kind men get six to a package at Duane Reade.
Bill’s, almost certainly. It must make her feel better to keep little pieces of her father close by.
“I haven’t had time to go through all of Daddy’s things yet,” she says. “But I doubt he’d keep something like that here anyway.”
“At the firm then?” I ask. That’s been my leading theory. If she has keys to his office, I can go hunting in there. I have backup plans if Caroline won’t cooperate, but this is by far the easiest way in.
But she’s shaking her head. “Definitely not. He didn’t even keep his will at the firm. He used to say that the only people you should never trust with your secrets are the people you pay to keep them.”
I suppress a wry chuckle. Bill was funnier than I gave him credit for. “Where, then?”
She looks back at me. Her eyes are red but shrewd. “If I had to bet, I’d say it’s in a safe deposit box.”
That crushes me. Stealing that will be nigh-on impossible, and without a key, it might as well be in fucking Siberia.
Looks like Bill took his secrets with him to the grave then.
Or, at the very least, until his executor handles all the last will and testament stuff, which could take months.
Months I definitely can’t afford to spare.
Fuck me. Looks like this was a useless visit after all.
I start to rise. “I see. Well, thank you for your time. If you do ever get access and you find something that seems relevant, then please reach out.”
If I’m even alive then, I add in my head.
I turn toward the door, searching my brain for options. I don’t know where I’ll go next, but I’m going to have to figure out some other way to get past the veil of secrecy behind which Vainakh operates. Maybe if...
“Mr. Satyrin.”
I stop and turn around. To my surprise, she’s holding out an envelope.
It’s a nine-by-twelve manila with a metal clasp, the corners softened from handling. Oglethorpe, William P. is written across the front in someone else’s handwriting—a clerk’s, probably, at the funeral home.
I take it carefully.
“His effects,” Caroline explains. She has not sat back down.
She stands with one hand on the back of her chair, the toe of the mismatched gray cashmere sock tapping a nervous little Morse code against the rug.
“Wallet, wristwatch, wedding ring.” Her voice catches on that last one.
“I haven’t opened it. I thought— I thought I’d do it tonight.
With a glass of wine. Like that would make it easier. ”
“Things like this are never easy,” I murmur.
“No,” she agrees, “they aren’t. But you tell yourself little lies like that, you know? Just to get through the hard bits. Lately, I feel like lies are the only thing that keeps me going.”
“I know the feeling.”
She looks at me a beat longer than is comfortable. Then she nods at the envelope. “Open it.”
I unwind the little red string from around the clasp and slide the contents out onto the side table.
A leather billfold, brown, scuffed at the edges.
A gold Patek with a black alligator strap, the crown stopped at 6:11.
A platinum wedding band.
… And a thin steel ring with six or seven keys on it. House, car, a brass one with a green plastic cap… and then a smaller silver one with a square head and the word CITIBANK etched in tiny block letters along the bow.
My heart thuds. I lift the keyring with two fingers, like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat.
Caroline exhales through her teeth. “I remember that key.”
“You do?”
“There’s a Citi branch on Madison and Seventy-First. He used to get this weird expression on his face every now and then and say he was going to get a sandwich, but Daddy hasn’t eaten lunch since I was born.
Mom and I used to joke about it. We thought he had a girlfriend.
” She laughs and knuckles at her swollen eyes.
“Christ. A girlfriend. I’d so much rather be dealing with that right now.
A secret girlfriend would be such a gift. ”
I work the Citibank key off the ring. The little silver square sits in my palm, cool and innocuous. Then I look up at her. “You don’t know how helpful this could be,” I tell her solemnly.
Caroline crosses her arms tight over her cardigan. The tube sock keeps tapping. “Tell me something, Mr. Satyrin. Whoever did this to my parents… Are you going to make them sorry?”
I wonder what exactly she’s seen in me that makes her feel like that’s the right question to ask. By all surface appearances, I’m merely a concerned employee who is troubled by something his former boss once said.
But maybe my edges have become more visible lately. Maybe the violence that is my birthright has begun to show.
So why bother lying about it?
“Yes,” I say. “I intend to.”
Caroline studies me for a long moment afterward. Then she nods. Her shoulders drop a quarter inch and she lowers herself back into the chair across from me. The tube sock stops tapping.
“There’s one more thing. I don’t even know if it’s useful or if it’s complete gibberish, but… Well, you seem like the kind of guy who can figure out the difference.”
“I’m listening.”
“Last night,” she says, “Mom woke up.”
My breath seizes up in my chest.
“Just for a minute. Maybe less.” She wets her lips. “I was the only one in the room. Just me, and the machines, and her. And then she opened her eyes. I haven’t told anyone this yet, by the way.”
She’s looking at the rug, not at me, telling it more to the wool than to anyone in particular. I don’t interrupt. That’s the first thing they teach you in law school: Never interrupt when someone starts confessing.
“She didn’t recognize me at first. And then she sort of swam up out of wherever she was, and her hand—” Caroline lifts her own to demonstrate, fingers closing around an imaginary wrist. “She grabbed me. Really hard. She had enough air in her lungs for one word, if that. At least, I think it was a word. I keep replaying it. It was all garbled, you know, from the drugs and stuff, and it was loud in there with all the beeping shit. But it sounded like she said, Jersey. ”
“Jersey,” I repeat, neutrally. “Huh.”
“Does that mean anything to you?” When I shake my head, she frowns.
“Because I was confused. I mean, my grandparents had a place in Spring Lake when she was little, and I thought, like, maybe she was so messed up on the morphine or whatever that it made her young again in her head. So I just said, Yeah, okay, Mom, you go to the beach, you go right ahead. ” Her chin wobbles.
“And then she squeezed my hand again, and she closed her eyes, and that was it. She was out before the doctor came in. And by morning…”
She trails off while I think as hard as I can.
Jersey. Jersey. What the hell does any of this have to do with Jersey…?
Or is it possible that she didn’t say Jersey at all? Caroline doesn’t seem certain.
But if not Jersey, then what? Juicy? Drowsy? Cozy? None of that makes any damn sense, either.
I just can’t shake the feeling that the answer is right on the tip of my tongue.
“I don’t know what that means, if anything,” I tell her. “But if she came back to say it to you, then it’s not nothing.”
“No.” She wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand. “It’s not.”
There’s not much to discuss after that. Caroline walks me to the door and we exchange awkward goodbyes. The whole time, I’m turning those syllables over in my head again and again.
Jersey. Jer-sey. Jerz-E.
Whatever it means, Susan Oglethorpe used her last conscious breath to say it. She wouldn’t have wasted that chance. She said it because someone, eventually, might come asking.
That someone is me.
I press my palm against my breast pocket and feel the soft crease of the sonogram beneath the wool. Seventy hours to go, give or take.
Time, as Lukas pointed out, is not a luxury I have. But a key in my pocket is more than I had this morning.
It’s a start.