Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
I woke at six-fifteen to the sound of Tony in the kitchen.
Not an alarming sound — the domestic sequence of a man who knew where things were and moved through a space without disturbing it.
The coffee maker. The low pull of a cabinet.
The specific quiet of someone being considerate about the hour.
I lay there for a moment and listened to it and thought about how strange it was that this had become ordinary.
A man in my kitchen at six-fifteen on a weekday morning, knowing where the coffee filters were, not needing to be told. Strange in the good way.
I got up and went to the bathroom. Tony’s razor was on the second shelf of the medicine cabinet, beside his deodorant, which had been there for three weeks.
This morning there was something new — a small tube of something, tucked neatly to the right of the razor.
He had not mentioned it. It was just there, the way the razor had just been there, the way he was just in my kitchen making coffee.
I smiled and then closed the cabinet and went to get dressed.
Rosaria’s chair was empty.
She had been gone since yesterday afternoon.
She’d left with the air of a woman heading into a situation she had strong feelings about and would report on thoroughly upon return.
That was normal. That was Rosaria. But this morning, with four days on the clock and the auction in two hours, the empty chair had a weight to it that the previous empty chairs hadn’t.
I put the kettle on. I made toast. I stood at the counter and watched the harbor come into its gray morning and tried not to look at the chair.
The toaster finished its cycle and popped and I reached for the toast and stopped.
In the chrome of the toaster — curved and distorted the way reflections are in curved chrome, but unmistakable — Rosaria’s face. Housecoat. Pinned hair. The expression she used when she was doing me a favor she considered unnecessary.
“Stop making that face,” she said. Her voice had the quality it always had when she came through an object — slightly compressed, like sound through a wall, but entirely herself. “I’m fine. I’m busy.”
“You’ve been gone since yesterday.”
“There is a great deal to attend to over here, Gina. You have no idea.” She said it with the mild exasperation of a woman who had taken on a responsibility that was larger than advertised and was managing it competently but wanted credit for the effort. “It does not run itself.”
“What doesn’t run itself?”
“Things,” she said. “Don’t be nosy.”
I looked at her reflection in the chrome — small and curved and absolutely certain of itself. “You’re all right?”
“I told you I was all right.” A pause, and something shifted in her expression. Softer, for just a moment. “Go to your auction. I’ll be here when you get back.”
Then she was gone, and the toaster was just a toaster, and the kitchen was just a kitchen, and I let out a breath I hadn’t entirely realized I was holding. “There is a great deal to attend to over here,” I said to the empty chair, and I almost smiled, and I ate my toast.
Tony came in with two cups and set one in front of me without being asked. He looked at the toaster, and then at me, with the expression of a man who had learned to read the room without needing all the details explained.
“Rosaria,” he said.
“She’s busy. Apparently there is a great deal to attend to.”
“Over there?”
“Over there.” I wrapped both hands around the cup. “She seemed well. Annoyed with me for worrying, which is essentially her baseline.”
He sat across from me and drank his coffee and looked at the harbor.
He had the quality he always had in the mornings — unhurried, present, the stillness of a man who had made peace with the pace of things.
He didn’t fill silences that didn’t need filling.
It was one of the things I had come to rely on without meaning to.
He finished his coffee and washed out the cup. “Gotta get to work.”
He kissed me at the door — unhurried, the way he did everything, the way of a man who had decided that the small moments deserved the same care as the large ones.
Then he was gone, down the harbor walk toward the station, his jacket against the October cold, and I stood in the doorway for a moment and watched him go and thought: yes.
This. Exactly this. Then I went back inside, picked up my bag, and headed for Halverson and Sons.
Ruth was on the front step when I arrived, notebook under her arm, and this time her expression was not the focused calm of the night before.
Margot, Halverson’s young assistant — dark-haired, efficient to the point of invisibility at the preview — was standing in the open doorway with her face the color of old paper.
Her hands were at her sides and she was holding them very still.
“Ms. Dwyer,” she said. “Mr. Halverson — he’s —” She stopped. She tried again. “He’s dead. I came in at eight and he was in his office and I called the police and they said not to touch anything —”
Ruth put her hand on the woman’s arm. “You did the right thing. Come inside. Sit down.”
The police arrived seven minutes later, Tony along with them. He took in the room, took in me standing next to Ruth next to a white-faced Margot. He knew we were coming to the auction so it wasn’t a surprise to see me there.
He nodded once and moved past us toward the back of the building, and I stayed where I was because that was what you did, and Ruth sat with Margot on the settee near the door, and we waited.
What we learned came in pieces — from Margot, from what I could observe, from Tony when he came back. Edmund Halverson had been found at his desk. Bludgeoned. The brass candlestick from one of the lots was on the floor near the door. The cash box on his desk was untouched.
Diane Halverson arrived while Tony was still in the back. Red-haired, somewhere in her fifties, and genuinely wrecked in a way that was not performance — the devastation of someone who had allowed themselves to hope for something and had the hope removed violently and without warning.
She had a key. She kept saying it to anyone who would listen, to Margot, to the officer near the door, to the room in general.
“He called me two weeks ago,” she said, her voice catching and restarting like a car engine catches in the cold.
“He said he’d been thinking. He said he wanted to try again.
I thought we were starting over.” She was still saying some version of it when Tony came back and gently redirected her toward a chair and a younger officer with a notebook.
I watched her and felt the uncomplicated sadness of it — a woman who had been handed something she’d wanted and had it taken before she could close her hand around it.
Tony found me near the door twenty minutes later, work expression on, doing several things at once behind his eyes.
“Walk with me,” he said. Outside, the October air was sharp and smelled like cold water and distant woodsmoke. We stood on the front step, slightly apart, in the manner of two people having a conversation that wasn’t for the benefit of the officers moving in and out behind us.
“Three lots are missing,” he said, low, without looking at me, the way he relayed information he was giving as a professional courtesy and expected me to treat accordingly. “A set of cufflinks. A small framed photograph. And Lot 47.” A pause. “The desk you told me about.”
I kept my face still.
“Against what was left — the jewelry, the paintings, the silver — those three lots make no sense as a robbery. The cash box was untouched.” He let that sit for a moment. “Whoever did this was trying to make it look like a robbery gone bad when the real reason was murder.”
“Or they came for something specific and grabbed a few more things to throw you off,” I said.
He nodded with the quality he always had when I said things like this — not skepticism, not credulity, just a man accepting the shape of a situation before he understood all of it. He would work the case from his side. I would work it from mine. We had done this before.
He glanced back over his shoulder. “The specific lots — that detail stays with us. The press will know about the death. They won’t know what was taken. If whoever did this thinks we’re treating it as a standard robbery, they may get careless.”
“Understood.”
I took out my phone and scrolled to the coven group text.
Tammy’s. Tonight. All of us. Emergency.
Three dots from Tammy almost immediately: Closed sign goes up at seven. Come around the back. Then Lori: I’ll be there.
Then Jill: Coming.
Then Ruth, who was still inside with Margot: I’ll be there.
Three days until the Hunter’s Moon. The desk was gone. A man was dead. I went back inside to find Ruth and told her we had a meeting tonight.