Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Tony arrived at nine with his jacket over one arm and a folder under the other, which meant he had come from the station after hours and brought work with him, which was not unusual.
What was unusual — or had been unusual, once, and was now simply the shape of things — was the way he hung the jacket on the hook by the door without being invited to and set the folder on the kitchen table and looked at the coffee maker with the expression of a man who had been going since seven in the morning and was making a private assessment of whether there was enough left in the day for another cup.
“There’s enough,” I said.
He looked at me. “You read minds too?”
“Just faces.” I poured him a cup and one for myself and we sat at the table across from each other with the harbor doing its nighttime work outside the window, and I told him what the coven had worked through at Tammy’s. Voss. Pruitt. The older woman I didn’t have a name for yet.
He listened the way he listened — completely, without interrupting, with the quality of attention that was one of the things I had come to rely on without meaning to.
He opened the folder. Halverson’s calendar, printed from what looked like a digital copy — the last three weeks of Edmund Halverson’s life laid out in the small boxes of a working man’s schedule.
Client meetings. Viewing appointments. A lunch date and two dinners with Diane, presumably the wife he had reconciled with.
We sat with it for a moment, the two of us on our respective sides of the investigation, the harbor outside, the kitchen warm. Tony had one of those silences that were never empty — they were just him, thinking, present, not needing to fill the space.
“There’s something else,” I said.
He looked at me over his cup.
“Rosaria is fading,” I said.
Tony set his cup down. He didn’t say anything. He was listening in the way he listened when something mattered.
“Since the night under the Merriwell,” I said.
“What she did — stepping into that circle, anchoring the binding — it cost her something. She’s been thinning ever since.
Getting less solid. Spending more time on the other side.
” I paused. “The coven thinks there’s a way to fix it.
Ada Waverly left a counter-working somewhere in Constance’s estate.
That’s what the desk is. That’s why it matters. ”
“A counter-working,” Tony said.
“A remedy. Written by a woman who died a hundred years ago and had the sense to leave a solution alongside the problem she’d created.
” I looked at my cup. “The desk is connected to it somehow. We don’t know exactly how yet.
But it’s not furniture, Tony. Whatever Halverson thought he was selling — it wasn’t furniture. ”
Tony nodded slowly. “And Rosaria,” he said. “She’s aware of what’s happening to her?”
“She told me herself. Two days ago. Sat in her chair and said We are not pretending anymore, Gina.” I could still hear the exact register of it. “She wants to see things resolved. Josie. You. A grandchild eventually. She said she just wants enough.”
Tony was quiet for a moment. “Enough,” he said.
“That’s what she said.”
Something shifted in his face — not quite a smile, but its approach. Then it settled into something more serious. “So we need the desk,” he said.
“We need what’s in it,” I said. “Or at least what we think is in it.”
When I finished, Tony was quiet for a moment.
The kitchen held the silence the way it did when something real had been said in it.
“Is Rosaria going to be okay?” he said.
I looked at him across the table. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m trying to make sure she is.”
He reached across the table and put his hand over mine. He didn’t say anything. He just left it there for a moment — warm, certain, the hand of a man who understood that some things didn’t need a response, just a witness.
He nodded. He set his cup down. “What can I do?”
“If your investigation locates the desk, will you let us see it?”
“I will.” He said it the way he said things he had decided. No elaboration required. The decision was the sentence.
Something shifted in the room. Not dramatically. Just the alteration of the air that I had learned to recognize.
Rosaria had been in the corner for some time.
I wasn’t sure exactly when she’d arrived — sometime in the last ten minutes, I thought, which meant she’d heard most of it.
She was a degree further along than she’d been at Tammy’s, the fading more visible now, but her expression was the one she had when she'd been proven right about something and was not going to say so.
“He’s a good one, Gina,” she said. “Don’t let this one go.”
I relayed it. Tony’s expression did the small thing it did when he was receiving information from a direction he couldn’t fully account for and filing it without resistance.
“Tell her I’ll do my best,” he said.
I looked at her in the corner — the housecoat, the pinned hair, the expression of a woman who had been managing the living and the dead with equal competence for eighty-three years and did not intend to stop — and felt the combination of love and exasperation and absolute certainty that was what Rosaria produced in me when she was being most essentially herself.
“She says it’s not a compliment,” I said. “It’s a bar you’ve cleared.”
Tony considered this. “I’ll take it.”