Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Tony called at two in the afternoon.
Rosaria was still in her chair. We had spent the morning the way you spend mornings when there is nothing to do but wait — I had made more coffee than I needed, I had looked at my phone more times than was useful, and Rosaria had told me three more things about Robert and Clara and the particular bureaucracy of the other side that I had filed carefully and would think about later when there was a later to think in.
The harbor had gone from silver to gray.
The Hunter’s Moon would rise in approximately six hours.
When my phone buzzed I had it in my hand before the second vibration.
“We have Voss,” Tony said. “Brought in for questioning an hour ago. The desk was in the back of her car.” A pause. “I’m keeping my promise. Can you be here in twenty minutes?”
I was already standing. “Yes.”
I called Lori. I called Ruth. I called Jill. I told Rosaria, who said “finally” in the tone of a woman who had been waiting for competence to assert itself and was mildly surprised it had taken this long.
The station’s evidence room smelled like industrial cleaner and old paper and the particular neutrality of a space that was not meant to be comfortable.
Tony had arranged it carefully — the desk on a table, the chain of evidence intact, a young officer standing near the door with the expression of a man who had been told to be present and unobtrusive and was doing his best with both.
We stood around the table. The five of us and the desk — walnut, hinged, ivory and ebony inlay, smaller than I remembered, more personal.
Ruth had her grandmother’s notebook open. Lori had her hands clasped behind her back in the manner of a woman exercising restraint. Jill stood to my left. Tammy, who had closed the restaurant at noon without explaining to anyone why, stood to my right.
I set my hand flat on the lid.
The death vision came the way it always came — fast, hard, the woman on the floor, the high-ceilinged room, the afternoon light going wrong.
I let it pass through and looked underneath it for the founders’ shadow, the quality of attention I’d felt the first time.
It was still there — Ada’s work, old and deliberate, reaching forward through a hundred years of wood and inlay.
I lifted the lid. Inside: the green baize writing surface, worn smooth with use. Two small brass fittings. A shallow tray for pens. Empty. Of course it would be, there would be a secret compartment.
I ran my fingers along the interior edges.
The baize. The fittings. The underside of the lid where Ada might have tucked something, written something, hidden something in the construction itself.
I tuned my vibration so that I could feel where she would have hidden it.
I checked the base for a false bottom the way Ruth had suggested on the drive over. I checked the hinges.
Nothing.
I stepped back.
The room was quiet.
“There’s nothing here,” I said.
Lori looked at the desk for a long moment. Then she looked at me. Then she looked at Ruth.
Ruth had her notebook open to the page she knew without finding — the entry she’d read to us four days ago in Lori’s family library. She read it again now, quietly, to herself, her lips moving slightly. Then she looked up.
“The writing knows where the rest of it is,” she said.
We had all heard it before. We had all heard it in Lori’s warm library with coffee and cinnamon cake and five days ahead of us, and we had understood it to mean the desk. The desk knows. The desk contains.
But that was not what Ada had written.
The writing knows.
Not the desk. The writing.
“The writing.” Lori said. We must have been on the same wavelength. “You write on a desk, not with it.”
“Huh?” Tony narrowed his eyes at her.
“It never was the desk. It was the pens. I remember them from the auction. In between the desk and the jewelry, there was a tray of them. Did you find those?” I asked Tony.
“No pens were taken from auction house,” Tony said.
The room went very still.
“That means they are still at the auction house. They were there the whole time,” Tammy said.
“Not still,” Ruth closed her notebook. “The rest of the auction items went under the gavel last night to people we don’t know.”
“We need to find out who bought them,” Tammy said.
“Margot would have the records,” Ruth said.
We looked at each other — five women in a police evidence room with a beautiful empty desk and six hours left to solve a problem.
“We need to get to the auction house,” I said.