Chapter Seventeen
AT NINE O’CLOCK on Wednesday morning, Nadya Sokolov uses her key to open the front door of the Westcotts’ brownstone and quickly disables the alarm.
She comes here every Wednesday. It is hard work, cleaning such a large house, so many floors, but she is strong.
She cleans beautiful homes for rich people.
It’s better than cleaning offices or hospitals, or the homes of not-so-rich families with grubby houses and messy children.
In Nadya’s experience, the wealthy are polite and pay well.
But even rich people have problems. She has read all about the awful sailing accident over the weekend.
She had called Mrs Westcott’s number and left a clumsy message of condolence, but she had not received a reply. She showed up today to clean as usual.
They stay out of her business, and she stays out of theirs.
The cleaning lady should be invisible, and Nadya is very good at being invisible.
She comes and goes when they are at work.
She does her work like a magical fairy, so that when her employers get home at night the bathrooms sparkle, the kitchen gleams, the floors shine.
The bed is made up with fresh sheets, the furniture is polished, everything is dusted, the pillows plumped, the costly rugs vacuumed.
It makes her think of the tale about the shoemaker and the elves.
Except he was poor, that’s why the elves snuck in at night and did his work for him.
These people aren’t poor, they just don’t want to clean up after themselves.
Peter is such a worry. Sometimes she wonders if he might have turned out better if they had remained in Russia, but it is impossible to know.
Occasionally, when she is cleaning, she imagines an alternative life, back in Nizhny Novgorod.
But she invariably imagines it differently than how it would actually be, through a haze of nostalgia.
They left for a reason, after all. There was so much poverty, so little opportunity.
But sometimes she reimagines herself as a girl, back in her homeland, meeting a different man, a better man than Ilya.
Someone who would take good care of them and give them a better life.
Peter’s father left them when the boy was four, and she has had to make a go of it on her own.
She knows it’s a good thing that she had no more children, although it is a sadness, too.
She would have loved to have a daughter, someone she could be close to, someone to take care of her in her old age.
A girl would be hardworking, devoted, or so she imagines.
Her son has turned out to be a disappointment.
She thinks he is bespomoshchnyy, the Russian word for feckless.
Perhaps it is because he had no father figure growing up, and a boy needs a father.
However, Ilya had liked his vodka too much and hadn’t been much of a role model, so perhaps it’s just as well he left.
She has tried to be a good mother, strong and loving, but Peter has always been a handful.
Finished with the toilet and shower, she moves on to the vanity, still thinking of her son.
There were problems at school; he was not a good student.
He wasn’t bad, not then, he just didn’t work very hard.
If it didn’t come easy to him, he wasn’t interested.
She found him challenging, but she loved him, the way a mother does, no matter what.
But as the years went on, he became more difficult.
It was impossible to make him do anything he didn’t want to do.
He was a slacker at school, a slob at home.
The school tried to help but they had enough to do already, and they weren’t very effective.
She tried to teach him at home, but there was something wrong with him, he couldn’t seem to learn, or he didn’t care.
And then as a teenager, he became sly, and sometimes not very nice.
He began to insult her. She tried to forgive him for it, because she knew it came from his own deep unhappiness with himself.
But she refused to put up with it. When he was still a child, she made him apologize and clean his room.
But he became taller and stronger than her, and there was always a feeling of walking on eggshells in her own home.
Sometimes she felt that she had left one authoritarian regime for another.
Now Peter is in his early twenties, and she suspects he has fallen in with a bad crowd, a bunch of Russian petty criminals.
He has tattoos all over his arms. When she tried to talk to him one night recently about his choices, he argued with her.
His unaccented English is perfect, unlike hers, and he also speaks fluent Russian.
‘It’s none of your business what I do with my life,’ he spat back, like he was still a rebellious American teenager, and not almost twenty-three years old.
She looked back at him. Her beautiful boy.
The blond toddler had grown into something unrecognizable.
He stood in front of her, just under six feet tall, muscular from working out at the gym.
He liked to work with his hands, but as far as she knew, he wasn’t using them for anything worthwhile.
He hadn’t wanted to learn any of the trades that she suggested, that were in demand, so that he could make an honest living.
She thought he could at least learn to drywall, but he was too lazy to work.
He seemed content to live under her roof and eat her food.
He occasionally got work loading and unloading trucks, when he needed cash and she wouldn’t give him any.
He was still so young. Like a child. He didn’t know anything about life. He was so easily led by others. She feared for him.
Lately he had begun to badger her. ‘These houses you clean for rich people. They must have lots of nice things, right?’ he said one night.
She didn’t answer. She ignored him, continued to make their supper of cabbage rolls, standing at the stove, stirring, wanting to avoid a confrontation.
‘They wouldn’t even miss it if you took something, would they? Something small, that they wouldn’t notice? And I could sell it. I’d split the money with you. They have too much already, and we have nothing.’
She lost her patience and turned to him. ‘You are a stupid, lazy boy. I am not stealing from my employers. Of course they will notice if something is missing! And I will be fired first thing, because who else would have taken it? They are not stupid, like you!’
‘I’m not stupid!’ he yelled back, enraged.
She waited for them both to calm down. She wasn’t going to become a common thief for him.
Now, she reflects unhappily on all this as she polishes the faucet in the Westcotts’ en suite bathroom.
She stops for a moment and studies herself in the large mirror.
She doesn’t look older than her age, despite her hardships and worries.
She turns away from the mirror thinking that there has to be more to life than cleaning rich people’s houses, then spending the evenings exhausted on her sagging couch, watching the reality TV shows that she loves – like Real Housewives and Selling Manhattan.
She still has some life to live. She feels like it’s slipping away from her though.
She hears the doorbell chime. Another delivery.
There are a lot of those – these people are always shopping, and they arrange deliveries for Wednesday, when she is there.
Nadya mutters as she descends the staircase at the extra steps these deliveries require her to make.
They never seem to arrive when she is on the main floor. Why is that?
She looks out the glass before opening the door and sees a man standing there, waiting quietly. He’s in his thirties, presentable, dressed in a suit. He has no package, and he doesn’t look like a delivery man. She hesitates, then opens the door a crack. ‘Yes?’ she says.
The man holds up a badge and says pleasantly, ‘I’m Special Agent Paul Ramirez, with the US Coast Guard Investigative Service. May I come in?’
‘They’re not home right now,’ she says. ‘They’re at work. I’m the cleaning lady.’
‘I know,’ he says. ‘It’s you I’d like to speak to.’
At this she feels herself become nervous. She hasn’t done anything wrong, but she is nervous nonetheless. This is about the terrible sailing accident last weekend. Why does he want to talk to her?
‘Please open the door,’ he says in a firm voice.
She does, and lets him in.
‘Perhaps we could sit down?’ he suggests, as she stands there in the foyer looking at him.
‘Okay,’ she agrees, and she awkwardly leads him into the front room. He chooses the leather armchair as if he’s already familiar with it. She sits down on the edge of the sofa, wondering if she should call her employers.
He smiles at her, as if sensing her doubt. ‘It’s okay, there is nothing to worry about,’ he says kindly. ‘I’m investigating the sailing accident that claimed Greg Westcott’s life. I’ve already spoken to Mr and Mrs Westcott. I’m just following up. I want to be able to close the case.’
She feels reassured, although she can’t imagine what he could have to follow up with her. She’d learned about the accident in the news. It was rather shocking. ‘Okay.’
‘Your name?’
‘Nadya Sokolov.’ She spells it for him.
‘Have you worked for the Westcotts long?’ he asks.
‘About three years.’ She watches him write that down.
For some reason, she thinks of her son and his suggestion that she steal from this house, and she flushes guiltily. He seems to notice, and she looks away.
‘On Wednesdays,’ he says.
‘Yes, on Wednesdays, when they’re both at work. Sometimes I come in extra days, around holidays, or if they are planning to entertain. If I have time.’
He nods. ‘Have you ever overheard Mr and Mrs Westcott discussing their financial situation?’
She furrows her brows. ‘I’m not here when they are home. They prefer it that way. I do too. I hear nothing.’
‘I see.’ He pauses a moment. ‘So you aren’t aware that they are having financial problems?’
‘How would I know that?’ she asks, alarmed.
‘You might have seen the mail – bills overdue, that sort of thing?’
‘No, of course not. When I’m here I pick up the mail when it comes through the slot and put it on the table in the foyer. I do not look through it.’ She’s insulted by the suggestion.
He nods at her again. ‘Okay, as I said, this is just routine, nothing to worry about.’ He hands her his card. ‘Thank you for speaking to me.’
He gets up to leave and she sees him out, locking the door behind him, uneasy. Why was he asking those questions? He said it was just routine, but it seemed like he was after something. And now she has a problem – does she tell her employers?
Ramirez exits the brownstone and climbs into his car parked on the street out front.
He didn’t think he’d get anything useful out of the cleaning lady – who was dressed in a loose T-shirt and jeans; somehow he’d expected a uniform – but he wants to get under the Westcotts’ skin.
The fact that he interviewed their cleaner will get back to them.
They will know he’s looking more deeply into their financial situation, and that he knows they are having problems.
It might have been the perfect murder, he muses, as he drives back to the office.
The more he learns, the more he thinks that what happened on the Fortune Seeker was murder.
But he’ll never be able to prove it – not unless one of them talks.
Maybe, if he applies sufficient pressure, Jill Westcott will crack and fess up against her husband. It’s extremely unlikely.
But at least he can enjoy making them sweat.