Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
GIA
The estate is so tense today. I have no idea why, and it’s eating at my insides.
Maybe that's just your guilt eating away at you.
Yep, I'm my number one enemy.
I know this because I come downstairs at half eight, and the kitchen is just…
wrong. Marco is at the range the way he always is, but the two men who eat breakfast in the kitchen most mornings, Fredo and the younger one whose name I still don't know, part of the overnight rotation, are not there this morning.
Their chairs are there. Their usual mugs sit on the counter, one of them half full and cold, abandoned like they left in a hurry and haven't come back.
Weird. These men don’t play with their food.
Marco doesn't look at me when I come in.
That's weird too.
"Morning," I try to say cheerfully.
"Mrs. Caruso." He gives a stiff nod and sets a cup in front of me without being asked, then turns back to the range. His shoulders are set in a specific way that makes it look like he's concentrating on the pan harder than the frying, or whatever, requires.
I wrap my hands around the cup and frown at it.
Even the house sounds different. There are voices somewhere in the east corridor, low, male, and uneasy. Through the kitchen window I can see two of the perimeter guards talking at the garden gate, not moving, just talking, which they never do during a shift.
Did I wake up in an alternate universe or something?
I drink my coffee, watch the window and I don't ask Marco anything because he is not going to tell me and it will make him even more unsettled.
By nine o'clock the east wing corridor has had four different men through it.
By half nine I hear Rafael's voice from behind the closed study door — I don't really hear what he’s saying but he’s talking in a really dark scary voice and I wonder for the umpteenth time what the hell is happening today.
Someone answers. Then silence. Then the door opens and a man I've seen twice before at the dinner table comes out looking white.
He walks fast toward the rear of the house without looking up.
I decide maybe I shouldn’t be around after all?
I go to hide in the library, which has a view of the corridor.
I am reading a book but I have not absorbed a single word since I sat down.
A second man comes out twenty minutes later. Younger, one of the drivers, his jaw tight. He doesn't walk fast. He walks carefully, making sure nothing in his body is giving anything away, which is itself a kind of giving away.
I turn a page.
By midday the study door has not opened without purpose once. Every time it opens someone goes in or someone comes out and the ones coming out all have versions of the same face, rearranged, tightened, the specific arrangement of a person who has been looked at very closely and is still feeling it.
I eat lunch alone in the dining room because the kitchen has two men in it. Carla brings my food and sets it down and turns to leave and I keep my voice easy, casual, the tone of a woman making small talk on an ordinary afternoon.
"Carla."
She stops and turns. Her hands are folded in front of her, the professional composure fully in place, but her eyes do a brief involuntary flick toward the kitchen doorway before they come back to me.
"Is everything alright?" I ask. "The house feels… I don't know, different today."
She pauses, her eyes staring right into mine, she looks at the doorway again. Then she steps closer to the table, just slightly, just enough that her voice won't carry past the room.
"The boss is questioning everyone," she says.
Low and quick, the voice of a woman who has decided that the wife probably deserves to know.
"About last night. What happened with the transport.
" Another glance at the door. "He started with the overnight staff at six this morning.
He's been through half the house already. "
I keep my face arranged into mild, appropriate concern. "Everyone?"
"Everyone with access to schedules. Routes." She presses her lips together. "Fredo's been in there twice. He came out the second time and he looked—" She stops herself. "The boss wants to know how the route got out. Who knew. Who talked."
The soup in front of me has gone cold. I don't look at it.
"I see," I say. "Thank you, Carla."
She nods and goes, her footsteps quick and quiet back toward the kitchen.
I sit very still in the empty dining room.
Who knew. Who talked.
My father used to have a saying about the difference between men who talk under pressure and men who don't. He said the difference wasn't strength or loyalty or any of the things people like to believe about themselves.
The difference was whether they had something worse waiting for them outside the room than inside it.
Rafael will find whoever did this.
He is not a man who raises his voice. He is not a man who makes speeches about consequences. He is a man who is quiet about it, methodical, and thorough, and the people it happens to do not come back to the dinner table.
He will skin you alive, and he will be calm while he does it.
I push the soup away.
By three o'clock the mood in the house has shifted again, into something denser. There's a new man at the bottom of the main staircase.
I walk past him to go upstairs.
Surveillance. He's put surveillance inside the house.
Not just the perimeter. Inside. Rafael is pulling the thread from every end he can find and he is going to follow it and he is thorough.
I have watched him be thorough, and the question that is sitting in the center of my chest right now is not whether he will find the leak.
It's when.
I go to the window. Everything looks exactly the way it looked yesterday. Everything feels completely different.
I think about the burner phone.
I should move it. The jewelry box is too obvious and if Rafael's men search the room with any seriousness the jewelry box is the third place they look, maybe the second.
I don't move it.
Because moving it means going to the jewelry box and taking it out and finding somewhere else for it, and every one of those actions is an action that could be observed, and there is a man at the bottom of the stairs whose entire function is to observe actions.
I sit on the edge of the bed.
Downstairs, a door opens. Footsteps cross the entrance hall, heavy and even, and I know the rhythm of them; Rafael is moving through his own house.
He hasn't slept. His voice this morning, when I passed the study, was the voice of a man who has been talking for hours without stopping and intends to keep talking.
He is going to find whoever did this.
I sit on the edge of the bed in the flat grey afternoon light, and I look at the jewelry box on the dressing table.
I think about twelve minutes and three men on the ground, and the route reference I typed into a phone while he slept.
I think about Laura. I think about the man at the bottom of the stairs.
He wants to know who talked.
The walls are not closing in.
They have already closed.