Chapter 25
The next day, I started on the gallery’s tax returns.
It was slow work. Garrett hated mess in the real world—blood and gristle, people shitting themselves as they expired—but his account books were an abattoir.
“We’re a family of accountants,” I told him on my third day at it. “How are you in charge of this? You don’t even keep receipts!”
“Mere paperwork.” He waved a hand at the files spread across the dining table. “Any fool can hide things from the IRS.”
“I thought hiding money was the point of this gallery.”
Garrett gave a disappointed sigh, like when Sebastian and I had turned in badly peeled eggs, all those years ago. “What do we bury in our basement? Gold?”
“No,” I said. “Bones.”
Blood was the only mother of history. Empathy, money, morality, the law were all a shared hallucination, a dream. The death of care was waking up.
“Stop focusing on spreadsheets,” he said. “The purpose of this gallery is to see into people’s desires. The wealthy define themselves with art. Are they old money? Arrivistes? Barbarians at the gate? That’s the only accounting that matters.”
“Which of those is Dr. Lyon?”
Garrett nodded. I’d asked the right question. “He collects Kandinsky and Matisse. Respectable blue-chip works, except for his one indulgence, his emerging artist: Hiromi Kennedy. She’s our way in.”
“But she hates him.”
“Irrelevant. He started buying art to impress people, but then he caught the bug. He reveals himself with his obsession.”
“With Hiromi, or her work?”
“No difference,” Garrett replied, and went back to talking about why he didn’t keep receipts—the arbitrary values of art.
I remembered Sebastian’s impersonation of him, back when we were little. The waving hands, the precision of his consonants, a disquisition on picking locks as dramatic as Aunt Iris showing us how to defuse a bomb.
Garrett still talks too much, I’d texted Sebastian yesterday. I’d hoped my revenge against the Lindqvists would show how much Peter meant to me, and that I could do more than follow orders. But those beautiful explosions had only illuminated my betrayal. He had not replied.
“Just do what you have to,” Garrett wound up his rant. “Put the numbers wherever they go.”
“The numbers are bullshit. They don’t follow Benford’s Law.”
Garrett made a face. “Benford’s Law applies to expenses?”
“It applies to everything. It’s not Benford’s Suggestion.”
“Fine.” He waved a hand. “Fix it.”
I wondered if Garrett’s account books were my own personal Albany. Maybe the family had sent me here to cure me of math.
“Jessica. May I have a word?”
Garrett startled, and I looked up. Arabella had arrived in the dining room without a sound.
She’d surprised us like this several times. Like a Morton kid in the Great House, she’d memorized the creaky stairs and floorboards. She was bored here, underused.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Arabella said. “It’s time you saw the neighborhood.”
Out on the street, she said, “I slept through most of Delicato’s classes. What’s Benford’s Law?”
I sighed. Not every Morton was a true accountant. “The universe prefers ones to nines.”
Arabella dodged a delivery bike wobbling down the narrow sidewalk. “Go on, but keep it simple.”
“In real-world data, the first digits of numbers follow a pattern. Lots of ones, not as many twos, fewer threes. Hardly any nines.” A shudder went through me. “When Garrett makes up his expenses, he sprinkles in the same amount of each. It’s unnatural.”
“The whole thing sounds unnatural. Why are there more ones?”
“Why are there are more teenagers than ninety-year-olds?”
“Because people die along the way.” Arabella went silent as we waited to cross Prince Street. She hadn’t told me anything about the neighborhood yet, and we were leaving it behind.
She kept glancing at her phone. This wasn’t an informational tour.
“Except that’s not always true,” she said. “Not long ago, our family had more ninety-year-olds than teenagers.”
I nodded. “A good accountant would notice. They’d see that something had corrupted the data.”
Uncle Max, putting his axe through Benford’s Law—along with Yvonne, Tobias, Tillie, Zach, Katie, Olive, and Ramsey.
“The other families noticed, before I left college,” Arabella said. “I never got to pass on the sacred traditions.”
A whole academic year had passed between her graduation and my arrival with Sebastian. A year with no Mortons at Helshire—the first such gap since the Great Influenza’s long shadow across the 1930s.
“The Lindqvists still ask about the cousins,” I said.
Arabella brought me to a halt. “How friendly is Sebastian with them?”
I shrugged. “He and Xavier don’t like each other.”
“Probably your fault,” she said, and checked her phone again.
I wondered which sacred traditions Arabella meant, and why she was asking about Sebastian and the Lindqvists.
She changed the subject. “Urban surveillance. Have you done much?”
“A few trips to Albany with Aunt Veronica. New Haven once.”
New York City was a different beast. On a Saturday at lunchtime, the sidewalks were thronged. A dozen people gathered at every crossing light, hundreds within view.
“This seems easier,” I said. “Plenty of crowd to hide in.”
“It goes both ways,” she said, pointing. “Follow him.”
I looked at the man she’d indicated—mid-forties, in a white shirt and dark trousers, a blue tie, sunglasses, a blazer slung over his shoulder. He stood out among the summer shorts, T-shirts, and sundresses.
“Easy,” I said, turning back to Arabella, but she’d slipped away. The orange hoodie she’d been wearing sat in a trash bin by the curb.
My phone had a message from her.
The real trick is to spot me following you.
I set off after the target, who was walking south. The sidewalk was narrow, and the restaurants had tables out. I got stuck behind three men staring at their phones, and went out into the street to pass them, dodging bikes and a delivery truck.
One problem with the crowds: losing my target.
I crossed the street and drew ahead, tracking the man’s blue tie in my peripheral vision. At the next red light, I checked behind me: no Arabella. What had she been wearing under the orange hoodie?
When the lights changed, my target headed across a park. Another obstacle course—artists selling paintings, bicycles coasting at walking pace, gears ticking.
He came to a sudden halt, looking at something on the ground. He wavered a moment, drifting closer to a food cart. But he didn’t order, just peeked around it. Lurking, hiding from someone.
Arabella hadn’t picked him at random. I pulled out my phone.
He’s tailing somebody too?
Correct, she replied. Now figure out who.
I swore under my breath. Arabella following me, following him, following someone else. What kind of test was this?
The crowd ahead was mostly tourists and shoppers. We were in the fancy part of Soho where Thomas had shoplifted food on my second nightwalk—ham sandwiches, oranges, a piece of shortbread that wasn’t as good as Aunt Bea’s.
I drew closer to the target, trying to track his eyes. But the crowd ahead was a jumble, and from this close I was too exposed. The man glanced back at me once.
Fucking Garrett, making me dye my hair blue.
I drifted away, crossing to the other side of the street. Walking faster, I could scan the crowd ahead of him. And then I saw her, in a white tank top and overalls.
He was following Hiromi Kennedy.