Chapter 36 Taylor
Taylor
As Taylor walks up the Knox’s back alleyway early Friday morning, she finds a truck and construction dumpster parked outside.
Two men are unloading serious-looking equipment from the truck: sledgehammers, an electric drill, a saw, thick gloves, eye protection.
Rose stands watching from the back door, her hands shading her face.
“We’re doing a little renovation project,” Rose shares, when Taylor approaches. Rose is wearing a black hoodie that reads, “The Butler Did It.”
Rose gives one of those quick, begrudging smiles Taylor has come to expect. “They’ll be in the basement, so it shouldn’t interfere with your work.”
“I didn’t know there was a basement.”
This isn’t totally true; Taylor knows how the basement—or at least a portion of it—connects the Knox to the adjacent building, where Jerry and Eduardo live.
Rose presses her lips together. “I received word late last night about this,” she finally adds. Is she pleased or displeased about this last-minute notice? It’s hard to tell.
The men amble up, their hands full of tools, and Rose leads them down the corridor.
Taylor waits a few seconds so it doesn’t appear like she’s following, and then she passes through the same corridor.
Things look different. Doors usually open are closed.
The door to the kitchen. The two French doors to the dining room.
The parlor entrance—which doesn’t contain a door—has a solid blue tarp hanging down from its frame.
All artwork on the common walls has been taken down, its hooks and D-rings and cleats now exposed.
Vases and the usual decor on the tables are gone.
For a person curious about the Knox, there really is nothing to see.
Well, except for that carousel horse, still down the hall, which didn’t make the cut.
The only open door is the small one, under the staircase, through which the men and Rose disappear.
Taylor’s never been down there. Nor does she have any desire to; the thought alone of descending into a dark, dank stairwell makes her feel instantly suffocated.
No; she’ll stay on this level, thank you very much.
But she can listen in on their conversation.
She stands at the foot of the stairs, craning her neck.
China the cat rubs against her leg with a small meow, and Taylor picks her up.
“The original blueprints are here,” Rose says. “Look. See here? You can see where this room was, and where the door was. This is what we need opened.”
“Right, yeah, I can see where the door was. We can open this up, no problem.”
“You hear something interesting there?” Liam’s voice says from behind, and Taylor jumps. China painfully digs into Taylor’s arms before leaping out, and Taylor has to stifle her cry.
“Sheeit!” Taylor hisses. Then she glances down the stairs, terrified Rose will realize she’s been eavesdropping. But there is no pause in conversation, thank goodness.
Liam leans casually against the opposite wall, sipping a coffee. “That’s an interesting good morning greeting.”
“What’s going on in the basement?” she asks in a whisper, ignoring his comment. She moves away from the door.
“There’s an old room that’s been sealed for years. Like, over a hundred years. Oliver wants it opened.”
“Who’s Oliver? And what’s in the room?”
Oliver, she recalls, is the name of the person for whom she had to fetch a package.
“You really don’t know who Oliver is?”
She shakes her head. “I’m new, remember?”
“Oliver’s…well, you’ll meet him soon enough.”
“Okay. And what’s down there?” she presses.
Liam smiles in a flirty way. “Guess we’ll find out. C’mon, new girl, let’s get to work.”
“They finally broke through the basement door,” reports Eduardo, when he reenters Canton’s a few hours later.
The restaurant is closed due to the construction, so Taylor and the others busy themselves polishing glasses, refilling salt and pepper shakers, folding napkins.
Readying for next week’s crowd, which will consist of members returning from the retreat, though there is more than enough time to prepare.
There’s a different energy in the air, almost like it’s an unexpected day off from school.
Every so often, when Rose slips away to check on the basement progress, Jerry sneaks down behind her.
“Fucking dusty as hell,” adds Jerry, a little while later, upon his return. “Hard to tell what it is. Some sort of room.”
“Do you want to have a look?” Eduardo asks Taylor, who gives an adamant “No.”
When he raises his eyes, Taylor says, “I…I can’t do basements. I get claustrophobic.” Even thinking of the basement is enough to make the sweat start to gather at the back of Taylor’s neck.
Liam, like Taylor, seems content to stay put. He restocks the liquors behind the bar and adds items to a growing pencil-and-paper grocery list: olives, blue cheese olives, toothpicks, lemons.
“You know there are apps for this,” Taylor points out. “Instacart? DoorDash?”
“Everything here is good old-fashioned paper.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
This is intriguing; she’s been hoping to come across records of some sort. Something that might show how Vivian—and her mother—is connected to the Knox. She’ll have to find out where such information is stored.
“Did you see the ‘Wall of Shame’ downstairs in the foyer?” Liam asks with a grin. “It’s the Knox’s policy—also pen and paper—to publicly list the members delinquent with dues. Right now, there’s just a Northrup Terrence on there.”
“Everything that can be paper is,” Eduardo interjects. “They don’t want, how do you say it? They don’t want to create a footprint.”
“Digital footprint,” Liam adds.
“Oh.” She folds and unfolds a napkin. “So, who does the shopping?”
“Rose, usually,” Liam says. “Today? Probably you.”
“Me? Great,” she says sarcastically.
Eduardo looks sharply at her, and she wishes she could take it back.
“I mean, it’s fine. I’m just curious about what’s going on downstairs.”
“When—or if—they want us to know, they tell us,” Eduardo says rather sternly, and Taylor feels appropriately chastised. He fishes through the backpack perched on one of the barstools and pulls out a red apple and a book, 1776 by David McCullough. It’s his signal that he’s taking his break.
“So, have y’all worked here a long time?” Taylor asks.
“Ten years this summer,” Liam says. “The Professor”—that’s what he calls Eduardo, on account of all the books he reads—“is ancient, though. How long you been here, Professor?”
“Seventeen years,” Eduardo replies.
“Seventeen years, wow,” says Taylor, but inside she’s crestfallen. That’s a year shy of when her mother would have been here. “You’ve probably…seen a lot.”
“Not that I can tell you, but yes.”
“Oooh, all righty, then,” she says. “Well, y’all know what they say: ‘Never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut.’ ” She gives a short laugh, but no one else laughs. Maybe they don’t get the Goodfellas reference?
“Seventeen years,” she repeats, trying a different approach. She wants to pick their brains while Rose isn’t hovering. “What can you ‘not tell me’…I mean, do people ever get, like, hurt here?” Like Vivian, falling down the stairs?
“No, they don’t,” Jerry replies rather thinly, and then gets up to go check again on the downstairs progress.
“And what about him?” Taylor asks, once he’s left. “How long’s Jerry been here?”
“O’Doyle? Five years, just about,” Liam replies.
“O’Doyle?”
Eduardo shakes his head. “Liam here has a nickname for everyone.” Then, turning to Liam, he admonishes, “Jerry’s last name, as you know, is Doyle, not O’Doyle.”
Liam shrugs.
“And his sister? How long was she here?” Taylor asks.
Liam stops stacking glasses from behind the bar. He looks surprised. “Who told you about Tara?”
“He did.” Taylor juts her chin toward Eduardo, who nods.
“Oh. What was it, a year?” Liam asks Eduardo.
Eduardo closes his book. “Yes, thirteen months. She’s in nursing school now. That’s what she wants to do—be a nurse.”
Taylor can feel her face redden at the mention of nursing. It’s stupid that this word would generate an instant guilty response, like anything outside of the insulated, gilded heft of the Knox is a dirty secret. “So why am I not supposed to mention her around Jerry?”
Liam and Eduardo exchange looks. It’s Eduardo who answers.
“She was in a relationship with Oliver…. Oliver’s in charge, or almost in charge. Jerry didn’t like that. Have you met him—Oliver?”
“I don’t know.”
Liam snickers. “That’s a no, then. You would know.”
Taylor shrugs. “Okay, whatever.” She thinks it’s weird that Tara would continue to be a touchy subject around here, if she’s long gone and doing fine.
“Hey, how did you get yourself here?” Liam asks.
“Me? My landlord referred me.”
“Yeah? What’s his name?”
“Her name is Anna.”
“And where did you say you worked before?”
“I didn’t say. But I worked at my dad’s restaurant in North Carolina.”
“North Carolina, huh,” Liam says. He’s watching Taylor closely, as if her answers are somehow making him suspicious.
“Peter interviewed her. And then the geomancy confirmed,” Eduardo says.
“And Michael did the geomancy reading?” Liam presses.
“I would assume so,” Eduardo replies.
Meanwhile, Taylor is thinking to herself that they must have made a mistake with her. She never met a Michael, and she has no idea what the geo-thing they mentioned is. What if she’s not supposed to be here?
But Liam nods, seemingly satisfied. He continues stacking glasses and then asks, much more lightly, “What brought you to Boston, anyway?”
“My mother.”
“Oh?” There is surprise in Liam’s voice.
Taylor is also surprised she said it.
“Well, my aunt, too,” she adds and then winces. Why is she offering more information than needed?
“They live here?” Eduardo asks.
“My mom used to. How about you?” she asks Eduardo, anxious to shift the conversation.
“I came from Colombia twenty years ago. I studied engineering there, but here, well, here I am.” He smiles, and any tension she seems to have previously incurred vanishes.
“An engineer, reader, and now part of the Knox,” Taylor says. “Impressive.”
“Yes, we are lucky to be here. You are lucky now, too,” he says. But the way he says it seems like he’s reminding her.
Liam leans his head on his hands on the bar countertop. “Well, New Girl, you didn’t ask me, but I’ll tell you anyway. Peter is the one who brought me here, from across the pond.”
“Oh, really? You knew each other?” Taylor feels her face further warming; it’s like a Pavlovian response when she thinks of Peter.
“I used to bartend at a dive bar, round the corner from an East London hotel he liked to stay at.”
“Oh, that’s lucky,” she says.
“It’s not about luck. You create your own luck.
Peter taught me that. I’ve got a lot of respect for him.
I knew him for many years, helped him out once in a situation.
He knew he could trust me. It’s all about trust here, you see, New Girl?
” He twirls the end of a small black cocktail straw in his mouth.
“Liam is right. It is about trust here,” Eduardo says. “You work hard, but you get rewarded. I get to stay in this country because of them. Any problem is taken care of.”
Just then Jerry reenters the room and reports that the men have cleared a lot of the debris. Eduardo’s eyes brighten with his arrival, like they always do. Is there something going on between the two of them?
“The room they’ve uncovered is maybe a third the size of this,” Jerry relays, gesturing around. “It’s got a wooden table inside, like an old-fashioned doctor table.”
Old-fashioned doctor table?
“Ah, that makes sense. One of the portraits downstairs is of a Dr. Robert Thurgood. Maybe he used to see the patients here?” Eduardo muses.
“Did they find any bodies?” asks Liam, with a wicked grin.
Taylor stiffens.
“Liam,” Eduardo chides.
But Jerry answers seriously. “No,” he says. “Not yet at least.”