Chapter 3

By eight-thirty the house was full, and everybody already knew.

That's the thing about a family like mine. Nothing gets said and everything gets transmitted. Corinne had it from Margot in the front hall. Pete had it from Corinne on the terrace. By the time the caterer came up to ask about the chairs, the story had hardened into something with edges.

Nine thousand one hundred dollars. Fourteen checks. A carpenter with a key.

"She had access, Reid," Corinne said to me, low, in the butler's pantry, holding a coffee cup she never drank from. "She was in the house at all hours. You don't think it's strange that a woman who does porch trim suddenly doesn't need the money?"

"She's never asked me for anything."

"That's what makes it work."

And here is what I did with that. I stood in the pantry and I let it sit on me.

Because I'd seen the checks. I'd seen her name fourteen times. And I'd watched her not say one word about it, and in my family, silence has always meant the same thing.

Margot came through with the clipboard. "The agency's log isn't a ledger," she said when I asked her about the binder. "The nursing invoices go through the estate office, not the kitchen drawer. Ask Harlan if you want. It's all there."

That was reasonable. That was the problem. Everything Margot said was reasonable.

At a quarter to nine I went up the back stairs.

Tessa had the suitcase open on the blue room's bed. Two pairs of jeans, boots, a flannel, the little tin box she kept her drill bits in. She folded everything the way she folded everything - exact, corners matched.

"Toby's down at the tent," she said, before I said anything. "Coloring. I saw him from the window."

"Tessa."

"May I say goodbye to him?"

I didn't answer. I didn't know how to answer a question that small, and that's the truth of it.

She closed the suitcase. She stood there in the wrinkled ivory dress she'd hung on the closet door the night before, work jacket over it, apron on top, no makeup on and no argument in her.

"Ask me," she said. "Once. Ask me and I'll tell you."

The hall clock downstairs struck nine.

"Margot says the state's coming Monday," I said.

"Yes."

"Say something, then."

Tessa picked up the suitcase.

"She says you're to be off the property," I said, and my voice did something I didn't like. "She's not wrong to ask. You have to see how it looks."

She looked at me for a long second. Then she nodded, like I'd handed her a tool she'd asked for.

"Okay," she said.

I picked up her suitcase. God help me, I picked it up, and I carried it down the back stairs and out through the kitchen and down the terrace steps myself, past my aunt and my uncle and the caterer and the kid with the folding tables, all the way to the car.