The Dinner

Chapter 19

"Sit down."

"I already ate."

"You ate a piece of bread at noon." He didn't look up from the paper. "Sit down."

The small dining room had a table for six and only two places set. One at the head. One to his right.

I stood in the doorway with flour on my sleeves.

"I'm your maid."

"You're my maid who spent yesterday on her back in a road." He turned the page. "Sit down before the food gets cold."

I sat down.

The plate in front of me had a pork chop on it, and potatoes, and green beans with butter on them, and I hadn't had a hot dinner in a week and my stomach turned over at the smell of it.

He had a plate too.

He didn't touch it.

I picked up my fork and started eating and he read his paper.

We did that for about four minutes. The fire popped. His paper rustled. I chewed.

"You're not eating," I said.

"Mm."

"Your food's getting cold."

He turned another page.

I put my fork down.

"Lucifer."

"Eat your dinner."

"You're not eating."

"I eat later."

"You said that two nights ago at the west hall and I cleaned that plate off the table at nine o'clock and it was full."

He looked up.

"You cleaned the west hall?"

"Somebody's got to."

He set the paper down. Folded it. Put it on the table next to his plate, and then he picked up his fork and cut a piece of the pork and put it in his mouth and chewed it and swallowed it and looked at me the entire time.

"There," he said. "Happy?"

"Ecstatic."

He put the fork down.

"You want to know what happens if I eat a full meal?" he said. "I'll tell you. Nothing. That's the answer. It's been nothing for eight years. But for eight years I've sat down at this table and I've looked at a plate of food and I've thought, what if this is the night it comes back up." He pushed the plate away. "So I eat in the kitchen. At four in the morning. Standing up. Alone."

I sat there.

"That's the saddest thing I've ever heard," I said.

He looked at me.

"I'm serious. That's the saddest thing I've ever heard." I picked my fork back up. "You're the most powerful man in this valley and you eat standing up in the kitchen at four in the morning like a raccoon."

He didn't say anything.

Then he picked his fork back up.

"That's not funny," he said.

"I know."

"It's not a joke."

"I know it's not a joke." I cut into my pork chop. "Eat your dinner."

And he did.

---

We ate. Neither of us talked.

I watched him out of the corner of my eye the whole time. He cut his food small. He chewed slow. He kept stopping to look at the window, and then he'd start again.

He watched me too. He wasn't even sneaky about it. Every time I moved my hand his eyes went to it, and then down to my plate, and then back up. When I reached for the salt he tracked the whole arc of my arm.

"You're doing it," I said.

"Doing what."

"The thing where you watch me like I'm gonna pull a knife on you."

"I'm not worried you'll pull a knife."

"Then what?"

He chewed and swallowed and didn't answer.

"Lucifer."

"I'm counting," he said.

"Counting what?"

"Everything." He set his fork down. "How much you eat. How fast you eat it. Whether you finish. Whether you leave a bite."

"Why?"

"Because there's a jar of preserves at the end of the table and you haven't asked about it."

I looked.

It was at the other end, past the candlesticks. A glass jar with a dark red lid and a piece of paper stuck on the side.

"Should I ask about it?"

"Nobody in this castle eats preserves," he said. "Not from that jar. It's been on that table for four years. It gets dusted. That's all that happens to it."

I got up and walked down the table and picked the jar up.

The paper label was faded and the ink had run, but I could still read it.

SILVER CREEK MILL & STORE.

"Where'd it come from?" I said.

"Milk cart. Four years ago." He was watching me. "That's what the ledger says. It came up the ridge road on a Thursday and got put on that table and nobody ever ate it."

"Preserves don't come up the ridge on the milk cart."

"Exactly."

I turned the jar over in my hands. Blackberry. The lid was dull with old fingerprints.

Then I noticed the fill line.

It was a third of the way down. There was a ring of old dried jam on the inside of the glass where it had started, and then a clean gap above it where the jam had slid down.

Somebody had been eating out of this jar.

"You said nobody eats it," I said.

"Nobody does."

I set it down on the table and turned it so the fill line faced him.

"That's not the line it started at," I said. "Somebody's been in this room, eating your dead mother's preserves, and not putting the jar back where they found it."

He came down the table.

He looked at the jar. He turned it. He held it up to the candle.

Then he set it down very carefully and didn't say anything for a long time.

"Doreen dusts this table," he said.

"Every day?"

"Every morning."

"So they're not eating it in the morning." I pulled the chair out from the head of the table and sat down in his chair and put my elbows on the table like a man. "They're eating it at night. After she dusts. After everybody's gone to bed."

"Or she's lying about dusting it."

"Doreen's not lying."

"You don't know that."

I thought about the flour. The list. The way she'd handed me that clipboard without a single question.

"Yeah," I said. "I do."

He pulled the other chair out and sat down across from me. We were both sitting at the wrong ends of the table and neither of us moved.

"Somebody lit a fire in my mother's room," he said. "Somebody cut a key. Somebody paid three of my men to take you off that road. And somebody's been eating preserves out of a jar that's been on this table for four years in a castle where every single night I black out and kill things."

"The preserves are the part that scares you."

"It's the part I can't explain." He rubbed his jaw. "Rogues I understand. Money I understand. Letters I understand. But somebody sitting alone in this room in the middle of the night eating blackberry jam?"

"You're thinking what I'm thinking."

"That the fire and the key and the rope are all business. And the preserves are personal."

The fire cracked.

"Your mother made those," I said. "Where'd you get the recipe?"

He looked up.

"I don't know."

"Come on. She must have canned them."

"She did. She had a cellar full of them. That's where the label's from — she sold them at the mill store in Silver Creek, the year before she died." He looked at the jar. "But the label on this jar's printed. The one on the ones she made was written in pencil and the pencil came off."

"So this isn't one of hers."

"No."

"And it came up the milk cart four years ago."

"No," he said. "It didn't."

I sat up straight.

"Because the mill store in Silver Creek hasn't made preserves since the fire," he said. "Somebody put a Silver Creek label on a jar of blackberry preserves and paid a driver to carry it up that ridge and put it on my table. Four years ago. Same year my mother died."

He picked up the jar and held it in one hand.

"And then somebody ate it," he said. "Slowly. Over four years. A little at a time. So I'd never notice the jar getting lighter."

The candle on the table flickered.

I got up.

"Where are you going?"

"To find Doreen," I said. "Because she dusts this table every morning for four years and she's never once told you there's a bite out of that jar, which means either she's the one eating it—"

"Or she's covering for whoever is."

"Or she's scared of whoever is."

We looked at each other.

"Get your coat," he said.

"It's almost nine. Where are we going?"

"To the kitchen." He picked up the jar. "If somebody in this castle has been coming into this room at night for four years, there's one person who's been here every single one of those nights. And she's probably scrubbing a pot right now."

Chapter 19 Ends