Chapter Four: A Very Decorative Lock

The envelope had waited on the desk all day, patient as a bill.

Eliza opened it at midnight, sitting cross-legged on the bed under a ceiling of kicks and explosions, with the lamp turned to the wall so nothing showed under the door. Inside was a single sheet of studio letterhead.

Miss Sinclair, you are invited to read for the role of Mira in IRON ORCHID. Thursday, 9:00 a.m., Studio 4, Harlow Lane. Please bring only yourself.

Underneath, in blue pen, someone had added a line. Mr. Voss asked for you by name after the clip. Don’t be late. J.

“Which clip?” Eliza said.

“The vault is generous tonight,” said Rex, curled on her pillow like a loaf of bread. “Three minutes, shot in a parking garage on a borrowed camera. Night Courier, Part One. Forty-one thousand views. Your girl took a flying kick off a car roof and landed it on a fire extinguisher.”

“And the fire extinguisher?”

“Did not survive.”

Eliza read the line again. By name. Not a Sinclair, not whoever happened to be free. At dinner, Lexi had said they asked for a Sinclair and let everyone fill in the rest. It was a very small lie, and it had worked beautifully for about two hours.

“Does Lexi know I’m called at nine?”

“I can’t see inside her head,” Rex said. “I only do furniture.”

“Then I’ll look at her furniture.”

At two in the morning the house had settled into the kind of quiet that costs money. Eliza crossed the hall in bare feet and knelt at Lexi’s door with a bobby pin from the desk drawer. The lock was brass, polished, and entirely ornamental. She had picked locks in four countries that took theirs far more seriously.

It opened in eleven seconds. She was almost insulted.

The room smelled of vanilla and hairspray. Lexi lay on her side with a silk mask over her eyes and one arm hooked around a pillow, breathing in slow, even pulls. Eliza stayed low and let her eyes adjust. Then she began, the way she always began, with the places people think are clever. The tissue box. The shoe closet. The hollowed-out book on the shelf, which turned out to contain a hollowed-out book, which contained three lipsticks and a ring that Rex swiftly identified as glass.

“Lovely clutch bag,” he whispered. “Counterfeit.”

“Do you have to appraise everything?”

“It’s the only thing I’m good at.”

“Let go.”

Eliza froze with a drawer halfway open.

It was Lexi, thick with sleep, the voice of someone talking to a person in a dream. Her hand had closed on the pillow, knuckles tight, pulling. “Let go. It’s mine. Let go, let go, I didn’t mean to…”

The sentence ended on a breath. Her fingers loosened, one at a time, and the pillow slid out of her arm. After a moment she rolled toward the wall and was quiet again.

Eliza stood there longer than she should have. Whatever else Lexi was, she was not sleeping well, and a person who dreams like that has done something she can’t put down. It didn’t make Eliza kinder. It made her more careful.

She finished the room in six minutes. No necklace. But on the hook behind the door hung a camel coat, and in its pocket was a folded slip of pink paper.

AURELIA GEM & REPAIR, CRESCENT STREET. Received: one silver pendant, small bird, wings open. Chain snapped at the clasp. Customer: L. Sinclair. Ready for collection: the 14th.

Next to the mirror, half hidden under a perfume bottle, was a printed email. It listed Thursday’s call times in neat rows. 9:00, E. Sinclair. 11:30, L. Sinclair.

So Lexi knew. She had known all week.

Eliza photographed both on the original Eliza’s phone, put everything back exactly as she’d found it, and slipped into the hall. She closed the door with her thumb on the latch so it wouldn’t click.

“Are you robbing Lexi?”

Eliza did not jump. She turned her head, slowly, and found Victor at the end of the corridor in plaid pajamas with a slice of cake on a saucer.

“I’m sleepwalking,” she said.

“You’ve never sleepwalked.”

“I’m starting.”

Victor considered this with the full seriousness of a man holding cake. “Okay,” he said.

She waited for him to ask about the bobby pin in her hand. He looked at it, looked at her, and then looked at the floor, which was somehow more embarrassing.

“I should’ve said something at dinner,” he said, very low. “Actually, I should’ve said it this afternoon. I just kept thinking I’d gotten the time wrong, and then Mother said not to upset anyone, and…” He rubbed his neck. “Lexi’s car came into the garage at ten to four. I was at my window. I saw her. And the maid started screaming at ten past.”

Eliza kept her face perfectly still. “Twenty minutes.”

“She said she’d just walked in. She told Mother that, in front of everyone. I thought I’d misheard.”

“You didn’t.”

“Then what was she…” His voice trailed off. He had the look of a person who had been holding a heavy box for hours and had just found somewhere to put it down. “Please don’t say it came from me. She’d be…”

“Nice to you,” said Eliza. “For about a day.”

Victor’s mouth twitched. It was nearly a smile. “Right,” he said. “Good night, Eliza. I’m glad you’re not dead.”

“So am I,” she said, and meant it more than he could know.

Back in her own room, with the door locked and the lamp finally turned up, she laid the photo of the slip on the desk and read it again. Twenty minutes in the house before anyone knew she was there. A broken chain. A pendant that had gone to a jeweler by the fourteenth.

“Aurelia Gem and Repair,” Eliza said. “Crescent Street.”

“A Blackwood Group property,” said Rex, hopping onto the dresser. “The whole street. The leases, the lampposts, probably the pigeons.”

Eliza went very still.

“Blackwood,” she said.

“You know them?”

She thought of a file. A last contract, a last name, a corridor she had left a little too slowly, and one clean cut on a man’s forearm that nobody had ever managed before or since.

“Only one of them,” she said. “I tried to kill him.”

“Oh,” said Rex faintly. “That’s not on the sheet.”