Chapter 31 Pasketti

"What was in the box?"

Detective Nadia Osei asked it from a crouch in my doorway at eleven at night, a pen-light clamped in her teeth while she went over the bent lock plate inch by inch, and she had to take the light out of her mouth to wait for the answer. She was tall even folded up like that, with close-cropped hair going gray at the temples and a pair of reading glasses pushed up on her head that she never seemed to bring down to her eyes.

"Bills," I said. "Letters. Her nursing license, some old receipts. Nothing anybody could sell."

"Bills."

"Medical bills. My mother died of pancreatic cancer. There were a great many of them."

Osei put the light back between her teeth and ran it round the splintered frame a second time, slower. Behind her a uniformed officer was photographing the front room from the doorway, and every few seconds his flash went off and lit Helen's recipe cards where they lay across the rug, *Chowder* and *Mabel's Lemon Bars*, white for an instant and then gone.

Her knees cracked when she stood. She looked past me into the house and began counting on her fingers without seeming to know she did it.

"Laptop upstairs, in plain view. Jewelry beside it. TV still on the wall." She clicked off the pen-light. "There are forty dollars in an envelope on your kitchen counter with *Milk Money* written on the front. Somebody forced a door on a street where everybody knows whose cat is whose, went through a dead woman's house like they were doing her taxes, and left with a shoebox of paper." She let that sit, then turned her head to me. "So you tell me, Dr. Fairley. Who wants a dead nurse's letters?"

I thought of a sealed claim in a Boston courthouse, and of a name that was mine and wasn't, and of Philip's peppermint in my winter coat. I thought of a gray truck idling across the lane one night this month, engine running, lights off.

"I don't know," I said.

Osei studied me without any hurry at all, and I made myself stand in my own hall and be studied.

"Then somebody knows more about your mother than you do," she said, and took a card out of her coat. "If you think of anything, even something stupid. Especially that."

The card was soft at the corners from living in her pocket. I turned it over twice before I spoke again.

"There's a truck."

Her eyebrows rose about a millimeter, which seemed to be as far as they went.

"A gray pickup, older, with a plate too dirty to read. My children saw it parked across the lane more than once this month. I saw it myself one night with the engine running and decided it was somebody waiting on a fish delivery, because that's what you decide on this street."

"Driver?"

"A shape. A cap, maybe."

She wrote it in a small notebook, in pencil, and I liked her a little for the pencil. "Your kids clocked it before you did."

"My son counts things. If a thing turns up in the same place twice, he knows."

"Good kid." She shut the notebook. "Tell him a detective said so."

---

The officers left at half past midnight, and nobody went upstairs.

Pippa fell asleep on Helen's sofa under my coat with Admiral wedged beneath her chin, still mourning the red mitten the harbor had taken, explaining to the ceiling that it could probably swim. Lorenz took a kitchen chair by the back door, a chair built for somebody half his length, and stretched his legs across the linoleum while Felix slept on his chest with one cheek pressed flat against the shirt buttons. Some time after two he went to sleep as well, sitting bolt upright, his glasses knocked crooked against Felix's hair.

I sat at the kitchen table and put Helen's recipe cards back into their tins in alphabetical order, because it was a thing I could finish. *Chowder* went under C. *Do NOT Use Margarine* went under D, since that was how she would have filed it and she would have looked at me over her glasses if I'd put it anywhere else. It took until four.

At six the fog was still flattened against the windows when somebody knocked.

I opened the door on the chain, the one part of the lock that still did its job.

Rhys stood on the step. At the curb behind him a long dark car idled with its lights on, and Owen Pike leaned against the rear fender holding two coffees and a cardboard folder with the patience of a man who had been holding things for other people since college.

"Crane has a police scanner feed," Rhys said. "He posted your address at one this morning. *Break-in at the home of Calloway's ex.*" His eyes went past me to the split frame and the tins stacked on the hall floor. "Are they hurt?"

"No."

"Are you?"

"No."

He went over my face once, fast, checking it against some list he kept, and then took out his phone and simply held it.

"I can have two men here within the hour. Ex-police, good ones, one front and one back, round the clock until this is dealt with." He weighed the phone on his palm. "Or Lantern Row. There's a gate. There's an alarm that actually works. There are rooms they've already slept in."

"No."

"Margot—"

"Not your house." I lowered my voice, since Pippa was asleep twenty feet down the hall. "I lived in that house for three years on your terms. I am not carrying my children back through that gate because somebody bent a lock."

He didn't argue, but his thumb found the bare place on his ring finger and tapped it twice.

My phone went off in my pocket. I had texted Tamsin at one, and at one-oh-two she had answered *calling at 6, dont pick up if asleep*, and here she was, punctual about catastrophe as she was about nothing else. I put her on speaker without thinking, and her voice filled the narrow hall along with a steady crunch.

"I'm up. I'm eating cereal out of the box like an animal. Is everybody alive?"

"Everybody's alive. Rhys is here."

Crunch. "Course he is. Hi, Rhys."

"Ms. Reyes."

"Let me guess what he's selling. Lantern Row."

"Lantern Row," I said.

"Absolutely not." The box rattled. "Do you know what Crane does with one photo of you carrying the twins through his front gate? He prints it under the word *Reunited*, and by Monday some judge's clerk has it on the fridge. His house, his gate, his rules. He can be perfectly lovely, I'm told. Still no."

Rhys regarded the phone in my hand with the air of a man who would have liked to take it outside and settle things with it.

"Then name a place with a gate," he said.

I opened my mouth and found I didn't have one.

Behind him a second car came down Netmaker Lane out of the fog, older and longer than his, a deep burgundy polished until it gleamed even in that gray, with a driver in a cap at the wheel. It drew up nose to tail behind Rhys's car, and the rear window slid down.

"*Quel brouillard de merde,*" Beatrix Whitlock informed the fog.

Then she took in my door, and Rhys in front of it, and me behind the chain, and raised her voice by the exact amount required.

"Margot. Get the children. You're coming to me."

---

I packed the way I had once packed to leave a marriage, fast and without letting myself choose anything: clothes in the duffel, the twins' toothbrushes in a sandwich bag, Felix's echo reports in their folder, the laptop, the earring dish. I walked past Helen's door without stopping.

Pippa woke furious with the entire world, then woke a little further and worked out that we were going somewhere, and her fury turned on a dime into interest.

"Where?"

"Madame Beatrix's house."

"The one with the cane?"

"The one with the cane."

"Has she got a pool?"

"She's got the sea."

She thought that over and allowed it. Then she was up the stairs before I could catch her sleeve, and she came down dragging my baby blanket out of the cedar chest by one corner, pale yellow wool trailing on the treads behind her.

"I need this."

"Pip, that's mine, it's old—"

"It's a shark cape." She threw it round her shoulders and held her arms out. "For flying. It's coming."

I didn't have one more argument left in me. I folded the blanket into the top of the duffel over the clothes and zipped it shut without looking at the gull in the corner.

Out on the pavement Rhys stood between the two cars with his collar turned up against the damp and watched Beatrix's driver stow my bags in the burgundy trunk, with the expression he used on a cargo he hadn't signed for.

"Your patron," he said when I came down the steps with Felix on my hip. "The one you treated in Zurich."

"Yes."

"Who funds your professor's lab."

"Yes."

"Who drives into Old Harbor at six in the morning, in fog, in her own car, to collect my ex-wife and my children." Through the back window Beatrix had produced a small silver flask and was pouring a measure into its cap. "That's a remarkably generous patient."

"She's a remarkably generous woman."

"Noted," Rhys said, in the tone he kept for things he had no intention of noting.

Lorenz came out last with his own bag and his coat over his arm. His flight left Friday morning, and he had taken a room near the airport until then. He knelt on the wet pavement to get both twins into one hug, and Pippa ordered him to bring more Sunday bread next time, and Felix whispered against her ear until she announced, "Felix says don't forget the soldering iron is his now," and Lorenz swore on his honor that he wouldn't. Then he stood, kissed my cheek, held my shoulders a moment longer than he needed to, and looked over my head at Rhys.

Neither man said anything. Each tipped his chin a fraction toward the other, which on that pavement amounted to a treaty.

---

Cliff Road climbed out of the fog in long switchbacks, and near the top we broke out of it completely into a hard, scrubbed blue. Below us Bramport lay under the white like milk in a saucer, with only the crane tops and the church spire poking through.

Beatrix had said nothing since Old Harbor. She sat upright in the corner of the back seat with her cane between her knees and her gloved hands stacked on the silver gull, and Felix, who was afraid of nearly every adult he had met in this country, had climbed across the leather and gone to sleep against her arm. She hadn't moved the arm, and she hadn't looked down at him, though I noticed she had stopped tapping the cane.

"He came at six," she said eventually, to the windshield.

"Crane posted the address."

"I know what Crane posted. I'm saying the Calloway boy came at six." One gloved finger rapped the gull's head. "Philip has my number and the same newspaper. Philip did not call."

I turned to look at her, but she kept her eyes on the road.

"Ambrose has made up the west wing, the rooms over the water. Don't argue with me about it. I'm eighty-one and I haven't had breakfast."

Whitlock Hall sat at the end of a long gravel drive on the lip of the cliff, low and pale, built of limestone the color of a heel of old bread, its tall windows full of morning and its slate roof furred green on the north pitch. Past it there was only the sea. The driver took the last curve and stopped at the front steps, where Ambrose waited in black coat and gloves, so composed he might have been put there with the foundation stones.

The twins were out of the car before anyone reached a door handle.

Then Pippa stopped dead on the gravel.

On the lawn, stepping across the wet grass on long blue legs, were two peacocks. The smaller kept its bronze-green train folded behind it. The other was enormous, and while we stood there it halted, shook out its feathers, and hoisted its tail into a rattling fan of blue and green and gold, a hundred eyes taller than Pippa, then pivoted slowly to make sure we had all seen.

Felix pressed his face into the backs of my knees.

Pippa marched straight across the gravel toward it with her arms already out, though the yellow blanket was still zipped in the duffel, and stopped about three feet short of the bird. It looked down its beak at her. She looked up at it, and then she planted both hands on her hips.

"That one," she announced to all of Whitlock Hall, "is called Pasketti."