Chapter 2 - The Carriage House
The courtyard between the main house and the brick carriage house was paved with granite setts, slick tonight with a glaze of black ice. The wind came off the Charles River, carrying the scent of salt, exhaust, and freezing iron. I shielded Lily inside the folds of my heavy overcoat, holding Mia’s hand firmly as we navigated the treacherous stones.
The carriage house was dark except for a single yellowish square of light on the ground floor.
I didn't knock. I turned the brass knob, found it unlocked, and stepped inside.
The smell struck me first: vinegar, eucalyptus, and beneath that, the unmistakable sweet, copper stench of severe internal hemorrhage. The radiator in the corner was hissing violently, fighting a losing battle against the drafts whistling through the historic window frames.
"Mama?" Mia called out, pulling away from me and running toward the small alcove that served as the bedroom.
I followed quickly. Grace Harper lay sprawled across a double mattress that had been stripped of its top quilt—the quilt Mia had used to wrap her sister. She was wearing a grey cotton nightgown, soaked through with sweat at the collar and dark with bile at the hem. Her face was gray, the skin around her nose and lips pulled tight over her cheekbones like wet parchment.
I placed Lily carefully in an empty wooden laundry basket lined with clean towels on the kitchen table, then went to the bedside.
I pressed two fingers to Grace’s carotid artery. Her pulse was a chaotic, thready gallop—tachycardic, easily over one hundred and forty beats per minute. When I touched her forehead, it felt like touching an engine block that had been running dry.
"Grace," I said loudly, pressing my knuckles firmly into her sternum.
Her eyelids fluttered, crusted with yellow rheum. Her eyes rolled wildly before catching my face. A jolt of panic seized her, her throat working convulsively.
"Mr... Mr. Duca..." she rasped, her voice tearing over the words. She tried to pull the damp sheet over her chest with hands that shook violently. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm coming up now. I just... I had a spell. Mia, where is the—"
"Be quiet, Grace," I said, keeping my tone level, stripped of all the anger burning behind my teeth. "Lie still. Mia is here. Lily is here. Nobody is firing you."
Her eyes filled with tears, spilling down into the hollows of her temples. "The silver... I didn't polish the silver for Thursday."
"To hell with the silver," I muttered.
I pulled my mobile phone from my trouser pocket and hit the speed dial for Dr. Julian Croft. Julian was seventy, lived three doors down on Chestnut Street, and charged astronomical sums to treat the city’s old money in their private beds so they wouldn't have to be seen in the triage units of Massachusetts General.
He answered on the fourth ring, his voice slurry with sleep. "Gabriel? It's past two in the morning. Has your ulcer perforated?"
"I need you at my carriage house in three minutes, Julian. Bring an IV kit, broad-spectrum antibiotics, and whatever you use to stabilize acute septic shock."
"What? Who is—"
"Three minutes," I said, and ended the call.
Mia was standing by the foot of the bed, her fingers twisted into the hem of her shirt. She was watching me not with the trust of a child, but with the hyper-vigilant calculation of an animal trying to determine if the larger predator was going to kill it or feed it.
"Go into the kitchen," I told her gently. "Find a clean glass. Fill it with cold water. Bring it here."
She scurried off, desperate for a task.
I leaned closer to Grace. Her breathing was shallow, catching on every third inhalation with a wet, bubbling rattle.
"Grace," I said, keeping my voice low. "Listen to me clearly. You have been sick for days. Why didn't you say something? Why did you send a six-year-old child to clean my library?"
Her hand reached out, her fingers clammy and cold, clamping onto my wrist with surprising, desperate strength. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick, caked with old limestone dust.
"Not... not the cleaning," she whispered, her chest heaving. "She had to... she had to make noise."
I frowned, leaning closer. "What did you say?"
"The noise," Grace choked out, a thin line of pink foam appearing at the corner of her lips. "The vacuum. The water. If it’s quiet... he knocks. If he knocks, he’ll find the latch. He told me... he told me he was running out of water."
A cold draft seemed to cut through the sweltering heat of the small bedroom.
"Who, Grace? Who is behind the wall?"
Her eyes widened, suddenly lucid with pure terror. She looked past me, toward the small window that faced the rear of the main house. "The shadow... from the cellar. He never died, Mr. Duca. Your father... your father didn't bury him. He locked him in."
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Before I could demand another word, her eyes rolled back into her head, her spine arched off the mattress in a rigid convulsion, and she went entirely limp, her breath escaping in a long, rattling hiss.
***
