Chapter 1 - The Weight of Still Water
The air on the terrace tasted of brine, cut lime, and wet stone.
Santino Ferrara did not look at the men lifting him onto the teak chaise. He did not look at the house doctor, whose gold cufflinks clicked against the flagstones as he dropped to both knees. He looked through the ring of linen jackets, beyond the silver cocktail buckets weeping condensation in the heat, straight at Emily Taylor.
She sat six yards back, where the crowd’s hesitation had deposited her. Her second shoe was gone. Her hair—fine, the color of wet river slate—stuck to the skin of her neck in dark cords. Water pooled around the hem of the cream skirt she had ironed that morning in a rented room three miles from the harbor, a room where the radiator clanked all night and her brother’s watch sat in a drawer inside a rolled-up sock.
"Get her inside," someone muttered. It was Julian Vane, the younger cousin who had spent the last forty minutes laughing with three men from the Providence water board. Julian’s cuffs were dry. His pocket square—folded into three sharp points—did not have a drop of chlorine on it. "Take her through the service pantry. Look at the terrace. We have the lieutenant governor arriving in twenty minutes."
Nobody moved to help her up. The silence was not polite; it was thick, like tallow left to cool in an iron pan.
Santino raised one finger from the edge of the cushions. It was a minimal gesture, but Julian’s voice died mid-syllable.
"Don't move her," Santino said.
His voice was hoarse. Water had stripped the velvet from the bottom of his register, leaving only the gravel of a man who had inhaled four mouthfuls of treated pool water while his friends checked their watches. He coughed once into his palm, spat something bitter onto the stone, and swung his eyes toward Julian.
"The girl stays."
"Santino, she’s soaked through. The staff—"
"The staff," Santino said, each syllable dry and flat as a slate tile, "was holding trays. Weren't they, Julian?"
Julian did not answer. He stepped back two inches, his eyes darting toward the far end of the lawn, where three men in dark gray suits stood near the boxwood hedges with their hands crossed over their belt buckles. Those men worked for the family’s maritime trust—which was the polite name for the five docks between Newport and Fall River where cargo containers sometimes lost their serial numbers between midnight and dawn.
Emily felt the cold finally reach her collarbone. It was an old cold, familiar from the winters when Leo was still driving the salt trucks down from Worcester. She remembered how Leo’s hands looked when he came off a ten-hour shift: cracked red at the knuckles, smelling of engine starter and cheap tobacco. Leo had died with two fractured ribs and a steering column through his chest on a bypass outside Providence while Santino Ferrara had been pulled from the twisted wreckage of a black Mercedes four hundred yards ahead of him. The state police report had called it an unavoidable multi-vehicle collision caused by black ice. Emily had read that report twenty-eight times until the staples rusted.
"Can you stand?"
The voice was directly above her now. It was not Santino. It was Silvio, the older man with the clipped gray beard who had checked her references nine days ago in an office that smelled of floor wax and lemon oil. Silvio had spent forty minutes looking at her forged diploma from a business college in Manchester that had closed three years ago, asking her if she knew how to use an old Remington electric and whether she had family in the trades.
"I can stand," Emily said.
She stood. Her skirt slapped wet against her shins. One bare foot was pale against the gray flagstone, the other still strapped into an eight-dollar heel she had bought from a church basement sale.
"Follow me," Silvio said. He did not touch her elbow. He did not offer his handkerchief. In this house, touching was either a greeting between cousins or an instruction from a court stenographer; anything between was dangerous.
They walked along the edge of the terrace, past forty men and women whose glasses remained frozen midway to their lips. A woman in a wide straw hat turned her head slightly to avoid the water dripping from Emily’s hem. Emily recognized her: Mrs. Corcoran, whose husband ran the concrete company that had laid the foundation for the new courthouse in Warwick.
Inside, the house swallowed them with carpet so deep it felt like walking through wet sand.
The back office was dark. Silvio did not switch on the overhead brass chandelier; he flicked the small green banker’s lamp on the corner of the partner’s desk.
"You have four minutes before the clothes arrive," Silvio said, sitting down behind the blotter. He didn't look at her; he looked at a small leather ledger that lay between two brass paperweights. "Tell me where you learned to release a buckle like that under water."
Emily’s throat burned with chlorine. "I was a guard at the municipal pool in Cranston. When I was nineteen."
"The application said you were in Hartford at nineteen. Assisting a magistrate's clerk."
"I was in Cranston during the summers," she said immediately. Her voice was too steady. She knew it the moment the words left her mouth. A real secretary—the kind who bought typing ribbons on Broadway and worried about shorthand speed—would be sobbing now, or asking for tea, or looking at the ceiling to see if she was going to be fired for ruining an imported carpet.
Silvio turned a page in the ledger. His thumbnail was yellowed at the edge, thick like an old coin.
"The chair weighs eighty-four pounds without the batteries," he said. "With the lead weights under the footrest—the ones we put in so the wind on the dock doesn't turn him—it’s a hundred and ten. A man in wool, soaked, is another two hundred." He stopped turning. His thumbnail pressed into the margin. "Most girls your size would have come up after the first tug."
"He was looking at me," Emily said.
Silvio looked up. The green light made his eyes look like dull moss. "And?"
"If someone is looking at you like that," she said, thinking of Leo’s eyes in the emergency room mirror three years ago, when the nurse had held the curtain back for two seconds before telling her to wait in the hall, "you don't go up until the job is finished. That’s all."
A knock came at the door—two short taps, then a long one.
A maid entered carrying a dark wool sweater, a pair of gray flannel trousers with an elastic waist, and a towel that smelled faintly of lavender and old cedar. She didn't look at Emily. She put the pile on the leather sofa, picked up the wet shoe Emily had left near the umbrella stand, and walked out without closing the latch.
"Change behind the screen," Silvio said, closing the book. "When you're finished, don't go back through the gardens. Go up to the third-floor library. Mr. Ferrara wants to know what you were carrying in your pocket when you went off the coping."
May you like
Emily’s stomach dropped.
Her right pocket had held two items: her notebook with the shorthand notes from the morning call with the shipping agent in Boston, and the small, brass ignition key she had taken from Leo’s toolbox the night they hauled his pickup to the scrap yard.
