Chapter 2 - The Red Teacup
The kitchen at Blackwood was forty feet long, floored in Belgian blue stone that had been taken from the stables of an abbey near Namur in 1922. It stayed cold until June. Even with the six-oven Aga burning its continuous low coke fire, the stones drew the heat out of a person’s calves through the soles of their shoes.
Naomi sat on the wooden stool by the bread crocks, her fingers wrapped around an ironstone mug of hot water. She hadn't put tea in it. Her mouth tasted like copper pennies, the way it always did when the police were in a house.
Upstairs, the tread of the paramedics was heavy and rhythmic. They had the portable monitor with them; every five seconds, a small, high-pitched pip came down through the dumbwaiter shaft behind the pantry, followed by the dry tear of Velcro as they pumped the cuff on Evelyn’s arm again.
The side door—the one that opened onto the gravel courtyard where the laundry vans turned—swung back on its brass hinges with a sharp clatter.
Marcus Voss did not knock. He had a key. He had held a key to the north entrance since he took over his father’s practice on Round Hill Road in 2004. He was fifty, with the square, thick-fingered hands of a suburban surgeon who spent more time on the squash court than in the theater, and he wore a Barbour jacket that smelled of wet labrador and woodsmoke.
“Where is she?” he asked. He didn't take off his cap.
“Upstairs, Doctor,” Naomi said from the stool. She didn't stand up. “The town squad is with her.”
Voss stopped four feet onto the blue stone. His eyes were small, pale blue, with the watery clarity of gin. “The town squad? Who called the town squad?”
“Mr. Adrian did.”
“I left explicit instructions on the chart,” Voss said, his voice tightening at the edges like a drying pelt. “Any pulmonary event was to be routed through my service at Greenwich Hospital. The pulmonary fibrosis makes her reactive to standard intubation. I explained that to Adrian last Tuesday.”
“She wasn't reactive,” Naomi said. She took a sip of the hot water. It didn't taste like anything. “She was smothered.”
Voss’s medical bag—an old-fashioned Gladstone in black calf that had belonged to his partner—did not drop, but his grip on the handle shifted. The brass catch clicked twice against the leather.
“What did you say?”
“You heard it,” Naomi said. “Your ears are good enough when Mrs. Vale is writing the checks for the foundation balls.”
Voss stepped toward her, his heavy brogues loud on the limestone. “Naomi, you’ve been under a significant amount of strain since the winter. Evelyn mentioned to me that you’ve been having difficulties with the inventory in the silver pantry. Forgetting orders. Misplacing invoices.”
Naomi set the mug down on the bread crock. The sound was very small, but Voss stopped where he stood.
“I haven't misplaced a salt cellar in this house since nineteen-ninety-four, Malcolm Voss,” she said. “And the only thing missing from the pantry is the green bottle of chloral hydrate you brought in your coat pocket on the fourteenth of March. The one you didn't enter into the log behind the medicine cabinet.”
Voss’s face didn't change color. He had the hard, polished skin of men who lived on salt water and high dividends, but his nostrils pinched together until they were white at the corners.
“You’re speaking well outside your station,” he said.
“My station is seventy-two feet from the front door to the back gate,” Naomi said. “I walk it twelve times a day. I see what comes in the wicker baskets and I see what goes out in the ash cans. You want to go upstairs and tell those boys with the oxygen tanks about Mrs. Vale’s lungs? Go on. The girl is up there. She’s got her tears all ready for you. She’s been practicing them in the looking glass since eight o'clock yesterday evening.”
Voss looked at her for five seconds. In those five seconds, Naomi saw the calculation move behind his eyes like a rat behind the wainscot: the value of the practice, the mortgage on the house in Nantucket, the five hundred thousand dollars Adrian had pledged to the new surgical wing at Stamford Hospital, and the three signatures required on the certificate of mental competence that was currently sitting on the corner of the mahogany secretary upstairs.
Then he turned and went up the back service stairs, two at a time, his boots hitting the risers with the dull, hollow rhythm of an axe in green pine.
Naomi waited until the door at the top of the stair clicked shut.
Then she reached into the deep pocket of her apron.
Her fingers closed around a scrap of blue paper, four inches by six, torn from the back of an address book that lived in the drawer of the nightstand in the master suite. It had three lines on it, written in Evelyn Vale’s spidery, copperplate script—the script they taught to girls at the Miss Porter’s School in the nineteen-fifties, where you never lifted the nib until the word was finished.
The girl is not from Baltimore, the first line said.
Ask about the sister in Utica, the second said.
The third line wasn't finished. The pen had dragged off the edge of the blue laid paper, leaving a long, pale brown streak where the iron-gall ink had thinned out into water:
The trust has two seals, not—
From the front courtyard came the sound of three cars arriving together: the heavy, diesel rumble of the ambulance; the high-revving drone of the Greenwich police cruisers; and the low, wet purr of a twelve-cylinder engine that Naomi knew without looking was Julian Vale’s vintage Bentley.
Julian was Adrian’s cousin. He had forty-nine percent of the voting stock in the maritime terminals in New London and spent six months of the year in a villa outside Sintra playing cello and losing five thousand dollars an afternoon at backgammon. If Julian was here at seven-thirty on a Wednesday morning, he hadn't driven down from Providence after the phone call.
He had been waiting at the Shell station by the turnpike exit for the phone to ring.
May you like
Naomi stood up from the stool. Her knees made a small, dry pop that sounded loud in the cold kitchen. She took the blue slip of paper, folded it twice until it was no larger than a postage stamp, and slipped it beneath the leather insole of her left shoe.
Then she took her apron off, hung it on the brass peg behind the scullery door, and walked out into the front hall to meet the police.
