Chapter 3 - The Second Will
Detective Sergeant Raymond Miller did not look like Greenwich. He looked like Bridgeport, where his father had worked the brass foundries until the grease took his lungs in seventy-nine. He had two inches of gray hair clipped like a brush, a trench coat that had lost its water-repellent coating three winters ago, and the flat, pale eyes of an inspector who spent his life looking at the basements of people who had more money than common sense.
He stood in the library beneath the portrait of Marcus Vale—Marcus looking out over the harbor at Mystic with his hand on a brass sextant he had never learned to use—and looked at the silver tray on the low coffee table.
The tea had dried into a sticky, dark ring around the porcelain cups.
“You hit her with this?” Miller asked.
“I did,” Naomi said. She sat in the small, straight-backed chair by the fire screen—the one the governesses had used when the boys were small. She had not been offered a seat; she had taken it before Miller had opened his notebook.
“She’s got a contusion on the right ulna,” Miller said, tapping his pencil against his thumb. “The doctor says it might be a hairline fracture. She’s claiming aggravated assault.”
“She can claim the moon is made of lard,” Naomi said. “The pillow has the marks.”
“The pillow is in an evidence bag in the back of my cruiser,” Miller said. He didn't look at his notebook. He looked at Naomi’s hands, which were resting flat on her knees. Her knuckles were large, the skin dark as a chestnut shell, dry from forty years of lye and soft soap. “You’ve been here a long time, Naomi.”
“Eleven years this September. I was with the Ogilvys in Rye for fourteen before that, until Mr. Ogilvy died of the cancer and the girls sold the place to the Japanese.”
“Evelyn Vale’s seventy-six,” Miller said. “Dr. Voss says she’s had three transient ischemic attacks since the first of the year. He says she was hallucinating last Thursday. Thought she saw her sister in the rose garden. Her sister’s been buried in the family plot at Morristown since nineteen-eighty-two.”
Naomi’s chin went up half an inch. “Mrs. Vale’s mind is as clear as yours, Sergeant. Clearer than most, because she doesn't spend her time trying to look at three things at once. She saw somebody in the rose garden because somebody was in the rose garden.”
“Who?”
“The girl’s brother.”
Miller stopped the pencil. “Celeste Arden doesn't have a brother. The background check for the wedding announcement said she was an only child. Father was an associate dean at Johns Hopkins; mother died of lupus when she was twelve.”
Naomi made a small, dry sound in the back of her palate—the sound she made when a butcher tried to charge her for the bone in a rolled roast. “The father was a shop teacher at a vocational high school in Schenectady, Sergeant. He died in the state pen at Comstock three years ago while doing eighteen months for altering titles on stolen Pontiacs. His name was Arthur Ardentowski. The girl changed it in the probate court in Albany the week after he went into the ground.”
Miller stared at her. The silence in the library was very deep. Outside, the rain had started—not a heavy rain, but the thin, cold drizzle that comes off the Sound in April, turning the rhododendrons black against the limestone.
“Where did you get that?” Miller asked.
“From the box under the floorboards in the linen closet,” Naomi said.
“What linen closet?”
“The third-floor service linen. Behind the damask tablecloths from the old house on Fifth Avenue. Mrs. Vale put it there three weeks ago, after she found the girl going through the safe in the gun room.”
Miller closed the notebook with a soft click of its elastic band. He walked to the window, looked out at the three cruisers parked on the circle, then came back and stood over her. He smelled of tobacco and wet wool.
“Adrian Vale is worth six billion dollars, Naomi,” he said quietly. “His firm handles the municipal pension funds for half the state. The mayor was at his engagement party. The commissioner plays golf with his tax partner every second Sunday. If you’re lying to me because you don't want to get put out of the cottage behind the carriage house when the new wife moves in, you’re going to spend the next five years in the state farm at Niantic.”
Naomi looked up into his flat, gray eyes. “Sergeant, I am sixty-three years old. I have two grandchildren at Howard and a nephew who flies cargo planes for the Air Force out of Dover. I don't care about the cottage. I don't care about the six billion dollars. But I washed Marcus Vale when he died in that bed upstairs. I dressed his boy for his first dance at the armory. And I am not going to let a girl who stole her clothes from a showroom in Fort Lee suffocate that old woman while the doctor holds the door.”
A knock came at the library door. It wasn't loud, but it had the weight of someone who owned the wood.
Julian Vale stepped in. He had taken off his overcoat, revealing a mustard-colored cashmere waistcoat that was slightly too tight across his stomach. His hair was silver, long at the ears, combed back with brilliantine that smelled of cloves.
“Sergeant,” Julian said, his voice smooth as grease on an axle. “I think that’s quite enough for now. The family is in an extraordinary amount of distress. My cousin is with his mother at the hospital, and Miss Arden is currently being examined by Dr. Voss for a possible fracture. We won't be pressing charges against the Carter woman today. We simply want her off the property.”
Miller didn't move. “She’s a material witness, Mr. Vale.”
“To what?” Julian’s smile didn't reach his eyes; it stayed around his small, moist teeth. “To an unfortunate medical crisis involving an elderly woman whose mental capacity has been declining for months? Naomi is an employee. A domestic. Her presence here is… disruptive. Adrian has already authorized a severance payment. Six months’ wages. It’s more than generous, considering the circumstances.”
He held out a white envelope, unsealed, with the blue crest of Vale Meridian embossed on the flap.
Naomi didn't look at the envelope. She looked at Julian’s left hand.
On his little finger was a signet ring—heavy, twenty-four-carat gold, bearing the Vale crest: an osprey with a broken fish in its talons.
The seal was worn down at the edges from forty years of rubbing against trousers, but in the center of the shield, the tiny crossbar of the letter V had a double notch.
The second seal.
The one Evelyn had written about on the blue paper beneath Naomi’s left heel.
“Keep your money, Mr. Julian,” Naomi said, rising from the straight-backed chair. She was three inches shorter than he was, but she stood with her weight balanced on both heels, her back straight as an ash spar. “I’ll be in the cottage until the sergeant tells me I can go. But don't you touch that linen closet on the third floor. I took the brass key with me when I came down the stairs.”
Julian’s smile did not leave his face, but the small muscle at the corner of his left eye gave three fast, rhythmic twitches, like a fly dying on a windowsill.
May you like
“There are no locks on the third floor that a locksmith cannot handle in twenty minutes, Naomi,” he said softly.
“Maybe,” Naomi said, walking past him toward the hallway. “But you won't find the key to the Albany court records in that closet, Mr. Julian. That one’s already in the post.”
