Chapter 5 - The Weight of an Alibi
The kitchen filled with the smell of simmered bay leaves, yellow onions, and rich chicken fat as the afternoon light began to fail.
Juliet stood at the island, her sleeves pushed up to her shoulders, kneading dumpling dough with the heavy, rhythmic thrust of her palms. The dough was soft, yellow from farm eggs Rosa had brought from her sister's coop, yielding beneath her knuckles with a faint, sighing hiss of air.
Nico sat on a high stool three feet away, his legs swinging in short, erratic arcs that occasionally clipped the rungs. He was wearing an apron she had fashioned for him out of a tea towel, pinned behind his neck with a brass safety pin. His hands were white with flour up to the wrists.
"My mother didn't put onions in the dumplings," Nico said. His voice was small, but the brittle edge was gone, replaced by the tentative, testing tone of a child trying out a new rule.
"Your mother was from Grosse Pointe," Juliet said without looking up from the board. "People from Grosse Pointe think onions are vulgar. I'm from down near Milan. We put onions in everything except the pie, and if the apples are sour enough, we put them in the pie too."
The boy watched her fingers work the dough into a long, pale snake. "Victor is upstairs."
"I know."
"He has his leather bag. The big one with the brass lock." Nico’s swinging feet stopped. "He usually takes papers from my father's desk when my father is at the warehouse. He told me he's the only one who knows how to keep the tax men away."
Juliet stopped kneading. She wiped a stray curl from her cheek with the back of a flour-dusted wrist, leaving a pale smear across her temple. "Did he go into the library?"
"Ten minutes ago," Nico whispered. "He told Rosa to make him some tea with lemon. He said he had to review the shipping manifests for the Toledo line before the five o'clock courier."
The cellar door opened three inches.
Rosa slipped through the gap, her face the color of skimmed milk, her fingers twisting the hem of her cardigan into tight, damp knots. She didn't look at Nico; she looked directly at Juliet, her eyes darting toward the ceiling with the frantic vigilance of a bird that had smelled smoke in the rafters.
"Matteo is in the gun room," Rosa whispered, her chest heaving as if she had run up three flights of stairs. "He told the gate guards to take the dogs to the kennels. He told them to lock the lower drive."
"Where is Victor?" Juliet asked.
"In the study. He's at the safe. I saw him through the crack in the pantry door. He has the ledgers out—the black ones from ninety-eight, the ones the old man kept before he died." Rosa crossed herself, her thumb leaving a greasy mark of olive oil on her forehead. "Juliet, there's going to be blood on the stairs. I know that look. When Matteo gets that gray color around his mouth, men don't walk out of this house. They carry them out in rugs through the laundry chute."
Nico slid down from the stool. His floury hands dropped to his sides, his eyes wide and dark as two inkwells. "Is my father going to shoot Victor?"
Juliet didn't answer right away. She looked at the boy—at the flour on his cheeks, the tea towel pinned to his chest, the small, fragile framework of a life that had been systematically dismantled over twelve months by a man who smiled while he did it.
If Matteo killed Victor in the library, the boy would spend the rest of his life believing that his father was the monster Victor had described. He would grow up in the shadow of a shotgun blast, convinced that violence was the only language this house understood.
"Rosa," Juliet said, her voice dropping into that deep, authoritative register that took command of the room like a heavy hand on an open door. "Watch the stove. Don't let the broth boil over."
"Where are you going?" Rosa hissed, catching at Juliet's sleeve. "You can't go up there! When the men are like this, they don't look at who's wearing an apron! They don't care!"
Juliet pulled her arm free, not roughly, but with an absolute, immovable strength that made the older woman step back.
"I have five days left on my week, Rosa," Juliet said, untying her apron and tossing it onto the maple island. "And I don't like people making a mess on the carpets I just cleaned."
She looked at Nico.
"Stay here," she told him. "Cut the dough into two-inch pieces with the butter knife. If they're not all the same size when I come back down, you're washing the soup pot."
The boy stared at her, then down at the butter knife on the board. Slowly, with an intensity that seemed to gather every scrap of his eight years of life, he nodded. "Two inches," he whispered.
Juliet walked out of the kitchen, through the swinging door, and into the silent expanse of the ground floor.
The house was cold. The radiators were hissing softly now, but the air coming off the stone walls felt like winter was already inside the masonry. She moved without haste, her thick rubber soles silent on the parquet, her head held high, her curls dark and wild against the white linen of her collar.
She didn't use the service stairs. She took the grand staircase, her hand gliding along the cold mahogany banister, her eyes fixed on the tall double doors of the library at the end of the second-floor gallery.
The doors were slightly ajar.
A narrow strip of golden light fell across the dark runner, cutting through the shadows like a blade.
May you like
Inside, two voices were speaking. One was high, smooth, and rapid—the voice of a salesman who had realized the door was locked from the outside. The other was low, rhythmic, and heavy as a church bell tolling for a pauper's funeral.
Juliet reached the threshold, pushed the heavy oak panel open with her palm, and stepped into the room.
