Chapter Eight:
One Bed, Two Liars
Nobody said anything for a bit. The curtain kept moving, in, out, and cold air came across the floor and touched her ankles.
Grant crouched and picked up the button with two fingers like it might go off. Hold it under the window light. I turned it over. Mother of pearl, she thought, dyed somehow, pale green with a black rim as thin as a pencil line.
“Dominic,” he said, not loud, and Dominic was there before he’d finished the word, which meant he’d been standing in the hall the whole time and Elish had not heard him at all.
They did it fast. Window latch, unforced. Desk drawers, all locked, all still locked, and Grant opened each one with the key on his ring and looked in with his jaw working. Papers. Pens. A pair of reading glasses folded on a ledger. Nothing went that he could see, but how would he know, he said, and he said it flat, he’d not opened these drawers since the funeral. He did not know what should be there.
“Then how do we know anything was taken?” Elish said.
“We don’t.”
“Then maybe someone just wanted to look.”
“Thats worse,” said Dominic.
He was right, she thought. Taking is one thing. Looking means you know where.
There was one more thing. Elish only saw it because she was standing near the shelves with her arms crossed, trying to look like someone who was not memorising a room. Bound ledgers, dark green spines, gold dates, running left to right, 1996, 97, 98, all the way to 2009. A good even row. Except between 2004 and 2006 where the gold said nothing at all because the spine was turned in, tucked back flush with the wall, and when she leaned closer she saw a small gap behind it. Like a tooth pulled and the gum closed over.
She said nothing.
She did not know why. The word was right there, look, and she kept it behind her teeth, and she watched Dominic bag the button and Grant lock the study again with his back to her, and she was so aware of her own silence it felt like a noise. Second one now. First the sleeve, then this. Two little lies on the pile and she was only three days into being engaged.
Pierce was in the library when they came back down. Feet up on a footstool, a book open on his knee, a fresh drink. He looked up and smiled at the three of them, Grant grey, Dominic stony, Elish probably white as paper.
“Whats the matter, you look like you have seen a ghost.”
“Where were you?” Grant said.
“Here. Reading. Ask Bernadette, she brought me a sandwich. Why?”
“Just asking.”
“Just asking.” Pierce turned the page. “Grant, if you want to accuse me of something you might try being less obvious about it. It’s a family failing. Father was the same.”
Something passed across Grant’s face and was gone. Elish could not tell what. She watched Pierce’s hands on the book, big, clean, nothing on the wrists at all. No cuffs. He’d taken his jacket off and rolled his sleeves to the elbow like a man on holiday.
Catherine said at dinner, mildly, that the house was old and windows did open by themselves, and if anyone wanted to make a fuss the person to make it to was the maker of the windows, who was dead. Then she said they would stay the night, of course, the drive was too long in the dark, and Bernadette had made up the blue room.
“Two rooms would be—” Grant started.
“There is one made up.” Catherine cut her chicken into exact squares. “You are engaged, Grant. I am old fashioned, but I am not a fool. And I do not intend to give your cousin the pleasure of asking why my son’s fiancée is sleeping down the corridor from him like a boarder.”
Pierce, at the end of the table, coughed into his napkin. Possibly a laugh.
So that was how Elish ended up in a blue room with a four-poster bed the size of her Queens apartment, and a fire someone had lit, and a man standing by the window with his hands in his pockets refusing to look at the bed.
“Ill take the floor.”
“Youre not taking the floor.”
“Elish—”
“Its a huge bed. It’s practically two beds. There’s a bolster.” She was already pulling the covers back on her side and it was ridiculous, her hands were shaking. “You have a meeting on Monday and a lake behind your house. If you sleep on the floor and get pneumonia I lose my fiancé and the whole thing collapses. It’s strategic.”
A long pause. Then, dryly, “Strategic.”
“Extremely.”
He got in on the far side with his shirt and trousers still on and a full three feet of mattress between them, lay flat on his back like someone in a tomb, and stared at the canopy. She lay on her side facing the fire with the ring turned round on her finger, listening to the wood crack.
Neither of them spoke. The house made its noises. Somewhere down the hall a door closed and a floorboard complained and then nothing.
“Its not the first of the month,” Grant said, out of the dark.
“What?”
“The question. In the contract. You get one on the first, and it’s not the first. It’s the ninth.” Pause. “So this is just me. Asking. You don’t have to answer.”
Her stomach did something odd.
“Go on.”
“Did you see something in the study?”
Every nerve in her lit at once.
“What do you mean?”
“When I opened the door. You looked at the shelves.” His voice was so quiet, so careful. “I thought you did. I thought she saw something, and she’s not saying.”
She could have told him. The gap between the ledgers. All of it, the sleeve, the folder, the green cuff. Right there on her tongue, and the fire, and the dark, and his voice being gentle like that made it worse, because it would be so easy. To just be someone who trusted him.
“No,” she said. “I was just scared.”
He did not answer for a long time. So long she thought maybe he’d gone to sleep.
“Okay,” he said finally, and she heard something in it. Not anger. Something more like a man putting down something heavy he had almost carried out of the room.
She lay there with her eyes open and hated herself with great precision.
Later, hours later, she woke to the mattress dipping. Grant sat on the edge of the bed with his back to her, shoulders hunched, something small and white in his hands.
“Grant?”
“Sorry. Go back to sleep.”
“What is it?”
He did not answer, and she sat up, and the fire had burned down to a low red and she could see it in his palm now. A slip of paper, old, soft as cloth, folded so many times the creases had gone brown.
“Found it in my fathers coat,” he said. “In the hall closet, downstairs. It hangs there still. I went to get some air and I put my hand in the pocket and.” He stopped. “Bernadette never cleared it. Nobody did.”
She held out her hand. He gave it to her.
A tailor’s receipt. Cream stock, engraved header, a shop in London she’d never heard of. Dated March, twenty-one years ago. Two lines in a neat clerk’s hand.
Shirts, bespoke, six. Cuff buttons, pearl, dyed green, black edge, special order. Two sets.
And beneath it, in the same hand, two sets of initials, one against each line.
R.L.
E.C.
The room went very quiet. She felt the paper go cold in her fingers.
“R.L. is my father,” Grant said, low. “Richard Lancaster. I don’t know who E.C. is. I went through every name I could think of.”
Elish looked at the second set of initials until they swam.
She knew who E.C. was. She had known before he finished speaking.
Edmund Calloway. Her father.
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