Part 5
When Naomi pulled out the box, the lock had been broken.
The passport was still inside.
The cash in the tea tin was gone.
Mara sat down on the hallway floor.
Naomi crouched across from her. “How much?”
“Eight hundred and sixty dollars.”
“You’re sure?”
Mara almost laughed.
She knew exactly how much. Forty dollars from every paycheck, sometimes twenty when her mother’s prescriptions cost more. The amount had taken eleven months.
“I’m sure.”
Naomi reported the theft.
A voice from the stairwell said, “I took it.”
Mr. Bell stood one landing below them.
He had removed his uniform jacket. His white shirt showed dark patches beneath the arms. Without the jacket and place cards, he looked smaller, almost elderly, though he was only fifty-six.
Naomi stood. “You need to stay where you are.”
He raised both hands.
“I took the money,” he said. “Mrs. Vale did not.”
Mara looked at him.
“Why?”
His eyes moved toward her room. “She told me to search for the phone. I found the cash. I thought—”
“What?”
He swallowed.
“I thought if you left tonight, you might not return. I meant to put it in the office safe.”
“Why?”
“So it wouldn’t disappear.”
“It disappeared because you took it.”
“I know.”
His face folded inward for a moment. Shame looked almost like fatigue.
Naomi told him not to move and called Daniel again.
Mr. Bell sat on the stair.
Mara stared at the man who had trained her when she arrived at the estate. He had shown her which silver polish did not damage the nineteenth-century trays, which guests snapped their fingers at staff, which bedroom windows stuck in damp weather. When her father died, Mr. Bell had covered two of her shifts without telling anyone.
“You closed the pantry door,” she said.
He looked at the floor.
“Yes.”
“You saw what she did.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you stop her?”
His mouth worked.
The answer came out thin. “I thought she would let you go.”
Mara waited.
“That isn’t an answer.”
“No.”
“Then answer.”
Mr. Bell pressed both palms against his knees. “Because I have worked for this family for thirty-one years. Because I have no savings worth naming. Because my wife’s care costs more each month than I earn. Because Mrs. Vale said the estate would be sold if tonight failed, and I believed her. Because I kept telling myself she was frightened, not dangerous.”
Mara felt anger move through her, clean and sharp.
“She tied my hands.”
“I know.”
“You watched.”
“I know.”
“You brought her the cord.”
Naomi looked at him.
Mr. Bell closed his eyes.
“Yes.”
The anger became something heavier.
Mara stood.
Mr. Bell lifted his head, perhaps expecting forgiveness because he had confessed, perhaps expecting hatred because he thought he deserved the simplicity of it.
She gave him neither.
“Where is my phone?”
“I don’t know.”
“You searched my room for it.”
“She thought you had hidden it here.”
“Where did she put it after the pantry?”
“She gave it to me. I put it in the drawer of the security desk outside the service wing.”
Naomi’s radio clicked.
Daniel’s voice came through: the drawer was empty.
Mr. Bell looked genuinely shocked.
Mara believed that part.
The problem with belief, she was beginning to understand, was that it did not arrive whole. A person could tell the truth about one thing and lie about everything around it. Another person could save your mother’s life in spring and tie your wrists in autumn.
Naomi finished packing the duffel.
As they returned downstairs, staff members gathered in doorways and pretended not to. The reception had been canceled officially. Vans were being loaded in the courtyard. Florists carried arrangements back through the side entrance. Somewhere, a chef shouted about six hundred oysters.
The ordinary waste of the evening made Mara’s stomach turn.
In the entrance hall, the spill had been dried. The tea urn stood on a linen-covered side table. Yellow evidence markers had been placed near the velvet cord and the place where Mara had knelt.
The house looked less grand with numbered cards on the floor.
Daniel had established a temporary command room in the estate office. He told Mara that the Newport police had been notified, but response time was delayed by a traffic accident on Bellevue Avenue. He did not make excuses for it.
Dr. Mercer offered to drive her to the hospital.
Adrian said he would go.
Mara said no.
He frowned. “You shouldn’t be alone.”
“I won’t be. Naomi can come.”
Naomi glanced at Daniel, who nodded.
Adrian accepted the decision, though not gracefully. He rubbed the back of his neck and stared toward the library door, where Celeste waited with an attorney on speakerphone.
“Mara,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
She shifted the duffel higher on her shoulder.
“For what?”
The question stopped him.
She had meant it honestly. There were too many choices.
He looked toward the portraits lining the hall. His father stood in one, silver-haired and smiling beside a sailboat. Celeste appeared in another wearing white at a charity gala, one hand on Adrian’s father’s arm. Adrian himself was absent from most of them.
“For not knowing what happened in this house,” he said.
Mara was too tired to comfort him.
“You didn’t live here.”
“That was a choice.”
“So was coming back.”
He looked at her.
She added, “I don’t know yet what either choice means.”
Then she left for the hospital.
Newport Regional Medical Center had fluorescent lights that made everyone look exhausted. Mara sat in a curtained bay while a nurse asked the same questions Dr. Mercer had asked, then asked several more.
Did she feel safe at home?
Was the person who restrained her a family member?
Was she concerned about retaliation?
Did she want police contacted?
“They already were,” Mara said.
The nurse, a woman named Patrice with purple-framed glasses, looked up from the tablet.
“Do you want them contacted?”
Mara understood the distinction.
May you like
“Yes.”
Patrice documented the answer.
