Chương 2
The elevator descended two levels to the underground garage. She leaned her shoulder against the wall and watched her reflection shiver in the brushed steel. There was blood on her chin. Her right cheek was already turning red. One earring was missing.
She pressed the emergency stop button.
The elevator halted with a soft mechanical jolt.
For several breaths she stood in the silence, eyes closed, forehead against the cold wall. Then a recorded voice informed her that emergency assistance had been notified.
“Of course it has,” she said.
The absurdity broke something open. A laugh escaped her, thin and wrong. It became a sob before she could stop it. She slid down the wall until she was sitting beside the suitcase, the hammer resting across her knees.
The emergency speaker clicked.
“Hanover residence security. Is someone trapped?”
Mara wiped her nose on the raincoat she had pulled halfway from the suitcase.
“No.”
A pause. “Mrs. Hanover?”
She had never used Daniel’s last name professionally. Howard had treated that as an early warning sign.
“I hit the button by accident.”
“Are you injured?”
Mara looked at herself in the metal. “Apparently.”
“We can send someone.”
“No.”
“Mr. Hanover has requested that you remain on the property.”
She reached up and released the stop button.
The elevator resumed its descent.
“Tell Mr. Hanover,” she said, “he can put that request in writing.”
The parking level was empty except for her twelve-year-old Subaru and a row of black vehicles belonging to people who had never worried about repair costs. Mara dragged her suitcase across the concrete, loaded it into the rear hatch, and placed the hammer on the passenger-side floor.
Her hands were still trembling when she tried to start the car. The key fob slipped between the seat and the console.
She bent to retrieve it and stayed folded over, cheek against the steering wheel, breathing through the throbbing in her face.
The driver’s door opened.
Mara jerked upright.
Evelyn stood there in a dark green dress, one hand gripping the door frame. She had come down without a coat. At fifty-eight, she remained so carefully groomed that even panic seemed like something she had applied in a flattering shade.
“You shouldn’t drive,” Evelyn said.
“Move.”
“Your face—”
“Move.”
Evelyn looked toward the elevator, then back at Mara. “Howard had no right.”
Mara stared at her.
It was the closest Evelyn had come to condemning her husband in thirty-four years of marriage, and she had still found a way to avoid using the word slap.
“You stood there,” Mara said.
“I didn’t know he was going to—”
“You stood there afterward.”
Evelyn tightened her grip on the door. Her wedding ring pressed into the leather trim. “You brought a hammer into our home.”
“It was Daniel’s.”
“That doesn’t explain what you did.”
“No. It doesn’t.”
Evelyn seemed startled by the agreement.
Mara reached across and pulled the door from her hand. “That’s the difference between us. I’m not going to spend the next twenty years pretending my worst moment was reasonable.”
“Mara, please. Give us the drive.”
There it was.
Mara held the door half closed. “What drive?”
Evelyn’s eyes flickered.
It might have been fear. It might have been irritation at making a mistake. With Evelyn, the two often looked alike.
“Howard thinks Daniel kept company files.”
“Howard said I found nothing.”
“He says many things when he’s angry.”
“He doesn’t get angry. He gets strategic.”
“You don’t know him as well as you think.”
“I know he hit me because I said his dead son left proof.”
A car engine started somewhere behind them. Evelyn stepped closer.
“You have no idea what Daniel was involved in.”
“Then tell me.”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
Evelyn looked toward the elevator again. “There are people whose livelihoods depend on Hanover Development. Thousands of people. Pension funds. Contractors. Families. You release documents you don’t understand, and it won’t be Howard who suffers first.”
Mara closed the door.
Evelyn caught it with both hands. “Daniel made mistakes.”
The words entered Mara more quietly than the slap had.
“What mistakes?”
Evelyn let go.
The elevator doors opened. Howard’s head of security emerged with another man in a gray suit.
Mara locked the car.
Evelyn stepped back, hugging her bare arms. “Please don’t make grief into a weapon.”
Mara started the engine.
In the rearview mirror, Evelyn stood between the concrete pillars while security approached. She looked small, despite the diamonds at her throat.
Mara drove out before anyone reached her.
Her friend Tessa Wu answered on the fourth ring.
“I’m in court,” Tessa whispered.
“Howard hit me.”
There was a silence, then a door closing on Tessa’s end.
“Where are you?”
“Driving.”
“Pull over.”
“I’m fine.”
“Your voice is doing that flat thing.”
“What flat thing?”
“The thing before you make a decision that ruins the next six months of your life.”
Mara glanced at the hammer on the floor.
“Tessa.”
“Oh, God. What did you do?”
“I broke a table.”
“What kind of table?”
“Glass.”
“Did anyone get hurt?”
“No.”
“Was it an accident?”
Mara passed through the mansion gates. The guard in the booth looked away from her face.
“No.”
Tessa breathed out slowly. “Pull over. Take photographs of your face. Do not delete anything. Do not post anything. Do not answer Howard, Evelyn, Bernard, security, the police, cousins, journalists, household staff, people you went to college with, or anyone whose number you don’t recognize.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“You once gave a statement to an insurance adjuster while concussed.”
“The adjuster was being rude.”
“Pull over.”
May you like
Mara stopped at a gas station three miles from the estate. She parked beside an air pump and took six photographs in the visor mirror. In the first three, the injury looked minor. In the fourth, the light caught the swelling along her cheekbone and the split in her lip.
A minivan pulled beside her. A child in the back seat stared through the window while his father checked tire pressure.
