Chapter 6
Chapter 6
“You locked the gates.”
“To keep someone else inside.”
She looked back at him. “You really think someone framed me?”
“I think your suitcase was packed before anyone asked you what happened.”
Silence.
Dante waited. He was very good at that too. He stood against the edge of the desk with his hands in his pockets and let the quiet do the work, and Alessia felt it pressing on her the way water presses on a swimmer who has gone too deep.
Finally she reached into the pocket of her uniform.
She placed something on the desk.
A brass cufflink. Small, heavy, polished to a shine. On its face, engraved in a fine serif, a single letter.
B.
Dante stared at it.
“Where did you find this?”
“Under your desk.”
“When?”
“Last night.”
“Why were you under my desk?”
“I wasn’t.”
She hesitated.
“I was picking up a photograph.”
Dante’s expression changed. It was a small change — the muscles around his eyes, the set of his jaw — but Alessia had spent seven months reading this man’s silence from across rooms, and she knew she had touched something.
“What photograph?”
“One of your mother.”
He said nothing.
“It was on the floor outside the study,” Alessia went on, carefully. “Facedown. I recognized her because there’s a portrait of her upstairs. In the east hallway, above the landing.”
His mother. Bianca Moretti. Dead eleven years.
Very few people in the house said her name. Mrs. Conte had told Alessia, in her first week, that the east hallway portrait was not to be dusted without supervision, and had not explained why, and Alessia had not asked, because in this house you did not ask.
“The study door was open,” she said.
“It’s never open.”
“I know. That’s why I looked. I went in to put the photograph back where it belonged.”
“And then?”
“And then I heard someone in the corridor.”
“Someone you didn’t see.”
“Yes.”
“So you hid.”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Behind the curtains.”
Dante stared at her.
Alessia shrugged. “They’re very large curtains.”
“Continue.”
“A man came in. He didn’t turn on the lights.”
Dante’s face went hard.
“He went straight to the wall behind your desk.”
“What did he do?”
“He pressed something underneath the wooden panel.”
Dante said nothing.
May you like
“Part of the wall opened.”
Now he moved — one step forward, away from the desk, and his hands came out of his pockets.
