Chapter 11 - THE ROOM WITH TWELVE EYES
Norah did not move.
“How long have you known?” she said.
“Two weeks.” Carmine stayed in the doorway, as if putting a line of tile between himself and the room could somehow keep him clean of whatever she had found. “I noticed you weren’t sleeping. You don’t work the ledgers during the day — you’re too smart to work the ledgers during the day. So I looked. You use the same account to pull the state filings that you used last month to check the house inventory. Same library card. Six years old.”
She had not thought of that. She had not thought anyone in that house would know about the library card.
“Does Daniel know?”
“No.” Carmine’s jaw worked. “And if I tell him, Frankie hears a rumor by the end of the day, because Frankie has a guy in the war room, and Frankie has a guy on the door, and Frankie has a guy in the payroll office, and there is no version of me telling Daniel anything at three in the morning that doesn’t end with somebody burning a book of evidence tonight.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
Carmine studied her for a long moment. He was a fireplug of a man and he had hated her from the first night, and none of that had changed. But something else had entered his face in the last few weeks, something reluctant, almost wounded, the way a man looks when he is being forced to agree with someone he has decided not to like.
“I came to tell you the thing Daniel won’t.”
“If Daniel won’t tell me something—”
“Daniel can’t.” Carmine said it flatly. “Daniel doesn’t know how to ask for help. He’s never asked anyone for anything in his life, which is why he’s alone in that house with a wired jaw and a target on his back and one person he trusts, and that person is the maid who broke his face.”
Norah looked at the binder.
“So what do I do?” she said. “Wait? Because waiting means Frankie finds out sooner or later that a housekeeper’s been pulling invoices, and then I’m a problem to be solved, and you know exactly how Frankie solves problems.”
“Yeah,” Carmine said. “I do.”
“Then—”
“Then you don’t do it quietly.” He took one step into the room, finally, and shut the door behind him. “You do it in the room.”
She waited four days.
She used the time the way she used everything else — by preparing. She did not leave the binder on her desk; she made three copies and left one locked in the jewelry safe in the second-floor linen closet, one with the concierge of a hotel three blocks from the estate who owed her a favor she had never planned to call in, and one in a folder on the tablet that she encrypted the way the librarian in Rogers Park had shown her how to encrypt a file, which was the kind of thing you learned to do when your landlord once went through your mail.
Then, on the fifth morning, at six exactly, she walked into the war room and set the binder on the steel table.
Twelve eyes locked onto her.
Daniel was at the head of the table, still drinking through a straw, still unable to speak. Frankie was three seats down, and the gold ring was on his hand, and he was already frowning at her, already opening his mouth to ask what the maid was doing at the table.
Norah did not let him ask.
“Frankie D’Amato has been drawing money out of the family for four years,” she said, to the room. “Three percent on the olive oil route. A phantom fee billed to a warehouse that burned down in twenty twenty-two. Both authorized under his signature. Both paid into a Delaware holding company that took delivery of two crates at a scrap yard in Gary four months ago. The same month a rifle was placed in an oak tree outside this house.”
The room went completely silent.
Frankie’s face went red, then purple, then white, in the space of a breath.
“She’s a maid,” he said. “She’s the inside girl. This is what I said. This is exactly what I—”
“Open it,” Norah said.
Frankie looked at the binder and did not touch it.
“Open it,” Daniel said.
Two words, forced out through the wire, in a voice like gravel in a drain.
Frankie opened it.
May you like
He turned three pages. Then four. Then his hands began to shake, and the golden ring knocked against the paper, tap, tap, tap, and he stopped turning pages.
Nobody in the room needed to see the rest.
