Chapter 4 - The Ledger in the Cellar
The move took twenty minutes because Beatrice didn't have much to move.
Her trunk was an old steamer of black-painted canvas with brass corners that had come from her father’s shop; inside it lay four wool skirts, six cotton shifts, a Bible with no cover and a family register written in her mother’s spidery, ink-stained hand, and three small tins of peppermint drops she bought two for a nickel at the apothecary down by the yards.
The small room next to the nursery was cold, exactly as she had predicted, but it smelled of scrubbed pine instead of old cabbage and damp wool. The window looked out over the terrace where the stone lions guarded the south lawn, their manes crusted with gray slush.
She sat on the edge of the iron cot for a long time after the house had gone down to its midnight silence, listening to the wind rattle the loose slate on the roof.
Downstairs, she knew Leo was still in the library. She could hear the faint, rhythmic thump-thump of his boots as he paced the length of the Turkey carpet—the same pacing he did every night before a cargo came in or a strike was called.
At two in the morning, the pain in her left knee—the old souvenir from the time she’d slipped on the ice while carrying a forty-pound sack of flour from the wagon—began to burn like a hot coal under the skin. She needed liniment from the pantry shelf.
She slipped her feet into her felt slippers, threw a gray wool shawl over her shoulders, and stepped out into the dark hallway.
The Rossi house at night was not quiet; it lived and breathed like a large, sick animal. The radiators knocked in their iron ribs; the timber framework groaned as the lake wind drove the frost deeper into the masonry; and somewhere down in the basement, the big steam boiler let out a long, shuddering sigh every four minutes like clockwork.
She descended the main stairs instead of the service steps, her slippers making no sound on the thick runners.
As she passed the library, she saw that the door was ajar by an inch. A thin yellow blade of light cut across the dark parquet of the hall.
She didn't mean to look. She was three steps past when she heard the sound—not Leo’s pacing, but the dry, metallic rasp of a small key turning in a brass lock.
Beatrice stopped.
The library didn't have a locked desk—not one that Leo used for household accounts, anyway. The family ledgers were kept in the safe behind the oil portrait of David Rossi in the billiard room.
She took two steps back toward the door and leaned her shoulder against the oak jamb, peering through the crack.
Leo wasn't at his desk. He was kneeling beside the low bookcase near the fireplace—the one where they kept the old bound volumes of the Chicago Tribune from the year the city burned. He had pulled the entire section of 1888 out onto the rug, and with it, a small panel in the wainscoting had swung open on oiled hinges she hadn't known were there.
In his hand, he held a flat tin box—the kind they used for lard in the butcher shops, painted black and sealed around the lid with red sealing wax.
He didn't open the box. He just sat there on his heels in the dark between the red morocco chair and the cold hearth, his head bowed so low his forehead nearly touched the floorboards, holding the tin the way a man holds a dead bird he’s afraid will fall apart if he squeezes too hard.
"You're up late, Miller."
The voice didn't come from the door. It came from the shadows by the globe—from the exact spot where Victoria had stood twelve hours before.
Beatrice didn't jump. She simply straightened her shoulders, drawing the gray shawl tighter around her massive chest.
Mateo Calder was sitting in the Windsor chair with his long legs stretched out toward the dead embers of the fire. He wasn't holding a gun, but his right hand was buried deep in the pocket of his gray trousers, and she knew from the way the fabric pulled that he had an automatic tucked against his thigh.
"My knee aches when the lake freezes," Beatrice said, her voice dropping into its lowest, gravelly register. "I was going down for the liniment."
Leo didn't look up from the tin box. He didn't move his hands.
"The liniment’s in the scullery cupboard," Mateo said, his voice as dry as corn husks. "You missed three doors."
"I was thirsty," Beatrice corrected herself without missing a beat. "The water in the nursery pitcher tastes like lead pipe."
Leo raised his head slowly. The fire had gone out entirely now, leaving only the small, hard light of a green-shaded brass lamp on the desk to show his face. Without the gold of the flames, he looked older—not fifty, which was what the parish register said, but sixty, seventy, the age of men who had spent their youth digging ditches in County Clare or hauling ties for the Union Pacific until their hearts gave out in the harness.
"Did you see it?" Leo asked.
Beatrice looked down at the floor between them—at the dark grain of the oak where her own boots had left no mark.
"I saw a hole in the wall, Mr. Rossi," she said. "I’ve seen holes in walls in every house I ever worked in. Usually they’ve got rats in them or old tax receipts."
Leo stood up. He didn't put the tin box back in the wall; he held it against his stomach, his thumb tracing the red wax seal where the crest of the Rossi transport line—a cart wheel with three broken spokes—was stamped into the red grease.
"This isn't tax receipts," Leo said. He walked toward her, his steps slow and heavy, stopping two feet away. He smelled of tobacco and cold iron and the particular kind of laundry soap they only used for his shirts—soap that cost four times as much as the stuff they bought for the kitchen. "This is why Victoria had to go."
Beatrice didn't look at the box. She looked at his chin, which was covered in two days of gray stubble that made him look less like a banker and more like the dock-boss he had been before the war.
"Miss Kensington didn't know about the box," Beatrice said. "She only knew how to be mean to six-year-olds. People like that don't look behind wainscoting; they think the world is made of whatever's on the surface."
Leo’s eyes—small, dark, and set deep behind his cheekbones—studied her with the kind of intense, unpleasant curiosity a horse-buyer gives a three-year-old mare whose teeth he’s about to check.
"You aren't afraid of me, Beatrice."
It wasn't a question. It was an accusation she had heard in one form or another in every kitchen from here to Galena.
"Fear’s a luxury," Beatrice said, her voice dropping until it was nearly lost in the hum of the radiator. "You have to have a small enough waist to fit through the door before you can afford to lock it behind you. I’m too wide for fear, Mr. Rossi. It gets stuck in my ribs."
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Leo gave a short, dry bark of a laugh that had no humor in it—the sound of a pistol cocking in an empty room.
"Get your liniment," he said, turning back toward the dark wainscoting. "And tomorrow, tell Mrs. Higgins to add three pounds of salt pork to the grocery order. The winter’s going to be longer than the papers say."
