Chapter 5 - The Red Door
The cold didn't break with February; it settled in like an uninvited cousin who had brought his own trunk and intended to sleep on the sofa until the spring thaw.
By the second week of the month, the snow was piled six feet high against the stone walls of the terrace, sealing the ground-floor windows in a dim, greenish twilight that made everyone in the house feel as though they were living at the bottom of an aquarium.
Lily was better—the peppermint and the iron kettle had done their work on her chest—but she had stopped going down to the schoolroom. Miss Gable had been paid off with two weeks’ wages and a second-class train ticket to Peoria three days after Victoria left, and nobody had troubled to hire a replacement.
Instead, Lily spent her mornings in the kitchen with Beatrice.
The kitchen was the only room in the house that truly smelled alive. It smelled of yeast bread rising under damp linen towels, of rendered lard and onion skins, of roasting coffee beans and the sharp, sour tang of the cabbage crock that sat by the brick hearth.
"Bee?"
Lily was sitting on a high wooden stool by the flour-bin, her small legs swinging rhythmically against the rungs, watching Beatrice knead a five-pound loaf of rye on the maple board.
"Hmm?"
"Is my mother in the box?"
Beatrice’s hands stopped in the dough. The gray flour was caked up to her wrists, dusting her forearms like dry lime. She didn't look up from the gray mound under her palms.
"What box, chick?"
"The one Daddy keeps in the wall," Lily said, her voice dropping into that flat, secret tone children use when they’re repeating something they weren't supposed to hear through a keyhole. "Uncle Mateo said it’s got her picture in it. The one where she’s wearing the green hat with the pheasant feathers."
Beatrice pressed down with the heel of her hand, the dough groaning under her weight.
"Your mother’s picture is in the silver frame on the drawing-room piano," Beatrice said carefully. "The one with the lace doily underneath it."
"That's not the real one," Lily said, her small boots hitting the stool-rung with a dry thump. "That one was taken when she had the influenza and her hair was short. The one in the tin is when she was laughing."
Before Beatrice could answer, the heavy service door swung open with a bang that rattled the spice jars on the shelf.
Mateo Calder stood on the threshold. He wasn't wearing his coat, but his sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, showing the thick, blue-inked tattoo of an anchor and a coiled rope on his left forearm—the mark of the Navy yards in South Boston before he’d followed Leo into the freight business.
"Miller," Mateo said.
"Mr. Calder," Beatrice didn't stop kneading. "You’re tracking mud on the clean flags. The boy washed them at eight."
"Leo wants you in the cellar," Mateo said.
The kitchen went very still. Even the rye dough seemed to grow colder under Beatrice’s hands.
"The cellar?" Beatrice said. "The bins are full. I checked the potatoes yesterday; there’s not a soft one in the lot."
"Not the potato cellar," Mateo said. His face was entirely expressionless—the face of a man who spent his life carrying messages that usually ended with someone getting into a black Packard with no license plates. "The other cellar. The one behind the coal chute. Leo’s got the iron bar off the door for the first time since the winter of nineteen-twenty."
Beatrice wiped her hands on her apron—leaving two long, white smudges across her hip—and slowly stepped down from the maple block. Her knees gave their familiar, dull pop, like dry twigs breaking under a boot.
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"Why does he want me down there?" she asked.
"Because," Mateo said, stepping aside to let her pass through the door, "you’re the only person in this house who hasn't tried to steal what’s inside, and you’re the only one big enough to help him lift the floorboards if the damp’s rusted the screws."
