Chapter 6 - The Iron and the Lime
The air down in the lower cellar was ten degrees colder than the rest of the house, smelling of wet slate, ancient coal-dust, and something else—something thin and dry, like old paper that had been kept in a tin box under a church floor.
Leo was standing beside the brick pier that supported the main kitchen hearth upstairs. He held a brass hurricane lamp in one hand, the yellow flame casting long, drunken shadows across the whitewashed stone.
In front of him was an iron door set flush into the floor—not the wood-framed hatch they used for the coal delivery, but a heavy plate of cast iron with a ring-bolt in the center, rusted the color of dried liver.
Beatrice stopped three steps down, her hand resting on the handrail of the stone stairs.
"Mr. Rossi," she said.
Leo didn't turn around immediately. He was looking down at the ring-bolt, his thumb hooked into the pocket of his vest.
"Mateo tell you why you're here?"
"He said something about floorboards and damp."
Leo looked up then. The lamplight caught the hard, flat plane of his cheekbones and the gray stubble on his jaw. He looked tired—not the tired of a man who had stayed up late at the desk, but the tired of a man who had been carrying a stone in his pocket for five years and had finally decided his hip was too sore to bear it another day.
"The floorboards aren't rotted," Leo said. "The box is down here."
He stepped aside.
Beside the iron hatch sat the black-painted lard tin she had seen him holding in the library two nights before. But now the red sealing wax was broken, chipped off in red crumbs around the rim like dried blood on a white tablecloth.
"Open it," Leo said.
Beatrice didn't move. Her boots stayed planted on the second stone step down. "That’s family business, Mr. Rossi. I’m the woman who scrubs the library baseboards."
"You're the only person in this house who knows how to keep a secret that isn't tied to a bank account," Leo said. His voice was very quiet now—so quiet she had to strain to hear it over the steady, distant rumble of the furnace through the flues. "My father built this room during the prohibition years. He kept the records of every bribe paid from here to Cairo down here in the iron box. When he died, I thought I’d burned the lot."
He kicked the side of the tin with the toe of his boot. It gave a hollow, tinny clink.
"I missed one," Leo said.
Beatrice walked down the remaining steps. Every joint in her body complained against the damp, but she kept her back straight, her massive shoulders squared inside the gray wool dress she wore for the heavy work. She stopped a foot from the tin box, her eyes fixed on the cracked lid.
"What's in it?" she asked.
"Proof," Leo said. "Proof that the car didn't go off the lake road by accident. Proof that Victoria wasn't the first one who tried to clear the house out."
Beatrice looked up from the box to his face. The yellow lamplight made his eyes look like two dark holes in a wall.
"Who killed her?" Beatrice asked.
Leo didn't answer right away. He reached down, his strong, scarred fingers hooking into the iron ring-bolt of the floor hatch, and pulled.
With a long, protesting screech of rusted iron against stone, the hatch came up. A rush of air came out of the hole—air that didn't smell like the cellar at all. It smelled like cedar shavings, expensive French cigarettes, and the bitter, unmistakable scent of almonds.
May you like
Cyanide.
"Not who you think," Leo said, his voice dropping into the dark between the stone piers. "Look down there, Beatrice. Look at what my father left me in the dark."
