Chapter 7 - The Ledger of the Dead
Beatrice leaned over the edge of the stone pit.
The lamp in Leo’s hand didn't reach the bottom at first; it only showed four stone steps leading down into a small, brick-lined vault perhaps six feet square—the size of a family crypt or a very small wine bin.
In the center of the vault sat a mahogany desk—a lady’s writing table with inlaid brass corners, the kind they sold at Marshall Field’s for five hundred dollars before the crash. On top of the desk sat a leather dispatch case identical to the one Mateo carried, its brass lock forced open with a cold-chisel.
And beside the desk, propped against the brick wall with its legs stretched out straight on the stone floor, was a pair of silver-buckled shoes.
Beatrice didn't draw back. She had seen dead men before—her uncle had come home from the timber camps in a pine box with his boots still smelling of spruce pitch—but this was different. This was clean. This was domestic.
"That's..." Beatrice started, her voice dry in her throat.
"That’s my sister’s husband," Leo said. "Arthur. The one the family said went to South America to buy coffee land in nineteen-twenty-six."
Leo knelt by the edge of the pit, lowered the brass lamp until the light fell across the skeleton’s knees, and reached into the open dispatch case. He pulled out a bundle of papers tied with yellow silk ribbon—the kind of ribbon they used for graduation certificates or wedding announcements.
"He didn't go to South America," Leo said, his thumb running over the dry silk. "He stayed right here in the basement until my father finished building the third garage over the top of the vent pipe. My father liked having his debtors close by. It saved on postage."
Beatrice looked from the skeleton to Leo’s face. There was no horror in his expression—only a kind of heavy, mechanical exhaustion, the look of a man who had finally reached the last page of a book he’d been forced to read twenty times.
"And the car?" Beatrice asked, her mind jumping back to the lake road, the ice, the small red car that had gone through the guardrail two years after the funeral. "The accident with Lily’s mother?"
Leo stood up slowly, his knees popping the same way hers did. He held the yellow-ribboned bundle out toward her.
"Open it, Miller," he said. "Read the date on the last letter."
Beatrice took the bundle. Her fingers, wide and red and scarred by the lye-soap, felt awkward against the fine paper, but she managed to slip the silk knot free.
The paper was thick, gray-tinted bond from the stationery shop on Michigan Avenue. The ink was iron-gall, turning brown around the edges where the damp had got to it.
‘Leo,’ the letter began. It was dated four days before the car went into the lake. ‘If you don't sign over the north docks by Tuesday, the girl goes the same way Arthur went. I have the keys to the cellar, and Victoria knows where the lime is kept. Don't look for the brakes to hold on the bridge.’
It was signed with a single initial: V.
Not Victoria.
David.
"My father," Leo said, his voice so low it seemed part of the stone around them. "He didn't die of a stroke in his bed, Beatrice. He died of a heart attack in this very chair when he realized I’d found the ledger before he could burn it. But before he died, he left the keys with Victoria. She’s been running the house since I was thirty, and she thought she owned the mortgage on my life."
He reached out and took the letters back, dropping them one by one into the tin box beside the open hatch.
"She thought she was going to marry me after the girl died," Leo said. "She thought she’d be the one sitting in the library when the federal men came for the books. She didn't know I’d already moved the real safe to the bank in Joliet three years ago."
Beatrice stood there in the dark of the cellar, the cold air from the brick vault lifting the stray hairs at the back of her neck.
"Why are you telling me this?" she asked. "I’m the cook. I wash the floors. Tomorrow I’ve got to make sixty biscuits for the freight-handlers' dinner."
Leo looked at her—really looked at her, perhaps for the first time since he’d hired her off the church steps in Galena with her father’s trunk and her mother’s Bible.
"Because you didn't run when you saw the box," Leo said. "And because when Victoria locked Lily in the sewing room yesterday, you didn't call the police or pack your bags. You stayed by the door until I got home."
May you like
He reached down, picked up the iron ring-bolt of the cellar hatch, and let it drop.
The sound was like a church door closing on an open grave.
