Chapter 4 - The Procession of the Witnesses
We did not use the elevator.
Twenty-two people moved down the south marble staircase in a slow, rustling column that looked like a secular pilgrimage of the very comfortable. The silk dressing gowns brushed against the brass stair rods with a sound like dry reeds in an autumn wind; the leather slippers of the uncles slapped the risers with a soft, irregular percussion; the screen lights of nine iPhones cast shifting, blue-white squares of LED illumination across the dark wood paneling of the landing.
Eleanor walked three paces behind me, her heels clicking with that rapid, executive cadence that she used when she was inspecting the floral arrangements for the botanical garden gala.
"Claire, honestly," she muttered, her fingers tapping the side of her phone case, her breath carrying the faint, sweet trace of the mint pastilles she kept in her evening bag. "You should have let the boy sleep. He has six hours of travel ahead of him. The transfer in Miami is only forty minutes, and you know how his sciatica acts up when he sits in those small regional jets. If this is about the jewelry—if this is the Van Cleef necklace he was bidding on at Christie’s—it could have waited for the breakfast at ten."
I did not turn my head.
"It couldn't wait for ten, Eleanor," I said.
We reached the fourth floor.
The fourth floor was identical to the fifth—the same navy-and-gold Axminster carpet, the same reproduction Piranesi prints of Roman ruins in gilded frames, the same smell of expensive, chilled linen and dry-cleaning solvent.
At the far end of the corridor, twenty yards away, the brass numerals of room 412 caught the glare of my father’s iPad.
The door, as I had seen on the optical sensor two floors above, was ajar.
It was not wide open; it was cracked half an inch, the shadow of the interior lamp casting a long, amber trapezoid of light across the blue carpet outside the sill.
The twenty-two people bunched together in the hallway like sheep approaching a gate.
"Is the camera on?" Evelyn whispered, pushing past Uncle Thomas with her phone held high, the red recording light blinking on her screen. "Jessica! Jess, darling! We’re outside! Are you decent? Ethan told everyone to come down!"
Behind her, my father stopped.
He was forty years older than me, but he had spent forty years watching the way men looked at legal documents when they knew they had committed an actionable fraud. He looked at the half-inch crack in the mahogany door; he looked at the strip of clear industrial tape that was visible across the brass strike plate; and then he looked at my face.
His gray eyebrows pulled down until they formed a single, unbroken horizontal line above the bridge of his nose.
"Claire," he said softly.
The word was not a question. It was a command to halt the proceedings.
"Let Eleanor open it, Dad," I said.
My voice was very clear. It carried down the forty yards of corridor, reflecting off the plaster cornices, entering the half-inch crack in the mahogany door with the absolute precision of a surgical probe.
Eleanor did not wait for my father.
She was sixty-one years old and she had never in her entire adult life encountered a door that she did not believe she had a social right to enter. She took three brisk, triumphant strides, her oyster-shell silk gown swirling around her ankles, reached out her right hand—the one with the four-carat emerald-cut diamond her late husband had bought her to settle a dispute over an estate in Southampton—and seized the brass lever.
"Surprise, my darlings!" she called out, her voice rising into that bright, operatic trill that she used for charity ribbon-cuttings.
She shoved the door wide open.
The mahogany slab hit the interior wall bumper with a concussive whump that shook the prints in the hallway.
The room was not dark.
May you like
The two bedside lamps were on, their silk shades throwing five hundred watts of warm, amber illumination across the twenty-four-foot suite, reflecting off the mirrors of the dressing alcove, lighting up the king-size bed with the clarity of a television broadcast.
The livestream lights from nine iPhones struck the interior at the exact same fraction of a second.
