Chapter 3 - The Girl in the Crawlspace
The ground-floor service room smelled of damp wool, wet boots, and the lemon-scented floor wax Elena had spent six hours applying to the flagstones before the pipe burst.
She sat on the edge of her narrow iron cot, the heavy steel frame of the Glock 19 cold and dead against her thigh where she’d tucked it into the waistband of her wool skirt. The pistol was absurdly heavy—fourteen rounds of nine-millimeter hollow-points in a frame that felt like a brick of lead wrapped in black polymer. Her father had taught her on an all-steel Beretta that weighed twice as much and kicked like a mule, but the shape of the grip was familiar enough that her thumb found the slide release without looking.
Click.
She didn't chamber a round. She wasn't an idiot. But she made sure the magazine was seated with a solid, reassuring thump.
The house was quiet now. The rain had settled into that dull, wet Chicago drone that made the city feel as though it were sinking slowly into the mud of the old prairie. Down the hall, through three sets of double doors and past the portrait gallery where the Valente ancestors glowered out of their heavy Victorian frames with the smug expressions of men who had bought their judges by the gross, she could hear the faint, low rumble of Matteo’s voice talking to Rocco.
They were heading down to the coal cellars through the exterior bulkhead.
Elena stood up, smoothed down the front of the white shirt—she had given up on the wet blouse hanging over the radiator—and walked over to her closet.
It wasn't a real closet; it was a narrow alcove built into the thickness of the old stone foundation, lined with cedar boards that had turned black with age. When she pushed her three dresses—two black skirts and a grey cardigan she wore on Sundays—to the left, the cedar panel at the back didn't look like a door.
It looked like twenty other sections of wall in the servants’ wing.
Until you pressed your palm against the lower right corner where the wood had shrunk away from the lime mortar, leaving a gap just wide enough for the edge of a butter knife.
Elena didn't use a knife. She used her thumbnail, sliding it down the vertical grain until she felt the small, greasy toggle of a copper latch.
Click.
The panel didn't swing out; it slid sideways on greased iron tracks with a sound like a mouse drawing its tail across dry straw.
A wave of air rushed out—cold, damp, and smelling faintly of stale cigarette smoke and wet wool. Not coal dust. Not old lime.
Tobacco. Imported Turkish tobacco, the kind that came in flat tin rectangles with green Arabic lettering across the lid—the same brand Matteo Valente kept in his private humidor behind the library bar.
Elena reached down to her waist, her fingers curling around the polymer grip of the Glock. She pulled the weapon clear of her waistband, letting her arm hang naturally at her side, the muzzle pointed at the grey linoleum floor.
Then she ducked her head, hitched the tails of Matteo’s oversized shirt up over her hips so they wouldn't catch on the rough timber, and stepped into the wall.
The crawlspace was narrower than she’d expected—barely four feet wide and five feet high, forcing her to walk with a slight hitch in her shoulder, her head ducked beneath the sagging web of old knob-and-tube wiring that ran along the ceiling joists like the intestines of some huge, grey mechanical beast.
The floor was laid with rough-sawn pine planks covered in a thick, grey pelt of dust that rose in little puffs with every step, coating the toes of her sensible black leather pumps in a powdery silt.
To her left, the wall was solid stone—the original 1880 foundation blocks of Lake Shore limestone, damp to the touch and slick with green moss where a slow leak from the main bathroom above had found its way down through the mortar. To her right, a series of vertical timber studs divided the crawlspace from the service corridor outside her room. Through the gaps between the lath and plaster, she could see long ribbons of orange light stretching across the hallway floor—light from the wall sconces Matteo kept burning all night to keep the shadows back.
She walked slowly, her breathing shallow and controlled, her ears straining for the sound of movement ahead.
Tap. Tap-tap.
The sound came from somewhere near the north corner—the section of the house that jutted out over the old conservatory, where the rain hit the glass roof with a sound like dropped marbles.
Elena stopped. She raised the Glock two inches, her index finger resting firmly along the frame above the trigger guard, just the way her father had shown her in the basement of the Racine Avenue house while the rain came down through their own leaky roof.
“Who’s there?” she whispered.
Her voice didn't carry. It was swallowed instantly by the thick, fibrous insulation hanging in greasy gray rags from the floor joists above.
She took another step. The pine boards beneath her right foot didn't creak—they dipped.
Before she could pull her foot back, the floor gave way with a dry, splintering crack like a dry twig under a boot. Her shin plunged six inches into a pocket of loose lath and plaster, the sharp edge of a lath slat scraping a clean, red line of skin across her shinbone through her stockings.
“Damn it,” she hissed under her breath, dropping to one knee in the dust to free her leg.
As she reached down to brush the plaster chips away from her ankle, her hand brushed against something cold and round lying in the darkness between two joists.
It wasn't wood. It wasn't stone.
It was a porcelain coffee mug—still warm to the touch.
Elena froze. Her fingers curled around the handle of the mug, lifting it toward the dim orange light filtering through the lath from the corridor outside.
The rim was stained with a dark, oily ring of Turkish tobacco and black coffee without milk or sugar—the exact way Matteo Valente drank his first cup every morning at six o'clock while he sat at the end of the long dining table reading the Tribune before any of the staff were allowed to enter the room.
Only Matteo didn't drink out of heavy, chipped diner mugs with a faded blue logo of the Chicago dockworkers' union on the side.
The mug belonged to her father.
It was the last thing she had packed from the kitchen on Racine Avenue before the marshals put the padlock on the front door—a souvenir from the old union hall where her father had served as treasurer before the federal accountants came with their blue boxes and their ledgers.
Elena stared at the mug in the dim, dusty gloom of the crawlspace, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.
Her father hadn't left that mug behind. She had placed it in the bottom of her cardboard moving box on the kitchen floor three weeks before she took the job at the Valente estate.
And yet, here it was, six inches deep in the dust beneath the floorboards of a man who didn't even know her real name until he looked her up in the personnel files—a man whose father had supposedly put a bullet through her father’s union president back in the nineteen-seventies during the great cement wars.
May you like
Before she could process the thought, a heavy shadow fell across the opening in the lath three feet ahead of her.
A hand—long-fingered, pale, and caked in grey wall-plaster—reached through the gap from the dark interior of the conservatory crawlspace, grabbed the hem of Matteo’s white shirt where it trailed across the floor, and yanked her forward into the dark.
