Chapter 3 - THE LEDGER BEHIND THE WAINSCOT
The room smelled of old cigars and wet wool now that the crowd was gone.
Gabriel hadn't turned on the overhead lights; he liked the lamps—heavy things with green glass shades that threw a jaundiced light across the leather-bound books lining the study walls.
Lucy was asleep on the divan under a vicuña lap robe that could have paid for my rent for three years. Her thumb was wedged between her lips, her breathing deep and even, completely indifferent to the fact that her mother was currently standing across a desk from the most dangerous man between Manhattan and Albany.
“I didn't know who you were when Julian hired me,” I said.
My hands were flat on the mahogany surface. It was cold—colder than the kitchen counters.
“Everyone in the Hudson Valley knows who I am,” Gabriel said. He was pouring amber liquid from a crystal decanter into a tumbler without a handle. He didn't offer me any. “They either work for me, owe me, or are currently trying to convince a grand jury that they’ve never met me.”
“I worked in a laundry in Fishkill until six months ago,” I said. “People in laundries don't read the financial pages unless the stock price affects the cost of industrial detergent.”
Gabriel took a slow sip of the whiskey. His throat didn't even move. “And the medal?”
“I found it in the lining of an old wicker trunk I bought at an estate sale in Cornwall three years ago. The house belonged to a woman named Clara Miller. She died with no family and three rooms full of junk.”
“Clara Miller,” Gabriel repeated, tasting the name again. “Clara was Nadia’s nurse. She stayed in the cottage behind the stables until ninety-nine.”
“She kept a lot of things,” I said. “Old photographs. Tax receipts from sixty-two. A receipt for a burial plot in Poughkeepsie. And that medal.”
Gabriel walked around the desk. He didn't loom over me the way men do when they want to frighten you; he moved with the heavy, unhurried grace of an animal that knows nothing in the forest can run faster than it can.
He stopped two feet away.
“Nadia didn't lose that medal,” he said.
“She must have. It was in her old trunk.”
“Nadia never kept trophies,” Gabriel said, his voice dropping into a register that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up like dry grass. “She hated everything my father built. She hated the ships, she hated the hotels, she hated the silver medals he bought with union dues to make her look like an athlete in the local papers. When she left, she didn't take her jewelry. She didn't take her clothes.”
He reached out.
His hand—broad, scarred across the knuckles from some old street fight or dock accident—hovered two inches above my cheek. He didn't touch me. He just let his fingers stay there in the air between us, as if he were measuring the distance between two different species.
“She took the child,” Gabriel whispered.
The room seemed to shrink until the walls were pressing against my ribs.
“She had a baby,” I said. My voice was very small now. “A little girl. But she died, Mr. Caruso. In a hospital in Troy. Pneumonia. Two weeks after the storm in ninety-six.”
Gabriel didn't blink. His gray eyes stayed locked on mine with the terrible, unyielding pressure of an hydraulic press.
“That’s what the death certificate said,” he said.
“It was a real certificate. With a doctor’s signature and a seal from the county clerk.”
“My father could buy a county clerk for the price of a good steer at the Dutchess County fair,” Gabriel said. He took another step closer. The smell of cedar and rain was overwhelming. “He didn't want his only granddaughter growing up in a trailer park in Troy. He didn't want the bloodline mixed with diesel oil and laundry bleach.”
“Then why—”
“Because my father died five years ago,” Gabriel interrupted. He set his glass down on the edge of the desk with a sharp clack. “And when we cleared out his private safe behind the wainscot in the old boathouse, we found three things: a deed to a gravel pit in New Jersey, a ledger of payoffs to three state judges, and a letter from a nurse in Troy named Clara Miller.”
He paused.
The rain outside hammered against the leaded glass like someone throwing handfuls of sand at the window.
“The letter said the child didn't die,” Gabriel finished. “The letter said Clara took the baby north to keep her out of the old man’s reach. And that she gave her to a girl she knew—a girl who had just lost her own baby in the same ward.”
My knees hit the back of the mahogany chair.
I didn't sit down; I sort of folded into it like an old coat dropped on a bench.
“My mother,” I whispered, “wasn't my mother?”
“Your mother was a woman named Sarah Sullivan who died of an overdose in seventy-nine,” Gabriel said, his voice as neutral as a weather report. “You were adopted off the books by Clara Miller using forged papers and fifty dollars in cash. You grew up six miles from here, thinking you were nobody from nowhere, while my father spent twenty years looking for the wrong girl in Montreal.”
He reached down.
His fingers touched my chin—not roughly, but with an immovable strength that left no room for debate. He tilted my face up toward the green lamp-light.
“Look at your ears,” he said.
“What?”
“The left lobe. There’s a tiny notch in the cartilage. Nadia had it. Her mother had it.”
May you like
He let go of my chin and turned back toward the divan where Lucy was still sleeping under the vicuña robe, her thumb twitching against her lip.
“She’s five,” Gabriel said, and for the first time, there was something in his voice that didn't sound like a ledger or a court order. It sounded like an old man looking at a fire that was finally burning down to embers. “And she dances like her mother when she thought nobody was watching.”
