Chapter 6 Chapter 6: Unexpected Visits

I didn’t sleep again.

I stayed sitting on the edge of Ethan’s bed, listening to what was happening downstairs, the guards’ clipped orders, the splashing of the water when they finally pulled the body out, Derek’s voice as he spoke on the phone to someone in a tone I had never heard from him before, low and sharp, the voice of a man reporting, not asking. When dawn began to break, I was still barefoot, the burn throbbing beneath the gauze I had put on myself because there was no way I was asking anyone in this house to treat it.

I took Ethan’s hand.

"Ethan, this is crazy, but for a second I thought it was you."

Eighty-two. Eighty-two. Eighty-two.

"I fought with her right here yesterday, and today she’s at the bottom of a pool. Explain to me how I’m supposed to keep that from pointing at me."

My mind is falling apart. A body in the water at four in the morning, and I’m talking to a man who hasn’t answered me in three days.

At seven, Gloria knocked and came in with a small tray, black coffee and an aspirin, and placed it on the bedside table without making a sound with the dishes.

"Ma’am, I brought you something. Mr. Manuel is expecting you at nine in the study."

"Thank you, Gloria."

"And Laura."

"Yes?"

"Change your uniform before you go downstairs. Don’t go to the study like that."

I showered quickly, put on a clean uniform, changed the gauze on my shoulder, which had already turned yellow from the fluid draining from the blister, and went down to the study at exactly nine because Manuel was the kind of man who measured even your minutes.

I found him standing beside the window, his cane in his hand and the face of an old man who hadn’t slept either.

"Laura. Sit down."

I sat. He walked to the desk, leaned against the edge, and took his time before beginning.

"An employee died in this house last night. Beatriz Linares, twenty-two years old, seven months working here. My daughter-in-law hired her to work in the east wing. She drowned in the pool sometime between ten and midnight, according to the doctor."

"She drowned?"

"That’s what the report says."

"Manuel..."

"Laura, I don’t interrupt you. Don’t interrupt me."

I fell silent. That day, he had a different tone, one he hadn’t used even on the night of the contract, and it was the tone a man uses when explaining to a new employee how things work.

"The report will say accidental drowning. There will be no autopsy, no police. This is my house, and she was my employee. Do you understand?"

"I understand."

"Then the question. Do you know something about this that I don’t?"

"No."

"Think before you answer me, because I’m only going to ask you once."

I pulled the collar of my uniform down slightly so he could see the gauze.

"Yesterday Beatriz deliberately threw boiling tea on me, right in front of my husband, and left me with this. I threw her out of the room yelling at her, with the door open and half the hallway listening, and I told her I would kill her if she came back in. I said that. With my own mouth. The rest, I didn’t."

Manuel stared at the gauze longer than a polite man should stare at a woman’s shoulder, and when he raised his face, his jaw was clenched.

"Who told Beatriz to throw that tea on you?"

"I don’t know. But someone made it clear to her beforehand that I was only the nurse and nothing more, because a twenty-two-year-old girl doesn’t burn the owner’s wife’s chest if she thinks it’s going to cost her her job."

"Someone who doesn’t know you signed the contract."

"Or someone who does know and wanted to see what I would do."

The cane struck the leg of the desk with a sharp knock, just once, and he straightened it immediately as if nothing had happened.

"Laura, I’m going to tell you something, and I’m only going to say it once. If anyone in this house lays a hand on you, you come to me. Before Derek and before my daughter-in-law. Me. Is that clear?"

"Clear."

"Now go upstairs and see your husband. And from now on, don’t eat or drink anything in this house that Gloria doesn’t bring you personally."

"Not even anything from the kitchen?"

"Not even that."

I climbed the stairs with my pulse racing and with the tally I had already started that morning: someone had ordered them to burn me, someone had taken that girl out of this world before breakfast, and nobody in the house was going to tell me whether the two someones were the same person. Welcome to the five-year contract.

I opened the suite door and froze in the doorway.

Marcelo was standing beside the bed, bent over his brother’s arm. He had something in his right hand that I didn’t get a chance to see because the moment he heard the door, he straightened and slipped his hand into his suit pocket, doing it with the kind of speed no natural gesture had.

He smiled. The smile came half a second late, and I had spent ten years being trained to notice half-seconds in people who were dying.

"Good morning, nurse."

"Mr. Marcelo. What are you doing in this room?"

"I came to see how my brother is doing."

"Visits to the suite are restricted by medical order and by Mr. Manuel."

"I don’t need permission to enter a room where my own blood is."

"You do. And while Mr. Manuel or his mother aren’t here, I decide who comes in and who leaves."

We stood there sizing each other up with the door open and his hand still in his pocket, gripping something, because the fabric of his suit was pulled tight around his wrist in a way that didn’t lie.

I took a step forward.

"Leave, Mr. Marcelo."

"Of course, nurse. How sensitive. I only came for a moment."

He adjusted the collar of his suit with his left hand. His right hand never came out of his pocket, and that was what stuck with me, because a man who has nothing to hide uses both hands to adjust his collar. As he passed me, he stopped just long enough to speak close to my ear.

"Take care of my brother. He’s very valuable to this family."

The same phrase from the first day, the same tone, and this time with the body of a young woman still wet out in the garden.

"I will, sir."

He left. I locked the door and hurried back to the bed.

I checked the arm where he had been leaning, the crook of the elbow, the IV vein. The catheter was intact, the dressing secure, the surrounding skin clean. No new puncture, no bruising, no redness. I checked his neck, his chest, the backs of both hands. Nothing.

I got here first. Barely, but I got here first.

I picked up the suite phone and dialed the security extension.

"Derek. Come up here now."

He was at the door in less than two minutes.

"Derek, explain to me why this house has twenty armed men if the owner’s brother can walk into the main patient’s room and nobody tells me."

"Was Marcelo here?"

"Marcelo was here, putting something in his pocket when he heard me arrive."

"What was it?"

"I didn’t see it. He was leaning over your boss’s vein, Derek. You figure it out."

His jaw tightened just like Manuel’s had an hour earlier, and that was when I understood that Derek had been raised by the old man, not by his father.

"Ma’am, I apologize."

"Apologies are useless to me. A girl woke up dead in the pool in this house, and by midmorning anyone can walk into this room. If the next person who gets in here without my knowledge puts something into my husband’s vein, the next person leaving on a stretcher will be you. Do you understand me?"

"I understand you."

He nodded once and left, closing the door with that soft click that drove me crazy.

I sat beside Ethan and took his wrist. Eighty-three, eighty-four, eighty-three. If Marcelo had managed to inject him with anything, that monitor would already be climbing or crashing, and it was doing neither.

"Ethan. Your brother was here with a syringe in his pocket. I’m almost certain it was a syringe."

Eighty-four.

"If you can hear me and you know I’m right, squeeze my hand."

I lowered his fingers over mine and waited, the way you wait when you already know nothing is going to happen.

Eighty-four.

An hour later, I heard movement in the garden and pulled the curtain aside with two fingers.

Down below, at the service entrance, Derek was talking to a group of guards standing in a semicircle. I couldn’t hear his words, but I could see his hand: he raised it, pointed at one man, and the man stepped forward. He raised it again, and another man came forward. He wasn’t scolding anyone.

He was forming a line.

I counted eight. He said something short to them, turned around, and went inside the house, while the eight men stood there for a moment, not knowing what to do, before beginning to walk toward the side exit.

Twenty minutes later, Gloria brought lunch upstairs covered with a white cloth. Broth, bread, fruit, and unopened bottled water. Gloria’s food.

"Thank you."

"Laura."

"Yes?"

She dried her hands on her apron even though they were already dry.

"This morning they fired the eight guards from the night shift. Mr. Derek himself did it, gave them an hour to collect their things and leave the property."

"Why?"

"Officially, they didn’t say. But I heard in the kitchen that it was because of Mr. Marcelo, because they let him go upstairs without notifying anyone."

I lowered my eyes to the tray and grabbed the glass of water with both hands because they were trembling, and I didn’t want Gloria to see.

"Thank you, Gloria."

She left me alone with the broth cooling and with a count that didn’t add up anywhere, because Marcelo had entered this suite at nine twenty in the morning, in broad daylight, with the house awake, and those eight men had been on the night shift. The shift that had been working between ten and midnight, while a twenty-two-year-old girl sank into a pool illuminated thirty meters from the service entrance.

They hadn’t fired those eight men because of Marcelo.

They fired them because they saw the garden.