Chapter 6 MISS ELLERY

IVY POV

So many years spent working undercover has taught me that a good cover takes months to build and every detail of it has to be earned."

But nobody tells you, when you build a cover out of a housekeeper’s résumé for a billionaire, that the job turns out to be real.I had spent months learning the names of cleaning products and the order in which one dusts a room, and on Wednesday morning I discovered that none of it had prepared me for the way a Victorian curtain holds on to a hundred years of everybody’s breath. By ten o’clock I had sneezed eleven times, lost an argument with a brass candlestick, and developed a grudging respect for the women who do this for a living and who had been right all along to look down on journalists.

Theo had appointed himself my supervisor. He followed me along the gallery at a distance of exactly six feet, which I took to be the width of the moat, and watched me work with the grave attention of an inspector from the county. When I reached Lena’s portrait he stopped.

“That’s Lena,” he said.

“I know. She looks kind.”

“She gave me a lamb.” He considered the painted hands, folded so carefully in her lap. “It’s a wood one. It’s in my bed. Daddy doesn’t know.”

“I won’t tell.”

“Okay.” He gave me a look of such frank appraisal that I felt I had passed a very small exam. “You can have the next one.”

I never found out what the next one would have been, because the doorbell rang.

I was kneeling in the foyer with a bucket by then, and Mrs. Pell got to the door before I could stand. She opened it the way she opened everything, with one hand and her face already arranged, and the woman on the step said, “Hester, you look wonderful, which means you haven’t slept,” and Mrs. Pell answered in a voice I could have used to sand furniture, “Miss Ellery.”

“Nora, please, I have been telling you for years.” She carried a casserole dish in both hands wrapped in a checkered towel, and she passed it over with the ease of someone who had done it many times. “Chicken and rice, because nobody in this house eats unless somebody makes them.”

I put her somewhere between thirty-five and forty. Honey-brown hair in a loose knot, round glasses, a cardigan the color of oatmeal, and the kind of face that makes strangers confess things on trains. She smelled faintly of old paper and vanilla. I disliked her for exactly four seconds, in the reflexive way I dislike anyone that pleasant before noon, and then Milo came barreling down the hall in his socks shouting “Nora! Nora!” and flung himself at her knees, and the dislike went out of me like air from a tire.

She dropped to the marble and caught him. “There’s my boy. Have you been good? Have you been a dinosaur?”

“Rawr.”

“Terrifying.” Over his head she looked up at me, and her eyes were gray-green and bright and extremely kind. “And you must be the housekeeper. Dominic told me. I am Nora Ellery. I run the story hour at the library and the Memorial Fund, which means I mostly drink tea and ask people for money.”

“Ivy Calloway.”

“Ivy.” She said it as though she were tasting it. Then she looked at my hands, which were red and chapped from the lye soap, and smiled. “Those aren’t scrubbing hands. Those are library hands. Where did you work before?”

It was a small question, asked lightly, and the whole of my profession stood up inside me and informed me that this was the first real interrogation of my career in the house. I gave her the résumé: the Birches in Vermont, a small hotel by a lake, a bad winter. She nodded in all the right places and said she had stayed at the Birches once and wasn’t the dining room dreadful, and I said the dining room was a crime, and she laughed and said she thought I would be good for this house.

Then, more quietly, with her hand on Milo’s back, “I was Camille’s friend before I was Lena’s, you know. I think about her every day.”

It was the first time anyone in Ashford’s Landing had said my cousin’s name in front of me as though she had been a person and not a verdict, and something loosened in my chest that I resented at once.

When I looked around, Theo was gone. He had been standing in the doorway of the morning room a moment before, watching with that closed, careful face, and now there was only a draft where a boy had been.

“He’s shy with me,” Nora said, following my eyes, without the slightest hurt. “I smell of the library, I think. Boys never trust a woman who smells of the library.” She pressed a card for the story hour into my hand and told me to bring the boys on Saturday, and as she said it she turned her left thumb against the base of her palm, a small, absent twisting, the way a person does with a ring that is no longer there. Divorced, I thought, and filed it with the cardigan and the glasses, and reached for my bucket.

The study door opened. “Nora.” He said it the way a man sets down something heavy that he has carried a long way, and the whole line of his shoulders came down an inch. He had said Miss Calloway to me twice in two days like a man reading from a card. I noticed the difference the way you notice a draft, and I decided it was none of my business and took my bucket to the back of the house.

At lunch I asked Mrs. Pell how long Miss Ellery had been coming to the house.

“Years,” said Mrs. Pell, to the potatoes. “She’s a kind woman.” She said it in the flat, careful way that people say the thing they have decided to say, and I put it away with the other things Mrs. Pell had decided not to say, a collection that was beginning to rival the east wing for size.

DOMINIC POV

Nora has never once asked me how I am, which is why I let her into the house.

Everyone else in Ashford’s Landing asks it with their heads tilted, as though grief were a condition that required a bedside manner, and Nora sits down across my desk with a stack of Memorial Fund papers and her reading glasses pushed up into her hair and asks whether I would mind signing four times, in blue. She was Camille’s friend, and then Lena’s, and she has stood beside me at two graves without once making me feel observed. In a town where everyone belongs to somebody, she is the nearest thing I have to a person who belongs only to the library.

I signed. She blotted each page with the care of someone who has never wasted a sheet of paper in her life.

“You have hired someone,” she said.

“Mrs. Pell leaves at the end of the month.”

“I know, and I am glad.” She capped her pen. “She’s very young for it.”

“She is thirty.”

“Is she?” Nora smiled down at the papers. “Well, she’s good with Milo. He climbed her like a tree.”

It was the kind of remark I wouldn’t have remembered if I hadn’t been watching the two of them through the open study door, the girl on her knees by her bucket with her red hands and that careful, ordinary way she had of answering questions, laying them down one at a time on a table to check them for cracks. I had watched her do the same thing to me. It was an odd, interesting sort of pressure, the feeling of being studied by someone who was better at it than I was.

Nora left at noon with a promise to bring the boys a book on Saturday. Theo, who had vanished at the sound of her voice, didn’t reappear until her car had gone down the drive. He is shy of everyone but Pell, and I had begun to notice, of the new girl a little less than the rest, which I found harder to explain.

After lunch I telephoned a man in the capital who finds things for people, and spoke to him for four minutes, and the sum of what I said was a name and a request.

That evening I came out of the study with a ledger under my arm and stopped at the head of the main stairs, because Ivy Calloway stood at the bottom of them in the half light with one hand on the rail. Her lips were moving. She went up a step, and then another, and I realized she was counting.

Seventeen. She reached the top and her lips stopped, and she stood looking back down the long drop with an expression I couldn’t read and didn’t like to, and it came to me that in fourteen months I had never seen another person climb those stairs the way I did, with the whole of my attention, as though each tread were a question I was not allowed to get wrong.

I know it is seventeen. I count them every night....