Chapter 7 THE BOTTOM DRAWER

IVY POV

Dominic Ashford left for the harbor office at eight on Thursday, and I watched his car go down the tunnel of oaks from an upstairs window with the particular hunger of a woman whose supervisor had just left the building.

By ten Mrs. Pell had decided that the boys would learn to make bread, which I understood to be a defensive maneuver, since a kitchen full of flour is the safest place in any house where two small boys and one nervous impostor might otherwise get in each other’s way. I offered to wash the upstairs windows. She looked at me as though I had offered to fly.

The key ring hung on the third hook by the pantry door. I had counted forty-one keys on it on Tuesday, and I knew the study’s by its green paper tag, and at twenty past ten, while Mrs. Pell bent to show Theo how a lump of dough ought to be turned, I walked past the hook with my bucket and lifted the ring off it with two fingers and carried it out of the kitchen like a woman carrying a dustpan. Theo watched the keys go by. He pressed his thumb into the dough and said nothing, which was becoming a family trait.

My hands did not shake. This is the most disturbing thing I know about myself.

The hall to the study was long and carpeted in a runner so thick that it swallowed my footsteps whole, and a grandfather clock at the far end kept time with the unhurried malice of an instrument that has watched a great many people do things they shouldn’t. I gave myself twenty minutes. I have given myself twenty minutes in a number of places in my life, and the number has never once turned out to be correct.

The study smelled of cedar and cold coffee and leather that had been oiled by someone who cared. A wall of green cloth ledgers, a window onto the oak drive, a desk the size of a small boat, and on the blotter a thick folder stamped CALDER POINTE PARTNERS: CONFIDENTIAL, its paper clip aligned with the edge so exactly that it might have been set with a ruler.

A cup with a dry brown ring in the bottom stood at the corner of the desk. I had spent three months studying the life of the man who worked in this room, and what struck me was how little of it was ornamental: no photographs of his wives, and only one picture of anyone at all, a grey old man with Dominic’s jaw in a frame so plain it looked like an apology.

I opened the folder and took out my phone.

PURCHASE AND SALE AGREEMENT, said the first page, and then a string of figures that I read twice to be sure of: the Reach Parcels, approximately four thousand acres of river land, four hundred million dollars, closing December fifteenth. I photographed every page. In the margin of page forty, someone had written two words in pencil and rubbed them out, and I could still read the ghost of them: Dad said. The rest had gone to a grey smear. I understood none of it, which is the condition in which most of my best stories have begun, and I put the folder back with the clip aligned to the edge and the edge aligned to the blotter.

The bottom drawer was locked.

It had a small brass lock the size of my thumbnail, the kind that keeps out children and honest people, and I took the two slivers of spring steel from the spine of the paperback I had bought for the irony, Rebecca, and knelt on the carpet. It took about as long as it takes to say a short prayer, and I will say that I was not praying.

There was one thing in the drawer. It lay alone in a space built to hold a dozen, a heavy cream envelope with a single word across the front in blue-black ink, Dominic, the capital D with its tail curling back on itself like a question mark. The seal was whole.

I knew that handwriting before I understood that I knew it. I had spent the summer I was twelve copying it into a notebook, the loops and the open-topped fours, because Camille wrote the way she laughed and I wanted everything she had.

For some time I knelt there holding my cousin’s last words to her husband, fourteen months unopened, and I was aware of the nineteen separate arguments a person in my profession could make for what to do next. The seal would lift. I had done it a hundred times with a kettle and a pair of tweezers and the patience of a saint. Instead I turned the envelope over twice and laid it back where it had been, and took only a photograph of its face, one frame, holding the phone in both hands because they had finally begun to shake. It had been written to him, and she had sealed it, and some stupid part of me wanted her to have one thing in this house that was left whole.

I had the drawer shut and the lock turned when I heard the gravel.

It was twenty to three, a clean, unmistakable crunch of tires on stone, a full hour before he was ever home on a Thursday. Somewhere down the hall the grandfather clock took the opportunity to strike the quarter. I put my forehead down on the desk because it seemed to be the only part of me still taking instructions. The key ring was in my left hand and the bucket was in the kitchen, and I had a phone full of a man’s private business and a lie about window washing that would not survive three questions, and I did the only thing I could think of, which was to turn around and face the door.

Mrs. Pell stood in it.

She had flour to the elbows and a face like a locked church. She looked at me, then at the drawer, then at me again, and for a long moment I could hear the dough rising in the next room.

“He’s early,” she said. “The back way.” She crossed the carpet in four steps and plucked the key ring out of my fingers. “And you never open that drawer again. Do you understand me?”

I was halfway down the back stairs, with my pulse knocking in my wrists and one hand on the wall, before it occurred to me that she hadn’t asked what I was doing in there.