“You will understand,” he said cryptically. “You can ask him yourself. I will move on.”
“Please,” I insisted.
I knew the commissioner thought of me as dim, as well as most women, but I didn’t appreciate his attempts to drive a wedge between myself and my husband.
“Are you aware that your husband visits the morgue nearly three times a week?”
I squinted at him, waiting for the other shoe.
“Interestingly enough, they’re missing some files,” he mentioned. “You wouldn’t know a thing about that, would you?” Mr. Hunt slid over a piece of paper—a visitors’ log.
On the list, there was Mr. Kamenev.
But there was also another stack beside it, the cremation logs.
It was like gravity was about to grab me by my ears and slam me down.
He knows. He knows about the deliveries.
I looked up at Mr. Hunt, his expression some mix of victory and satisfaction, a stare that pierced me to my core, seeing straight through me.
He knew this would not just distress me but violate me.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The Artisan
“So everything is better?” Kostya bumped his shoulder into mine.
My whiskey sloshed against the glass. “It is fine,” I mumbled.
Quiet mumbles of the morning mixed with the haze of sluggish cigarettes and dark roasts. Walnut from floor to ceiling with the exception of the mirror behind the bottles of the bar and the haze of the windows between the smoke and café curtains. The gilded painted lettering on the window read backward from inside, clear against the light greeting those with hangovers. Kostya and I nested ourselves in the pub corner, my friend’s morning beer in hand with espresso on the side.
“Now that you’re getting along with your wife, Emily has been asking for a double outing.” He grinned. “We could try something fun, a show and dinner, perhaps?”
“Now why would you assume that?” I laughed.
“Oh sorry. I just thought ...” He sipped his tall glass awkwardly, like he’d gotten too far ahead of himself.
I shook my head and took another sip of whiskey, then frowned. “Wait.” I whipped my head back to him. “What are you talking about?”
“I thought you took my advice regarding reputation.” He shrugged, frowning back at me, equally confused by my reaction.
“Why would you bring it up?”
“Have you not seen the papers?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
Kostya looked over one shoulder, then the other, before standing and heading toward the door of the pub, checking behind a chair before digging out the paper from the morning in the garbage tin. He brushed it off, unfolding it as he sat next to me again.
The bold typeface of the headline read:
New York’s Rising Swells Turning Heads—New York’s Illustrious Sweethearts Off to the Races.
The main image was a photograph of the two of us promenading about the event. It was a nice photograph, though I hardly recognized myself next to her, dressed for her tax bracket. They caught something rare in the photo, not just my new tailoring but a small, fleeting smile on Petronille while she was with me. It was so brief, I didn’t even remember it.
It would have been a great photo ... if it weren’t for the image below, accompanying the article.
