“Is that so? Have you ever been to Italy?”
“I’m of half a mind to go there tomorrow.”
“I suggest you wait until Mussolini and his ilk are thrown out of office, Addie. Then you and I can go together to the annualFesta del Pesca, the Festival of the Peach. Tens of thousands gather in plazas andparks to simultaneously flambé peaches. It is a beautiful and moving sight. The golden light of myriad brandy flames dances over the facades of the buildings and glows in the smiling faces of the celebrants, as the fragrance of all those warm peaches fills the night. It is the experience of a lifetime.”
I surrendered and laughed. “I’m so glad you’ve never quite grown up.”
“That is a fate I have tried to strenuously avoid.”
“So, I came all this way for an enormous piece of the pecan-cherry pie that I should have had with dinner. Don’t tell me some hungry hawkshaw got his mitts on it, so now I’ll have to settle for a smoked peach.”
Chef gave me two thumbs up. “I was prepared for the equivalent of a plague of locusts. I made four pies. The fourth remains safe in the third Frigidaire. If you wish, indulge yourself until you fall violently ill. For whatever reason, the malingering sleuth rummaged through two Frigidaires but not the last one.”
“Rummaged?”
“As you know, I keep the contents of my refrigerators better organized than a lawyer’s files. Everything was where it shouldn’t be. He sat at the center island to eat and left a mess.”
“If anyone in this family left a mess,” I said, “they’d have to answer for it. They’d clean up after themselves because they’d know what the punishment is for slacking off.”
“And to think, starting tomorrow night, there will be even more Pinkertons pinking around than there were today.”
“Tell Lynette about this. She would have had to let him out, the hungry malingerer, so she’ll know which one he was.”
Chef Lattuada shrugged. “They’re here to keep you all safe. I don’t want to make them feel unwelcome—not even if one of them is asloppy slacker.” He opened the third Frigidaire and withdrew a pie. “I can give you the whole thing and a fork to take to your room.”
“You’re a gentleman, a true friend. But if you’d just cut a piece for me, I’ll pour a glass of milk. I’ll eat at the island and clean up after myself. You need to go back to your place and get a good night’s rest. You’ll have a lot of cooking to do. If some of the same agents come back, you’ve raised their expectations just like you’ve raised all of ours over and over again.”
He smiled. “You are a charmer, Addie.”
“Thanks. I’ve been called worse. I’ll let you out.”
“No need. I’ve got my old key for the old locks and my new key for the new locks. I hope that’s the end of more keys. My dad had so many responsibilities, fourteen keys on his key ring, way too much to think about. The fewer keys, the clearer your mind, the better your life. Good night, Addie.”
“Good night, Luigi. I won’t forget that promise to take me to theFesta del Pescawhen Mussolini’s gone.”
With his hand, he drew a cross over his heart. He left by the kitchen door, locked both deadbolts, waved at me through the French panes, and followed the lamplit garden path to his apartment.
If ever I get to sample the ambrosia that the gods of classical myth were said to eat, I’m sure I will find it inferior to Chef’s pecan-cherry pie topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Not for the first time, I was grateful that, since arriving at my current weight long ago, I never gained or lost a pound regardless of how much or little I ate. Over the years, I’d given hardly more thought to that curious actuality than to the fact that I breathe. Likewise, as I hadn’t once been ill, hadn’t experienced as much as a single head cold, concerns about my health never troubled me. Because of the radical deformities that made me a star attraction as a freak, I would never marry or have children, never be able to pursue a normal career or don a swimsuit for an afternoon at the beach—andtherefore I spent no time fantasizing about my future or lamenting about what I could not have. As I served myself another and smaller slice of pie, I realized with some surprise that my limitations and my lack of options comprised one reason why I could clear my mind to such an extent that I became immersed in a novel, experiencing it as if the characters and events of the story were real, and hold it in memory. I was not prepared to believe that a pie, no matter how delicious, could inspire in me the greater self-awareness I’d just achieved, so it must have had something to do with Chef Lattuada and our conversation.
By the time I finished the second serving and cleaned up after myself as the rogue Pinkerton man had not done, our current drama here at the Bram began to seem much like a sequence from the eerier fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson or that of Wilkie Collins. With an uneasiness new to me in this house, I turned off the kitchen lights, passed through the dark butler’s pantry, and crossed the dining room in the palest of moonlight admitted by the tall windows. Stepping into the long main hall lighted by the sconces I had dimmed earlier, I thought of the house named Manderley in the new novel by Daphne du Maurier. Manderley was a grand yet subtly sinister house because of the portentous housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, who was also a keeper of secrets. We had no one in the Bram with a wicked spirit like hers, and there were no baleful secrets here that were likely to lead to a fiery finish. However, as I passed dark rooms and darker rooms that lay beyond those nearer chambers, the beauty and grandeur of the Bram seemed to have been themise en sceneof a light fantasy that was now concluded, with a new and fearful story waiting only for the curtain to rise or the cameras to start turning.
In the foyer, as I approached the main staircase, I thought I heard a murmuring voice so indistinct that I couldn’t tell what was being said. I halted, listened, but failed to determine from where it came. The library? The main drawing room? Far back in the hallway alongwhich I’d just ventured? It might even be whispering down the stairwell from the second floor. Although I was at first certain that what I heard must be a voice and that the speaker was peevish if not angry, I began to wonder if I might instead be hearing an oscillating vibration of ductwork related to the air-conditioning system. The sound abruptly stopped, and I waited, but the murmuring did not resume.
Novels of all genres and levels of ambition engage readers with one degree of suspense or another. When a person has been immersed in fiction more hours than not and has been shaped by what was read, as I have been, there inevitably are moments when you find yourself in a situation that recalls scenes akin to many with which writers have entertained you, and you tend to act as did the characters in those stories. As I continued toward the stairs, something click-click-clicked as though a handful of pickup sticks had been cast across a floor. Then silence. Having been present when Captain made his threats, being now alone on the ground level of the mansion, moving through lightless or dimly lighted spaces where every deep shadow might be something more than it seemed to be, with everyone else asleep on the upper floor, a character in my position would usually resort to one of two reactions. She might cry out at such a sudden creepy sound, waking everyone. Or if she were the spunky but not reckless type bent on preserving her dignity, she would race up the stairs, return to her room, close the door, lock it, and assure herself that she’d heard nothing more than mice in motion behind the wainscot. I took the stairs two at a time.
The upper floor was laid out like the letterI, with one long hallway intersecting shorter hallways at each end. My suite was off the shorter hall at the west end. The Persian carpet runner softened my footsteps. I hurried but did not sprint, and I knew better than to glance back to see if anyone was following me. In spite of the severely dimmed sconces, when I came to the end of the main hallway and turned left, I saw a figure in the gloom.
A bright beam pinned me. Harry whispered my name, switched off the Eveready, and quickened to me. Though my vision was compromised by the sudden glare, I had seen that he held the flashlight in his left hand and a pistol in his right. The gun was his. He was expert with it. His reading of history these past few years taught him a lot, not least of all that humanity repeats the worst mistakes of previous generations and that every free, prosperous civilization will eventually be destroyed by that small fraction of its people who find no satisfaction in anything but anger. Their ceaseless complaints eventually escalate into histrionic violence producing mostly symbolic damage, but that excites the worst thugs among them to commit brutal assaults, then murder, and then mass murder. Soon civilization dissolves in war; the violent bear it away. That was the argument Harry had made to his parents when pressing the case why he also, not just they, ought to be armed to protect the family and the homestead. He was only seventeen but as responsible as any adult when Loretta began taking him to a shooting range to earn the right to have a gun stored safely in his room.
“The pistol. What’s happening?” I whispered.
We stood in the junction of the west and the main halls. He continuously scanned both corridors. “I heard someone talking in Dad’s office.”
That home office was under Harry’s room. If asleep, he would have heard nothing. He’d been lying awake, on his bed but still in his daytime clothes, wondering if maybe he would enjoy a career as a Pinkerton detective. The voice was that of a man. Not Franklin. But Franklin was the only man in the house at that hour. Unable to make out what was being said, Harry could nevertheless hear anger and urgency—or perhaps eagerness—in the cadences of the speaker’s voice. Because there were no audible responses during those moments when the intruder fell silent, it had become obvious he was on the telephone. Especially after the events of the day, no circumstance existed in whicha stranger should be in the Bram at that hour. Harry had gotten off the bed, quietly gone into his walk-in closet, and retrieved his pistol from the locked gun safe. If he had called out a warning to his parents, whose suite was toward the east end of the main hall, he would have alerted the intruder. My quarters and Gertie’s room were in the west wing, near Harry’s room. He’d decided to collect us and take us quietly with him to his parents.
The mess in the kitchen that Chef complained about had not been left by a lingering Pinkerton man. The intruder must have raided the Frigidaires after the Pinkertons were long gone, after all of us had retired to our bedrooms for the night. If my lust for pie had sent me roaming an hour earlier, I might have entered the kitchen while he was wielding knife and fork. I didn’t think it likely that the security specialists overlooked a door or a window or other point of entry, nor that a ragged hobo carrying his worldly possessions in a bindle had wandered into the house through the one gap they had failed to notice. Even before being further secured, the Bram had been a place that required a concerted effort on the part of anyone scheming to enter uninvited.
The boldness of the kitchen raider suggested three things. First, he didn’t care if one of us caught him at his meal; he had no fear of arrest—or of how an encounter would end. Second, he had been hungry, famished, perhaps because he’d been hiding in the house since morning with nothing to eat. Third, he came here with Captain and scaled the estate wall while Farnam’s unexpected visit had drawn everyone’s attention to the front gate; he slipped into the house while we were in negotiations on the great lawn, in the absence of birds. He must be the boy whom Captain called Jack. The boy who murdered his cousin Bobby for a train-flattened lucky penny. The freak whose appearance frightened people too much for his folks to take him into town. The psychopath who was Captain’s obedient puppet—until he didn’t want to be. No doubt he’d hidden in the Bram to report toCaptain about whether the pitchman’s demands were being met. He must be extremely clever and gifted in some way that made it possible to elude the Pinkerton agents hour after hour. Now he knew Captain was not going to be paid the ransom. That was surely whom he had called from Franklin’s home office. That was why he sounded angry and eager. In my mind’s eye appeared the moonlit meadow from my dream—the screaming horse, the pale and long-limbed rider.
