“Good morning, Jessica.” A curtsy. “Let me go and check.”
“Yes, do that.” I shut the door behind me.
The girl scampered away barefoot, dress billowing. I followed.
The hallway was decorated with Gertie’s drawings of Helshire—Ogden, Ridermore, Dewitt, all in meticulous detail. I recognized Sebastian’s Terrace House, his window on the second floor, a faceless figure staring out.
The room where he’d sewn my stitches, where we’d promised to tell each other everything. But I hadn’t, and now he told me nothing.
The first door along the hallway opened on a sewing room, where four podmates were at work on a quilt. Two boys, two girls, they wore last-century dresses in mismatched greens and looked up at me with intense smiles.
I kept walking. Two small bedrooms, a study, and a corner room stuffed with antique armchairs and couches. Just like the one in the Great House, which my elders called “the den.”
This apartment was huge, and not Morton-owned. I wondered what form of chicanery was paying the rent. Maybe Gertie was printing her own money.
But I hadn’t been offered tea or cookies. Standards were slipping.
The girl who’d first greeted me reappeared, curtsied again.
“Gertie will see you now.”
Swathed in black chiffon, she waited in an enormous kitchen, the morning light slanting in on cracked linoleum and floating cat dander. Uncle Max was on the floor beside her, splayed in a sunbeam, motionless except for the twitching whiskers of some murderous dream.
Two podmates, who’d been sifting flour onto a large kitchen island, scuttled out of the room. The shelves were untidy. The coffee grinder looked broken.
I recognized the farmhouse table where Gertie sat.
“You brought this monstrosity with you,” I said. “To a sixth-floor walk-up?”
She looked up from her drawing—an arched stone doorway. “Home is where the heart is.”
“Gertie. That saying means youdon’thave to haul your shit everywhere.”
“That seems wrong, because one does.” She went back to her work. “Besides, people who never visit aren’t allowed to comment on decor.”
“Did I miss an invitation?”
“You are always welcome, cousin.”
I took this as permission to sit.
Still no tea. The kitchen was hot, even with the windows wide open. Perhaps air-conditioning was counter to the aesthetic.
“The new color scheme is lovely,” I began. “We need to talk about Sebastian.”
“The hallway isn’t the right shade yet,” she said. “What about him?”
“Would you call it jade? Just this morning, Bianca Lindqvist showed up and told me about his little revenge.”
“It’s malachite.” Gertie looked up from her work. “And you pulled this trick last time—making one assume you knew all about a thing when you, in fact, did not.”
I kept my smile steady. “I’m pals with the Lindqvists now. Xavier gave me his Hefnd speech. But I didn’t expect Sebastian to wreak vengeance in Albany.”
Gertie gazed at me, trying to read my face. “Do you think the family will figure it out? Some state senator having a heart attack, a few weeks after our cousin shows up?”
A little thrum went through me. Sebastian had killed someone. He was angry at me, at the family. A Hefnd was the most unMorton thing he could imagine. His own homage to Peter.
“Heart attacks are easy to cover,” I said. “They’ll never guess.”
