"Junior Consultant," Hollis said, and set the folder down on the parlor table with a soft, terrible thud, right on top of Allison's abandoned ouija board, which nobody moved. "R. St. Clair. That's a pretty distinctive signature."
"Oh my God,” Allison said, from the settee. "I knew it. I said secret society, and everybody laughed, but this is basically a secret society, isn't it?"
"It is not a secret society," I said.
"It's adjacent."
"Would somebody explain what's happening," Taylor said, emerging from the dining room with what appeared to be a mimosa. “Because I have a flight in five hours and I would like to know whether I'm about to become a supporting character in somebody else's true crime podcast or not."
"You're already a supporting character in my true crime podcast," I said. "You have been since Thursday."
"I'd like a producer credit."
I was about to protest when I realized that was totally unimportant.
"Everybody calm down," Hollis said. “Take a seat.”
Vivienne had her phone out before her backside hit the cushion, filming low and steady from her lap in that way she thought was subtle and totally wasn't.
Reginald still hadn't moved. He was looking at the folder like it might still be persuaded to close itself. I wondered if he was winning his game of checkers against himself. Like, how did you gauge that?
"Evelyn found the watermark," I said. "The 1920s paper on letters that were supposed to be from the 1860s. She had it verified by a paper conservator at the University of Georgia back in June. She had the restoration file, too. Your signature on materials that never existed the way you certified they did. She wrote a letter, Reginald. Unsent, or sent to herself, I'm honestly not sure which, and it doesn't matter, because either way she meant every word of it. She was going to read it out loud at the end of the gala. In front of the board. In front of the press. In front of every client who's ever hired St. Clair Preservation and trusted your name on a certificate of authenticity."
"That's not—" His voice cracked on the second word, which was the first honest sound I'd heard from him since the night Evelyn died. "That's not what happened. You don't understand what happened."
"So tell us," Hollis said.
"I was twenty-six." He said it like an apology, like a plea, like the number itself was supposed to be a defense. "I was six months out of school, working under a firm that had done Belle Rêve's original nomination paperwork, and the senior partner told me the ironwork was original, told me the timber was original, told me all I had to do was initial a form that a hundred other people had already signed off on, and I did it, because I was twenty-six and I wanted to keep my job and because I believed him. I believed it for years. I didn't find out until nearly a decade later, doing conservation work on another property entirely, that the milling techniques on that ironwork didn't exist yet in 1850. By then my name was already on the paper. By then I'd built an entire career on that signature. Every job I've gotten since, every reference, every article, all of it traces back through that one form."
"So you kept quiet," I said.
"I preserved it." His chin came up, and for one strange moment I watched him become, right in front of me, the man he must have practiced being in every mirror for twenty years — reasonable, wounded, historically correct. "Do you understand what Belle Rêve is? What it does? It's not just a house, Harper. It's the reason four other Garden District properties got their designations. It's the reason a dozen grant programs still exist. It's the reason this city has any funding at all for keeping its history standing instead of letting it collapse into condos and parking structures. If Belle Rêve's provenance is exposed as fabricated, it doesn't just take me down. It takes the whole architecture of how this city protects itself. Forty years of preservation work, unwound because Evelyn Carrington wanted her name in the paper one more time before she died."
"She wanted the truth told," I said. "That's not the same thing as wanting her name in the paper."
"The truth was never going to save that house. Only the story was ever going to save that house. I have spent my entire career protecting buildings, Harper. Do you have any idea what happens to a structure the second it loses its designation? The grants dry up. The tax abatement disappears. The maintenance stops. In ten years it's a teardown, and in twenty it's a parking garage with a plaque nobody reads. I wasn't protecting a lie. I was protecting a house. I was protecting a hundred houses, because if Belle Rêve falls, they all get reexamined, every property I've ever certified, every restoration with my name on it, gone."
"So you killed her," Hollis said. Matter of fact.
The room was quiet.
“She asked me to modify the straw," Reginald said, and it came out of him slowly, like something being extracted rather than confessed, each word set down with the same careful precision he probably brought to a mantel repair. "A micro-engraving kit, spring-tension clamps, watchmaker's files small enough to work inside a hollow shaft. All the tools of my trade, the same tools I've used my whole career to make broken things look whole again. I know silver. I know how it bends and where it's weak and how to hide a seam so well that a conservator with forty years of experience wouldn't catch it under magnification. I built it small. Elegant, even. A spring, a needle, pressure-triggered. It would have looked, to anyone who found it, like a manufacturing flaw from a century and a half ago. One more secret the old house kept."
"You built a murder weapon and you're describing it like restoration work,” Allison said.
"It was the only language I had for it." For the first time, something that might have been shame crossed his face, there and gone. “I knew she wanted to die, dramatically, at the end of the evening. I told myself that I was protecting legacy. That word did a great deal of work for me. Legacy. It's a very forgiving word. It felt like I was protecting myself and giving her what she wanted all at the same time. But then she said something to me. That Belle Rêve had always demanded sacrifice. If the truth required one last performance, she intended to give it. And so I knew she was going to tell everyone everything and my reputation would be ruined. I didn’t realize her intention was to frame me for murder as well."
“You thought she would get stabbed in the throat and no one would wonder why?”
“She had cancer. She was dying.” He shrugged. “I couldn’t take any chances on what her plan or intentions were at that point.”
“You needed her to use the right straw," Hollis said. "The rigged one. And Evelyn was already onto you by then. She'd had the provenance verified. She was building a case. If she suspected you'd tamper with anything, she wasn't going to sit still and let you near her table."
"She called Hyacinth," I said. "Two days before the gala. Told her exactly which straw would be at her place setting and asked her to swap it for a different one. Her grandmother's, she said. Sentimental. A woman who thought she might be sitting across a table from her own murderer decided to protect herself the only way she knew how, through someone she trusted, without ever saying out loud what she actually suspected." I watched his face while I said it. "She swapped your straw out. She changed her mind. She got the safe one onto that table. And somehow it didn't matter. Somehow you still won."
Reginald's jaw tightened. “She found out. She knew that wasn’t the correct straw when the catering items arrived on Wednesday and the serving pieces were brought out of storage. She had to have known. It’s the only explanation I can think of.”
“Why wouldn’t she just toss it out then? I don’t think she knew.”
