The Child at the Staircase
Chapter 04 - The Child at the Staircase
Valente did not move for several seconds. Then he walked to the foot of the stairs and crouched, making himself smaller than the man everyone else in that house stood aside for.
“Theo,” he said, “tell me about the lady.”
The boy pressed a hand to the banister. “She had a blue coat. She smelled like oranges. She knew the song.”
“What song?”
“The little bird one. Mommy sang it when the lights went out.”
Norah felt Celia's key turn cold in her palm. Ida used to sing a song about a bluebird in winter, changing the words each year as Norah grew. She had thought it was Ida's invention.
“Would you sing it?” she asked.
Theo considered her, then shook his head. “Not with everybody watching.”
Valente sent the footman away. He didn't tell Theo that his mother was dead. He didn't tell him she was alive. Norah noticed the restraint, and how much effort it cost him.
They sat in the conservatory with warm milk and two shortbread cookies. Theo insisted on giving Norah the cookie without the broken edge. He asked what she did when the lights went out.
“I used to count the cars on the street,” she told him. “My grandmother would sit beside me until I got bored of being afraid.”
“Was she nice?”
“Most days. Not when I put wet towels on the wood floor.”
Theo smiled. Then, without warning, he leaned toward her and whispered, “The blue-coat lady said I had a sister called Nori.”
Norah did not trust herself to answer.
After Theo went upstairs, Valente showed Norah the household visitors' register. The previous Sunday carried four names and one blank line. Staff came and went through a side entrance, but no unknown guest had been recorded. The camera nearest that door had stopped functioning for forty-seven minutes.
“That seems convenient,” Norah said.
“Convenient for somebody.”
He told her what he had withheld at the restaurant. Theo's mother Clare had left a family trust for her son and for the residents of three modest retirement buildings purchased with her own earnings and an inheritance from Julian. After her disappearance, someone had challenged the trust and claimed that Valente's guardianship was temporary. Marcus Ellery said a woman taking Clare's place in the household would reassure an appointed evaluator.
“He suggested giving her Clare's identity?”
“He said the private arrangement would remain private.”
“That's a careful way of calling a forgery a favor.”
“I agree now.”
“You should have agreed then.”
“Yes.”
His willingness to accept criticism disconcerted her more than a defense would have. She had expected a man who owned half a Chicago shipping district, and whom the papers hinted had inherited much uglier businesses, to consider being wrong a minor inconvenience for other people.
Valente opened a door at the end of the corridor. The linen room was smaller than Norah expected, with shelves of folded sheets and a narrow old cupboard. The brass key fitted the lock only after she lifted it slightly.
Inside were two wooden boxes. One held baby photographs, birthday cards addressed to Nori, and a cheap plastic bracelet shaped like a duck. The other held bank statements, copies of building deeds, and letters from tenants whose retirement homes had been threatened with sale.
On top lay an envelope marked FOR NORAH, IF I FAIL TO COME BACK.
Norah opened it slowly. Clare's handwriting was different from the old note in Ida's sewing tin, more decisive, but there was the same habit of underlining the words she most needed to believe.
I wanted you to have a life that wasn't built around what happened to me. I told myself I was protecting you. That is the decent word people use when they are too frightened to tell the truth. I was frightened. I am sorry.
The letter went on to explain that Clare had uncovered transfers from the housing trust into a private company called North Quay Management. Residents had paid for maintenance and services that were never provided. When she challenged the accounts, she was warned that the trust could be dissolved and Theo sent to a relative willing to cooperate.
Norah looked at Valente. “Did you know?”
“Not about the transfers.”
“Was North Quay yours?”
“A subsidiary. One of forty-two. I signed its acquisition.”
“And you didn't read what you were buying?”
“I read the report I was given.”
“That's a very expensive distinction.”
He took the words without protest. In the dining room a clock chimed five, absurdly cheerful.
The last page of the letter made Norah sit down. Clare wrote of hearing a familiar car outside her home several nights in a row. She had hidden copies of the financial records in places only women who had been ignored their whole lives would think to look.
Find Celia. Find Mrs. Ward in building C. And don't let them tell you that age makes a woman's memory unreliable.
Below that was a date: six days before the car was found at the river.
Norah examined the statements more closely. Some entries had been highlighted in yellow, with Clare's small comments running along the margins. She had written LOOK FOR THE SECOND BILL beside an elevator repair and WHO AUTHORIZED THE MOVE? beside the name of a tenant called Dolores Vega.
"Did Clare tell you she was investigating?" Norah asked Valente.
"She told me the trust accounts were troubling her. I offered to send my finance people."
"Your finance people were the ones charging the bills."
"I understand that now."
She ran a fingertip down the names, each followed by a room number, a date, or an amount. The ledger looked nothing like the glamorous crime she had imagined when she heard the word mafia. It was a history of faulty staircases and emptied checking accounts. Somebody had discovered that stealing a little dignity from hundreds of people was less noticeable than robbing a single rich man.
A soft knock sounded at the doorway. An elderly woman with beautifully brushed white hair stood there, leaning on a cane. Her black dress was plain but finely made. Valente rose.
“My grandmother,” he said. “Eleanor Hayes.”
Eleanor looked at the open cupboard and then at Norah's face.
“I asked Marcus to keep you away from this house,” she said. “It appears he has failed.”
“You knew about me?” Norah asked.
May you like
Eleanor's gaze moved to Clare's letter. “I've known about you for twenty-eight years.”
Then she reached into her handbag and brought out a photograph of Clare on the riverbank, taken three months after the day she was supposed to have died.
