Chapter 1 - BEHIND THE PAINTING
My travel bag hit the marble floor the moment I walked into the library.
Tilda Avery was on her knees beside the west wall, one arm wrapped around my four-year-old daughter while the other still held the iron fireplace poker she had apparently used to destroy a brass latch. A six-foot oil painting of my grandfather hung crooked beside them. Behind it was an opening in the wall I had never seen before, barely wide enough for an adult to turn sideways inside. Elsie clung to Tilda with both arms, her cardigan smeared with dust and one sock missing. Her face was white except for the blotchy redness around her eyes.
For several seconds, my mind rejected the room in front of me. I had left for Chicago three nights earlier. Ramona had kissed me in the driveway and promised she would keep Elsie’s routine normal while I handled a merger meeting. I had changed my flight after negotiations ended early and told no one I was coming home. Now my daughter was trembling beside a hole in my wall.
“Elsie.”
She looked at me and began crying harder. “Daddy.”
I crossed the room so fast my shoulder struck the edge of an armchair. Tilda loosened her hold only when Elsie reached for me. I lifted my daughter and felt how cold her hands were. “What happened?”
“She put me in there.”
“Who?”
Elsie pointed down the hall.
Ramona appeared before she could say her name.
She was still dressed for the dinner she had told me she was attending that evening, dark green dress, heels, earrings, hair pinned neatly at the back of her neck. She looked first at me, then at the broken panel, then at Tilda. The calculation on her face lasted less than a second.
“She’s lying again.”
Elsie tightened both arms around my neck.
Ramona moved toward us. “Give her to me. She had another tantrum, and Tilda has turned this into something grotesque.”
Tilda stood. “I heard her crying through the wall.”
“You heard what you wanted to hear.”
“I broke the latch because she was locked inside.”
Ramona reached toward Elsie.
I stepped between them.
“Don’t touch her.”
“Landon, this is ridiculous.”
“What was she doing in there?”
“She went in herself.”
Elsie shook violently against me. “No.”
Ramona reached again, quicker this time, and I saw my daughter recoil before Ramona’s fingers ever touched her.
My hand moved before my judgment caught up.
I struck Ramona once across the face.
The sound shocked me as much as it shocked everyone else. Her head snapped sideways and she stumbled into the wall. I hated myself for the satisfaction that lasted one ugly fraction of a second. Whatever Ramona had done, Elsie was in my arms now. I had already blocked her path. The slap had been anger, not protection.
Ramona touched her cheek. “You hit me.”
“Yes.”
I did not deny it.
Her leather purse had fallen from a brass hook beside the hidden panel. It landed open-side down, but nothing spilled out.
Elsie suddenly stiffened.
“Daddy.”
I looked at her.
Her eyes were fixed on the purse.
“Check it.”
Ramona moved.
Not toward me.
Toward the bag.
Tilda saw it too and stepped sideways, but I reached the purse first. Ramona grabbed my wrist.
“Landon, don’t.”
That was the first thing she had said since I arrived that sounded frightened.
I pulled free and opened the bag.
Lipstick. Wallet. Keys. A folded pharmacy receipt. A small pouch. Then, beneath a silk scarf, something black and rectangular.
I stared.
For twelve days, my office had been searching for a missing security device the size of a thumb drive. We had disabled some of its functions remotely but not all of them because the device was paired to an offline authorization system used by the Keats family office. I had searched my desk, the jet, two hotel rooms, my car, and every pocket of every coat I had worn that month.
Ramona had helped me search.
She had stood in my study three nights before my trip and told me I was becoming forgetful.
Now the missing device was sitting inside her purse.
Elsie whispered, “That’s why.”
I looked at her. “Why what?”
“She said I saw something I wasn’t supposed to see.”
Ramona’s face went blank.
I held the device between two fingers.
“Ramona… why is this in your bag?”
She looked at the hidden room instead of answering.
That was when I noticed what was inside it.
An empty water bottle lay on its side. A plastic dog-food bowl sat against the wall. There was a folded blanket on the floor, far too neatly placed to have been there by accident.
This had not been improvised tonight.
May you like
Someone had prepared that room to hold a child before I ever boarded the plane to Chicago.
And when Tilda said quietly, “Mr. Keats, I don’t think this is the first time,” my entire understanding of my marriage began to come apart.
