Chapter 6: The Housekeeper's Price
Rosa's apartment was a forty-minute train ride from the Whitmore penthouse — a small, clean place above a dry cleaner on a street that the Whitmore family would never have reason to visit.
The door was unlocked.
Elliot pushed it open slowly.
Nora stayed close behind him.
The apartment was tidy.
A single cup on the kitchen counter.
A chair pulled slightly out from the table, as though someone had stood up quickly.
Rosa's coat was still on the hook by the door.
Her phone was on the floor beside the chair.
The screen was cracked.
Elliot crouched and looked at it without picking it up.
The last outgoing call was to his number, forty minutes ago.
The call that hadn't connected.
"She was here," Nora said quietly.
"She was here and she left fast." He stood.
"Or she was made to leave."
On the kitchen table, held down by the edge of the cup, was a single sheet of paper.
Not a note.
A photograph, printed on plain copy paper, slightly blurred — the kind of image pulled from a security camera.
It showed Rosa.
Standing outside a building Elliot recognized immediately.
Frey's office building.
Taken today, from across the street, within the last three hours.
Someone had been watching them.
Someone had followed Rosa there, or had followed Elliot and Nora and seen Rosa arrive separately.
He turned the photograph over.
On the back, in his mother's handwriting — the same careful, controlled script from the note under the desk blotter — were five words.
*Let this be enough warning.*
Nora read it over his shoulder.
Her voice was very steady when she spoke.
"She took her."
"I don't know that yet."
"Elliot." Nora's hand closed around his arm.
"She cut a rope while I was hanging from a balcony.
She does not send warnings.
She sends messages."
He looked at the photograph again.
Then he pulled out his phone and called Frey.
Frey answered on the second ring.
"We have a problem," Elliot said.
"I know.
Someone called my office twenty minutes ago asking which clients I had seen today.
My receptionist said nothing, but the call itself is a message." A pause.
"Is the woman who came with you — the one who waited in the lobby — is she safe?"
"We don't know.
She's missing."
A longer pause.
"Then we need to move faster than I planned.
I've already put in a preliminary request to the probate court for access to the original filing records.
But if your mother has allies in that office — and given the money involved, she may — we need something she can't suppress."
"The recording," Elliot said.
"The recording proves intent on the balcony.
It does not prove the will was altered.
We need Bellamy." Frey's voice was careful.
"Arthur Bellamy has been silent for three years.
I believe he was paid to be silent.
But if Rosa is in danger — if your mother is willing to go this far — then Arthur needs to know what kind of person he protected with that silence."
"Can you reach him?"
"I can try.
Tonight." A pause.
"Elliot.
Keep your wife somewhere your mother doesn't know about.
Not a hotel she could find through your accounts.
Somewhere off the record."
Elliot looked at Nora.
She was already looking at him.
"I know a place," she said quietly.
He told Frey he would call in the morning.
He ended the call.
Nora was already moving toward the door.
She stopped at the hook where Rosa's coat still hung, and touched the sleeve once, lightly, before she walked out.
They took the stairs.
Not the lift.
Outside on the street, the dry cleaner below Rosa's apartment was still open, the light yellow through the window.
A woman inside looked up as they passed, then looked back down at her work.
Halfway down the block, Elliot's phone buzzed again.
The same unknown number.
This time it wasn't eight words.
May you like
It was one.
*Basement.*
