CHAPTER 1: The Night the Orchestra Stopped

The call to Scottsdale went through at half past midnight.

Phillip made it from the east sitting room with a detective present and a recording running.

Julian sat near the window.

Nora had returned from giving her statement and was seated across from him, the locket still around her neck, a cup of tea growing cold on the table beside her.

Gerald Fitch answered on the fourth ring.

He sounded like a man who had been waiting for this call for eleven years and had made a kind of peace with the waiting.

His voice was steady, slightly hoarse, the voice of someone in his mid-seventies who had smoked for decades and stopped too late.

"I wondered when you'd find the recordings," he said, before Phillip had finished introducing himself.

"She told me she'd made them.

I didn't believe her at the time.

Helena Hawthorne was a very thorough woman."

"Mr.

Fitch," Phillip said.

"I want to be clear about why we're calling."

"You want my records," Fitch said.

"And my statement.

And you want to know whether I'll cooperate before Malcolm's attorney offers me a reason not to." A pause.

"The answer is yes.

I've been retired for eleven years.

I have a daughter in Phoenix and two grandchildren.

I'm not going to spend whatever time I have left protecting a man who paid me to do something I should have refused."

The detective leaned forward slightly.

"What exactly did Malcolm Hawthorne pay you to do, Mr.

Fitch?" Phillip asked.

A long silence.

"He paid me to make it look like a fall," Fitch said.

"He paid me forty thousand dollars and told me it was a family matter.

He said the woman had become unstable and was going to destroy everything her husband had built." Another pause.

"I had a man on my team.

Former military.

I told myself it was a different kind of work.

I told myself a lot of things." His voice didn't waver, but something underneath it did.

"I have the original contract.

I have the wire transfer records.

I have a written instruction Malcolm sent by courier, which was stupid of him, but he was in a hurry and he thought I was completely in his pocket."

"Are you willing to provide all of that to law enforcement?" Phillip asked.

"I'm willing to drive it to the nearest FBI field office myself if that's what it takes," Fitch said.

"Tell me where to go."

Julian looked at the window.

The grounds outside were still lit.

The police vehicles were still in the drive.

He could see, from this angle, the shape of the ballroom windows, the chandeliers still burning inside, the white roses still climbing the columns.

Two hundred people had come tonight expecting an engagement announcement.

They had gotten something else entirely.

Nora was watching him.

She had been watching him, quietly, for most of the last hour.

Not with pity.

With something steadier than that.

"He's going to give them everything," she said softly, when Phillip moved to the corridor to continue the call.

"Yes," Julian said.

"Is that enough?"

"It's more than enough." He looked at her.

"Malcolm will be charged.

Fitch will be charged.

Camille has already told the detective everything Malcolm told her, which corroborates the recordings." He paused.

"It's enough."

Nora looked at the locket in her palm.

She had taken it off while the detective was photographing it as evidence and put it back on when he was done.

The detective had been careful with it.

He had handled it like something fragile, which it was, and like something important, which it also was.

"Your mother hid this for eighteen years," Julian said.

"She was frightened," Nora said.

"She was a seamstress with a daughter and no money and a very powerful man who had made it clear what happened to people who talked." She closed her hand around the locket.

"She did the best she could with what she had."

"So did yours," Julian said.

Nora looked up.

"She trusted a six-year-old girl," he said.

"With the most important thing she owned.

She trusted that the truth would find its way back eventually." He paused.

"She was right."

Nora's eyes went bright.

She pressed her lips together and looked at the ceiling briefly, the way people do when they are refusing to cry in front of someone they have only just met.

Then she looked back at him.

"She would have liked you," she said.

"Helena.

She talked about you, that afternoon in the garden.

She said you asked too many questions and that it was the best thing about you."

Julian almost smiled.

It was the closest he'd come all evening.

"She wasn't wrong," he said.

Outside, a car door closed.