Chapter 6: Three O'Clock
Nora talked at eleven-fifteen in the morning.
It didn't take long once Daniel told her what Marcus had found — the shell company, the transfers, the will.
He laid it out without drama, the way you might explain a set of directions.
When he finished, he said only:
"You were hired to do something that would have left my daughter without a father.
I don't know what he told you about me.
But that's what you were part of."
Nora looked at her hands for a long time.
Then she said: "He told me you were dangerous.
That Claire had been afraid of you.
That Lily would be better off with her family."
"Did you believe that?"
She was quiet.
"Did you believe it after you'd been in this house for eight months?"
"No," she said.
"Not after the first week."
"But you stayed."
"He had things on me." She looked up.
"Not things I'm proud of.
From before.
He found them and he used them and I didn't see a way out."
Daniel pulled a chair and sat across from her.
"Tell me everything he told you.
Everything he asked you to do.
All of it."
She told him.
It took forty minutes.
Marcus recorded it on his phone with Nora's permission.
By the end, Nora's voice was flat and exhausted, the voice of someone who has been carrying something heavy for a long time and has finally set it down in the wrong place and knows it.
"The tea," Daniel said at the end.
"What was in it?"
"He gave me a powder.
He said it would make you ill.
Seriously ill.
He said it wouldn't—" She stopped.
"He said you'd survive."
"He said."
She nodded.
"And you believed him."
She didn't answer.
That was its own answer.
Daniel stood.
"The police are going to want to speak with you again.
This time you're going to tell them what you just told me."
"He'll deny it."
"He'll try." Daniel picked up Marcus's phone from the table.
"But you're going to be on record first."
At two forty-five, Daniel sent Lily to the neighbor's house with her backpack and her bear and a promise that he'd pick her up before dinner.
Lily went without argument.
She was six, but she understood more than six usually allowed.
At three o'clock exactly, Richard Calloway's silver car turned into the driveway.
He came through the front door looking exactly as he always did — good jacket, easy smile, the faint suggestion that he was doing you a favor by arriving.
"Daniel." He looked around the entrance hall.
"Where's Lily?"
"With a friend."
"Good.
Good." Richard moved toward the sitting room.
"So — the paperwork.
What specifically did you need to go over?"
Daniel didn't move from the doorway.
"Sit down, Richard."
Something shifted in Richard's face.
Barely.
A recalibration.
He sat.
Marcus came in from the kitchen and sat in the chair by the window.
He placed his phone on the armrest, screen up.
Richard looked at Marcus.
Then back at Daniel.
"What is this?"
"This," Daniel said, "is me giving you one chance to tell me the truth before I hand everything I have to the police and let them ask the questions instead."
Richard's smile didn't disappear.
It just stopped being a smile.
"I don't know what you think you've found—"
"Nine hundred thousand dollars, Richard."
Silence.
"Hargrove Domestic Services.
Your name on the registration."
More silence.
"And Nora," Daniel said.
"Who talked to us this morning for forty minutes.
All of it recorded."
May you like
Richard looked at the phone on Marcus's armrest.
For the first time since Daniel had known him, Richard Calloway had nothing to say.
