Chapter 4: The Box Behind the Wardrobe
They discharged me the following morning.
Gideon sent a car.
Not Walter — a different driver, someone I hadn't seen before.
He didn't explain why, and I didn't ask.
The mansion looked the same from the outside.
Stone and glass and the flat gray surface of the lake behind it, still in the November cold.
But something had shifted in the air of the place, the way a room feels different after a window has been left open overnight.
Gideon met me at the side entrance.
"Sera is at lunch in town," he said.
"She'll be gone another hour."
He led me upstairs.
Not the back staircase.
The main one, wide and carpeted, with a solid oak railing that I held with my good hand.
Sera's room was at the end of the east corridor.
Gideon opened the door without knocking, which told me something about how the conversation between them had gone since yesterday.
The room was immaculate.
That was the first thing I noticed.
Not tidy — immaculate.
Everything placed.
Nothing left to chance.
Gideon crossed to the wardrobe on the far wall.
He moved it two inches to the left.
Behind it, flush against the baseboard, was a flat wooden box.
He lifted it out and set it on the bed.
"I found this three days ago," he said.
"I was looking for a set of documents my father left.
I had no reason to search her room.
The wardrobe had shifted during the cleaning and I saw the edge of it."
He opened the box.
Inside: a notebook, a folded letter, and a small glass bottle with a cork stopper, still faintly stained at the bottom with something pale and viscous.
Olive oil.
My breath left me slowly.
"The notebook," Gideon said.
I picked it up with my good hand.
The handwriting was neat, slanted, controlled.
Sera's, I assumed, though I had never seen her write.
The first page was a list of names.
Eight names.
Patricia Holt was third from the top.
My name — Adeline Marsh — was at the bottom, written in slightly darker ink, as if added later.
Beside each name was a date, a short note, and a single word in the margin.
Patricia Holt.
*Allergic reaction, kitchen.
Inconclusive.*
The one above her.
*Reported fall, main staircase.
Resigned.*
The one above that.
*Emotional distress.
Left voluntarily.*
Beside my name, the margin word had not yet been written.
There was only a question mark.
My hand was not entirely steady when I set the notebook down.
"Eight nurses," I said.
"In three years."
"The agency told me the turnover was due to my father's condition.
That he was difficult."
"My father," Gideon said, "is the easiest man in this house."
I looked at the glass bottle.
"She kept it."
"She kept all of it." He picked up the folded letter.
"This is the one that concerns me most."
He held it out.
I unfolded it carefully.
It was addressed to a name I didn't recognize — a solicitor, from the letterhead.
The language was formal, dense, but the meaning was clear enough once I read it twice.
It was an inquiry about the conditions under which a live-in caregiver's employment contract could be voided if the patient's condition deteriorated.
And beneath that, a second question, underlined in pencil.
*In the event of the patient's death, does the caregiver retain any claim to the estate under the terms of a verbal agreement?*
I read it again.
"She thinks your father promised something to one of the nurses," I said.
"Or she's afraid he did." Gideon took the letter back.
"My father has been asking to change his will for the past four months.
Sera knows this.
She does not know what the changes are."
The room was very quiet.
"She's been removing anyone who gets close to him," I said.
"Yes."
"Because she's afraid one of them is the reason he wants to change it."
"Yes."
I looked at the question mark beside my name.
"Am I?"
Gideon looked at me steadily.
"No," he said.
"But she doesn't know that.
And that makes you exactly as dangerous to her as if you were."
A door opened somewhere downstairs.
We both went still.
Sera's voice rose from the entrance hall, bright and carrying.
"Gideon?
I came back early.
The restaurant was dreadful."
Her footsteps started up the main staircase.
Gideon closed the box.
Slid it behind the wardrobe.
Moved the wardrobe back.
He was fast.
Precise.
A man who had done things that required not being seen.
"Sit down," he said quietly.
"On the chair by the window.
You're recovering.
You came upstairs to rest."
"And you?"
"I came to check on you."
I sat.
The door opened.
Sera stood in the frame with her coat still on, her eyes moving from me to Gideon and back again with the speed of someone who had spent a lifetime reading rooms.
"How sweet," she said.
"You're playing nurse to the nurse."
May you like
Her smile was perfect.
Her eyes were not.
