She seemed as startled to see me as I was discomfited to see her. We stood unmoving, staring at each other, our mouths open, as if we were a couple of figures from an animated Swiss clock that had suddenly stopped with the opening of the door.
Like Henry Lolam and Paulie Sempiterno, surely Victoria thought that Noah Wolflaw’s invitation to Annamaria and me was reckless and inexplicable. While I was searching for words, I knew that she was deciding whether to cry out in alarm, because I was welcome only on the ground floor of the house.
Before she could scream, I stepped into the laundry room, smiled my dumb-as-a-spatula fry-cook smile, and raised the pillowcase sack in which I carried the towel-wrapped hacksaw. “I have some delicate laundry, and they told me to bring it down to you.”
Twenty-seven
SLENDER, FIVE FEET TWO, VICTORIA MORS WORE THE black slacks and simple white blouse that served as a uniform for her and Mrs. Tameed. Although she was probably in her late twenties, I thought of her as a girl, not a woman. She was pretty in an elfin sort of way, with large faded-denim eyes. Barrettes held her strawberry-blond hair back; but now—as every time I’d seen her—a couple of strands had escaped the clasps and curled down the sides of her face, which with her rosy cheeks gave her the look of a child fresh from a session of jump rope or hopscotch. Although her body would have suited a ballerina, she sometimes moved with a charming, coltish awkwardness. She tended to look at me sideways or else with her head lowered and from under her lashes, which seemed like girlish shyness but was more likely sour suspicion.
There in the laundry room, she stared at me directly, and her large, pale-blue eyes were open wide with solicitude, as if hovering over my head were a vampire bat of which I was unaware.
She said, “Oh, you didn’t have to bring the laundry yourself, Mr. Odd. I would have come to the guest tower for it.”
“Yes, ma’am, I know, but I hoped to save you the effort. It must be exhausting for you and Mrs. Tameed to take care of this big house. All the dusting and sweeping and polishing and the endless picking up after. Although of course I suppose there must be several other maids I haven’t met.”
“Haven’t you?” she said, by her tone and expression managing to present herself as a dim but winning girl who couldn’t quite follow conversations in which exchanges were longer than six words.
“Have you worked at Roseland for long?”
“I’m ever so glad for the job.”
“Well, who wouldn’t be?”
“We’re like a family here.”
“I feel the warmth.”
“And it’s such a lovely place.”
“It’s magical,” I agreed.
“The beautiful gardens, the wonderful old oaks.”
“I climbed one, spent an entire though very short night in it.”
She blinked. “You did what?”
“I climbed one of the wonderful old oaks. All the way to the wonderful top, where the limbs were almost too small to support me.”
Perhaps because I’d gone well past six words, she was confused. “Why would you do that?”
“Oh,” I said, “I just had to.”
“Climbing trees is dangerous.”
“Not climbing them can be just as dangerous.”
“I never do anything dangerous.”
“Some days, just getting out of bed is dangerous.”
She decided not to look directly at me anymore. Returning to the task of sorting laundry from the cart into the two washing machines, she said, “You can just leave your things, and I’ll deal with them, Mr. Odd.”
“My things?” I asked, because I can pretend to be as obtuse as anyone.
“Your delicate laundry items.”
I couldn’t yet decide whether or not I wanted her to starch the hacksaw, so I held on to the pillowcase sack and said, “Mr. Wolflaw must have very high standards. The house is immaculate.”
“It’s a beautiful house. It deserves to be perfectly kept.”
“Is Mr. Wolflaw a tyrant?”
Glancing sideways at me as she continued to feed the washing machines, Victoria seemed to be genuinely hurt on behalf of her boss. “Whyever would you think such a thing?”
“Well, people as rich as he is can sometimes be demanding.”
“He’s a wonderful employer,” she declared, with a note of disapproval aimed at me for doubting the exemplary nature of the master of Roseland. “I never want another.” With the tenderness of an infatuated schoolgirl, she added, “Never ever.”
“That’s what I thought. He seems like a saint.”
She frowned. “Then why did you say ‘tyrant’?”
“Due diligence. I’m going to apply for a job.”
She met my eyes directly again, and said dismissively, “There aren’t any openings.”
“Seems like there aren’t enough security guards.”
“Two of them are on vacation.”
“Ah. Henry Lolam says he gets eight weeks off. That’s a generous vacation.”
“But there aren’t any openings.”
“Henry only took three of his eight weeks. He says the world is changing too much out there. He only feels safe here.”
“Of course he feels safe here. Who wouldn’t feel safe here?”
I suspected that the thirty-four dead women in the subcellar of the mausoleum had at some point not felt safe in Roseland; however, I didn’t bring up the subject because I didn’t want to be boorish.
If I had ever fantasized about being a CIA interrogator, I’d lost interest in the job when the law limited them to extracting information from terrorists only with the offer of candy. But I was pleased with myself for getting some interesting responses from the maid even without a Three Musketeers bar.
Now that I’d switched techniques and had begun to needle her a little, our chat might turn hostile, in which case I would have to solve the problem she presented before she could report my presence in the house to anyone.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet figured out how to deal with her, because I was not inclined to shoot her as a first option.
She was nearly finished sorting the laundry.
I said, “Henry Lolam told me Roseland is an unhealthy place, but I think he must have been joking, considering that he can’t bear to be away from it.”
“Henry reads too damn much poetry, he thinks too damn much, and he talks too damn much,” Victoria Mors said, sounding not at all like a schoolgirl.
“Wow,” I said, “you really are like a family.”
For just an instant, the hatred in her eyes told me that she wanted to bite off my nose and turn me over to Paulie Sempiterno so that he could put a bullet in my face.
But Victoria Mors was a quick-change artist. As I set down the pillowcase sack, she retracted her fangs, blinked the venom out of her eyes, washed the vinegar out of her voice with honey, and spoke with the quivering emotion of a winsome child defending the honor of her beloved father.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Odd.”
“De nada.”
“Please forgive me.”
“Forgiven.”
“It’s just, well, I can’t stand it when someone’s unfair to Mr. Wolflaw, because he’s really so … he’s so incredible.”
“I understand. It really steams me when people say bad things about Vladimir Putin.”
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
Victoria had finished with the laundry, so she wrung her hands as if she’d spent a lot of time recently learning dramatic skills from silent-movie melodramas.
“It’s just that poor Henry, he’s a nice man, he is rather like a brother to me, but he’s one of those people—you could give him the world, and he would be unhappy because you didn’t give him the moon, too.”