CHAPTER ONE
Marta was fixing a faucet when she heard the noise.
She liked to think of herself as a personal assistant. That was what it said on her contract, and it was probably how Mrs. Estrom would have described her if she’d had cause to do so in company. That was the respectable term, the one that didn’t make Mrs. Estrom feel like an old woman.
Marta knew the truth of it, though: most of the time, she was a glorified janitor and housekeeper. She cooked, she cleaned. She saw to the house and made sure that Mrs. Estrom had everything she needed in order to get on with her days without thinking about anything mundane. The formidable matriarch of the extended Estrom family had far better things to do with her time, spending it on everything from seeing important political figures to organizing elegant soirees.
Right now, she was asleep. Mrs. Estrom liked to go to bed at precisely ten thirty, and to be woken at seven. Marta found that arrangement usually gave her at least an hour or so to herself, although in this case she was using part of that hour to try to effect repairs to a dripping faucet in the kitchen. Mrs. Estrom could afford to get a plumber in to replace it a thousand times over, but Marta had quickly found that for small things, her employer really didn’t see the point of bringing in specialists.
Probably because Mrs. Estrom wasn’t the one having to do the work.
There was a lot of work when it came to the crumbling old house that had been the Estrom family’s home for generations, back since great-great Grandpa Estrom had first made his money on the stock market. It was huge and twisting, big enough that, back in the day, it probably had a small army of staff to maintain it.
These days, there were still staff, but they only came in periodically to do what was needed, and Marta was the one who had to arrange it when they did, making the calls, organizing the schedules. Certainly, when major repairs were needed, Marta had to stand there in her hard hat, overseeing any contractors. The rest of the time, it was just her, seeing to any problems that arose.
When she’d taken the job, she’d assumed that she would need to know about schedule management and talking to important people, basic first aid in case Mrs. Estrom’s medical conditions got out of hand, and the ability to coordinate with her various business interests, not about the inner workings of butterfly valves or minor electrical repairs.
Which all sounded as if Marta was complaining, but honestly, she found that she loved her job. Mrs. Estrom was about as generous an employer as it was possible to find, and Marta had discovered that she liked knowing that she could take care of all the small things around the place without any problems. Whenever her mother asked why Marta wasn’t going off to do something with that business degree that she’d put so much effort into, Marta just pointed out that this job paid better than half the low earning positions she’d had trying to get a foot on the ladder in the business world, and probably meant that she would have better connections at the end of it, too.
Marta had just gotten the faucet apart, ready to replace the faulty ceramic cartridge, when she heard the sound of someone moving about the house.
“Mrs. Estrom, is everything ok?”
Her employer didn’t usually get up in the night. She slept with an ease and soundness that Marta couldn’t help admiring, given that Marta mostly woke up feeling even more tired than she’d been when she went to sleep.
So if she was moving around, maybe there was something wrong. Marta had been trained to deal with a whole range of medical emergencies, since that was a big part of the reason that she was there. Mrs. Estrom’s mind might still be as sharp as ever, but at ninety, her body was slowly failing her, one minor medical complaint at a time. If Marta weren’t there, she suspected that Mrs. Estrom would quickly find herself in a home of some sort, and as her employer had said, that would kill her quicker than anything else could.
“Mrs. Estrom? Do you need something?” Marta asked as she headed out of the kitchen into the hall. The sounds were coming from the drawing room. Had her employer gotten up in the night because she wanted something from there? Usually, she found it more convenient to call down to Marta in those cases, using the phone she’d given Marta that was exclusively for communications between the two of them, so that there was never a chance of someone else being on the line. It meant that Marta sometimes had to get up in the night, just to fetch something from downstairs.
Still, Mrs. Estrom was… well, herself, and that meant that she did very much as she pleased. If she wished to wander around her own house at night, that was very much her business, not Marta’s. Marta’s business was to be there and make sure that everything around her life ran smoothly.
Marta headed for the drawing room. The light was off, so Marta flicked it on, looking around the expensive antique furniture that had been collected over several lifetimes in the family. There was no one there now, but a decanter on a small side table had been knocked over, sending a spill of what Marta knew to be particularly expensive brandy out over the floor.
“Damn it!” Marta said, and hurried forward, trying to find something to clean it up with. Thankfully, she already had a cloth ready, on hand for wiping any excess water from around the faucet. Kneeling, she started to mop it up, imagining what Mrs. Estrom would say when she saw all of this. Would she assume that Marta was drinking on the job? Or had she been the one to cause this? Maybe she was down here somewhere. Maybe she’d had some kind of medical emergency and knocked over the brandy while she staggered off out of the room.
Marta was still worrying about that when she heard the creak of a floorboard behind her. She started to turn, assuming that her employer was in there after all, but a hand grabbed her hair, yanking her head back sharply, forcing her to look up at the ceiling.
Marta cried out as she saw the flash of a knife above her, but it was too late to do anything. She tried to reach out to stop it, but it was already plunging down into her, agony bursting through her as the weapon slid in and out of her as mechanically as a sewing machine.
“Marta, is everything all right dear?” Mrs. Estrom called from upstairs.
Marta didn’t have any breath to answer. The knifeman shoved her down to the carpet, and the last thing Marta saw was the sight of her blood mingling with the spilled brandy.