Chapter 2 - The Logic of the Dining Room
The silence that followed her response was not empty; it had weight, texture, and a faint smell of vinegar.
Garrick’s younger brother, Julian—a boy of twenty-four who spent his father’s trust money on custom leather jackets and trips to Vancouver—was sitting three seats down, his phone balanced on his thigh beneath the edge of the table. He let out a small, wet chuckle, hiding his mouth behind his water glass when his mother looked toward him. His sister, Claire, a thin girl with bitten cuticles and a cashmere cardigan that looked two sizes too large for her, kept her eyes fixed on the small mountain of mashed potatoes on her plate, her fork tracing small, parallel lines through the butter gully.
I didn't raise my voice. When you have spent thirty years in the criminal courts of Cook County, you know that the loudest person in the room is always the one who is losing the argument. The men who kill their wives in the kitchen don't yell when they take the stand; they speak in low, reasonable tones about how the supper was cold and how they had stayed up late working on the accounts.
"Garrick," I said, my hands resting lightly on the back of the empty chair beside my daughter. "What rules are those?"
He didn't look up from his plate. He was busy separating a small wedge of fat from the marrow bone with his silver knife. "The standard rules, Evelyn. The ones that keep a house from falling into the ditch. A man works eighty hours a week to clear the line for the senior vice presidency, he expects his home to look like an asset, not a laundry mat. He expects his wife to be where she said she’d be when the car comes down the lane."
"She was at her grandmother’s house on Saturday, Garrick," I said. "I called her at three."
"She was three hours late getting back," Miriam snapped from the head of the table, her gold rings clashing against her goblet like a pair of small bells. "Garrick had the regional director from Devon Capital coming to the club for the seven o'clock tee time. Her dress wasn't even pressed. She was sitting in the mud by the greenhouse looking at some dead ferns."
"They weren't dead," Sienna whispered. Her voice was so small it seemed to come from the floorboards rather than her chest. "They were just dry."
"Quiet, Sienna," Garrick said. His tone was not angry; it was casual, the way a horse trainer speaks to a three-year-old filly that has taken a bad step near the gate. "The elders are speaking. Go see about the coffee. And make sure you use the silver pot this time—the one we got from the branch manager's retirement dinner."
Sienna's shoulder hitched again, the black canvas straps of the sling groaning against her linen blouse as she turned toward the pantry door.
I sat down in the chair beside her empty plate. The wood was cold through my skirt. I pulled my telephone from my coat pocket, laid it flat on my knee beneath the heavy linen tablecloth, and began to type with my right thumb.
To: Arthur Vance (Trustee)
Come immediately. Bring every board member you can reach. Ask Commissioner Raymond Fletcher to join you if possible.
I didn't look at the screen while I typed. When you have cross-examined three hundred police officers, your fingers know the geography of a keyboard better than your tongue knows the roof of your mouth.
"You’re being very quiet tonight, Evelyn," Miriam said, her eyes tracking the movement of my fork as I picked at a piece of cold bread. "Usually when you come down from the city, you’ve got three different stories about some clerk who stole five thousand dollars from the drainage board. Has the state run out of thieves?"
"The state never runs out of thieves, Miriam," I said, my thumb hitting the send sequence on the glass beneath the table. "They just change their zip codes."
I clicked the contact list again, finding the number for Dr. David Chen—the chief maxillofacial surgeon at Northwestern Memorial who had testified for my division in forty-four separate domestic felony trials since 2012.
"Dr. Chen," I said when the line opened on the second ring. I didn't hold the phone to my ear; I kept it flat against my hip, my voice carrying across the mahogany table with the clean, dry resonance of an indictment being read to a bailiff. "I’ll need you available this evening at the private receiving pavilion on Superior Street. We have an ulna fracture that needs an independent diagnostic scan, and I want a full soft-tissue evaluation of the left lateral cervical line before the state registry opens tomorrow morning."
Garrick’s knife stopped in the middle of a slice of beef. The silver blade made a long, thin screech against the porcelain as he turned his head six inches to the left to look at me.
"A doctor?" he said, his laugh short and dry as a cedar shaving. "That’s a little dramatic over someone tripping on the terrace, isn't it, Evelyn? We’ve already been to the clinic on Route 41. The boy there put the sleeve on her and said she didn't even need the plaster."
May you like
"I didn't fall, Garrick," Sienna said from the pantry doorway.
The room went entirely white.
