Her Friend Set The Poor Waitress Up On A Blind Date— Mins Later, The Mafia Boss Entered With His Dog
Chapter 5
The dog didn’t lift its head from Wren’s lap for the rest of dinner, and neither of them mentioned it again. Nathaniel stayed seated. He drank his water. He asked her about her work with questions broad enough that she could answer with anything she chose, and Wren realized it was a skill — one a person learned only after spending many years in rooms where asking the wrong question could be costly. She gave him half answers. She said she’d worked there for three years. She didn’t say why. He said he worked in real estate. She didn’t ask what kind.
Her hand remained on the dog’s head. She didn’t realize what she was doing until she’d already done it — her fingers had slipped beneath its jaw, searching for the pulse, counting seventy-eight, a little fast for an animal lying still. Then she counted its breathing, sixteen breaths a minute, steady, without wheezing, and noticed that when she lifted the skin along its spine, it returned to place a little too slowly, the kind of delay seen in an animal not drinking enough water, and she thought it needed about seventeen more fluid ounces a day before she stopped herself and pulled her hand away, heartbeat pounding in her ears. She hadn’t done that with any living creature in three years. She hadn’t allowed herself to.
Nathaniel was watching her. He said nothing, but he had seen it, and she knew he’d seen it. The frightening part wasn’t that he’d noticed. It was that he chose not to ask. He stored it somewhere. She had the feeling this man stored everything somewhere and never let anything back out until he’d decided exactly what to do with it.
Two days after that dinner, Nathaniel sat in his study at eleven-forty at night, a folder open in front of him that he’d first requested from Walter that same afternoon — a full background report on Wren Kelly, waitress, twenty-seven, no criminal record, considerable medical debt tied to a facility in Warwick. He read it twice, and on the second reading, a single line caught him in a way statistics rarely did. Two years earlier, the same year his father Rory Cross had died, a small veterinary clinic on the east side of the city had briefly employed a veterinary assistant named Wren Kelly, before her enrollment lapsed. Same clinic. Same year. Same dog, once, briefly, on an intake form nobody had thought to cross-reference until now, because the dog had come through that clinic exactly once, on an emergency visit three months before his father’s death, with an injury to its hind leg.
Nathaniel sat perfectly still. He remembered the injury. He remembered his father mentioning, in passing, that the gate had closed too fast one night and caught the dog’s leg, nothing serious, the vet had cleared it within the hour. He had never once, in two years, connected that offhand comment to anything larger.
He opened a second folder he hadn’t touched in two years, one containing everything connected to his father’s death — the official report, the photographs, the particular detail that had never sat right with him: the report stated the estate’s gate hadn’t opened at all on the night his father died, an unusual claim for a property with as much traffic as Ardith House normally carried, and one that had, at the time, simply been filed alongside a hundred other small, unexplained details in a death everyone had quietly agreed to call an accident.
He thought of the dog’s collar — the one it had worn every day of its life until the night his father died, after which it had simply stopped wearing one at all, because no one had ever thought to replace it, and no one had ever asked why the original had disappeared along with everything else connected to that house.
Nathaniel called Walter the following morning and asked, without preamble, whether he had ever had the code to his father’s gate. Walter was quiet for a long moment. “That isn’t something you pay for,” he said finally. “What I had couldn’t be bought.” Nathaniel remained still. He asked the question again, more precisely this time, and Walter, after a pause considerably longer than the question warranted, said that yes, he had.
“Rory wasn’t my father’s son,” Nathaniel said slowly, watching the pieces arrange themselves into a shape he’d spent two years refusing to properly examine. “You were the only man in this house who never asked your father a single question he didn’t already know the answer to.” He fell silent for nearly twenty seconds. Walter waited.
“I need to know,” Nathaniel said finally, “whether he had the code to the gate for a reason that has nothing to do with what happened that night. Or whether it has everything to do with it.”