They Wrote Me Fat and Doomed, So the Judge Paid My Fine novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Locked Drawer

Her father calls her 'that' at dinner and takes her keys; she finds her mother's sealed letter, and a man with a knife waits under the orange trees.

My father called me "that" at dinner.

"Tell that to pass the salt," he said to the footman, with me sitting two feet away.

The long dining room of the Ardaval house had forty chairs and four of us at it.

Count Aurelio Ardaval sat at the head, enormous in a dark coat.

He wore rings on every finger.

He had been eating for an hour and talking for most of it.

"The Queen has been generous," he said. "She has told me the estate stays with the family."

He lifted his glass.

"In return, you will go quietly on Midsummer."

"To the salt flats?" I asked.

"To wherever the Lord Justice sends you," he said.

"He's going to cut my hair off in the plaza," I said.

"Then it will grow," my father said, and reached for a duck leg.

I looked at him.

He was fifty-five and heavy and had never once asked me a question that ended in a question mark.

"You look at that duck like it is the first one you've ever seen," he said.

"Put it down. You've shamed me enough this week."

I picked up the duck.

I tore a piece off it with my fingers and ate it, and looked right at him while I chewed.

[+10. Refused to apologize for your body.]

His face went purple.

"The keys," he said. "Give me your keys."

"Which keys?" I asked.

"All of them. Your mother's room, your own. The strongroom."

"You will have no keys after Midsummer, so you may as well have none now."

I put them on the table.

I did it slowly, because the maid at the door was watching.

I wanted her to see what he did next.

He swept them into his pocket without looking at them.

"That will be all," he said.

I didn't go to bed.

At midnight I took a candle and went up to the east wing, to the corridor where my mother's room was.

My father had her keys.

But the old Ximena had been a girl who got what she wanted, and she had known where a spare was hidden.

It was under the third tile of the window seat.

I knew that the way I knew the garden and the scissors and the stair. The body just knew.

The room was cold and smelled of dust and a dry floral scent I didn't recognize.

A bed, a table, a dressing glass with a sheet over it.

In the table was a drawer with a small lock.

The key was on a ribbon around the neck of a china cat.

Inside the drawer was a letter in a hand I had never seen.

It was sealed with black wax and addressed, "For my daughter Ximena, on the day she needs it."

I turned it over twice.

It was her mother's, and it had a second paper folded in with it, thick and creamy, stamped with a notary's seal.

I didn't open it.

I thought: not here, not with him in the house.

I tucked both papers into the front of my gown and went down the back stair.

The kitchen was dark and warm.

Someone had left a pot of rice and a cold roast out on the table.

I stood at it in the dark and ate with my hands.

The gate bell rang once, far off, and stopped.

I had a feeling I didn't like.

I went to the garden door and looked out.

The orange trees stood in rows in the moonlight, black and silver.

Under the third tree, someone was standing still.

A man, in a dark coat, holding something low against his leg that caught the light.

A knife.

He was not looking at the house.

He was looking at my window, on the second floor, where my candle wasn't.

I stepped back from the glass.

[Next scripted event: none. Unscripted attempt on your life detected.]

[Plot is correcting itself.]

"Great," I whispered. "Thanks for that."

I went up the back stair with the letter against my ribs and my heart going so hard I could hear it.

My room was dark.

I didn't light the candle.

I crossed to the bed in the dark.

My hand found the poker by the hearth, and I held it in both fists.

If he came through the door, I would hit him.

If he came through the window, I would hit him too.

A board creaked on the roof outside.

The latch on the window turned, from the outside.

The shutters swung in.

A tall dark shape swung a leg over the sill and sat there against the moon.

It had something in its hand.

I swung the poker.

It stopped in the air, caught by a hand the size of a dinner plate.

"Good arm," said Bastian Orrelo, from the windowsill. "Wrong man."

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