The Gold Digger's Ledger novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: The Bare Library

I didn't sleep.

I lay in Tristan's bed with his arm heavy across my ribs.

I listened to him breathe, and I thought about twenties.

At eight, I slipped out from under his arm and found Gus in the hall, dressed and waiting.

He looked as if he had expected me.

"Good morning, Miss Dunleavy."

"You said you live in the walls," I said. "I want to see the fourth floor."

He looked at me for a long moment with his clear blue eyes.

Then he took a brass key off the chain at his belt, and said, "Take my arm."

The fourth floor smelled like dust.

Gus unlocked the door and pushed it open, and I stood in the doorway and understood the paint.

There was no paint.

There were four rooms, and they were empty.

Pale rectangles on the wallpaper, where pictures had hung for a hundred years.

A bare floor with four dents in it where a piano had stood.

One chair. One dust sheet, folded on the chair, with nothing underneath.

"The paintings went in March," Gus said. "The piano went in April."

His voice dropped.

"It was my wife's. She played it every Christmas morning of her life."

I put a hand over my mouth.

"My son, Tristan's father, died six years ago," Gus said.

"He was a charming man, and a terrible one with money. He put the whole of it into one friend's idea and lost it in an afternoon."

"All of it?"

"Everything but this house, and the house isn't ours."

He tapped the floor with his cane.

"Honor hid it. She told me I was getting forgetful, and she took the accounts."

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