Chapter 18: Box Under Cobb

Rhys's POV

At seven the next morning I walked into my father's house with my arm in a sling and told the cook I had slipped on a dock.

She believed me.

She believed everything in that house, because the alternative was to ask.

Lavinia was in the fitting room off the hall, standing on a stool in her slip while a seamstress knelt at her hem.

On the table beside her lay a pair of new white gloves, elbow length, with a heron stitched at each wrist.

"Darling," she said. "You look dreadful."

"I fell."

"You should rest. Tonight is important."

"I know. I came to see the dress."

I sounded like a man who didn't care what he said, which I had practiced for twenty-two years.

She smiled, and turned her head back to the mirror.

Her bracelet was on the vanity upstairs.

She took it off every morning to be fitted, and I had watched her put it back on every night since I was a boy.

I went up two flights with one arm.

The bracelet lay in a dish of rose water, six small charms on a chain.

The fifth was a key about the length of my thumbnail.

It took me a minute to work the ring open with my teeth.

I put the key in my pocket and the bracelet back in the dish, and went downstairs, and kissed my stepmother's cheek.

"Rest," she said again.

"Yes, Lavinia."

Harbor Trust opened at nine.

The clerk looked up at me and then at the card I signed at the desk, which said L. Cobb.

I had copied her hand off a hundred place cards.

It was slanting and hard, and it came out of my own fingers without trouble.

"Mrs. Mercer's box," I said. "She asked me to fetch a paper. I have her key."

"Of course, sir."

He took me down a flight of marble stairs into a room of steel drawers, unlocked the outer door, and left me with the long box.

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