The Exiles (20 page)

“It’s the pastry
deck,
” Kiara said to them before leading the group over to the countertop. “It’s far enough away from the hot kitchen that the stone could be kept ice cold, day in and out.”

“And to think we just spent a fortune on marble,” the second twentysomething said to the first. Then, noticing Emily eavesdropping, she said, “We own a bakery, small scale, in Providence. Near
Brown,
” she rolled her eyes toward the college-tour mom.

“I almost went into the food industry,” Emily said. “Cheese-making.” It sounded so real when she said it out loud, like a dream that had come
this close
to fruition.

“You’re based where?” the first twentysomething asked Emily. “New England cheeses are having a renaissance, but you must know that.”

“I’m in New York,” Emily said, and almost corrected herself,
almost told them she was a Newport resident, but what she felt, more than anything, was that that wasn’t true. She couldn’t possibly feel less like a Newport resident.

“Upstate?” The second girl asked. Unlike in Manhattan, there were cows and goats and dairy farms upstate.

Emily nodded. It was a small nod, a minor neck twitch, a half lie. Then she walked quickly into the next room, catching up with Kiara and the rest of the group. Her chest began to tighten, her head to float. She had just lied without premeditation, without even noticing it until the fabrications were out of her mouth. When had this started? Lying was a form of thievery, stealing facts and inserting them into her own life story. This tour was only supposed to last forty-five minutes, yet already Emily felt as if she’d been on it for days. She hadn’t taken a pill since before dinner last night, and now her remaining meds were in the bottom of the diaper bag, with Nate and the Rufino. Crap.

She should sneak out of the Elms. She should go back to the Viking to find Nate. She should at least call him. She was rarely away from Trevor for this long.

“Follow me, this is a treat just for the underground tour!” Kiara motioned the group through a doorway, past a small throng of other tourists wearing headsets, who were taking the eight-dollar self-guided route. “Seriously, we’re going to go all the way up to the roof next, eighty steps up! But first, even though you thought we were in the basement, there’s one more level down!” There was always one more level down, Emily knew. Even when you were at absolute zero.

She lowered herself slowly onto the stairs, shallow and slick, a lawsuit waiting to happen. (Easy money! Emily thought before coming to her senses.) With her left hand she clung to the metal railing, cold in her grasp. At the bottom of the flight, the other
tourers stood uneasily with their eyes to the ground. There was nothing else to do. This room was an empty expanse, a completely underground dungeon the size of a backyard swimming pool. Emily’s eyes locked on the basement’s brick walls, marred by soot and dust. It wouldn’t surprise her to hear that the original owners had kept their prisoners here. She imagined the early WASP settlers had bound and gagged the Jews and Catholics who mistakenly wandered onto their property—but then she remembered that despite this town’s appearance of privilege, Newport was founded as a bastion of acceptance. If Nate’s partners were to be believed, to this day the year-rounders were devoted to diversity and rampant self-expression. And yachts.

“Welcome to the utilities rooms,” Kiara said. She pointed up at the large pipes overhead. “If you turn to the cabinet on your left, this way,” and she motioned to the crowd’s left, “can any of you tell me what this contraption was used for?”

As if in answer, Emily’s phone rang. She edged away from the tour, toward the back wall of the basement, and flipped open her cell. “Nate, thank God,” she whispered into it.

“Emily Latham?” a voice said. Not Nate. She hadn’t looked at the caller ID.

“Who’s calling?” Emily kept both her voice and her eyes low.

“Ma’am, I’m Lieutenant Anthony Ogden, New York Police Department. Anna Barber gave me your name and number. We’re taking statements from the guests who attended her party last Wednesday. There was a theft from the Barbers’ home that fits the time frame of the party.”

“Oh,” Emily said, afraid to breathe. A lieutenant this time. “Yes, I had heard.” The lieutenant didn’t respond, apparently waiting for more from Emily. Her hand shook as she clutched the phone. “I didn’t see any theft, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“If you could recount your own activities during the party, it would help. When you arrived, where in the apartment you spent time, and when you left.”

Emily suddenly felt like a suspect. The air in the basement was damp. “This cabinet was a lightbulb tester!” Kiara said, her voice slicing through Emily’s interior tintamar. Being kept in this room as a prisoner wouldn’t be so bad. It would beat being paraded in public, being locked in stocks. Being humiliated in Manhattan district court. “The house’s spare bulbs were stored here, on the subbasement level,” Kiara said, “and who would want to climb all of the way up to the main floors to replace a light, only to discover it was faulty?”

“That whole thing is a lightbulb tester? A lightbulb
tester?
” asked the prospective Brown student. “That whole cabinet? Whatever.”

“This isn’t really a good time,” Emily said into the phone. “I’m on a historic tour, it’s a holiday weekend.”

“Of course,” the officer said. “I can schedule a time to come up and talk with you in person.”

“In person?” Emily felt a wheeze rising to the top of her lungs. “I didn’t see anything. And I live in Newport now, you can’t come up to Newport.” She was trying to sound polite, but all that seemed to be coming out was anxiety. She wished Nate were here, and not just because he had her pills on him. “I wouldn’t want you to waste your time,” she said.

“We’re covering our bases, Ms. Latham. One of the Barbers’ other guests mentioned that she’d seen you walk to the back of the apartment, and that’s where the theft occurred. That makes you a person we’d like to talk to, in our fact-gathering.”

Fuck.

She inhaled deeply and held the air in her lungs, trying to bring on the cotton-like calm (a calm that even Jeanne admitted
might be mostly placebo effect) that came with an Inderal, tried to visualize those pills migrating from the bottom of the bag that was with Nate to the base of her tongue that was here in the basement of the Elms. She feigned a swallow. Feel the peace, she instructed herself. She felt, instead, an escalating buzz. The subbasement’s air grew heavy and solid. Who? Who saw her go into the Barbers’ study? Who!

“I went to the back of the apartment, sure,” she said, measuring out her words, trying to keep the pace slow and natural. “There’s a bathroom there.”

“Sure,” the lieutenant said.

“Plenty of people went back there during the party.”

“Yours is the only name that’s come up so far.”

“I wasn’t the only one.” She sounded angry. She needed to breathe.

Across the room, the tour group seemed to be planning an insurgency. “You call that a lightbulb tester? Did they even have incandescent lights when this house was built?” a father on the tour with two teens said, defiant. “Edison didn’t get going with electricity until, what, the 1880s?”

“The Elms was completed well
after
Edison and his invention,” Kiara shot back. Emily looked up. “This house is only a century old. It’s new,” Kiara said. Emily tried to focus on Kiara’s words, on the fact that while the cops were wasting their time tracking down a useless piece of art, the rest of the world was continuing, in mundane fashion, to tour mansions.

“Who?” said the lieutenant on the phone.

“Who what?”

“Who else went to the back of the apartment during the party?”

“Who else?” Emily hadn’t actually seen anyone else go to the back of the apartment, but surely someone must have, at
some point? She couldn’t be the only person who’d needed to pee while the powder room was occupied. But she blanked: She couldn’t remember the name of anyone who was at the party at all, other than herself and Nate and Anna and Randy. She couldn’t remember a single other person. “Anna,” she said. “Anna Barber wandered back there. I saw her.” Technically, Emily hadn’t seen Anna leave the kitchen the entire night, but at some point, to go to bed at least, she had to have gone back toward the study.

“She lives in the apartment, ma’am. There’s nothing questionable about her wandering back there.”

“Are you kidding?” Emily said. She’d spoken more loudly than intended, and the tourers briefly glanced her way. They’d paid fifteen dollars apiece for this walk-and-talk. Emily lowered her voice. “Of course it’s suspicious. I can’t remember ever seeing a hostess—a hostess from this crowd—leave the kitchen area during her own party. Especially Anna. She’s usually camped out at the doorway that separates the kitchen from the living room. First of all, because she likes to lord over the whole affair, anyone will tell you she’s a control freak.” Anna was a control freak. That was true, at least. “Plus, she’s scared shitless that the caterers are going to walk off with pieces of her silver. So yes, it certainly is suspicious that she’d go to the back of her own apartment, out of eyeshot from what’s going on. Trust me.” Emily stopped, listened to her own heart. She was almost proud of her quick save, a sure sign that all of those years in marketing and advertising had paid off.

“Okay, so Ms. Barber was back there. Anyone else?”

“Like I said, there’s a bathroom back there. I’m sure other people had to pee, but I didn’t take down names.” She tried to picture the party, exactly who was standing at the bar when she grabbed her first drink, when she went in for a refill, but all she
could picture was the Rufino with its glaring swatches of gray and orange, like torn shards of police hazard tape. “You really want me to try to think back to who peed at a party I attended half a week ago? Are you serious? I mean, if Anna was back there, others were, too.”

“Right.” He paused. “Obviously, as you said, this isn’t a good time to talk. How about I call you tomorrow? We can set up a time for me to see you in Newport on Tuesday.”

“I’ll look forward to it,” Emily said, hanging up the phone. She remained against the far wall, reluctant to rejoin the tour, which seemed to have stalled in this room.

“This house obviously postdates Edison, you’d know that if you’d been listening,” one of the Providence bakers said to the teens’ father. “The house is practically new.”

“New isn’t a century old. A century old is just that. It’s
old,
” said the father, squaring his shoulders. “A century ago people weren’t even driving cars.”

“A century ago we were already in the modern age, buster,” said the second baker.

The world was being overrun by idiots, and it was Emily who was being hunted by the police? She opened her mouth to talk—the modern age started more than four hundred years ago, with Machiavelli’s push toward progress!—but then Kiara gestured to the crowd and began to lead them back up and out of the room. The modern age is long over, Emily nearly hollered at the departing tour.

Emily stayed where she was. Why talk, anyway? Who would trust the words that came out of her mouth? Everything she touched turned to crap. After nearly forty years of barely skating by, she was done. No money, no job, no brain cells firing, and the cops on the way. She had to tell Nate about the painting. She clenched her jaw and felt the courage drain out of her.
She slid to the ground, her body like dead weight, heavy on the floor. She’d stay here until tomorrow. She’d stay here forever. If the NYPD wanted to take her statement, let them come to the basement of the Elms. Let them arrest her on this soot-stained concrete floor, at rock bottom. It was over.
It was over.
Like the era of grand mansion living in Newport, Emily’s life as she knew it was over.

CHAPTER
18

Trespass

T
HE
N
ARRAGANSETT HOUSE WAS BEAUTIFUL
. Not George Bedecker beautiful—austerely, intellectually, architecturally impressive—but classic, historic, kick-off-your-shoes-and-smell-the-sea warm. The wide plank floors and oak door frame of the back mudroom showed signs of everyday wear, divots and cracks and damp spots of raw wood where the paint’s seal had cracked. Deeper inside, the home was decked out with the kind of furnishings Nate figured might come from a 1950s department store sale. The living room was filled with conservative, upholstered set pieces, all soft lines and matte finishes—with a few nineteenth-century antiques thrown in.

After changing Trevor’s diaper, Nate put the boy down for his nap, laying him flat on the living room’s fluffed, floral sofa. He pushed a console table against the front of the couch, caging his child into a makeshift crib. With the sleeping boy securely boxed in, Nate took himself on a full house tour, as calm as if he’d been invited in as a guest.

The place was noticeably clean and airy, smelling of floor wax and detergent, acerbic and citrus. The rooms were so spotless and dust free that, for a moment, Nate worried someone was currently living here, that he’d actually broken and entered into a stranger’s full-time residence. No, he told himself, the house was vacant and had been for some time. The shades were all shut tight and the refrigerator had been emptied and wiped clean. The kitchen cabinets were stocked but only with canned goods and nonperishables. As if appraising the home’s contents for auction, Nate looked in every drawer and cabinet as he canvassed the space. A tall chest stretched along the edge of a hall that connected the kitchen to the front vestibule. The cabinet’s top-left drawer was practically empty, like George’s buildings. Only a thin, spindly silver pen, barely tarnished, was nestled against the drawer’s side, next to a small blank notepad, white with a barely discernible gray grid. In the right-hand drawer, Nate found merely a square, unmarked gray box containing standard silver paper clips. The house where Nate grew up had been similarly devoid of extraneous matter (of piles of change, skiffs of torn notepaper, clipped coupons), not just to the naked eye but below the surface as well. Even the closets at Bedecker House had been expertly organized and pared down to the basics, except for the armoire in Nate and Charlie’s room. The boys had used that closed-door space as the repository for everything they owned, shoving their baseball cards and sweatshirts haphazardly inside, keeping the mayhem out of their father’s sight.