She drove home under a sky the colour of plums, and she did not see, because she was not meant to, what began that night: a second man, and then a third, folded into the furniture of her street β a new night porter at the little hotel, a road crew with a long job and longer lunches, a taxi that waited at the corner and somehow never took a fare. By the week's end the whole street was watched the way weather is watched, constantly and without comment, and the dark car, coming down at walking pace on Thursday, found so many eyes upon it that it did not slow at all. It went past the bakery at the speed of traffic, and it did not come back again.
June, watching from behind her counter with her pencil in her hand, wrote it down in the order book anyway. Dark car, she wrote. Did not stop. And underneath, after a moment, in smaller writing: neither did we.
Chapter 11: The Test
Dominic waited until the house was asleep, and then he sent for his son.
Adrian came to the study in his shirtsleeves, a pencil still behind his ear, and found his father standing at the long window with his hands clasped behind his back, looking out at nothing the dark would show him. On the desk lay a road map of the county, folded open. Beside it, three index cards. Beside those, a pen, laid down with the precision of a man who does not like what he has written.
"Sit," Dominic said. "And then I am going to tell you a thing I would burn this house down before I said in front of another living soul."
Adrian sat.
"You know what a canary trap is," Dominic said. It was not a question, but Adrian answered anyway.
"In the intelligence services. You give every suspect a different version of the same document. The version that leaks tells you whose hands it leaked from."
"Crude," Dominic said. "Effective." He came away from the window and set one finger on the first index card. "On Friday, at dinner, in front of Tomas and the house staff, I will mention β carelessly, the way a father mentions things β that you are driving to the Sonoma vineyard on Saturday morning to walk the rows with the manager. The coast road. Alone, because you like the coast road alone. Every servant in this house will hear it, and half the town by breakfast."
His finger moved to the second card. "At the garage, where Nino and the old captains drink their coffee, it will be said that you are flying out at dawn on Sunday from the private strip, and driving yourself over the ridge road in the dark to get there, because you trust no one's driving on the ridge but your own."
"And the third?" Adrian asked, though he already knew the shape of the thing and felt his stomach tighten around it.
"The third," Dominic said, "I will say myself, at Sunday lunch, at my own table, in my brother's hearing β and in the hearing of his friend Vane, who has taken to lunching with us like a nephew. I will say that you are driving the valley road on Sunday night, after the house is quiet, to look at the cannery books by lamplight, the way you like to work. The valley road. At night. Alone."
The study was very still. Somewhere below them a clock performed its small arithmetic.
"Three circles," Dominic said. "Three lies. Each circle hears one route, and believes the others were never mentioned. If every road stays empty, then Leo is a frightened child and your grandfather's ring was a copy bought in a pawnshop, and I will apologize to God and sleep." His voice did not rise. It never rose, these days, when it mattered; it went the other way, down and flat, like a spade into earth. "And if one road fills up with men β then that road tells me whose table the knife was set at."
Adrian was quiet for a long moment. "You're fishing," he said at last, "in your own house. In your own blood."
"I am aware of the geography."
"And if it's the staff?" Adrian said. "If some poor devil repeats a dinner-table remark to a cousin β"
"Then it is the staff, and God be thanked for it, and I will deal with the staff and no one at this table will ever know why." Dominic picked up the third card and looked at it a while. "Do you know what I am hoping, Adrian? I am hoping for a traitor with a name I have never said at a christening. I am hoping to be a fool who suspected his family. A man can survive being a fool."
He set the card down and aligned it with the others, exactly, corner to corner. Adrian watched his father's hands β the old hands, mapped and steady β and understood that the steadiness was costing more than anything he had ever seen his father pay.
He did the tellings the way he did everything, without hurry and without a wasted motion.
Friday's dinner remark fell among the soup plates like a dropped coin, hardly noticed. Tomas served the fish and did not look up, and the maids carried the plates away with the remark inside the ordinary noise of the house.
At the garage on Saturday, among the coffee cups and the smell of warm oil, Nino laughed at the ridge road at dawn β "The boy has your stomach for heights, Dom" β and the lie went into the old captains' pockets with their cigarettes.
And at Sunday lunch Dominic sat at the head of his table with his brother on his right hand and Eddie Vane two chairs down, smiling and helpful and quick with the wine, and he heard himself say, in the tone of a man imparting nothing at all, that Adrian would take the valley road that night, late, to sit with the cannery ledgers; that the boy worked better with the house asleep; that he, Dominic, had given up correcting him. Benny carved the lamb and said that the valley road was a ribbon of a road at night and Adrian always did have a taste for ribbons, and passed the mint sauce to his left, and Dominic watched his brother's face above the steam of the dish and hated himself with a clean, complete hatred he had not felt since he was a young man being taught what the family business cost.
He had been a boy with this man. They had stolen plums from their mother's tree and been beaten for it in tandem, each refusing to name the other. He had held Benny's first child. Benny had held him, forty years ago, the night his wife's first labor went bad and the doctor came out of the room wiping his hands.
Now he sat at his own table and dealt lies like marked cards and read his brother's smile for a flaw.