Chapter 6: The Brake Line
The garage sat at the far end of the estate, past the stables that no longer held horses, and it smelled the way garages had smelled in every decade of Dominic Serra's life: oil, rubber, hot metal. He stood in the doorway in his party clothes, the silk of his shirt gone dark with sweat at the collar, and watched Sal Moretti work.
Sal was seventy-one and had kept Serra cars running since before Adrian was born. He did not hurry for anyone, not even for Dom, and he did not speak while he worked. The silver coupe sat up on the lift with its underside lit by two work lamps, and Sal lay on a creeper beneath it with only his legs showing, saying nothing for a long time, which Dominic understood to be a bad sign.
When the legs finally slid out, Sal stood up slowly, one hand pressed to the small of his back, and held something between his thumb and forefinger. A length of rubber hose, no longer than a child's hand, with a fitting at either end. He carried it to the workbench and laid it down with the care of a man laying down a snake.
Sal turned the hose under the lamp. The cut ran across it at an angle, clean as a surgeon's work, deep enough that the wall of the hose was held together by less than a fingernail's thickness. "Brake line," Sal said. "Front. Somebody knew what he was doing. Not a tear, not wear, not a stone. A blade, and a hand that stopped exactly where it meant to stop."
"How long would it have held?"
"Through the party, easy. Through the gates, easy." Sal turned the hose a fraction. "It would have gone on the mountain road, on a bend, the first time your son pressed the pedal hard and meant it. The pressure would finish the cut. No brakes at forty miles an hour on the ridge road. That's not an accident, Dom. That's a grave with a date on it."
Dominic looked at the little piece of rubber for a long moment. He thought of Adrian at four years old, asleep across this same workbench with a socket wrench in his fist. He thought of the switchbacks above the valley, and the guardrail that existed only where the county remembered to be afraid.
"Who knew the car would be here tonight?" he asked.
"Half the county knew he was driving himself. He always drives himself."
Dominic nodded toward the lift. "Nobody touches it, nobody washes it, nobody drives it. Lock this building and give me the key yourself, not to the house." He turned toward the door, then stopped. "Sal. The men from the caterers. Did any of them come near this garage tonight?"
Sal shook his head. "I was at the party till the cake fell, same as everyone. I saw nobody. And the two waiters you're asking the whole estate about —" He shrugged. "Nobody's seen them since the cake went down. Not at the gates, not on the road. Men don't vanish off this hill, Dom. Unless somebody opens the door for them."
The great hall, when Dominic came back to it, had the air of a battlefield after the armies have gone home. The cake lay where it had fallen, a five-story ruin of white and gold, the sugar roses ground into the parquet, and a pair of house men were working at it with flat shovels and a silence that said they knew better than to be heard.
On the long sofa by the cold fireplace, Poppy Lane was asleep.
She lay on her side with her knees drawn up, her party shoes still on, one hand tucked under her cheek and the other fisted in the skirt of her dress, which was ruined — frosting down the front of it, chocolate on her chin. Somebody, one of the house women, had covered her with a man's dinner jacket.
Standing over the sofa with her arms wrapped around herself was June. Her hair had come loose from its pins in a way she had not yet noticed. She was watching her daughter breathe the way people watch a candle in a wind, and when Dominic came up beside her she spoke without turning, in the low, flat voice of a woman holding herself together with both hands.
"They said you wanted us kept here."
"I wanted you kept safe here."
"They'll say it was us." The words came out of her all at once. "I've been standing here doing the arithmetic, Mr. Serra, so let me save you the trouble. A broke baker nobody's heard of. A cake that falls down in front of two hundred of your friends the one night somebody cut your son's brake line, and my six-year-old did it not ten feet from him. I know how this story sounds to men like yours. It sounds like we were the delivery."
"Look at me, Mrs. Lane."
She turned. Her eyes were dry, which frightened him more than tears would have; he had buried a wife and a daughter and he knew the dry stage came after the shaking.
"Your daughter," Dominic said, "told me a secret in my own ear at my own table, in front of two hundred people who would not have crossed the room to save me the trouble of dying. She told me about a car, and brakes, and a mountain road, and tonight. I believed a six-year-old child with cake on her hands over the word of grown men, and I kept my son in this house on a lie about a song. Sal Moretti has just shown me the brake line of Adrian's car, cut through to the last breath of rubber. Tonight that little girl stopped my son from dying on a bend above the valley."
He let that sit in the air between them. June's hands, folded across her own ribs, tightened until the knuckles went white.
"Whatever else is said in this house, by anyone, about anyone — it will not be said about her." Dominic looked down at the sleeping child, at the ruined dress and the borrowed jacket. "She is the reason there is still an heir in this family. I do not forget a thing like that, Mrs. Lane. I am not built to forget it."
"And the two men?" June whispered. "The waiters she heard?"
"Gone," Dominic said. "Off my hill like smoke. Which means somebody helped them, and that is my problem, in my house, and I will finish it." He turned his head toward the hall's great doors, where Adrian stood in the shadow with his tie undone, having heard, Dominic knew, every word. "Adrian. The garage is locked. Tomorrow we take this night apart piece by piece."