They went one at a time, in the order of Aggie's list. The cook went first, because the cook had seniority and a terror of being thought involved in anything that happened above the ground floor. She had not been in the private wing. She had made soup for the people who had. She could name the soup.
The laundry maid went second and cried before the door was shut, not from guilt but from a general belief that rooms with closed doors and quiet men in them were where a person's employment ended. She had carried sheets. She had not touched the bed.
The two porters who had hauled the wardrobe went together, and answered in a duet of headshakes. The gardener, summoned absurdly from his cottage at one in the morning because his name stood on the duty roster, explained with great patience that he had been asleep and in charge of nothing but roses.
June Calloway waited in the corridor outside the sitting room for two hours, on a chair that had been placed there for the purpose, and listened to doors open and close.
She was not a fool. She had known since the morning — since Aggie had come down the back stairs with her mouth set in a line June had never seen on it — that the house had discovered what she had discovered. All day she had worked with the knowledge sitting behind her ribs like a swallowed stone. She had changed linens. She had mopped the scullery. She had eaten half a sandwich at midnight and given the other half to the dishwasher, because her hands had needed something to do besides shake.
She had also, in the long afternoon, considered lying.
She considered it thoroughly, the way she considered everything, with Danny's face in front of her the whole time. Danny in his hospital bed with his leg suspended and his jokes going thin at the edges. Danny's bills, folded in her locker in a hospital envelope she could no longer open without her stomach turning over. The agency's cheerful warning on her first day: homes like this one did not complain, they simply never called again. A girl who was never called again did not pay a hospital.
Lying would be so easy. That was the obscenity of it. She had put everything back. Everything except a corner of folded paper a fraction of an inch out of line — and who in the world could build a case, a firing, a ruin, on a fraction of an inch of crayon drawing?
The King of New Orleans could. She knew it the way she knew the weight of a full bucket. He had squared that corner himself. Men like Vittorio Salerno did not keep their whole hearts squared by accident.
So the lie sat in her mouth all night, fully built, furnished, ready to move into — I never saw a box, sir; I lifted the mattress with help and Aggie watching; nothing fell; nothing opened — and June turned it over and over while doors opened and closed, and she was still turning it over at ten past two, when Benny came out of the sitting room with the folder under his arm and looked down the corridor at her, alone on the chair in the half-dark, and did not call her name.
"He's done with the list," Benny said.
June stood up. Her knees had opinions about the two hours on the chair. "Am I — is it my turn in there?"
"No," Benny said. "He doesn't want you in there." He held her look a moment, and something in the old man's face was not unkind, which frightened her more than the folder had. "The King will ask you himself. His study. Three o'clock."
The study was at the end of the west corridor, a room June had dusted twice and never once been in with the lights on. She walked its length at five to three with her apron still on, because no one had told her to take it off. The house had gone the deep quiet it went at that hour, the quiet of radiators ticking and old wood settling, and her shoes sounded loud on the boards no matter how she placed them.
She thought about Danny. She thought about the envelope in her locker. She thought about three lines of a living man's handwriting — living, that was the horror of it, three rooms away and waiting — a father apologizing to a daughter for a birthday he had missed in 2004, in handwriting that had leaned closer and closer to the page as the sentence went on, as if the words had been heavy.
She knocked once, softly, on the study door.
"Come in," said the King of New Orleans, from inside, in the voice of a man who had not slept either, and June opened the door.
He was not behind the desk. She would remember that later, when she had leisure to remember things in order: that he had not put the desk between them. He stood by the window with a glass he was not drinking from, in a dressing gown over his shirt, an old man and a monarch in roughly equal proportions, and he looked at her across the lamplight without haste, without heat, the way a man looks at weather coming over water.
"Sit down, Miss Calloway," he said. She did not sit. He appeared to accept this as a position she was entitled to hold. "You were alone with my bed."
It was not a question. She let it stand in the air as a statement, because it was true, and she had not the strength left to decorate the truth at three in the morning.
"You lifted the mattress. Something was under it. Something is now — slightly — not where I left it." He set the glass down, precisely, on the windowsill. "I am not going to shout at you. I am not going to threaten you. Everyone in this house has told me a careful story tonight, and I find I am tired of careful stories." He turned from the window then, fully, and the lamplight found the whole of his face, and it was not a cruel face, which was somehow the worst possible discovery. "What did you see beneath my bed?"
Chapter 8: The Truth She Told
June told him all of it, standing in her apron in the lamplight, because the lie she had built all night turned out to be too heavy to lift at three in the morning.