The Family Lawyer

Elspeth

Ten in the morning, and autumn in the Hudson Valley is dying.

The snow has come and half gone again, leaving the maples bare against a low, iron sky, black branches clawing upward like the hands of the drowned.

"Dahlia. Visitor."

Bridget Sorrell stands at the threshold of C-104 with her half-glasses on their chain and her impatience pressed thin between her lips. She doesn't wait for me to react. She crosses the room, takes my wrist and hauls me off the bed. The grip is firm enough to remind me of what I am, and no firmer.

We walk the length of Wing C. Past two posts where Hollis stands with his arms folded like a bouncer at a club that nobody wants to enter. Through a steel door that buzzes. Into the special visitation room, fifteen square meters of acoustic foam and a steel table bolted to the concrete, two chairs, also bolted.

Above the table, a wide-angle black dome stares straight down at the tabletop.

The man on the other side of the table turns his head as the door opens.

Warren Marrow.

I've seen him in three-piece navy at Thanksgiving dinners. I've seen him in a tuxedo, drunk, at a benefit, telling a waiter to go to hell. Today he wears fine Italian wool in a deep midnight blue, with a wine-red silk tie knotted in an Eldredge, the intricate braided one that takes six minutes to tie and shows the world you have six minutes to spare. The Marrow jaw. The Marrow cheekbones. The face of men who grew up in rooms where decisions that cost other families their houses were made over brandy.

My brother-in-law. Lead attorney for the dynasty. Its cleaner of blood debts.

"Thank you, Bridget. Ten minutes, if you would."

His voice is deep and round, with a politician's resonance. It is a voice built to be heard in the back row of a courtroom.

Bridget nods and goes out. The door slams.

I stand with my back to the soundproof wall and my hands over my stomach. I let my head fall and my knees tremble, just visibly. My eyes find his mirror-polished oxfords and stay there.

"Come, sit down, Dahlia." He points at the chair across from his and arranges a smile that has been practiced in a mirror. "Don't be afraid. I'm here as the family's legal representative. And as Conrad's brother."

I walk to the table. I pull the chair back with a rasp, a drag that is exactly one second too slow, and I lower myself into it like a woman who weighs less than she does.

"Who," I whisper, "are you?" My voice cracks on the last word. I peer up at him through the black hair with wide, wary eyes. "Dr. Kestrel said I shouldn't meet strangers."

Warren watches me from under hooded lids.

His brown eyes go over me: the brittle hair, the skin gone gray, the left hand clutching the edge of my patient gown. An appraiser's glance. The glance of a man visiting a cage that he and Kestrel have spent millions to build, checking the bars.

"I'm Warren. Warren Marrow." He leans back and folds his hands on the steel. "I wanted to see how your treatment is going. The family has been very worried about you."

Worried.

The word falls between us like a piece of dirty ice.

"Conrad?" I blink fast. I make my mouth shake. "Is he... how is he? The doctor said I hurt him."

Warren lets out a long, heavy sigh. A theatrical sigh, with a hundred Manhattan courtrooms in it.

"Conrad is dead, Dahlia." He lowers his voice, painting his face with sorrow. "That night, you did something that can't be undone. But my brother was a good man. He always loved you. He tried to protect you, always, from these breakdowns of yours."

Conrad was a good man.

As the sentence leaves his mouth, I see the reflex travel through his body.

His left hand, laced into his right on the tabletop, loosens. The left index finger rises and falls against the back of his right hand. Tap. Tap. Tap. Three beats. The muscle at the hinge of his jaw twitches, a flicker lasting two-tenths of a second. His pupils contract and then dilate again.

Tell.

I have seen that tap before. Not on Warren. On a man who also kept one hand at his thigh at dinner parties and thought no one noticed. A Marrow habit. A family signature.

I turn the pieces over very carefully, as one handles glass that is still hot.

Warren is lying, and the lie has weight. And underneath the lie something else moves, a wave of loathing that comes straight from the bone of him. It has nothing to do with me. It is for his brother.

Warren Marrow despises Conrad.

That's useful. I put it in a drawer and lock it.

Because another thing rises in me, and this one is not useful at all.

Fury.

It comes up from the bottom of my stomach like a flame in a chimney. Conrad Marrow was not a good man. Conrad was a brute, a charming one, an abuser who knew how to leave no marks. A man who gambled and drank and lied, who had siphoned four hundred and twelve million dollars out of a fund meant for the survivors of floods and the pensions of civil servants, to cover tables in Macau and shell companies in the Caymans. He and this man in front of me had taken my own skills and made a weapon of them. They had used me to launder the arithmetic. And when it all came apart they had burned Dennis Oakhurst in a lake house and hung the crime around my neck.

My chest heaves. Blood pounds in my throat. I want to lunge across the table. I want to wind that wine-red silk around my fist, and sink my nails into his carotid, and shriek Dennis. Dennis Oakhurst. until the foam on the walls shakes.

Half a second.

Then the cold, analytical brain of Elspeth Calder puts out the fire with a bucket of ice water.

No.

If I say it, Warren won't panic. He'll smile. He'll stand, tug his cuffs, walk out of the room, and make one phone call. The next time I see the Glass Orchard, it won't be to lie on a chaise. He is the one with the legal authority out there. I am only a locked-up patient with a bleached head and a diagnosis.

I take the rage and fold it small, and I put it where I keep the pills.

And I let my body do what a body does when it has been told its husband is dead.

I begin to tremble. Violently. I bring both hands to my head and lay my forehead against the cold steel of the table, and sound comes out of me, chopped gasps, wet, ugly.

"No. No, I didn't mean to... I don't remember anything." My voice splits upward. "I see fire! I smell... it smells like burning... Dr. Kestrel! Where is Dr. Kestrel?"

Warren watches the performance.

The coldness in his face loosens by a degree. The suspicion that had been sitting behind his eyes gives way to something I know very well from other rooms: the pleasure of a man who has been afraid of an animal and discovers it is already in the trap.

"Dahlia." He pushes the chair back and stands. He smooths his lapels. "You need to rest."

He pauses. He doesn't leave yet. He takes something from his inside pocket and slides it across the steel until it stops against my elbow.

A photograph. A grave.

A fresh one, in a cemetery I know. St. Aldric's, on the hill over Poughkeepsie, where the Marrows keep their dead. A black headstone, polished. Gold letters.

CONRAD AUGUSTIN MARROW. BELOVED SON.

Dates. Flowers. A single wreath of white lilies at the foot.

"You'll want that," says Warren gently. "To remember."

He watches my eyes. It is not kindness. He is testing. Does the name on the stone produce relief, or recognition, or a flare of the wrong kind of knowing?

I look at the photograph. My gaze slides over the stone, the lilies, and the gold. I don't breathe.

Under that stone lies Dennis Oakhurst's ash.

Warren gave me the photograph to prove that Conrad is dead. And in giving it, he has told me where Dennis is.

I put my hand on the picture. My fingers shake. I turn my face away, and I weep, honestly. Not for the show. I weep because under the stone, a warm, raspy voice is asking me to foot the column, and I cannot.

"You need rest," Warren says again. "The family has paid for your lifetime care here. You'll be safe. Permanently."

He crosses to the door and knocks softly. Three times.

It opens. Bridget comes in, takes my arm, begins to pull me up.

Warren stops at the threshold. His eyes lift past her.

Down the hall, Kestrel has just come around the corner with the black logbook under one arm, striding in his silent shoes. Warren raises a hand. The two men meet in the corridor a few steps outside, and they lower their voices, and they believe that five meters of hallway and a door of padded foam will keep me from hearing.

They are right about the foam.

They are wrong about the door.

When Bridget marched me in, I noticed the gap beneath the frame: ten inches of black, a sealed heating duct that someone in the original building cut for warm air and someone later covered with a grille. The foam on the walls absorbs reverberation. But the duct runs in a straight line from the corridor to the steel table where my head is lying now. Sound goes through it like a speaking tube.

I keep my face against the steel. I keep my shoulders heaving.

"How is she?" Warren asks.

"Her brain-wave patterns are stable under hypnosis," Kestrel says, level. "Old memories are being sealed. The Dahlia Reeve construct is ninety percent complete."

There's a small pause in which I can hear Warren's silk tie moving against his collar.

"Good." A hand lands twice on a shoulder. The sound of fabric. "Keep her in that state. Don't let her remember too much. If she starts raising the name Larkspur, or the ledger..." A beat. Three beats. Tap. Tap. Tap. "You know what to do."

"I know my limits, Warren."

"Do you?" Warren says. "Mother wonders."

It is the only unscripted thing in the exchange, and Kestrel doesn't answer it.

Footsteps, then. Warren's, leaving. Fading under the howl of wind in the eaves.

I raise my head slowly from the steel.

My cheeks are still wet. But behind the wet lashes my eyes have turned cold as Arctic ice.

Don't let her remember too much.

That sentence is the best piece of evidence I've held in a month.

If I were truly a woman who had murdered her husband in a psychotic break, if I were truly mad, they would want me to remember. Remembering is how you heal. Remembering is the whole point of a hospital.

But they don't want me to remember.

They've spent millions to lock me in a white box, hypnotize me, and drug me into a fog. They've done it because they are afraid of this brain. Because a forensic accountant has a memory for numbers that cannot be sedated out of her, and they know it.

I am not mad.

I never was mad.

I lift my left hand, wipe the tear from my cheek with one finger, and straighten my spine. And as Bridget Sorrell's hand closes on my arm, I let myself be taken back down Wing C, small and gray and bowed.

I don't look at the camera. I count the steps instead.

Fourteen.

…

In C-104, with the lock sliding home behind me, I sit down cross-legged on the floor facing the wall, and I open the books.

A forensic accountant starts every engagement the same way. Before you chase a single transaction you draw a line down the middle of the page.

Assets.

One. A wall of scratched figures, held by the opposing party. (Negative asset. Entered for completeness.)

Two. Eleven pills, hidden in the hem of a gown.

Three. A tell on Warren Marrow: three taps of the left hand, the family hand. A tell on Kestrel: the cufflink. Both verified.

Four. A man humming a number in the day room.

Five. A dead woman called Patient Twelve, who slept in this bed and had her hair painted black, and whose name someone has taken care to bury.

Six. A grave at St. Aldric's, with the wrong man in it.

Seven. A sentence: Don't let her remember too much. Witnessed by me. Not admissible in any court in the state.

Liabilities.

One. Myself, the sole witness, in custody.

Two. A mind that is beginning to pull toward a chair in a glass room. The tug under my ankle. A phrase that tastes familiar. I do not know what Kestrel has already done to me, and I do not know what I have already forgotten.

Three. Time. Every day another dose is not taken is a day the books may be audited. Hollis has a photograph. Bridget has a penlight.

Four. Dennis.

I look at the fourth line for a very long time.

I do not write a number beside it. It isn't that kind of liability. It's the kind that stays on the sheet after the company has closed, the one you carry forward in a footnote because nobody has found the form for it.

Numbers never lie, Els.

They don't, Dennis. People do.

It's the first time I have said it to myself in the voice I intend to use on them.

Warren Marrow believes he saw a woman broken for good. He believes he looked at a doll in a glass case, and he walked out whistling.

He doesn't understand that in ten minutes he handed me three things. A tell. A grave. A sentence I can quote.

The hunt has entered a new phase. And this time, it is I who am counting down the days they have left.