Investigation Addiction

Thursday, 4:30 PM, May.

The folder was blue.

That was the first thing Camille noticed. In the entire history of Julian Kastellan's filing habits, in the weeks she had known him as a spy and the months she had known him as a lover, every dossier he had ever kept had been yellow, or black, or the plain buff of government issue. A blue folder was a departure. A blue folder was, in the language of the man, practically a love letter.

She stood in the doorway of his study in the new house, a four-story brick townhouse in Fort Greene with a stoop and a magnolia tree and a kitchen window that opened, with a mug of coffee in one hand and the other on her hip, and she looked at it.

It lay in the center of his desk. It had a label on the tab, in his slow precise hand.

*QUIMBY, D. (CAKE).*

She read it twice.

"Julian," Camille said pleasantly, "darling."

There was a pause. Somewhere in the depths of the house, a chair creaked, a door opened, and a tall man in shirtsleeves with a pen behind his ear appeared at the end of the hall and stopped.

He looked at her. He looked at the folder.

"Ah," said Julian.

…

It had been, by general agreement, a very good spring.

The studio had opened in April. It was a narrow storefront on Roosevelt Avenue, between a bakery and a shop that sold phone cases, with a green awning and a hand-painted sign. *DUARTE.* Nothing else. No tagline, no logo, no mention of Kastellan. The first customer had been Mrs. Pena. The second had been a teenage boy with braces who wanted to know if she did men's nails. By the end of the week there was a line out the door.

Camille worked Tuesday through Saturday, nine to five. On Sunday, she took her father to Mass. On Monday, she did nothing at all, and was extremely good at it. Rafael had the room with the south windows on the third floor, a small, bright, bookish room with a desk and a bed and a chemistry set Julian had bought him for his birthday, which Rafael had unwrapped with a long, silent, wordless look, and set up the next morning on the windowsill.

The house was theirs. They had chosen it together, on a gray Saturday in March, after seeing eleven properties and rejecting nine for reasons that Julian had found incomprehensible (the ceilings are low, Camille had said, I want to be able to breathe) and Camille had found entirely clear. The twelfth had a wide stoop where one could sit with a coffee, and a kitchen window that opened onto a back garden, and a magnolia just coming into bud. She had stood in the front hall and said, "This one."

"Why?"

"Because I'd like to stay."

He had bought it that afternoon.

The chessboard had been sold. It was the first thing he did. He had walked into Sotheby's with the set in a velvet bag, the ivory and rosewood set, four generations old, the one Augustus had taught him on, and walked out forty minutes later with a check he'd made out, without being asked, to the Document Integrity Fund. Augustus had said nothing about it for a week. Then he'd rung Julian at three in the morning and said, "Good," and hung up.

It was all going splendidly.

Julian was seeing a woman named Dr. Marsh on Tuesday afternoons. He came home from each session rather quiet, rather pale, and went for a long walk. He did not talk about what was said. But on the third Tuesday of April, at two in the morning, he'd woken beside her in the dark, and she had felt him go very still, and then felt his hand find hers.

Tuesday, he'd said.

I know.

It was on a Tuesday.

I know. I'm here.

I thought it would be worse, Julian had said, wonderingly. Saying it. Out loud, to someone. I thought it would hurt more.

Does it?

Differently.

She had held his hand until morning.

All of which was why the blue folder, this particular blue folder, in this particular study, on this particular Thursday, made her so very, very curious.

…

"I can explain," said Julian.

"Please do."

"It's not what it looks like."

"It looks like a dossier on a pastry chef."

"It's research."

"On a pastry chef."

"On a prospective vendor." He came into the room with a carefulness she had seen him use only with unexploded ordnance. "It's an ordinary precaution. A wedding of this size is a high-profile event. There'll be two hundred guests, a dozen heads of state, a Supreme Court justice. Anyone who prepares the food is, in a technical sense, a potential point of vulnerability."

"Julian."

"A cake, Camille, is a very easy delivery vehicle for—"

"Julian."

He stopped.

She set her coffee on the desk, picked up the folder, and opened it.

There was a photograph, clipped to the inside cover: an elderly woman in a flour-dusted apron, standing in front of a bakery in Bay Ridge, beaming at the camera with a rolling pin in her hand. She had a round pink face, a lacquered white bun, and the sort of expression you'd see on a woman who has made six thousand birthday cakes and forgiven every one of the children who ate them.

QUIMBY, DOLORES A. Age 71. Proprietor, Dolores's Delights, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, 1987 to present. Widowed. Three grandchildren. Member, St. Anselm's Altar Guild.

Below that, a typed page.

Criminal record: none. Civil record: one dispute with a neighbor over a hedge (resolved, 2004). Credit: excellent. Social media: a Facebook page with eleven followers, mostly of cats. Flour supplier: Heartland Mills, Kansas, family-owned since 1919. Verification pending: Heartland Mills, personnel.

"You checked the flour supplier," said Camille.

"It's the weakest link in the chain."

"Of a woman who goes to altar guild."

"They're the worst," said Julian darkly. "Nobody suspects the altar guild."

She stared at him.

She had been prepared, in some corner of her mind, for this moment. She had known that item two was the hard one. She had known it from the day she put it on the list, and watched him swallow, and said it anyway. Habits like his did not die. They went underground. They became quiet and polite and clever, and they dressed themselves in the clothes of prudence, and waited.

She had not expected to feel what she felt now, standing in the study of her own house, with a folder in her hand and a dossier on a seventy-one-year-old baker, and a man in front of her, tall and rigid and visibly braced, as if for a blow.

What she felt was a tidal wave of helpless, overwhelming laughter.

"Camille?" said Julian, warily.

She pressed her lips together. Her shoulders shook.

"Camille. Are you—"

She put the folder down very carefully on the desk, and then she sat on the edge of it, and laughed until she cried.

…

"It's not funny," said Julian, ten minutes later.

"It's very funny."

"There are real threats in the world."

"From a woman who makes a lemon-chiffon with a rolling pin."

"You don't know that she—"

"Julian. Honey." She wiped her eyes. "She's seventy-one. She's a widow. She has a Facebook page for her cat."

"For three cats."

"I stand corrected."

"The point is that it's prudent." He had sat down on the sofa across from her, his hands between his knees, and the picture of him there, all six feet two of him folded onto a chintz cushion with an expression of wounded dignity, was too much for her. She had to look at the ceiling. "I'm not tailing her. I'm not following her. I haven't spoken to anyone in her family. I simply wished to be informed."

"You checked her flour."

"It's diligence."

"Item two."

"I was going to tell you."

"When?"

"Immediately."

"It's been four days."

"I was gathering my thoughts." He closed his eyes. "I was going to tell you on Saturday. After the tasting. I thought, if the cake were good, it would be a nonissue."

"And if the cake was bad?"

"I would have said she was a security risk."

She burst out laughing again.

He opened one eye and regarded her with a deep, long-suffering, tender exasperation. She saw, with a stab of love so sharp it hurt, that the corner of his mouth was twitching.

"You're not angry," he said.

"No."

"You said if I slipped—"

"I said you were to tell me. You told me." She smoothed her expression. "Eventually. By accident. When I found it. That counts for a half."

"A half."

"A half-credit. Which means you've earned a half-penalty."

Julian's eyes narrowed. "What is a half-penalty?"

She stood. She crossed the room, and sat down beside him on the sofa, and leaned her head against his shoulder. The magnolia outside the window had come into flower. A single white petal drifted down past the glass.

"You're going to have to let me investigate you," Camille said.

He went rigid.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Back. One for one." She tilted her head and looked at him. "You get a file on Mrs. Quimby. I get a file on you."

"I'm an open book."

"You're a vault, with a mortgage."

"There's nothing to find."

"Then it won't take long." She smiled sweetly. "I've already started. Marcus has a very interesting story about a Christmas party in 2016."

The color left his face.

"He wouldn't."

"He already did. In a diner. He told me over pie." Her smile widened. "There was something about a ferret?"

"It wasn't a ferret."

"It sounded like a ferret."

"It was a small mammal," said Julian, with great dignity, "and it was a gift, and I did not know how to refuse it."

She put her face in his neck and shook with laughter.

His arm came around her. It did so slowly, almost reluctantly, then tightened, and she felt, against her cheek, the rumble of something in his chest. A low, helpless, rusty sound. He was laughing, too.

"I'm going to have to stop doing this," Julian said, after a while.

"You are."

"I can't. I think it's a condition."

"I know."

"You said you'd find someone."

"I did find someone. It's you." She kissed his jaw. "I'm just going to be the one in charge of the files."

…

On Saturday, they went to the tasting.

It was held in the back of a small, clean, flour-scented bakery in Bay Ridge, at a long wooden table, with a pot of strong tea and eleven slices of cake arranged on blue-and-white plates. Dolores Quimby, in an apron, with her white bun and her rosy cheeks, stood at the head of the table with her hands clasped and watched them taste with the anxious solemnity of a woman at a christening.

"Lemon chiffon," she said. "Almond. Red velvet. The chocolate is a little bit of a family secret."

Camille took a bite.

It was, unmistakably, the best cake of her life.

"Oh," she said. "Oh. Mrs. Quimby."

"Dolores, dear."

"Dolores."

"I know." Dolores beamed. "It's the flour. It's from a mill in Kansas. A nice man there brings it up every month. He was just telling me last week that a very polite gentleman had telephoned to ask about the personnel."

Camille did not look at Julian.

Julian looked at the ceiling.

"A very nice gentleman," said Dolores serenely. "Quite thorough. He asked if any of the millers had a record. I said, young man, these are Lutherans." She patted Camille's hand. "I like a man who's careful. My Harold was careful. God rest him."

"So is mine," said Camille gravely.

"Is he?"

"Terribly."

"Well, then." The old woman looked fondly over her glasses at the tall man seated across the table, who was studying a piece of red velvet with every sign of fascinated attention. "I expect you'll be very happy."

Camille laughed.

She could not help it. She laughed, with her hand over her mouth and her eyes full of tears, and the baker patted her arm, and Julian, in the most exquisite and mortified silence, ate his entire slice of red velvet down to the last crumb.

It was, he conceded, afterward, in the car, the single finest dessert he'd ever tasted.

"I'll cancel the investigation," he said.

"You will not."

"No?"

"You'll finish it." She was grinning. "I want a full report on the Lutherans."