Thirty-One Floors Up

"The politest liars are the ones who tell you the truth first, and then take it back."

The building on Hudson Street had been designed by someone who wished the sky to feel inferior.

It rose out of Tribeca in a clean, gleaming column of glass and pale stone, forty-six floors of it, with a bronze door that opened silently as a mouth and a lobby paved in a green marble that Lauren could not name. A fountain the size of a bathtub whispered to itself in the center. At the desk a doorman with a silver mustache and a gray uniform that fit like a second skin regarded them with a courtesy so complete that it amounted to a refusal.

"Ms. Lindqvist is expecting you?"

"She isn't," said Lauren. "But she may be willing to see us."

She laid her badge on the marble, and he did not look at it. He looked at her, and then at Ethan, in his plain gray coat, and at the wet umbrellas they had left on the mat, and something in his face decided that these were not people who would leave a mark on the floor. He lifted a phone the color of old ivory.

"Mrs. Pryce-Lindqvist, ma'am? There are two officers from Boston in the lobby. A Captain Vance and a Mr. Vance." A pause. "Yes, ma'am. I'll send them up."

"Thirty-first floor," he said to them, with no change at all in his expression. "The elevator on your left. The penthouse is the only door."

"Thank you," said Ethan pleasantly. "It's a lovely fountain."

"It's an unreliable fountain, sir. The pump has failed twice this year."

"Everything good does."

They rode up in silence. The elevator was paneled in dark wood, with a small brass rail along the back and a mirror above it, and Lauren watched her reflection climb with her through the floors. She did not like what she saw. Her eyes looked flat and gray, a color that she had always privately thought of as the shade of a gun barrel, and there was a tightness at the corners of her mouth that she did not recall putting there.

Floor twenty. Twenty-five. Twenty-nine.

Ring 31.

Ethan, without turning his head, touched two fingers to the side of his nose.

She understood. She took a slow breath through her mouth and then drew it in, in the way their father had taught them as children, over a cold supper, in the voice of a man teaching his sons to fish. You don't sniff, Laurie. You let it come to you. The elevator smelled of polished walnut and the clean dry perfume of a place where the air is changed four times an hour. Underneath that, so faint that she might have imagined it, there was nothing.

The doors opened.

…

The woman who stood in the corridor was taller than Lauren had expected.

She was about five foot ten in flat shoes, slender and long in the neck, in a loose gray linen shirt and black slacks, with her pale hair pulled back in a knot as casually perfect as a thing in a magazine. Her face was narrow and lined, but the lines were of the kind that look deliberate, as though drawn in by a careful hand to give the face character. Her eyes were green. Not the green of a child's marble, but the cold, clear, shadowy green of old bottle glass, and she turned them first on Lauren, then on Ethan, and smiled.

"Captain Vance. Mr. Vance. Do come in." Her voice was low, a little husky, with a faint trace of something northern under the American vowels. "I'm so sorry. I was cooking, and I'm afraid I've been rather distracted. Mind the shoes, I've had the floors done. Is that an umbrella? Hand it to me, I'll put it by the stand."

She took Ethan's umbrella before he could argue, set it neatly in a copper pot beside the door, and led them in.

The penthouse was extraordinary, and it took Lauren a moment to understand why it troubled her.

It was white. Walls, ceiling, floors, a long sectional sofa the size of a boat, white lacquer shelves climbing twelve feet to the ceiling with their books arranged by color. There was a wall of glass at the far end, from floor to ceiling, and beyond it all of lower Manhattan went on glittering under the dull October sky like a handful of coins thrown on a gray table. A single orchid stood in a vase on the sill. There was nothing else on the surface of anything, no mug, no coat, no magazine, no photograph in a frame.

It was like walking into the mind of a woman who had decided to be someone else.

"It's a little overwhelming, I know," said Sophia Lindqvist, as though she had read the thought off Lauren's face. "My husband designed it. He says that a home should have a silence in it. I think it's more like a hospital. Please, sit. I'll bring tea."

"You don't need to trouble."

"It's no trouble at all. It's the only civil thing I know how to do."

She went through an archway to the left, and Lauren let her gaze move, quietly, from object to object.

In the hall, a tall mirror in an antique gilt frame hung opposite the door. It was the only old thing in the room, and it looked out of place there, like a bishop at a cocktail party. The glass was slightly foxed at the edges. She noticed that she could not see her own reflection in it clearly from where she stood, only a pale shape and the glimmer of a window, and she noticed that Ethan, who had stopped beside it, was not looking into it. He was looking at the frame.

"Heavy," he murmured. "Look at the carving. Twelve inches of oak, at least. Someone has taken this off the wall and put it back more than once."

"What do you mean?"

"There's a clean mark on the plaster at the right, where the wire has rubbed. Fresh, a month or two old at most." He crossed to the sofa with an easy shrug, as though they had been discussing furniture. "Never mind. I am only a cook. We notice the weight of things."

She sat down opposite him in a white armchair that took her in like a hand, and set her notebook on her knee. The silence of the room began to press softly against her ears. She could hear the faint tick of the clock in the kitchen. She could hear a pot, on a low flame, giving up its steam, and she could hear, very far below, the thin hum of Hudson Street, as if the whole city had been tucked away behind a pane.

And she smelled it.

…

It came, not from one place, but from many. That was the strange part.

It was not in the air so much as in the architecture of the air, laid down in layers, like the grain in a table. Lavender first, thick and clean, from a bowl of dried heads by the window. Beneath it, bleach, bright and chemical and recent. Beneath that, wine, and clove, and the deep brown comfort of onions in butter, which came from the kitchen. A woman making dinner at three in the afternoon. A table of ordinary things.

And under them, so faint that it was less a smell than the memory of a smell, as faint as a fingerprint on glass, she caught the thread.

Copper. A coin held on the tongue. Milk.

She did not move. She had learned a long time ago that the body must not know what the nose has found. Her hands lay quiet on her notebook. Her face stayed polite. Only, very low in her chest, something small and cold turned over and began to sink.

She looked at her brother.

He was sitting with his ankles crossed and his scarred hand lying open on his knee, looking out of the great glass wall at the city. His expression was mild, even sleepy. But the muscle at the corner of his jaw, the little one that he could never control, had gone still, as it did when he had tasted something in a sauce and had decided, privately, that it was not going to be mentioned at the table.

He had it too.

Where? she asked him, with her eyes.

He answered with the very faintest lift of one finger from his knee, a gesture so small it might have been a tremor. He pointed down. At the floor. At the long white lacquered boards, newly waxed, that stretched between the sofa and the glass.

"Here we are," said Sophia, returning with a tray. "Darjeeling. I hope that's all right. I'm afraid I've nothing sweet in the house. I have been terribly disciplined lately."

"Darjeeling is perfect." Lauren took the cup. It was thin white porcelain, warm and fragile, and she held it with both hands so that her own would stop trying to shake. "Thank you. I know that you must be wondering why we're here."

"I assume it is about the book." Sophia sat on the very edge of the white sofa, with her cup held in both hands as though to keep it from rising. "Somebody has been writing letters to the publisher again. They send them to my office, you know, mostly in green ink. Some of them are quite beautiful. I'm sorry. I am talking too much."

"It is not about the book." Lauren put down her cup. "It is about a young woman named Jiang Yingying."

The effect was small and exact. Sophia Lindqvist did not drop her cup, or gasp, or change color. She lowered her eyes, for no more than a breath, to the surface of her tea, and when she looked up she had arranged her face into an expression of kind, pained, intelligent attention that Lauren had seen on sympathetic doctors.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, dear. Is she all right?"

"We don't know. She hasn't been in contact with her mother since the fourth of August. She worked for you that summer."

"She did. She was one of my interns. Quiet little thing. Very bright, very hard-working, a wonderful reader." She sighed. "I'd hoped she'd gone home. When was she meant to finish? The end of August? She left rather suddenly, you know, in July. A family matter. She told me her mother was unwell, and I told her to go at once. We don't stand on ceremony. I did wonder why I never heard."

"In July," said Lauren.

"I believe the second week. I could check my diary. Why, has something happened to her?"

It was perfectly done. Lauren, who had listened to the lies of three thousand people over twenty years, could not have said where the flaw lay. The voice was easy, the grief genuine, the eyes direct. A person who was lying might have stared. A person who was lying might have hurried to fill the silence. Sophia sat quite still and waited, her long hands loose in her lap, and not one thing in her face or her body said she is hiding.

Except, perhaps, that she was too good at it.

The phone records said Yingying had left the Harrow & Finch office on the fifth of August, with a security-camera timestamp of seven twenty-two. Sophia Lindqvist had not seen her since July.

One of the two facts was a mistake. And Lauren, who had been taught by a quiet man in a cardigan to be patient with mistakes, decided to let it lie.

…

"Do you live alone, Ms. Lindqvist?" asked Ethan.

It was the first thing he had said in ten minutes, and he said it so softly, so lightly, with such a pleasant air of making conversation, that it did not seem a question.

"No, I have a husband. Nathan." She smiled. "He's away at present. He's an architect. He is working on a library in Chicago, I think, or a hospital in Seattle. He tells me and I forget. I'm a dreadful wife."

"And you cook for yourself."

"I cook for the pleasure of it. I never used to. I was one of those women who ate a bowl of cereal standing at the sink." She laughed, a little breathlessly. "I took it up in the spring. A friend said it would be good for my nerves. And I found, to my astonishment, that I had an appetite."

"May I?" Ethan rose, and nodded toward the archway. "Forgive me. It's an occupational weakness. I used to have a restaurant, and I can never resist a kitchen."

He did not wait for permission. He moved through the archway with an air so unassuming that Sophia, after a startled instant, laughed again and followed him. Lauren set her cup down and trailed after them, and what she saw in the kitchen made her stop in the doorway.

It was a professional kitchen, bigger than the one in Ethan's restaurant, with a six-burner range in blackened steel, a wall of copper pans, a butcher's block as wide as a door, and a walk-in refrigerator with a heavy steel handle, set into the far wall. A pot was simmering on the back burner. The air was warm, brown, and rich with onion.

On the block lay a long slender knife.

It was clean. It was perfectly, spotlessly clean. And Lauren, who had no knowledge of kitchens beyond the burning of soup, saw it the way she would have seen a loaded gun left lying on a table in a nursery.

"What a magnificent range," said Ethan.

"Nathan insisted. I never use half of it." Sophia stood by the stove with a wooden spoon, her face flushed from the steam, and she looked suddenly very young, young and tired, like a girl caught at a school dance. "You must forgive the walk-in. It's rather absurd. I've stocked it as though for an army."

"Do you entertain much?"

"Hardly at all." She turned the spoon in the pot. "Only when someone's very hungry."

The sentence hung there. It was an odd thing to say, and she seemed to realize it as soon as it left her mouth, because a faint, quick color came up under the thin skin of her neck. She laughed again, too brightly, and dipped the spoon, and tasted.

"Salt," she said to herself. "It needs salt."

And Ethan, standing at her shoulder with his hands in his pockets, said in the gentlest possible voice, "Ms. Lindqvist, have you been a vegetarian at any point in your life?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"You've a lovely kitchen. I can tell what a person cooks, usually, by what they have not bought." He smiled, a little apologetically. "But I can't find a thing in it that grew in the ground. No greens in the rack. No flour on the shelf. No fruit. It's all fat and bone and stock. Oh, I'm sorry, I know it's rude. I only wondered."

There was a pause.

It lasted about three seconds. It might have been nothing at all. Sophia stood very still with the wooden spoon in her hand, and Lauren, from the doorway, saw her eyes move, once, to the walk-in refrigerator, then back to Ethan's face.

"I've lost my taste for vegetables," she said lightly. "It's one of the strange things that happen when you're writing a book like that. One's appetites alter. Haven't you noticed, Mr. Vance, that when one lives with something dark for a long time, one begins to want things that are... plain?"

"Plain," said Ethan.

"Yes. Plain." She put down the spoon, and wiped her hands on a cloth, and for the first time since they had entered the apartment she met Lauren's eyes across the room, directly, with a long clear look that Lauren would remember later, on a night when she could not sleep. "Was there anything else I could help you with, Captain?"

"One more thing," said Lauren. "Do you know a detective named Raymond Miller?"

"No." The answer came at once. "I'm sorry. Should I?"

"No reason," said Lauren. "Thank you for the tea."

…

The elevator took them down in silence.

They did not speak in the lobby, past the unreliable fountain and the doorman with the silver mustache, or on the steps, or on the long wet block to the car. Lauren unlocked the doors, and they got in, and she turned the key, and then did not drive. She sat with her hands on the wheel and the engine running and the rain beginning again on the windscreen in fat, slow drops.

"Under the lavender," said Ethan.

"And the bleach."

"Not in the kitchen. She is careful about the kitchen. It's in the floor." He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his scarred hand. "Along the baseboards. In the grain of the rug in the hall, and the frame of that damned mirror. Someone has scrubbed the place on their knees. But you cannot scrub out what's gone into the wood."

"Could it have come from the book? From Hale? From a visit?"

"It could." His voice was flat. "A man who keeps trophies, who has a house full of them, would leave it on every coat he touched. A woman who spent a year in his company might carry it home on her shoes. That is a perfectly good explanation, Laurie. I have been thinking of it since the elevator. It explains everything."

"Except?"

"Except that she lied to us about the fifth, and she lied to us about Ray, and she lied about the vegetables." He looked at her, and his face in the gray light looked thin and old. "And when she said she was only cooking for someone very hungry, she looked at the refrigerator. Not at the stove. At the refrigerator, as a woman looks at a door she has locked."

Lauren put the car in gear. The wipers began to beat across the glass, steady as a heart.

"We don't have a warrant," she said.

"No."

"We don't have a body."

"No."

"We have two noses and a story that would make a judge laugh." She pulled away from the curb into the traffic, and the building on Hudson Street shrank in the mirror to a column of light, and then to a point, and then to nothing. "So we find a better one."

Behind them, on the thirty-first floor, in a white room with a glass wall, a woman stood at a stove, and tasted what she was cooking, and was silent for a long time. Then she took the spoon from her mouth, and turned, and looked at the foxed gilt mirror in the hall, and for the first time in many weeks she did not look away from it.