Chapter 3
Two days later, Mercy had a lot more respect for her sister and others working in this career and a whole lot less respect for the employers who they worked for. Such a cold atmosphere surrounded Mercy that she didn’t understand how her sister had handled it. It took a couple days for Mercy to get accustomed to the physical work and to the sheer drudgery of it. Without mental stimulation, it was more difficult for her. She loved a challenge, but dusting faster wasn’t one she could get behind. Still, she was no slouch and could do the work, but she was grateful she was only here temporarily.
Added to that was the frustration of being here for several days now and not finding anything of interest. How was she supposed to learn anything about her sister’s murder when all she did was dust and clean and scrub?
She’d gone over her own bedroom top to bottom but hadn’t found anything saying her sister had ever been there. Surely someone here at the mansion knew something. Yet no one talked to her.
Mercy hadn’t had a chance to contact the detective again either. So much tension was in this house that it made her look around every corner as if she were watched. Yet she never saw anyone. But the feeling remained.
She was very mindful of the fact cameras were likely everywhere, giving her limited places to search unobserved. She tried to be friendlier to the staff, but that was like butting up against a wall of ice. Knowing her behavior was monitored, her actions watched and her words analyzed, she stuck to herself more and more. She ate alone; she worked mostly alone and had very little social contact with the outside world. If this was her sister’s life, she pitied her.
Surely there was a boyfriend, someone who cared. As far as anyone here knew, Mercy Romano was not related to Anna Gardini—she hoped. Therefore, Mercy had no right to ask questions outside of morbid curiosity into a dead person’s life. And that was likely to draw attention to her. More attention she didn’t want. It seemed like everyone knew she was failing to live up to the housekeeper’s expectations as it were. Maybe it was nerves, but it seemed like people were watching her.
Several times she’d spun around sure that she was being watched—only to find no one was there.
She walked into the kitchen storage area and put away the dusting rags and other materials. It was time to work on the windows in the dining room. She grabbed the cleaning supplies she needed, the small ladder and headed to the dining room. And stopped. It wasn’t empty. In a low tone she said, “I’m scheduled to clean windows in here. Will that bother you?”
Mr. Freeman, the owner, looked up, a harried look in his eyes as he glanced from her to the windows and back again. “No, that’s fine. Go ahead.”
She hurried to the first of the three huge windows to set out her short ladder and climbed up. As she cleaned, she glanced around, noting the cameras on the far side. Of course. She couldn’t look for anything in this room, even without him here.
She was working on the second window when one of his associates walked in and said, “We’re having trouble with the security cameras inside the house.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“They keep flickering off and on.”
“Well then, call the damn security company.”
“I have. They’re sending a man out.”
“Is it affecting the outside security?” This time Mr. Freeman’s voice was harder.
His associate nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Mercy turned her gaze away after catching the conversation. She didn’t want to remind them she was here. But a problem with the security system could be a great thing to help her snoop around some. However, the main outage seemed to be on the grounds of the estate. So the “flickering off and on” inside the mansion didn’t really give her a precise window of opportunity. Her chances of successfully using this interruption in security were obviously extremely small.
“Double the perimeter security,” Mr. Freeman said.
“Already done.”
Mr. Freeman nodded. “The individuals in the security room must watch all the time, in case the new man is outside. Make sure he’s sticking to his job and not to my business.”
The associate said, “That I can do.” He turned on his heels and walked out.
Mercy finished the second window and moved her ladder to the third one. There she climbed to the top of the ladder and scrubbed down the window.
“How are you finding your new job?”
His tone of voice and words directed at her startled her enough she almost lost her footing. She grabbed hold of the ladder. When balanced again, she looked at Mr. Freeman and said with a small smile, “It’s fine.”
His gaze was piercing as he studied her face. She swallowed hard and dropped her gaze, hopefully appropriately subservient. When she glanced back up his head was already down, looking at the papers on the big dining room table. He had a huge desk in his office, and she wasn’t sure why he was here, but binders and documents were all up and down one side of the long table.
She finished the window, folded her ladder, grabbed her cleaning supplies and walked past him. And she paused. “I don’t know if you have an assistant or not, but I do have a little experience helping my mother with paperwork … She had a small sewing business.” To her horror the lie rolled off her lips naturally.
He looked up in surprise.
She gave a small smile and kept walking. She’d thrown out the bone. Whether he did anything with it or not was up to him. Back in the kitchen storage closet, she put away the cleaning supplies and looked at the schedule the housekeeper had set out for her. Mercy was scheduled for laundry. Awesome. She was behind. She shook her head. What’s new? In the back of her mind, she wondered if Martha was intentionally setting up Mercy to fail so she would be fired.
This job left her feeling inadequate, and yet it was just damn cleaning. With her shoulders already slumping at the thought of the ten loads still to be washed, dried, folded, and put away. She walked into the large laundry room to find a couple loads already started and several piles ready to be sorted and more to be folded. There was even ironing. Who ironed in this day and age?
These people had more money than God. Surely they could afford to buy no-iron shirts. But bellyaching never got her anywhere. She buckled down and folded the towels. She’d already had a lecture on the proper way to fold them and how everything was to be placed correctly in the cabinets. She had to admit they looked nice, but they sure weren’t worth the extra work when she had so much else to do today.
This was only her second time in the laundry room on laundry duty, so she struggled to get through the instructions in her head. She looked around to see if instructions were posted on the wall in here. A piece of paper had been dropped by the door, so she walked over with a towel in her hand to pick it up, but it wasn’t what she was looking for. She frowned, glanced around again and then shrugged. Minutes later the door opened, and the housekeeper walked in. “What are we looking for?”
Mercy raised her eyebrows. “Sorry?”
“Security called to let me know you were looking for something in the laundry room,” she said coolly. “What were you looking for?”
Wow. I didn’t realize I was under such tight observation. “The written list of instructions you verbally told me as to the exact amounts of detergent for each different load. I had hoped that”—she pointed to the sheet of paper on the floor—“was the instruction sheet.”
The housekeeper gave her a penetrating look and said, “I’ll write them down and bring it in.” She walked from the room, closing the door firmly behind her.
The trouble was that snick of the door closing was almost like a prison door snapping shut. Unbelievable. She would be here for several hours no matter how much was on her schedule. No way she could get through these massive amounts of towels and bedding and get the ironing done.
With a sinking feeling, she realized it was time to buckle down and get it done. She quickly realized how futile was her hope to find out more about Anna while serving as a maid here. Mercy needed to get the hell away and go home. There was no other option. Maybe that was what this was all about. Maybe she had to get to the point where she accepted she would have to leave this up to the police.
Two hours later she was still working in the laundry room when the housekeeper returned. She carried a sheet of paper and put it on the wall beside the machines. “Here are the instructions.” She walked out without saying another word.
Mercy glanced at her watch. It was almost noon, and she was well past her time allotted to be done with the laundry. Yet, she was only halfway done. She knew at the end of her shift she would get another lecture, if not get fired. She shook her head. Maybe that would be for the best. She was well known to be a hardworking staff member at her real job, but here she had a sense of never doing enough, never being appreciated for what she had done. However, her fighting spirit and her sense of pride remained intact.
It took her another hour plus to get through the rest of the laundry. When she walked into the kitchen looking for some lunch, she found a premade sandwich sitting on the counter, the edges already dry. She glanced at the chef.
He said, his voice full of irritation, “You’re late.”
She nodded warily. “Three and half hours in the laundry room.” She snatched her sandwich and a glass of milk and went outside. She sat down, looking at the immaculate gardens, thinking about security cameras flickering, realizing even with those minuscule and unknown windows of opportunity, there was still no chance for her to find out anything without getting caught. Surely it was time to leave this foolhardy mission. But, if she did, she felt she would be giving up on her sister.
*
Back at the estate Michael changed his plans when he saw repairmen working on the security cameras. He’d done a good job sabotaging the system without making it look like it had been sabotaged. He’d have to do his best to screw up any attempt to fix it. Or at least make this a long-drawn-out process so he could get a secure window of time to search the estate. As it was, he struggled to maintain the whole “Yes, master” syndrome, the obedience here that was demanded.
While in the military he had no problem obeying orders as he’d believed in the system. Now he wanted to punch some heads to get the information he needed. One of these bastards had likely murdered Sammy. Michael wanted to know who. This morning not once did security figure out that Michael had made several tiny slices in the wires, then flooded them with the sprinklers. They were completely drenched and flickering. The security system would short out from the water.
He’d broken the line on a more remote section of the gardens as well to confuse those trying to fix the system. He needed to delay them in repairing the security cameras. The inside security system was a little bit more complicated. He only had access to a small portion of it but had done what he could with what he had.
He was no electrician, but he was pretty damn handy with wire cutters. At the end of the day, the security system was still not resolved, and he headed back to his small apartment over the older garage used mostly for storage and when doing vehicle maintenance. That’s when he caught sight of the new maid again. He watched her. He’d passed her several times as she sat on the small porch, eating what looked like dry bread. He didn’t think she’d last long.
She looked tired, worn out and, like him, frustrated. He had to wonder at that. Back in his apartment he made himself a sandwich. He hadn’t picked up much in the way of groceries but didn’t want to eat at the big house, particularly after seeing the food served to the new maid, Mercy. Thankfully it was a choice for him.
Then he got into his own vehicle and headed into town. There he picked up a few more groceries and stopped in at the coffee shop. With his laptop and secure Wi-Fi, he checked in for any information from the detective. A message from Ice waited for him. He smiled. Ice was an old friend. He knew her better than he knew Levi. But then, Ice had flown Michael’s ass out of trouble more than a couple times.
Michael owed her his life.
She sent him her complete intel files she’d created on Sammy and everyone else in the house. The detective had sent Michael what the commander had already sent, except some files were more extensive. Michael read through them but found nothing new other than the proof of a relationship between Sammy and Anna, the maid.
Obviously the killer decided that, if one was culpable of spying, likely the other was involved as well. So Anna could’ve been an innocent bystander, but, by association, she’d been taken out.
He opened the folder he’d received from the commander on Anna Gardini and froze. Because there in front of him was an image of the woman who looked so similar to Mercy. He quickly searched the family history, found Anna’s name change. Romano was her family name. Further research quickly revealed a sister. Mercy. “How the hell did Freeman’s security not catch this? Or are they fully aware and will just kill her when deemed necessary?”
He settled back and sipped his coffee as he wondered, “What the hell are you doing here, you fool?” He shook his head disturbed.
Was she here by choice? He couldn’t come up with one damn good reason why she had been coerced here … Or was she really out of work and had asked to take her sister’s place?
As he thought about the reasons why he was here, it was a little hard to ignore the fact that maybe, just maybe, she wanted answers too.
But the last thing he needed was a nosy amateur sleuth asking questions around the place, mucking up his undercover investigation, distracting him from his op. And he didn’t give a damn how sexy she was.