FLORA ROBINSON HAD A WELL-DEVELOPED SENSE OF IMPENDING trouble, a skill she had developed in her time working at a speakeasy. You had to be able to feel the ripple that went through the room when the police were approaching the door. You had to know a false alarm from the real thing. You had to develop the reflex to hit the alarm button at just the right moment—that button that tilted the shelves and opened the chute and sent hundreds, or sometimes thousands, of dollars’ worth of booze and glass down into a hidden disposal area. Do it right, and you saved the club from closure and all the patrons from arrest. Do it wrong, and you simply ruined everything.
Flora could taste fear and anticipation in the air tonight. She turned and looked at the little silver clock on the side table. Iris and Alice had been gone for a long time. She’d seen them off at noon. Usually, when Iris took her drives, she was back in an hour or two. She’d been gone eight. No one had called Flora for dinner.
This break in routine made Flora extremely uneasy. There was trouble around, somewhere in this quiet mansion tucked up in the mountains. She sat on her bed in her room, hugging her knees, listening and waiting. Her keenly tuned hearing and the acoustics of the house meant she heard the arrival at the front door. Iris was back. She slipped out of her bed at once and went to the edge of the balcony to see what had kept her friend.
Instead of Iris, the butler was ushering in a man. It was George Marsh, a close family friend and member of the intimate Ellingham circle.
Normally, George would have come in and made small talk with Montgomery as he handed over his hat and coat. Tonight, the hat and coat stayed on and the two of them walked briskly and silently toward Ellingham’s private office.
George was a former New York police detective. Several years before, he had saved Albert’s life when an anarchist placed a bomb in his car. Full of gratitude and impressed with his wits and courage, Albert called J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, and recommended that George be taken on as an agent. George tended to be wherever Ellingham and his circle were—if they were in New York, he worked out of the office there. If they were in Vermont, George would be moved up to Burlington to work on smuggling cases coming down from Canada via Lake Champlain.
George Marsh was Albert’s de facto security man, and tonight, Flora could see he was here on business. Off duty, George was loose and gregarious. This was on-duty George, his step quick, his tone clipped. George and Montgomery were speaking in very low voices, but Flora could make out a few words.
“. . . thirty-five minutes,” George said. “Have you . . .”
“No, sir,” Montgomery replied. “No police . . .”
Within a few seconds, he was ensconced in Albert’s office along with Montgomery.
Police. Not a word Flora wanted to hear. She had to act.
She went down the servants’ stairs to the floor below, and then made her way to Iris’s dressing room by keeping close to the wall. She pulled a key from the pocket of her dress and unlocked the door to a large room—an oasis of comfort. The pearl-gray carpet was soft under her bare feet. The long silver satin curtains were still open and pale moonlight seeped in, causing the gold trim and threading on Iris’s Louis XV furniture to take on a gentle glow.
Iris had so many things; Flora needed one object in particular. She started at the mirrored makeup table, where Iris’s extensive collection of cosmetics were kept in rigorous order by her maid—lipsticks lined up like soldiers, French perfumes pleasingly arranged, silver hairbrushes and mirror tidily side by side. Flora tore into the drawers of powders, shadows, hairpins, creams, lotions . . . where was it? Not in here. She moved on to the chest of a dozen drawers that housed Iris’s gloves, hat pins, cigarette cases, sunglasses, and any number of small accessories. Not in there. She worked the room, steady and fast, drawer by drawer, until every one was exhausted.
Flora heard knocking on the doors down the hall and her name being called. The maid was looking for her. There wasn’t much time. She had to think. Where had she seen it last?
An evening bag. The pink silk one they’d gotten that day in Paris when it rained so much they had to run barefoot down the street.
Flora ran to the closet, opened the baize door, and switched on the light. The closet was not a closet—it was another room full of racks and shelves of silk and satin, with beads and fur, with enough shoes to fill a store all lined up on shelves. The handbags took up an entire wall. Flora scanned them until she found the pink bag. She yanked it off the shelf, snapped it open, and removed a Schiaparelli makeup compact in the shape of a telephone dial.
The knocking was getting closer. Flora had to hurry. The maid was at the dressing room door, knocking and calling.
“Coming!” Flora said.
With only seconds to work, she shoved the compact down the front of her dress, wrapping her arms over her front to conceal any lump, and went to the door to admit the maid.
“You’re needed downstairs,” the maid said. “At once, miss.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“I’m not sure, miss. Mrs. Ellingham and Miss Alice didn’t come home and Mr. Marsh has come. That’s all I know.”
Flora pushed the compact down near her belted waist as she followed the maid downstairs; she would have to deal with its contents later. She was ushered into the office. She had only been in here once or twice before. It was the nexus of Albert’s business, his private area. Tonight, the large room was strangely close, the long curtains drawn, the fire in the fireplace making a sweaty heat.
“Flora,” Albert said. His voice had an urgency she had never heard before. “Did Iris tell you anything about where she was driving today?”
“No,” Flora said. “Just that she was going for a drive.”
“But she didn’t say where? Was she going toward Waterbury? Burlington? Which way?”
“I don’t know, Albert,” Flora said. “What’s happening?”
Albert turned toward the fire.
Flora looked to George. She and George knew each other very well. Normally, she could read his expression in a moment. He had a wide face, with a heavy jaw and big brown eyes—the kind of face that could take a blow, rattle a crook, or melt in infectious laughter. Tonight, he was a cypher.
“Please,” she said. “What’s wrong? Where’s Iris? Where’s Alice?”
“It’s fine,” George said. He was such a terrible liar, and what was the point of lying under these circumstances? “If you could just go back to your room . . .”
“I want to know what’s happened to Iris,” Flora said.
“Flora, please!” Albert cried.
The desperation in his voice made her physically cold. His secretary, Robert, shook his head, indicating to her not to press the question.
“Of course,” Flora said. “I’ll see myself upstairs, Montgomery.”
The maid was out in the atrium, fluttering around. It was obvious to Flora she was trying to find some business near the office door so she could monitor what was happening inside.
“I’m in desperate need of a pot of coffee,” Flora said to her. “Could you have one brought to my room?”
“Yes, miss,” she said, and skittered off.
When the maid left to go to the kitchen, Flora turned quickly and silently to the ballroom, next to Albert’s office. These rooms had intentionally been built side by side because they were rarely in use at the same time, and both benefited from high ceilings.
The lights in the ballroom were off and the curtains all drawn. The motley black-and-white floor still felt rough and dirty from the weekend’s revels; the staff had not yet cleaned it. There, under the soft padding of her feet, were the paper streamers, the gravel from the drive tracked in on dancing shoes, the endless sticky patches of spilled champagne.
Iris had shown Flora a trick about these rooms: the mirrors in the room were interspersed with panels covered in wallpaper, in a pattern depicting the characters of the commedia dell’arte. On the last panel on the left side, there was a wall sconce in the form of a Venetian mask. Flora climbed quietly onto one of the gold chairs against the wall and stretched to reach it. She put her fingers through the eyeholes of the mask and pulled down sharply. The wall panel tilted, exposing a space behind. Flora pushed the panel, which swung open on a well-made hinge.
The ballroom and the office, while seemingly sharing a wall, actually shared a secret space, about two feet wide. The ballroom mirrors on this side were one way and could be used to watch goings-on in the ballroom. There were switches that could be used to make the lights dim and flicker, and tiny panels you could open to snatch a glass from a confused partygoer. The perhaps unintended second use was that it was a perfect place to listen to what was happening in Ellingham’s office. Flora slipped along until she found the little door that led into Albert’s office. The door was far enough away from the men and sufficiently hidden in the wall that she felt she could safely crack it open an inch without anyone noticing, exactly as Iris had shown her.
“Most of what I hear is very boring,” Iris said when she showed Flora the passage and the door. “I wish he’d get a mistress and give me something better to listen to.”
Flora had a feeling it would not be boring tonight.
“. . . the one that came on Thursday,” George was saying. “Do you still have it?”
“Of course.” That was Robert Mackenzie. “Here.” He handed George a paper.
“‘Look, a riddle, time for fun,’” George read. “‘Should we use a rope or gun? Knives are sharp and gleam so pretty. Poison’s slow, which is a pity. Fire is festive, drowning’s slow. Hanging’s a ropy way to go. A broken head, a nasty fall. A car colliding with a wall. Bombs make a very jolly noise. Such ways to punish naughty boys! What shall we use? We can’t decide. Just like you cannot run or hide. Ha ha. Truly, Devious.’”
“The envelope was postmarked Burlington,” Robert added.
A phone rang, and it was snatched from the hook before the ring could even complete. Albert Ellingham said a breathless hello. The men gathered around the telephone on the desk and the responses were difficult for Flora to hear, until George’s voice broke out of the cluster.
“We saw your man,” a voice with a strange, unplacable accent said. “You called the cops.”
“No,” Albert replied. “George is a friend. He just came to visit.”
“We know who he is,” the voice replied. “You’ve made this worse on yourself. This is what you do now. You gather up all the jewelry, all the cash, anything you’ve got. You put them in pillowcases. You send your friend there alone, in his car. He drives east on interstate two and makes the left toward West Bolton. We’ll take care of it from there and you’ll get them back. Better move it. You have one hour from now.”
The phone went silent. Albert said hello several times but no one replied. Flora chanced it and opened the door an inch wider to see what was happening. The men were standing around the desk, not moving and not speaking.
“I go alone,” George finally said.
“No,” Albert replied. “It’s my wife and daughter . . .”
“You heard them, Albert,” George replied. “They want me, so I go.”
Robert Mackenzie had produced a map and opened it over the desk where the men were gathered.
“Here,” he said. “They want you to go east on interstate highway two and take the left to go toward West Bolton. It’s a dirt road. The drive looks like it would take a half hour, maybe more, depending on what happens once you turn.”
“So we work fast,” George said. “Get Montgomery to start gathering things. Jewelry, watches, anything you can get.”
“Why you?” Robert asked. “You’re in law enforcement. You’re trained.”
“I’m cheaper,” George replied. “If Albert went and something happened to him—if they hurt him or killed him—that’s international news. That’s the president getting involved. That’s the chair. An FBI agent no one’s ever heard of? That’s not such a big deal. It happens. They can’t let anything happen to you, Albert.”
“You’re right,” Robert said. “And they’d also get no more money, if that’s how this goes.”
“We have to move now,” George replied. “We need to get the stuff they want. Where’s the jewelry?”
“There are two safes upstairs, one in my dressing room and one in Iris’s. The combinations to both are left five, right twenty-seven, left eighteen, right nineteen. Go, Robert. Get Montgomery to help you. Empty them.”
Robert Mackenzie hurried off, leaving George and Albert alone with the map.
“I should go,” Albert said again.
George’s voice was quiet but it managed to fill the room and disturb the air. “You need to listen to me. You brought me here for a reason. It sounds like they’re ready to give them up, so we just have to be cool-headed about it. We play by their rules, but we play smart. I’ll go, and I’ll bring them back to you. I know you feel like you have to go, but you have to put your feelings aside.”
Albert leaned against the back of a chair and remained silent for a moment.
“If you do,” he finally said, “you have my life.”
“I’ll be satisfied with a stiff drink,” George said, grabbing his coat. As he did so, Flora saw his glance pass in the direction of where she was hiding, but he didn’t seem to see the tiny opening in the wall panel. He simply picked up the coat and turned back. “Lock this place down. I don’t want a mouse able to get in here. You have a revolver?”
“There’s one in the desk,” Robert said.
“You load it. You lock the school. You get the staff stationed at every door. And you two stay in here with that door locked and that revolver ready until I return. If I don’t show up by, say, one in the morning, you call in the cavalry. This is how we have to do this. This is how we bring them home.”
Crouching in the secret corridor, her head to the crack in the door, Flora felt her heart beat so fast that she grew faint. She slid down to the floor as silently as she could.