Chapter 3 - The Girl from South Boston
By four o'clock, the news had settled into Sadie’s brain like a cold stone.
She sat in her small apartment above the garage, looking out at the rain through the narrow dormer window. Her room was simple—a narrow bed with a blue quilt, a white dresser she had bought at a consignment shop in Salem, and a single wooden chair that creaked whenever she shifted her weight.
She had sixty-four dollars in her checking account.
She had eleven hundred dollars on a credit card she hadn't touched in six months.
She had a sister in New Hampshire who called her once a month to ask if she was "finally doing something real with her life."
And she had a boss who was being stalked by a ghost who left scraps of newspaper under his mantelpiece.
A knock sounded at her door.
Sadie stood up, smoothing her wool trousers—she had changed out of her uniform the moment her shift ended at three—and opened the door.
Martin Doyle stood on the small landing, holding a wide black leather folder under his arm.
"Boss wants you upstairs," Martin said.
Sadie let out a long breath. "Martin, my shift ended an hour ago."
"The boss doesn't have shifts," Martin said flatly. "And right now, neither do you."
He stepped aside, gesturing toward the covered walkway that connected the garage apartment to the main house.
Sadie picked up her cardigan, wrapped it tight around her shoulders, and followed him back through the rain.
This time, they didn't go to the library.
They went up the grand staircase—the broad oak steps that curved up toward the second floor beneath a chandelier made of two hundred pieces of cut lead crystal.
Julian’s private study sat at the end of the east corridor.
It was a room Sadie had entered only twice to vacuum the heavy red rug. It smelled of old brandy, leather, and cedar. A single leather armchair sat before a dark wood desk that looked older than the state of Massachusetts.
Julian was sitting behind the desk. He was wearing a fresh shirt—dark blue this time, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows—and holding a silver pen between his fingers.
"Sit down, Sadie," he said.
Sadie didn't sit immediately. She looked at the chair—a massive wingback covered in dark green leather that looked as though it had been built for a nineteenth-century ship captain.
"I'm off the clock, Mr. Corsini," she said quietly.
Julian set the silver pen down on the desk. It made a small thud against the leather blotter.
"You are thirty-one years old," Julian said, his voice dropping into that low, flat register that sounded like stone sliding over gravel. "You were born in South Boston. Your father was a machinist at the navy yard until he was laid off in 1998. Your mother worked the evening shift at St. Margaret’s Hospital."
Sadie’s heart did a strange, violent flip in her chest. "You looked at my background."
"I look at everyone’s background," Julian said simply. "You took dance lessons from age six to twelve at the Sullivan School of Ballet on Broadway. You stopped because your father broke his wrist and couldn't work overtime."
Sadie felt her jaw clench. The air in the room felt suddenly hot. "Is there a point to this, Mr. Corsini?"
"The point," Julian said, leaning forward and resting his broad forearms on the desk, "is that you know what it means when something you care about disappears overnight because somebody else made a decision you couldn't control."
Sadie stared at him. "That was twenty years ago. It was dance lessons."
"It was what you wanted," Julian corrected smoothly. "And you have spent the last nineteen years pretending you were fine without it."
He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a yellowed photograph.
He didn't offer it to her. He held it between two fingers, looking at it himself.
"On August 14, 2003," Julian said, "my father, Arthur Corsini, was shot three times in the parking lot of a diner in Revere. He survived thirty-six hours in the hospital before his kidneys failed."
The silence in the room became absolute.
Sadie held her breath. Everyone in Boston knew Arthur Corsini had died in 2003, but the official story had always been a heart attack during a business dinner in Cambridge.
"The man who shot him," Julian continued, his voice unchanged, "was never found. The police called it a botched robbery. My family called it an inconvenience."
He looked up at her then.
"The train ticket," Julian said, "was in my father’s pocket when he died. It was a ticket from Boston to Portland, departure time eight-fifteen PM. He was shot at seven-forty-five."
Sadie felt a cold shiver run down her spine. "He was trying to leave."
"He was trying to run," Julian said. "With four hundred thousand dollars in cash that belonged to three men from South Boston who are now either dead or living in Florida."
He laid the photograph down on the desk.
It showed an elderly man with thick gray hair and a heavy jaw, standing beside a much younger Julian—perhaps twenty-three years old—whose face was thinner, sharper, and entirely devoid of the cold authority he carried now.
"The thief who is coming into my house," Julian whispered, "is not stealing my things, Sadie. They are returning my father’s luggage."
Sadie looked at the small gray scrap of paper sitting on his blotter.
08-14-03
"The tie clip," Sadie said, her brain connecting the pieces with a sudden, sharp clarity. "The matchbook from the waterfront. The cuff link."
"All of them," Julian confirmed. "They belonged to Arthur. They were the small things he carried in his leather bag the night he died."
He stood up from the desk.
He was so tall the shadow of his broad shoulders fell across her lap as she sat in the green leather chair.
"The thief wants me to know," Julian said, stepping around the desk until he was standing inches from her knee, "that my father did not die because of a robbery. He died because someone knew he had that ticket."
Sadie looked up into his face.
"Why are you telling me this?" she asked, her voice barely a breath. "I'm the housekeeper, Mr. Corsini. I clean the toilets. I fold the sheets. I... I dance in your shirts when I think nobody is looking."
Julian leaned down.
He brought his face so close to hers she could see the tiny gold flecks in his gray eyes, could see the small, thin scar that cut through the edge of his left eyebrow.
"Because three nights ago," Julian said softly, "the thief was in the drawing room at eleven-forty."
May you like
Sadie’s eyes went wide.
"You were there at eleven-forty-seven," Julian murmured, his voice dropping an octave, thick and dark as syrup. "If you had arrived seven minutes earlier, Sadie... you would have met the man who killed my father."
