Chapter 4 - The Sound of the Garrard
The house felt different that night.
It wasn't just silent; it was listening.
Sadie didn't go back to her apartment above the garage. At nine o'clock, Julian had told her—not asked, told—that she would sleep in the guest bedroom on the second floor, three doors down from his own quarters.
"It is safer," Martin Doyle had grunted as he carried her small canvas overnight bag up the grand staircase. "The garage lot has four blind spots near the fence line."
Now, at midnight, Sadie lay on top of the oversized four-poster bed, wearing her flannel pajamas and staring up at the white plaster medallion in the center of the ceiling.
She couldn't sleep.
Every shadow in the room looked like a man with a heavy coat and a red plastic gas can. Every creak of the floorboards sounded like a boot stepping off the runner rug.
At twelve-twenty, she stood up.
She didn't put on her slippers. She walked barefoot across the soft wool carpet, opened her door two inches, and looked out into the long corridor.
The sconces were dimmed to a low, amber glow.
At the far end of the hall, the door to Julian’s study was open a crack. A single line of yellow light fell across the dark walnut floorboards.
Sadie hesitated.
She should go back to bed. She should shut her door, pull the quilt over her head, and remember that her paycheck was two thousand dollars a month and that none of this was listed in her job description.
Instead, she stepped out into the hall.
Her feet made no sound against the runner as she walked toward the light.
She didn't knock. The door was open six inches, and through the gap she could see Julian sitting at his desk.
He had not gone to bed. He was wearing his black trousers and a charcoal gray sweater with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows. A crystal glass with two fingers of amber liquid sat near his right hand, untouched.
He was looking at a monitor.
It was a small, high-definition screen split into four sections, showing black-and-white live feeds of the estate: the front entrance, the long driveway, the drawing room, and the third-floor corridor.
On the drawing-room screen, the old Garrard turntable sat on its mahogany stand.
Sadie reached out and pushed the door open another inch.
The small hinge made a tiny creak.
Julian didn't look back. "You should be sleeping, Sadie."
Sadie stepped into the room. "You have twenty cameras in this house, Mr. Corsini. Do you have one in this door too?"
"I don't need a camera to know when you are nearby," Julian said softly. "You breathe differently when you're thinking about running."
Sadie stopped three feet from his desk. "I'm not running."
"You should be," Julian said. He turned his head slowly, his gray eyes searching her face in the dim light of the monitor screen. "Any woman with a grain of sense would have taken her sixty-four dollars and caught the four-o'clock bus to Portland."
Sadie let out a short, dry breath that wasn't quite a laugh. "Portland has too many memories for you, apparently."
Julian’s eyes narrowed slightly, but the corner of his thin mouth twitched—a tiny, almost invisible sign of amusement that vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
"Sit down," he said, gesturing toward the green leather chair.
Sadie sat. She pulled her knees up against her chest, wrapping her arms around her legs, her flannel-clad ankles tucked under the edge of her cardigan.
"Why didn't you tell the police?" she asked. "About the items. About the scrap of newspaper."
Julian took a small sip of his whiskey. The crystal glass clicked against his signet ring.
"The police in Boston," Julian said flatly, "are very good at managing traffic during sports events and picking up drunks outside the garden. They are not designed to investigate events that happened twenty-three years ago among men who do not use written contracts."
"You mean the mafia," Sadie said outright.
Julian looked at her for three seconds. "I mean men who believe that ownership is defined by who is holding the key at midnight."
He pointed toward the screen showing the drawing room.
"Look at the turntable," he said.
Sadie leaned forward, her eyes fixing on the small black-and-white square.
The arm of the record player was down. The record—the same album she had played three nights ago—was spinning slowly, forty-five revolutions per minute, though no sound came through the security monitor.
"Why is it playing?" Sadie asked, her brow pulling together.
"It isn't," Julian said softly. "The feed is on a seven-minute loop."
Sadie froze. "What?"
"Someone looped the feed for the drawing room at twelve-zero-four," Julian revealed, his voice dropping into a low, terrifying calm. "They think I am looking at a live image of an empty room."
He stood up from his desk.
He reached into his bottom drawer, pulled out a short, dark steel revolver, and checked the cylinder with a quiet, metallic click.
"Stay here, Sadie," he said.
Sadie stood up so fast her chair screeched against the floorboards. "Julian, no!"
It was the first time she had called him by his first name.
Julian stopped near the door. He looked back over his shoulder, his gray eyes dark as midnight, his broad frame blocking the warm light from the hallway.
"Stay in this room," he repeated, his voice like iron sliding over stone. "Lock the door behind me. If I am not back in five minutes, press the red button beside the desk lamp."
"Julian—"
May you like
"Lock it, Sadie," he ordered.
He stepped out into the corridor, his dark trousers vanishing into the shadows, leaving her alone with the quiet hum of the security monitor and the ghost of a record spinning on a seven-minute loop.
