“I’ll get her.”
Emily ran. I heard the front door open and her feet striking the porch steps. Grant stood between me and the fallen phone, breathing hard. Through the open doorway came Emily’s voice, calling to a neighbor.
Whatever he had come for was still in the house. I saw him calculate that, too.
He backed toward Clara’s workroom. I went into the sitting room.
Lena was on the floor beside the sofa. A lamp lay broken near her shoulder. She was conscious, but blood had dried along her hairline, and her left arm was bent close against her body.
“Emily?” she asked.
“Outside with Mrs. Alvarez. Can you move?”
“She has the envelope.” Lena swallowed. “In her cardigan. Don’t let him tell you she made this up.”
From the hall came the sound of Grant’s shoes on the stairs. I picked up my phone, called the emergency number, and gave the address. The dispatcher asked me to stay on the line. As I knelt beside Lena, a door slammed above us. Grant was searching the workroom.
Lena caught my sleeve. “I opened it,” she said. “I know it wasn’t mine to open.”
“You can tell me later.”
“No. I need to tell you now.”
That morning she had gone into the workroom for drawing paper. Emily liked the thick sheets Clara used to keep there. A drawer had been pulled partway out of the filing cabinet, and when Lena tried to close it, she found an envelope wedged behind it. The envelope was addressed to me in Clara’s handwriting. Inside were copies of bank records, a letter from a solicitor, and a note Clara had written shortly before she died.
Lena called Grant because his name was on the records. She thought there might be an explanation.
“He got here before I could call you,” she said. “Emily came downstairs while we were arguing.”
A heavy thud sounded overhead. The dispatcher asked what it was. I told her Grant was upstairs and that I could not leave Lena alone. She said officers were on their way.
Mrs. Alvarez appeared at the front door with Emily tucked under her arm. The neighbor’s slippers were wet from the grass; she must have come across her garden.
“Emily’s staying with me,” she said. Her eyes went to Lena. “Help is coming.”
Emily pulled away from her just far enough to speak. “I put the envelope in the cereal box.”
Lena shut her eyes.
I looked toward the kitchen. Grant, upstairs, could hear every word.
The workroom door banged open. His steps crossed the landing, fast and uneven. I told Mrs. Alvarez to take Emily out of sight. They had barely reached the porch when Grant came down. He stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked from me to the kitchen.
“It’s a misunderstanding,” he said. “I can explain the transfers.”
He had not told me there were transfers.
I held his gaze while the dispatcher listened. “Then explain them to the officers.”
Grant went into the kitchen. I followed to the doorway, keeping the phone against my ear. He opened the cupboard above the counter, moved a tin of tea, then turned and saw me watching. He had found the wrong hiding place.
For years he had been the person I called when something broke. He knew which window stuck in wet weather, how Emily liked her toast, which cupboard held the cereal. Now he stood in that familiar room, checking each shelf as if it belonged to him.
“Clara asked me to manage things,” he said. “You weren’t well after she died.”
I remembered the months he meant. Emily had been five. Some mornings, getting her socks on the right feet had taken all the strength I had. Grant had brought meals and collected forms and told me to leave the difficult calls to him. I had thanked him.
“What things?”
“The property. Her savings. There were expenses you never saw.”
“Then show me the accounts.”
“I was trying to.”
He reached for a cereal box. I stepped into the room. He gripped the cardboard, and I caught it from the other side. For a second we stood there, neither willing to pull hard enough to tear it open.
A car door shut outside. Grant looked past me toward the street. His fingers loosened. I took the box.
He made one last attempt. “She trusted me.”
I did not answer. I had trusted him, too.
The officers found him in the kitchen. He told them Lena had fallen, that Emily had become frightened, and that the records were a private family matter. He spoke clearly until one officer asked why he had taken both phones. Then he looked at me.
Lena went to the hospital with a concussion and a fractured wrist. Before the ambulance left, Emily slipped out of Mrs. Alvarez’s house and came to its open doors. Lena raised her good hand. Emily pressed her palm against it and held it there until a paramedic gently asked her to step back.
Only when the ambulance pulled away did I open the cereal box.
