Chapter 1 - The Maid Who Counted the Money Instead of Taking It
The first time Dominic Rinaldi watched me sing into a feather duster, I was fairly certain I was about to lose my job.
The second time he watched me, seven hundred and twenty thousand dollars lay between us, and he looked like the one who didn't know what to do.
I had been employed at his Pennsylvania estate for precisely three hours.
That made it a personal record. My last job had ended after a manager discovered I was pregnant and abruptly decided the restaurant could survive without another hostess. Of course, he insisted the timing was coincidental. Men with expensive watches were remarkably fond of coincidences.
I was twenty-eight, five months pregnant, and living out of the least expensive room at a roadside motel outside Philadelphia. My husband, Evan, had been missing for four months. The police called him a voluntarily absent adult. I called him the man who still left me voice messages on the refrigerator before disappearing, telling me not to forget lunch and to stop driving with the gas gauge on empty.
The pregnancy wasn't a secret I enjoyed keeping. But the black maid's dress I'd borrowed from the staffing agency was roomy at the waist, and our baby's future didn't allow me to be picky about employers.
My feather duster was older than the house. I called him Duke because my father had always said a tool deserved a name if it stayed with you long enough. Duke's wooden handle was cracked, his feathers ragged, and he had survived two apartments, one disastrous catering job, and my wedding.
When I entered the walnut-paneled morning room, I saw an enormous fireplace, windows taller than my old apartment, and a table polished until it reflected the chandelier.
Naturally, I began singing.
“Good evening, Philadelphia,” I told Duke in my best nightclub voice. “Tonight's headliner is a woman with seventeen dollars in checking and the vocal range of a distressed dishwasher.”
I held the duster to my lips. The song was terrible. I knew it was terrible. Singing made the silence less heavy, and the silence in that mansion had weight.
Behind me, a man's voice said, “Is the dishwasher available for an encore?”
I turned. Duke slipped from my hand and landed at the feet of a very large man.
He had a close-shaved head, dark eyes, tattooed forearms, and a charcoal suit that probably cost more than my car. Dominic Rinaldi looked like somebody had dressed an industrial bulldozer for a board meeting.
There were stories about him. Shipping contracts. Nightclubs. A family whose money smelled vaguely of the Delaware River after midnight. The employment agency had called him a private businessman. The motel clerk had called him a mafia boss. I was not in a position to investigate either description.
“I apologize,” I said. “Duke gets carried away.”
Dominic looked down at the duster. “Duke?”
“He's union. Difficult to replace.”
For half a second, his expression almost changed.
Then he said, “Bring him upstairs. Second door after the portrait gallery. Clean that room.”
He walked away before I could explain that no one should trust me with art worth more than a town.
Upstairs, I opened the study door and took exactly three steps.
The table in the center held twelve orderly stacks of cash. Each stack was bound with bank bands. Beside them lay several strands of pearls and a diamond-and-sapphire necklace with an open clasp.
I didn't need a calculator to understand the display was deliberate. Nobody left that amount of money beside heirloom jewelry by accident. Not in a room without a dust cover and with a new maid scheduled to arrive.
A card beside the stacks read: $720,000.
I thought of the hospital invoice folded beneath my motel pillow. Nine thousand six hundred dollars in unpaid prenatal and emergency care from the night I thought I was losing the baby. I thought of a crib advertised online for forty dollars. I thought of a husband I didn't know how to find.
My hand rested on my stomach.
“Well, kid,” I whispered, “your mother has been offered an unusually inconvenient moral exam.”
I did not take a bill.
I took my housekeeping notebook from my apron pocket and wrote down exactly what was on the table. The money was arranged in twelve stacks. One bundle had tipped sideways, so I straightened it. A loose twenty lay beneath the chair, and I returned it. The clasp of the sapphire necklace had come apart; one pin was bent and caught in the velvet lining of its case.
I knew how to fix clasps. My father repaired watches in a storefront nobody ever visited unless an heirloom broke. He taught me patience before he taught me multiplication.
I used a clean pin from my hair to ease the clasp back into alignment. It shut with one delicate click.
Then I left a signed note documenting the valuables, the loose bill, and my temporary repair. I apologized for touching the necklace without permission and started dusting.
The door opened again fifteen minutes later.
Dominic entered with three other housemaids behind him. They looked startled to see me still working. One had her hand over her mouth, as though waiting to witness my execution.
Dominic inspected the table. He read my note. He opened the necklace clasp and shut it again.
“You counted the money?” he asked.
“I counted the bundles. I didn't individually count every bill. It would take longer than my shift.”
“You didn't take anything.”
“No, sir.”
“You need money.”
“Yes.”
“Then why not?”
I set Duke against the shelf. “Because needing something doesn't make it mine.”
His face remained unreadable. “Sixty-one employees failed this test before you.”
I looked at the table, then at the three terrified women near the door.
“Sixty-one?”
“Over seven years.”
I should have stopped talking. I needed the job. My motel bill was due Friday. The baby had an appointment Monday. My mouth, unfortunately, had always worked more quickly than my sense of self-preservation.
“Maybe you should test the people who keep putting that money out,” I said.
One maid gasped.
Dominic turned his head. “Explain.”
“If sixty-one people supposedly stole from you, either you're hiring from a particularly unlucky planet, or something is wrong with how you decide who's guilty.”
The silence felt suddenly expensive.
Then I added, “You also shouldn't leave your mother's jewelry sitting open. The clasp was going to break completely.”
He stared at me. “How do you know it was my mother's?”
I looked down. Inside the velvet case was a faded photograph of a dark-haired woman wearing the necklace. The resemblance was impossible to miss.
“Because she has your eyes.”
Dominic lowered the photograph.
“What is your name?”
“June Keller.”
His expression changed at the surname. It was small, but I noticed. When you have spent four months watching strangers react to the name of a missing man, you become very good at noticing.
“Keller,” he repeated.
“My husband's name was Evan Keller. He worked for Harborline Freight before he vanished.”
One of the women behind him went pale.
Dominic looked at her, then back at me.
“Who told you to apply here?”
“The agency.”
He slowly folded my note and slipped it into his jacket.
“Starting tomorrow,” he said, “you won't clean rooms. You'll inspect the household accounts.”
I stared at him. “I'm a maid.”
“You're a maid who noticed my test has a problem.”
Then he reached for his phone and said something that turned my confusion into fear.
“Get me every file we have on Evan Keller. Quietly.”
The other maids exchanged looks.
May you like
I felt the baby move beneath my hand.
I had come to that house looking for a paycheck. I was beginning to understand that somebody there might know exactly why my husband never came home.
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