Page 44 of One Last Lie

“It must be nice to be rich.”

He chuckles, but his face quickly gets serious. “I don’t know if I agree with that anymore. After everything that’s been going on?” He shakes his head. “I feel like there is such a thing as too much.”

I think of Theresa and her justification for her theft. I think of the opulence I find in Cecilia’s bedroom and my brief moment of sympathy for Theresa.

Then I think of the letter and decide that if anyone knows who Theresa’s enemies would be, it must be one of the staff. “Do the rest of the staff feel the same as you?” I ask.

I get the answer I hope for. He laughs and says, “No. Paolo doesn’t feel one way or another about wealth. As long as he can cook, he’ll sleep in a tent or a palace. Doesn’t matter which. As for Theresa? Well, let’s just say she’s here to live vicariously. Don’t tell her I told you this, but I caught her wearing one of Emily’s dresses once.”

“Who’s Emily?”

“Oh, right. That was Johnathan’s mom. She died about ten years ago, shortly after I started working here. I was heading upstairs to give Lawrence—that’s Johnathan’s father—the title to a Bentley he had bought, and I caught Theresa through the door to her room. She had one of Emily’s dresses on, and she was parading around like a teenager playing dress up.” He laughed. “I kind of wished I had said something to her.”

I try to think how to ask about the subject I want to ask. I start with, “Did anyone say anything to her?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was there anyone who caught her who wasn’t happy with her theft?”

He looks fishily at me. “What do you mean theft?”

I backpedal, “Oh, well, I mean that’s how they’d see it, right?”

He chuckles. “Honestly, Emily and Lawrence would have just found it funny. They would probably have fired her, but they wouldn’t have hated her for it.”

“Does anyone hate her?”

He gives me another fishy look. “I get the impression you don’t care very much for her.”

“I can’t say I do,” I admit, “but… I guess I just want to know if it’s only me or if others find her annoying.”

"It's not just you," he replies. "She's an arrogant, bitter, rude woman who is indeed very annoying. But hate is a strong word. Working in service is a different kind of life. Even if you don't like each other, you have to support each other. Your lives are centered around enabling the lives of people who live in an entirely separate world from yours. It's very hard to do this kind of work without letting that affect you, and it's a lot harder when you have to do it alone." He looks back at me again. "You're new. You'll understand eventually."

He's essentially told me that she has no enemies and likely never will. That’s the opposite of what I want to hear. I don’t know where else to look. I suppose I could look online, but the chances of finding any information on a housekeeper are nonexistent. The only other option is going to the police, but I don’t want to do that until I know who the police should be looking for.

It galls me, but I may need to make some sort of overture to Theresa and get her to confide in me. Maybe now that she knows it’s not me, she’ll have some idea who it really is.

We return home with the Chinese food and fill our conversation with small talk. He tells me of the time he thought he had blown the transmission on Johnathan’s Corvette only to realize he had shifted to neutral and not drive. I share an anecdote of my first Christmas party at the school in New York when one of the teachers gets so drunk she vomits on the principal.

One of these days, someone will have to explore why it is that so much of human interaction is based around laughing at misfortune—ours and others. Are we such fearful creatures that we must force laughter into every event to make it small enough not to be terrifying?

It’s moments like these that I’m grateful I choose to forgo that career.

It seems Samuel won the movie contest. We end up watching Godzilla Vs. King Kong. Not a cinematic masterpiece, to be sure, but seeing Samuel smile makes it worth the watch. Isabella seems to agree. She looks at him with such love that it sets my heart aglow.

Cecilia pays more attention to Elijah, but she is met with stony silence. My heart breaks for her, but once more, I can’t be sure if she’s simply a struggling widow or a murderous one.

When the movie ends, the younger children go upstairs to shower and head for bed. Cecilia remains downstairs for a few more minutes, but when it’s clear she won’t get any conversation from Elijah, she heads to her room.

I wait until I hear the door to Cecilia’s room close before I speak, but it’s Elijah who breaks the silence.

“I think she killed Dad.”

Hearing my own darkest suspicion come from his lips startles me. I stammer for a moment, and he smiles tightly. “Crazy, right?”

“Yes,” I say honestly. “Very. What… what makes you say that?”

“She doesn’t love him. Never did.” He cocks his head. “I take that back. She did love him for a while, but that changed about five years ago.”

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