Chapter 2 - The Secret Behind the Carriage House Door
Three days after finding Noel in the garden, I watched her from the second-floor gallery as she carried a stack of fresh linens down the western hallway. She moved with a quiet, careful grace, her eyes always absorbing details others missed—the wear on a carpet, the dust on a molding, the slight misalignment of a heavy oak door. She wasn't just a maid; she was an observer. And in my world, observers were either liabilities or spies.
I summoned my chief of security, Dominic, to my private study.
"Find everything on Noel Hart," I told him, pouring a finger of scotch as the rain began to lash against the tall glass windows. "Where she came from, why she applied for a housekeeping position at Larks Hill instead of cleaning hotels in Manhattan, and who hired her."
It took less than forty-eight hours for Dominic to return with a thin manila folder that didn't make sense. Noel Hart wasn't a career domestic. Her real name was Eleanor Vance, and her father had been the head accountant for Ferrante Freight until he died under suspicious circumstances twelve years ago—right around the time my father was consolidating absolute control over the northern shipping terminals. Her father hadn't died of a heart attack, as the old police reports stated; he had been investigating a massive, systemic drain of capital siphon-pumped through fake shell corporations operating out of the very carriage house I had locked up the morning after I met her.
She hadn't come to Larks Hill to clean rooms. She had come to find out who murdered her father and stole his legacy.
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That evening, instead of going down to dinner, I walked out into the damp courtyard and bypassed the main locks of the carriage house, using my own heavy master key to slip inside the darkened, dust-choked building. The air smelled of old paper, damp wood, and rotting canvas. Flashlight beam cutting through the gloom, I checked the old oak desk in the corner. Someone had been here recently. Fresh fingerprints smudged the brass inkwell. And taped beneath the bottom drawer was a small ledger, bound in black leather, containing three tiny, pressed autumn leaves and a handwritten list of bank routing numbers that matched accounts belonging to my own uncle, Marcus Ferrante.
Marcus—the man who had helped raise me after my father's death, the man who supposedly managed our legal corporate holdings with absolute loyalty. The man who had placed Noel into my house as a low-level servant to test whether I would notice her investigation before she could dig up the truth.
