There I was all these years thinking my father did what he did for the love of it, for the pioneering legacy building of it—but no. They must have paid him an absolute fortune.
And the truth is, he kept that from me.
Of course we never wanted for anything, but he kept all this—this immense wealth, this potentially ethically questionable hoard—from me. He must have been a genius for hire. A genius who, it seems, had little issue with lying to his daughter.
There is a trail here to follow, and my father is finally leading me to an answer.
“Should you decide to part with any of the art collection, now or in the future, we’d be happy to assist at Mitfield & Booth,” James says with an admirable level of disinterest.
I give a nod of acknowledgment as my gaze moves on to the enormous wall-to-wall glass doors across the front of the room. Outside is the immense curve of the island’s coast, the tops of the palm trees beneath us, the cove with its perfect crescent of sand, and out into the shallows, the graduating greens of the island waters dropping out into the deep hue of the Caribbean Sea—the sun twinkling across it, glittering everything.
James moves behind me. Momentarily unnerved by his proximity, I spin, my shoes squeaking on the marble. He looks surprised by my nerves but recovers quickly, giving an airy gesture toward the staircase. “If you’re ready I can show you downstairs?”
CHAPTER 8
MARIA
T he electrician looks back at her with a smile that says: See? Just as I predicted—nothing happened. Something inside Maria shifts, and she realizes with odd clarity that she wishes something had happened—to him. She wishes something bad had happened when that lovely, helpful, kind man, with all his misplaced male confidence, had pressed the button just to prove to her, and himself, that the world was as he expected and not as she feared.
That wish, that the world had opened up and swallowed him whole for his baseless assumptions, no doubt springing from anger built up over a lifetime of having to anticipate every eventuality in her own life as a woman: just in case.
Of course he can just press the button. But Maria knows bitterness is a pointless emotion. So instead she gives him an enthusiastic cheerleader clap for his bravery and ushers him safely back out of the room.
“I guess the button must just be for show then,” she says, a hand gently leading him out into the dim hall. “That’s so great to know, thank you so much for taking a look in there.” The signals she’s giving are clear, she hopes. She’s telling him he has done what he was asked and now it’s time for him to go.
Social order gently reintroduces itself to the equation.
The man looks momentarily deflated that their tiny adventure, where he was the hero and she applauded on the sidelines, is over but as they reach the stairs his ego rallies and makes sense of it all somehow.
At the front door, goodbyes are oddly exchanged and then he is gone.
—
MARIA SITS BY THE POOL, her limbs loose and warmed to the bone as she sips an iced coffee, hard won, from the professional-standard coffee machine she’s finally managed to work out how to use.
The client and the children are not coming. She feels it now as if it is fact.
She lets the cool drink slide down her throat and closes her eyes. She tries to forget the green button, the man, the white room. She listens to the wind in the palms and she almost, almost lets it all go…until the sound of the house phone brings her eyes flashing open.
—
IT’S THE WOMAN WITH THE too-tight chignon checking on the work completed.
“Yes, he fixed the lighting issue. Yes.” Maria almost stops there but decides to continue, her newfound anger still there, like a will-o’-the-wisp, rolling deep in the hidden parts of her. “He couldn’t fix the problem with the locked room, though,” she adds with an odd relish.
The woman at the other end falters a moment at this new information. “Excuse me?”
“The room you told me not to go in. It’s open, unlocked. The man you sent tried to fix it but it’s broken. Well, not broken exactly, the room just isn’t locked anymore,” Maria explains.
The woman on the other end makes an odd clicking noise, half tut, half hesitation.
“You haven’t entered the room, though?” she clarifies.
“No, I have not entered the room,” Maria tells her, with a strange jolt of satisfaction.
The woman is silent for a moment before answering, “Good, that’s good.”
“Great,” Maria counters, “so I’ll just stay away from the now unlocked room, right? That’s what you’re telling me to do? Right?” Maria isn’t entirely sure what exactly she’s asking but it seems to require specificity.
