Chapter 3: What Walter Knew
The ambulance arrived at 6:41.
I know because I watched the clock on the kitchen wall the entire time Gideon kept pressure on the cut above my temple with a folded dish towel.
He didn't speak.
Neither did I.
Walter stood in the doorway with his arms at his sides and his face doing something complicated that I didn't have the energy to read.
Rossella had gone back upstairs.
She hadn't asked if I was all right.
The paramedics were efficient and kind.
The younger one, a woman with short red hair, asked me my name and what day it was and whether I had lost consciousness.
I answered all three correctly.
She splinted my wrist, cleaned the cut at my temple, and told me the wrist would need imaging at the hospital.
"I'll take her," Gideon said.
"Mr.
Marquetti—" Walter started.
"I'll take her, Walter."
Walter closed his mouth.
In the back of Gideon's car, with my splinted wrist across my lap and a gauze pad taped above my ear, I finally said what had been sitting in my chest since I hit the floor.
"She said that's three this year."
Gideon's hands stayed on the wheel.
His eyes stayed on the road.
"Yes."
"The other two nurses."
"Yes."
"What happened to them?"
A long pause.
The lake appeared on our left, gray and flat under the November sky.
"The first one twisted her ankle on the front steps in September.
She said a stone had come loose.
Maintenance found nothing loose." He exhaled slowly.
"The second one left in October.
She didn't give a reason.
She just packed her bag at midnight and called a car.
She wouldn't return my calls after that."
I turned to look at him.
"Did you know?
Before today?"
He didn't answer immediately.
That was its own kind of answer.
"I suspected something was wrong," he said finally.
"I didn't know what."
"But you kept hiring nurses."
"My father needs a nurse."
I looked back at the road.
"And Rossella keeps removing them."
He said nothing.
"Why?" I asked.
"Why does she want your father without a nurse?"
The car slowed for a traffic light.
Gideon's jaw worked once, like he was deciding how much to say.
"My father's estate goes to review in January," he said.
"There's a clause.
If he is deemed medically incapacitated before then, Rossella becomes the primary trustee."
The light turned green.
"And a nurse on the premises," I said slowly, "is a medical witness."
"A nurse on the premises," Gideon said, "is someone who can testify to his condition.
His clarity.
His capacity to make his own decisions."
I stared at the dashboard.
Nine years as a nurse and I had walked into a legal trap wearing scrubs and carrying a medication tray.
"She wasn't trying to scare me off," I said.
"No."
"She was trying to hurt me badly enough that I wouldn't come back."
He didn't deny it.
We pulled into the hospital drop-off.
Gideon put the car in park but didn't move to get out.
His hands stayed on the wheel at ten and two, like a man holding something together by force.
"Adeline." He said my name the same way he had at the top of the stairs.
Like it cost him something.
"I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer honestly."
"All right."
"Before you fell — last night, or this morning — did you see anyone near the back staircase?"
I opened my mouth to say no.
Then I stopped.
Because I had.
At 5:50 in the morning, twenty-five minutes before I carried the medication tray to the back stairs, I had gone to the kitchen for water.
The hallway light was off.
But the door to the back staircase had been open, and there had been a shape at the top of it.
I had assumed it was Walter.
I had not looked closely.
"Yes," I said.
"I saw someone."
Gideon turned to look at me for the first time since we had gotten in the car.
"Who?"
I shook my head slowly.
"I don't know.
But they were wearing something light.
Something pale."
His face went very still.
Rossella's silk robe was pale ivory.
He knew it.
I knew it.
We both sat with that knowledge in the cold car outside the emergency entrance while the automatic doors opened and closed for other people with other problems.
"Will you come back?" he asked.
"After today.
Will you come back to the house?"
I looked down at my splinted wrist.
"That depends," I said.
"On what?"
"On whether you're going to do something about your sister.
Or whether you're going to keep pretending you don't know what she is."
He didn't answer.
The automatic doors opened again.
I got out of the car.
May you like
But I heard him, just before I stepped through — quiet, almost to himself, like a man making a decision he had been avoiding for a long time.
"I know exactly what she is."
