Chapter 6
At eight the next morning, a black car pulled up in front of the laundry and did not turn off its engine.
Odette saw it first, through the front window, and went very still with a folded sheet in her hands.
Tobias Cain came in. He filled most of the doorway, and he took his hat off in a way that suggested somebody had raised him properly, and he held out a plain envelope.
He did not explain it, and he did not wait.
Camille turned it over. There was one line on the back in pen, in a slanted, unhurried hand.
Was your father named Remy?
The address on the envelope was in the Bywater, four blocks off the water — a brick warehouse with the original crane rail still bolted along the roofline and new glass set into the loading bays.
Inside it was cool and dry and smelled of paper the way a library does, and it went back farther than she had expected. Rows of steel shelving under hanging lamps. Gray archival boxes stacked four high and numbered by year.
The years on the nearest aisle started in 1979.
Forty years of shipping documents. Somebody had been keeping every scrap of it.
Gideon Ferraro was at a long table near the middle with his sleeves turned back and reading glasses pushed up into his hair, which was not the man three hundred people had watched come down a staircase the night before.
Camille had the strange sense that she was seeing something she was not supposed to have access to.
She did not sit. She walked the length of the aisle and put the envelope down on the table between them hard enough that it skidded.
Inside had been two pages.
The first was a disbursement schedule on plain letterhead for something called the Harbor Fund — columns of case numbers and monthly figures. No names. No explanation.
The second was a single line highlighted in the middle of a page of forty others.
B. Marshand — paid in full.
Month 74.
Six years and two months. Without one interruption. Without one letter. Without one person ever calling to ask her anything.
He did not offer her a chair, and he did not offer her a speech.
He pushed a third sheet across the table with two fingers — an authorization page with his signature at the bottom and a date in January.
“I sign the budget every year,” he said. “I don’t read the list on purpose.”
She had to stand there a moment before she understood what he meant by that.
And when she did, it went through her sideways.
A man who wants gratitude reads the list. A man who wants leverage reads it twice and keeps a copy.
Forty-some families. Six figures a year. And he had built the thing so that he would never be able to walk into a room and know which of the people in it owed him something.
Then the rest of it arrived, and she had to put her hand flat on the table.
Marshand was her mother’s name. Sylvie Marshand of Leon, who after that October had gone down to the parish office with two children and filled out the forms and changed all three of them quietly without explaining it to anyone, because she was frightened, and because frightened people make themselves smaller.
Camille had grown up as Camille Marshand. Bo had been enrolled at Lake View as Marshand and had never been anything else there.
She had only taken her father’s name back two years ago, on the guardianship paperwork, because it had felt like the one thing she could still give him.
Which meant that for six years, this man had been paying for her brother’s recovery without any possible way of knowing whose brother he was — and that the name he had apparently been hunting for half his life had not existed in a single public record in the state of Louisiana until the spring before last.
She looked up.
He was watching her arrive at it, and he was not hurrying her.
Then he changed the subject entirely, which she came to learn was the way he handled anything he was not ready to hand over. He wanted the archive translated — all of it. Forty years. French and Italian and Latin and whatever else turned up in it, cataloged and cross-referenced.
He named a figure for six months of work that was more than she had earned in six years of floor wax and folded linens.
She did not say yes, and she did not say no.
She asked him the only question she cared about.
“Why have you been looking for the name Thibodeaux?”
He took his time.
He squared the authorization page with the edge of the table, the way she had squared the folio the night before, and something moved behind his face and then closed again.
“Not today,” was all he gave her.
She was three rows down the aisle, halfway to the doors, when the other thing caught up with her and stopped her flat between two shelves of gray boxes.
Six years. Seventy-four consecutive months, paid in full, by a fund that had never once asked her name.
Preston had been telling her since last April that the firm was handling Lake View directly. That she shouldn’t trouble herself with the invoices. That it was all taken care of.
And it had all been taken care of. It had been taken care of for four years before he ever bought her a coffee on Magazine Street.
So what, exactly, had he been paying for?
She took the work. Of course she took the work — though she made him put the start date after her notice period at the auction house, because she was not going to leave Rosalind Ashmore short-handed on a Tuesday, no matter what she had learned in that ballroom.
By the end of the first week she had a rolling cart, a box cutter, and a system.
On the ninth day, three men came in through the loading bay while she was sorting 1994, and stood at the far end of Gideon’s table with their backs half turned to her, and talked for four minutes without lowering their voices once.
She was a woman in a canvas apron with a pencil behind her ear, kneeling beside a crate. They no more thought about her than they thought about the shelving.
They spoke Sicilian, which in that city had been a safe language for a hundred and twenty years.
Safe the way a locked drawer is safe. And they used it the way men use a thing they have never once had to be careful with.
A shipment. Berth nine. Thursday night, late, after the second shift went home.
And a name that came up twice — once flat, and once with something underneath it that made the shortest of the three men laugh.
Whitfield.
Camille did not look up. She logged the crate, wrote the intake number in the ledger in her own small square handwriting, set the lid aside, and reached for the next one, and her heart was going hard enough that she could feel it in her wrists.
Four minutes. Then boots on concrete, and the loading door rolling down.
Gideon had said nothing the whole time.
He was still at the table with a pen in his hand when she stood up, walked over, and spoke to him in Italian — quietly, the way you would tell somebody there was a stain on his collar.
May you like
“Berth nine. Thursday.” She kept her voice level. “And you should ask the one called Marquetti again. He told you three lies in four minutes.”
The pen stopped moving.
