Send the Ugly One, He’ll Reject Her! They Laughed — But the Mafia Boss Was Speechless!

Chapter Twenty-Six — Mrs. Halloran’s Daughter

The ninth item on the list took Maren five weeks, because the ninth item had refused to be found, and a thing that refuses to be found is the only kind of thing that Maren Ashcroft could never leave alone.

Mrs. Halloran’s daughter was named Bernadette, and she had worked in the house on Commonwealth Avenue for eleven years, and Vivian had fired her on a Thursday in August for looking at her in a way she did not like, and she had walked out with her coat over her arm and her purse on her shoulder and had not taken her final paycheck, and had not been heard from since by anyone in the family or by anyone in the staffing agency or by anyone in the housekeeping service.

Maren found her because she did the one thing that she herself would never have expected to do, which was go and ask Mrs. Halloran.

She went in person, on a Sunday, to a three-decker in Somerville, with a fruit basket that she immediately regretted and left in the car, and stood on the porch in the cold, and knocked, and Mrs. Halloran — seventy-one years of iron-gray hair and a starched collar — opened the door and looked at her for four seconds and then said, in a voice that had been in that house for thirty years and had never once in thirty years been anything but level:

“Miss Adelaide.”

Maren’s throat closed.

“Nobody calls me that anymore.”

“I do,” Mrs. Halloran said. “I called you that when you were four years old and came into my kitchen with a book, and I’m not going to stop at my age.” She stood aside. “Come in. It’s cold and you’ve got a car running.”

Maren came in. The house was small and warm and smelled of a Sunday roast, and there was a clock on the wall and a photograph of a girl in a cap and gown and a plate of soda bread on the table, and Maren sat down at the table because she was told to sit down at the table, and Mrs. Halloran put the bread in front of her with a knife.

“Eat,” she said.

“I came to ask about Bernadette.”

“I know what you came to ask about,” Mrs. Halloran said. “Eat the bread and then ask.”

Maren ate the bread. It was very good and she had not eaten since seven in the morning.

“Your stepmother fired her,” Mrs. Halloran said, when Maren’s plate had been taken away. “On a Thursday. For looking at her a certain way. That’s the reason and it’s the whole reason, and I want to say one thing before you ask me anything, which is that I have worked in that house for thirty years and I have never once in thirty years said a word against that woman to anybody, and I’m going to say a word now, because you’re the only person who’s ever walked back up that driveway.” She folded her hands. “She fired my daughter because Bernadette saw something she was not supposed to see, and what Bernadette saw was your stepmother going through your father’s desk at two in the morning in August with a flashlight, taking things out of a drawer and photographing them with her phone.”

Maren sat very still.

“Did she tell you that.”

“She told me that in the car on the way home and I told her she was imagining it and she cried all the way to Somerville,” Mrs. Halloran said. “And two days later she was fired for looking at her a certain way, and Bernadette is not a stupid girl, Miss Adelaide, she knew what the two things had to do with each other, and she has not been able to say it out loud to a living person since, because a person who says I saw my employer go through her husband’s desk in the dark is a person nobody hires. So she works in a warehouse in Chelsea now and she puts boxes on a pallet and she has a bad back and she will not talk to me about it and I have not been able to do a thing about it for five months.” Mrs. Halloran picked up the plate and set it in the sink. “So ask your question.”

Maren sat at the table in a three-decker in Somerville with a plate of soda bread in her stomach and worked out, in about four seconds — because she had spent four months learning the shape of her father’s last year, and there was a hole in it, and a hole in it had always bothered her — exactly what Vivian had been looking for.

“You know the house is mine,” she said. “The house, the furniture, the contents. The trust owns all of it, and I’m the trustee’s beneficiary, which means I own the contents of a study in Back Bay.”

“I’ve heard that from my niece,” Mrs. Halloran said.

“Then here’s the thing.” Maren leaned forward. “There’s a safe in the wall of that study. Behind the painting. It’s about a foot and a half square and it’s got a dial, and my father never let anyone near it — the housekeeper, the staff, nobody. My stepmother knew about it. She must have known about it, because she’d lived in that house for twenty-six years and a woman like that knows where the valuables are.” She paused. “So what was she photographing at two in the morning? Not the safe. You can’t photograph what’s inside a safe.”

“No,” Mrs. Halloran said. “You can’t.”

“She was photographing paperwork,” Maren said. “Photocopies. Documents. Things taken out of a drawer by a woman with a phone camera and a flashlight, at two in the morning, in August.” She sat back. “And the reason a woman does that is that she’s building a file. On her own husband. Eleven days before she sold her shares to a family office at a price she couldn’t brag about and then told her card group she was selling out of wisdom.”

Mrs. Halloran looked at Maren across her own kitchen table.

“She was building a way out,” she said.

“She was building an escape hatch,” Maren said. “And she needed to be able to say I didn’t know if it all came down.” She stood up. “I want to talk to Bernadette. Not about the wedding. Not about the family. About the desk. About what was in the drawer.”

Mrs. Halloran stood up too, and put her hand on the back of her chair, and said, in a voice that had finally gone soft at the edges:

“Miss Adelaide. Before you do that — I want to ask you a thing and I want you to tell me the truth, because I’ve been carrying it for a while and it’s heavy.” She looked at her. “There was a night, in that house, when you were about eleven years old. You came down to the kitchen at half past eleven at night in your nightgown with the glasses on and you stood in my doorway and you asked me — you asked me, and I’ve never forgotten the words — you said, Mrs. Halloran, is it true that my mother was a bad driver?”

Maren stopped.

“I remember,” she said.

“I said no,” Mrs. Halloran said. “I said no, your mother was a careful driver, she was the most careful driver I ever met, she used to check her mirrors twice before she pulled out of that driveway, and it wasn’t her fault and I told you so.” She put both hands flat on the table. “And then you said thank you and you went back upstairs and you never asked me a single question about it again, not one, in thirteen years. And I have thought about that night about every week since, and I’ve wanted to know one thing, and here it is: did you believe me?”

Maren Ashcroft stood in the kitchen of a three-decker in Somerville on a Sunday afternoon in winter and looked at a woman who had fed her bread and had told her the truth when she was eleven years old.

“I believed you,” she said. “You’re the only person in that house who ever told me anything that was true, and I have spent the whole of my life with your sentence in my head, and it is the single reason I did not lose my mind in that library.” She picked up her coat. “Which is why I’m here about your daughter, and why the answer is not going to be a check.”

Bernadette Halloran took two weeks to agree to meet, and when she met Maren it was at a coffee shop in Chelsea at seven in the morning before her shift, and she did not sit down at first, and when she did sit down she said, without preamble:

“I’m not taking your money.”

“Understood,” Maren said.

“I’m not taking your job, either. I don’t want to work in a house. I’ve worked in houses for eleven years and I’m done with houses.” She had her hands around a paper cup of coffee and she was twenty-nine and she looked forty. “I want to be clear about that before you say anything. I don’t want to be rescued and I don’t want to be the story. I’ve spent five months being the girlfriend who got fired for a reason nobody can say out loud.”

“Then you’re going to like what I’m here to offer,” Maren said, “because it isn’t a rescue. It’s an invoice.” She put a folder on the table. “You were fired without cause and without your final paycheck, on a pretext, two days after you witnessed a shareholder of my firm conducting a surreptitious search of her co-shareholder’s private papers. That search is directly relevant to a transfer of shares that my firm’s counsel had to unravel, and what you saw — and the fact that you saw it, and the date you saw it, and the fact that you were fired two days later — is a fact that goes into a file, and the file is not going to court, and you are not going to be a witness, and that is a promise.” She slid the folder across. “But it goes in the file, and it gets notarized, and you get paid a fee for the interview, and the fee is eight thousand dollars, which is the standard rate in this city for a commercial eyewitness statement, and it is not charity and you can look it up.”

Bernadette Halloran looked at the folder and did not touch it.

“And the job,” she said.

“You said no houses,” Maren said. “You didn’t say no work. The firm has four hundred employees and a subsidiary that runs facilities, and there is a night security post at a building on State Street that pays forty-one thousand a year with a pension and a bad back gets a standing post, not a walking one, and the job is open, and I am not going to call anyone about it, and there is a number in that folder and you can apply on Monday like everyone else.” She stood up and put two dollars on the table for the coffee. “And Bernadette — there’s one more thing, and it’s the actual reason I asked to see you. Your mother told me something on Sunday that I’ve been carrying for a week. She told me a thing I asked her when I was eleven. And she said it was the reason I didn’t lose my mind.” She looked at her. “Your mother has been working in a house for thirty years where nobody once said thank you. I want you to know that she raised a thing in me that the whole rest of my family could not kill, and that it was bread and one true sentence, and that if she had not been standing in that kitchen on that particular night, I would not be sitting here in this one.”

Bernadette Halloran sat in a coffee shop in Chelsea at seven in the morning with her hands around a paper cup.

Then she picked up the folder and put it in her bag.

“I’ll apply on Monday,” she said.