Chapter 95: Separate Counsel
The docket went up on the tenth of February and Marina Kessler had read it by lunchtime.
I know that because Doyle told me, and because Doyle thought it was professionally admirable.
Serena Montigue had been under indictment since the sixth of October, on two counts, and had been living in that house the whole time.
The trial date had already moved twice. Doyle said it would move again, and it did.
Until that week everybody on her side of it had been working with everybody on the family’s side, which is ordinary and legal and has a name.
One firm coordinating. Documents shared. Nobody surprising anybody.
It is called a common interest arrangement. I had to look that up as well.
On the twelfth of February that ended, in a letter of one paragraph.
Constance Blackwood’s counsel withdrew from the arrangement, effective immediately, and thanked Ms. Kessler for her courtesies.
Marco logged two envelopes leaving the house by messenger at 08:20 that morning, from the same firm, to two different addresses.
He logged them because he logs everything, and because his contract had eleven weeks left on it and he had stopped pretending otherwise.
I did not understand the law of it. Doyle explained it in one sentence and I have never needed a better one.
“They were in the same boat,” she said. “Now there are two boats.”
I asked what that meant in practice.
“It means that from now on, anything either of them says about the other is admissible, and nobody is obliged to warn anybody.”
I wrote that down and underlined it, which I hardly ever do.
Constance came into the breakfast room on the thirteenth while I was cutting up a pear.
Grey cashmere. Tea she had made herself, in a house with staff, which she has done every morning of her life.
She asked after his sleep. She asked whether the new molars were through.
She knew which molars. She has always known which molars.
I have never decided whether that is love or inventory.
“Serena has had a very hard year,” she said. “I think she will be happier somewhere quieter.”
She said it the way you say a room needs painting.
“Victor has done something in a courthouse. I don’t pretend to follow it. I’m sure he had good advice.”
Then she put her hand for a moment on the back of Ethan’s chair, and not on Ethan.
“You have been very steady, Lily. I hope somebody has said so to you.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Blackwood.”
“Nobody says it in this house,” she said. “We are all a little spoiled.”
She took her tea and went out along the corridor.
Ethan said Ba and pointed at the ceiling light, which was off, and then said Mo and pointed at the pear.
I gave him more pear. That is what Mo is for.
Serena left on the sixteenth of February.
Four suitcases and two garment bags. A car at 09:15. Marco logged the plate and the driver’s name.
She had lived in that house for three hundred and sixty-one days and I had spoken to her twice.
I was at the top of the west stairs with a laundry basket when she came out of the morning room.
Grey suit. She stopped about four feet away, which I noticed, because it was the closest she had been to me since October.
“They have told you about the lawyers, I suppose,” she said.
I did not answer.
“You have been very busy.”
“I have been working.”
“No, you haven’t.” She said it evenly. She says everything evenly. “You have not been on that payroll since the thirtieth of November. I have seen it.”
I did not answer that either, because it was true, and because true things from her were worse than the other kind.
“When all of this is finished,” Serena said, “you will still be the nanny.”
Then she went past me and down four stairs and stopped with her hand on the rail.
She did not turn round.
“I never touched the water,” she said.
Then she went down the rest of the stairs and out through the side door, and a man put four suitcases into a car.
I stood on that landing holding a basket of a child’s laundry and did not move for some time.
Then I put the basket down and got the notebook out and wrote it against the wall.
16 February 2027. 09:11. West stairs. Six words, verbatim.
Here is why verbatim.
The word water is not in the indictment. That charge is a foyer and a forearm and forty-six seconds.
It is not in the discovery. It is not in the police report, or in my statement, or in one page that has ever been handed to her or to her lawyer.
Four living people had ever said that word out loud about that room, and I could name every one of them.
Marco Ruiz. Elias Moreno. A lawyer on LaSalle Street. Me.
Nobody had told her.