Blood in the Water(2)

He went down across the foyer, then through the living room. The living room had a massive fieldstone fireplace that took up one entire wall. There were two conversational groupings of couches and love seats and chairs. Martha had done a very good job with all of it. She did a very good job at all the things he had married her for, except one.

Arthur went through the dining room—another chandelier, a table with chairs to seat twenty-four; they gave dinner parties here—and then through the butler’s pantry into the kitchen. The kitchen was part of a big open space that included an octagonal sunroom for a breakfast nook and the family room. You really had to be careful going through this house. The lists alone could make you dizzy.

There was one place set at the kitchen table, a place mat with a stemmed crystal bowl full of melon balls on it. There was a silver spoon next to the bowl. There was a coffee cup and saucer next to the place mat. There was a linen napkin next to that. Arthur sat down, put the napkin on his lap, and said,

“Cortina?”

Cortina was the maid. She was very small and very Latina and probably, Arthur suspected, illegal. At first, he’d objected to that. He was very careful about the things he did in his life. He’d gotten all the way to Waldorf Pines and he intended to stay there. He didn’t want to get fired one day because he’d been employing illegal immigrants and not paying their Social Security taxes. Martha had explained all that to him. It was a big world out there, one he’d never suspected.

“Cortina?” he said again.

Cortina stuck her head out of the walk-in pantry and grunted. “I am coming,” she said. “Do you know how late Mrs. Heydreich is going to sleep? I need to have a time for the housecleaning or I get behind.”

“Mrs. Heydreich isn’t asleep,” Arthur said. “She was up and out before I even woke up this morning. She must have one of her committees.”

“Her car is in the garage. I saw it when I came in.”

Arthur stood up and walked across, past the pantry door, to the mudroom. He went through the mudroom and then opened the door to the garage. It was a heated garage. Cars never failed to start just because of the weather. If you had good cars, you had to make sure to take care of them.

He had good cars. His own was a Mercedes S-Class sedan, a good dark blue, sober and responsible and establishment. Martha’s was a Mercedes, too, but one of those little two-seaters, and painted bright pink. It was sitting where it was supposed to be, in the bay farthest from the pantry door.

Arthur closed up and thought about it. Then he went back to the kitchen.

“Huh,” he said. “Maybe she walked. It’s only across the golf course. It’s a nice day.”

“Does that sound like Mrs. Heydreich to you? That she would walk?”

“It’s a nice day,” Arthur said. “Martha does walk. She walks all the time.”

“She drives that car all the time. Everywhere. She’s famous for it. You should hear the other maids talk about it. And it isn’t just the maids.”

“I’m not sure what you want out of me,” Arthur said. “If she isn’t here and she didn’t take her car, she must have walked.”

“Things happen,” Cortina said. “People are kidnapped. People disappear. People are murdered and found in ditches.”

“Are you saying you think my wife was kidnapped and murdered? Out of her own bed? With me in it?”

“I’m saying you don’t know what happens. You never know. Things happen.”

Arthur sat down at his place at the table again. Then he reached into his pocket and brought out his cell phone. “This is crazy. You do know that, don’t you?”

“Things happen,” Cortina said. “I don’t live here. Maybe you sleep like the dead. Things happen all the time where I come from.”

Arthur wanted to say that where she came from there was a drug war going on, and people killed their local government officials if they couldn’t get a job in the post office for their uncles. He didn’t say it because he didn’t know it was true, and because that wasn’t the way you talked to maids.

He punched Martha’s speed dial number into the phone and waited. She had a million committees. She was on the admissions committee for the Waldorf Pines golf club and the cotillion committee, too, and she did volunteer work at the Waldorf Pines library. She had so many things to do, it almost didn’t matter that she didn’t get paid for them. She was busier than he was.

He let the phone ring for a moment and then, just when he was about to put it down and give up, he heard the ringtone on Martha’s phone, sounding muffled but oddly close. He closed his phone and looked up.