Chapter 10
— What Renata Heard
I had not slept in my own bed since the night Landon pushed me into the Danube, and the first morning I woke in Vienna again, in a borrowed room above the company's offices, I lay still and listened to the city. Trams. Gulls. The low thrum of a riverboat turning at the pier below. For six days I had been a woman the world believed dead, hidden in Kieran's cottage above the lock. Wesley had brought me here before dawn, through the service entrance, past the night watchman who asked no questions. There was work to do, and the first of it was a woman I had trusted for twenty years.
Renata had kept my house in Vienna since before Nelson died. She knew where the silver was kept and which windows stuck in winter and how I liked my tea. She had also, I now learned, heard something she had been afraid to tell anyone, because the man she had heard was my son.
Wesley drove me to the house in the grey light of early morning. I used my own key, and the door opened on the smell of beeswax and lavender, the smell of a home that had been kept even while its owner was believed to be at the bottom of a river. Renata was in the kitchen, and when she turned and saw me standing in the doorway, the tray in her hands shook and a cup slid to the floor and broke.
"Madame," she said. She did not scream. She put her hand over her mouth and stared at me as if I were a ghost, and then she crossed the room and took my hands in both of hers, and her hands were shaking. "Madame, they said you drowned. They said it on the radio. Your son came here and took your papers. He said the house would be sold."
"Not while I am alive to stop him," I said. "Sit down, Renata. I need to ask you something, and I need the truth."
She made tea with hands that would not quite steady, and we sat at the kitchen table where I had eaten breakfast for forty years. I told her, briefly, what had happened on the deck of the Danube Empress. She listened without interrupting, and tears ran down her face, and she did not wipe them away.
"I knew," she whispered. "Not that. Not the river. But I knew something was wrong in this house, and I was afraid."
"Tell me," I said.
It had been three weeks before the cruise, on a Tuesday afternoon, when the house was quiet and she was dusting the landing. The study door was closed, but not quite closed, and through the gap she heard Landon and Xavier Wexford arguing. Xavier's voice was raised, and then Landon's was raised higher, and she stopped where she stood with the duster in her hand.
Xavier had said the invoices were becoming a problem. That was the word Renata remembered most clearly: invoices. He had said there were too many of them now, and the amounts no longer matched anything the boats had actually needed. He had said Alpen Trade had been paid for repairs that had never happened, and that the money was moving too fast, and that someone in the office was beginning to ask questions.
Landon had answered that no one would ask questions, because his mother was old and tired and would sign whatever he put in front of her. Then Landon had lowered his voice, and she had to lean closer to the door to hear him, and what she heard next frightened her more than the shouting had.
He had said the audit had to be stopped, because if I called for an independent audit, everything would come out, and the two of them would lose everything. Xavier had said there must be another way, a quieter way, and Landon had said there was no quieter way left, and that some problems only went away when the person asking the questions went away.
Renata had stepped back from the door then, her heart hammering, and gone downstairs to the kitchen, and stood there with her hands braced on the sink until the two men left the house. She had not told anyone. She had told herself she had misunderstood, that a son could not speak of his mother that way. She had told herself that rich men argued about money and it meant nothing. But she had kept the day in her memory, the way she kept everything in that house, neatly and in order, and now she gave it to me.
I took her hands again. "You did nothing wrong," I said. "You were afraid, and you are not afraid now, and that is what matters. Will you tell this to a detective, when the time comes? Will you say it in front of witnesses, the way you have said it to me?"
She looked at me for a long moment, and then she nodded, once, firmly, the way she had nodded every morning for twenty years when I asked her to do something that mattered. "I will, Madame. I should have spoken sooner. I will speak now."