“Tell this man you’ve known me for fourteen years. You have never argued with me on a matter of how I’d receive information inside my own house. We won’t begin today.”
“Absolutely not,” Cabot said.
She turned her attention to me. “Mr. Fletcher, you are not a photographer.”
“No, I’m not. I’m with a personal security firm called The Guardians. I’m assigned to Stanley.”
“You are keeping him safe?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She inclined her head toward the coffee service.
“Stanley, pour the coffee.”
He stood, moved around the table, and lifted the pot. He poured three cups, and he knew which was hers without being told. He set it in front of her with the handle at the correct angle, then placed cups in front of himself and me. Reed remained at his post.
Eleanor lifted hers and sipped.
“Maria came to me in nineteen eighty-five. She was twenty-three. Her father had been killed at the docks eight months earlier. She had two younger brothers; the older was at Boston Latin and the younger was only nine. The position was for an assistant in the kitchen, under a woman named Bernadette who ran my kitchen at the time.”
She glanced at Cabot. He didn’t move.
“Bernadette retired in nineteen ninety-three, and Maria has run the kitchen from that day. I have not interviewed a person to enter this household in thirty-two years. Maria has done all of that.”
She set her cup down.
“Stanley, the morning I spoke to you on the terrace about Henry. The morning after the luncheon.”
“Yes.”
“Maria brought me my coffee at seven, the way she had every morning for thirty-eight years, and she mentioned that you had sat next to Henry at lunch the day before and that you had seemed taken with him. She said it the way she said anything to me. As an observation, not a request. I delivered the message to you on the terrace forty minutes later in my own words, and I believed they were my own words. They were not.”
She looked at her hands.
“I have been carrying her voice for forty years and calling it mine. She has been making plans for some time now?”
“At least five years,” I said. “Possibly longer.”
Eleanor folded her hands in her lap once more. “I want one thing.”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“The wedding goes forward—tomorrow. I will not cancel a family wedding—a joyous occasion—because a woman in my house decided forty years ago to use it as the place where she would make a statement.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Will you be on the property tomorrow?”
“With your permission, yes. Federal agents will be here as well.”
“Yes, I want you to be here. Please disrupt the wedding as little as possible.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good.”
She picked up her coffee again.