I held his eyes. He was paler than he’d been at the meeting. I didn’t detect panic, but he’d developed an edge.
“It’s manageable,” I said.
We walked to the parlor. It was maybe fourteen feet wide. It had a black marble fireplace and built-in bookshelves on either side. The couch was made of good leather, gone soft with use, and two armchairs angled toward the hearth.
Wiley was on the couch. He had a pen in his right hand, but he wasn’t writing. He was rolling the pen between his thumb and forefinger, slowly, the way he did at the meeting when Eamon was talking.
Farrow was still at the window.
He turned his head when I entered.
I crossed to the windows and reached past him, folding the right interior shutter closed. I threw the latch and did the same for the left one .
Farrow’s mouth twitched at the corner, but he said nothing.
“Phones,” I said.
Wiley set his on the coffee table without comment. Cabot did the same. I picked them up one at a time, powered them down, and laid them back face down.
“Laptops stay closed. No outbound traffic until we’ve cleared the channels.”
“That’s going to be a problem,” Wiley said.
“Problem?”
“My editor is going to call Samuel.”
“He can call. Samuel can answer. Samuel can say you’re working.”
“Samuel doesn’t lie well.”
“Then he can say nothing. He can manage.”
I stepped back and took the position I wanted: the inside corner where the parlor opened off the hall, with sightlines to the front windows, the doorway, and the staircase landing.
“No one’s alone in this house. Not even for a minute. The bathroom doors remain unlocked. If you need to go upstairs, you tell one of us.”
Cabot nodded.
Wiley rolled his shoulders the way a man rolls his shoulders when he’s settling into a coat that fits worse than he expected.
Farrow remained silent.
I let two seconds pass before I turned to Cabot.
“Talk to us.”
He didn’t hesitate.
“The Harcourts aren’t a single family. They’re a structure. Three generations and four branches by marriage. The business holdings layer across all of it. The Brookline house is the center on paper, but it’s not where decisions get made.”
“Where do decisions get made?” I asked.
“Always in smaller rooms.”
“Who controls access to the small rooms?”
“Formally, the matriarch, Eleanor Harcourt, Pierce’s widow. She turns eighty-one in February, and nothing gets past her.” A pause. “Informally, it depends on the event.”