I sent Eamon a routine status: position confirmed, principals secure, next check in thirty.
The read receipt didn’t come.
Eamon answered status checks immediately. He had for the two years I’d worked under him. The delay was a minute, then two, and then five. Nothing.
Maybe he was in a meeting. Or it could be a poor signal in whatever building he was in.
I didn’t move it up the priority list. Not yet.
Wiley stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankles. “Whose house is this?”
“It’s not yours,” I said.
“I’m aware. I’m asking who lived here. Whose ghost am I sitting next to?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know, or you won’t say?”
“I don’t know.”
Farrow turned from the window. “I’m putting in for John Quincy Adams’s second cousin, once removed.”
“Once removed from what?”
“The will, mostly.”
Cabot smiled.
“The style here is Federalist, probably eighteen-twenties. The cornice work in the hall is original. Whoever owns it now didn’t buy it for the kitchen.”
“You date houses now?” Wiley asked.
“I date a lot of things.”
Cabot made a soft sound that might have been a laugh. “There’s a tour every spring, sponsored by the Beacon Hill Garden Club. People pay forty dollars to walk through six of these and get told whose grandmother chose the wallpaper.”
“You’ve gone?” Wiley asked.
“Twice. For work. It’s how I learned the difference between old money that maintains a house and old money that hires someone to maintain a house.”
“And which kind are the Harcourts?”
“Neither,” Cabot said, “they’re the kind that owns the contractor.”
I folded my arms across my chest.
“Cabot.”
“Yes?”
“Are you ever going to tell us about the cousin?”
“Cousin?”
“The one they didn’t want you to write about. What’s his name?”
“His name is in the family documents. It’s Henry Harcourt Benton, Pierce’s sister’s son. He was born in nineteen eighty-five and attended Milton Academy. There’s no college I could find or professional affiliation. He doesn’t appear in any of the standard society documentation. The family tree is the proof of existence. I asked Maria once, casually, whether she had set a place for him at the Vineyard the year I was there. She said yes and changed the subject, which Maria almost never does.”