Things were missing. The first thing Maggie noticed—by its absence, that is—was the ruby ewer that lived in the niche by the stairwell. She’d come across the piece the summer of 1989 at a tag sale in Maine among a clutter of cheap china sauceboats, cheaper plastic teacups, and other unwanted effluvia of some deceased spinster’s dissolving household. A Sotheby’s employee later appraised the ruby ewer at $1,200, the monetary value being quite beside Maggie’s love of its sheer excellence as a wrought object. Now it was gone. Her mind leaped to certain obvious culprits—so obvious that the leap instantaneously provoked overwhelming pangs of shame and guilt for the very leaping. For example, Quinona the laundress, a twenty-year-old single mother from Norwalk who was sometimes ferried to Kettle Hill Farm by obvious male gangbangers. Or Javier. She tried to tell herself it was only the tattoo that prompted her suspicions, but a harsher voice nagging inside insisted she was a racist bitch. So had similar thoughts about Florence, the day maid. Her very suspicions disgusted her so much that she couldn’t bear to think of the ruby ewer at all anymore, however excellent it was.
But then her silver Lincoln and Foss coffee urn turned up missing the morning that Reggie Chang drove up from the city with a crew of stylists and assistants to begin shooting the photos for Keeping House.
“Someone’s pinching things around here,” Maggie whispered to Nina while the assistants set up the props for a vignette in which Maggie would be shown cleaning a crystal chandelier with baking soda and a toothbrush.
“Who’s pinching whom?” Nina whispered back.
“No. Stuff’s missing.”
Nina visibly stiffened and the air seemed suddenly heated between them.
“Are you accusing me?”
“Would I mention it if I suspected it was you?”
“I really don’t know.”
“Oh, come on, Nina. I trust you absolutely—”
Reggie interrupted: “We’re ready for you, Maggie.” Nina marched back to the kitchen where she was testing recipes for the summer catering season. They never did get a chance to clear up the misunderstanding, since Nina departed at four o’clock while Maggie was demonstrating a method for regilding old picture frames in her crafts room.
Around five, while the crew rearranged furniture for some shots of Maggie dusting a valance in her second-floor boudoir, she happened to glance out a window and see Walter Fayerwether’s Volvo motoring up the driveway. When it pulled up to the boxwood border a blond woman stepped out—a rather young blond woman, not more than twenty-five, it appeared from a distance, and rather shapely, too, in perfect blue jeans and a clingy short-sleeved, scoop-necked magenta top. Shocking, Maggie thought, wondering at the same instant why she was shocked. But her meditation was cut short when the young thing reached back inside the car and honked the horn—three vigorous blasts. Moments later, Walter himself appeared through the arbor, all loose joints and smiles, waving at the girl. To Maggie, the tableau smacked of a magazine advertisement for country casuals, by way of a porn movie. Walter gave the blonde a little smooch and a familiar squeeze. The two of them hopped into the Volvo and drove off.
“Maggie, the stepladder’s in place,” Reggie said, as the Volvo turned through the gateposts.