The string quartet found its place again in the music and began to play. Imani let herself be walked through the side gate and into the service corridor that ran along the outer wall of the estate.
The heavy door clicked shut behind her. She stood in the shadow of the corridor, May’s sun cut into a narrow slice above her, and listened to the muffled sounds of the party resuming on the other side of the wall.
Her heart was running fast and loud. Her hands, still inside the yellow gloves, were shaking slightly.
She didn’t know if Callaway would cover the plate. She didn’t know if anything would come of it.
She didn’t know if what she’d seen was what she thought it was, or if she’d just destroyed her reputation in Chicago’s event services industry based on a half-second glimpse across a crowded garden.
What she knew was that she’d seen Celestine Harrow’s hand open over that plate. And she knew what her gut was telling her about what that meant.
One of the security men, younger with an apologetic set to his jaw, appeared beside her and cleared his throat.
“I need to collect your badge and your cart access pass,” he said. “You’re being released from today’s assignment.”
Imani pulled the badge from her apron and handed it over without a word. “Ms.
Harrow asked me to make sure you understood you’re not to return to any Briggs property,” he added.
He had the decency to sound uncomfortable about it. Imani nodded. She was already pulling out her phone to call Patrice and let her know before Patrice heard from someone else, already mentally calculating what this would do to her availability rating on the temp agency’s platform, already running the math on whether she could afford to lose this source of income given the Thursday dialysis appointment and the outstanding hospital bill and the 3-month-old crack in her building’s heating system that her landlord had promised to fix in February.
Then she heard it, muffled through the stone wall but clear enough, a single voice, Celestine’s voice, smooth and certain, carrying the confidence of someone who had already decided how this would end.
“Fire [snorts] her now and make sure she doesn’t get work in this city again.”
Imani stared at the wall. Then she put her phone in her pocket, squared her shoulders, and walked toward the service exit at the end of the corridor.
She had Reuben to think about. She had Thursday to think about. She had a feeling, quiet and stubborn, settled somewhere beneath the fear that this wasn’t over.
The Briggs estate had a private lab contact. Callaway had discovered this necessity 3 years ago after a business dinner where he suspected, correctly as it turned out, that a competitor had sent someone to tamper with the water supply at a negotiation retreat.
He kept the contact’s number in his personal phone, not his work phone, under the name Dr.
Fenwick Golf. It was the kind of precaution that felt paranoid until it didn’t. He made the call from his private study on the estate’s second floor while the engagement party continued below him, the string quartet’s melody drifting up through the open window like a polite fiction.
He could hear Celestine’s laugh carrying above the crowd, that signature laugh, bright and perfectly measured, the one she deployed at parties the way other people used punctuation.
He stood at the window and listened to it while he waited for the lab to confirm receipt of the plate, which he had quietly passed to his head of security, DeMarco, with instructions that would have been career-ending for DeMarco to repeat to anyone.
“Cover it. Don’t touch the food itself. Seal it, bag it, send it to Fenwick tonight.
Tell no one.” DeMarco had looked at him the way a man looks when he understands that the ground under a situation is less stable than it appeared.
Then he’d nodded and left without a word. That was why Callaway kept DeMarco. The party ended at 7:00.
By 7:30, the last guest had been walked to their car. The catering company was breaking down tables, and Celestine had moved through the goodbyes with the smooth efficiency of someone crossing items off an invisible list.
She’d kissed him on the cheek at the door of the study, smelling of champagne and gardenias, and told him she was exhausted in a way that sounded like a cue for him to insist she stay.
He hadn’t insisted. She’d gone to her car with a smile that didn’t waver, and he’d watched the taillights of her black Mercedes disappear down the estate’s private drive, and he’d stood there in the quiet driveway for a long moment before going back inside.
He spent the evening in the study. He didn’t eat. At 11:47 p.m., his phone buzzed.
Dr. Fenwick Golf. He picked up on the first ring. “Tell me,” he said. The pause before Fenwick spoke was 3 seconds long.
Callaway counted them. “Zolpidem,” Fenwick said, “high concentration. The kind of dose that would have put a man your size down for 6 to 8 hours minimum.
Rapid onset, maybe 15 minutes depending on how much you consumed.” Another pause. “Callaway, this wasn’t an accident.
That concentration doesn’t end up in food by accident.” Callaway said nothing. Outside his window, the garden was dark and silent.
