directly at them for longer than a few seconds made me queasy and gave me the curious, confusing thought that I was here but not here, real but not real, both approaching the house but at the same time retreating from it.
I took care not to look directly at the tubes anymore. I kept my eyes on the path ahead and proceeded a few hundred feet.
At the end of the passageway, I opened a copper-clad door and fumbled for the light switch. Beyond lay a wine cellar with stone walls, a concrete floor decorated with the exposed ends of copper rods, and a couple of thousand bottles in redwood racks.
Something as normal as a wine cellar seemed abnormal here. You torture and kill women, you imprison your own son, you and your staff are armed for Armageddon, your house — maybe your entire estate — seems to be a machine of some kind, you have a pack of swine things chasing around the property, and you sit down of an evening with a good Cabernet Sauvignon and a bit of nice cheese to — what? — listen to Broadway show tunes?
Nothing in Roseland was as normal as show tunes or cheese, or wine. Maybe this had once been an ordinary mansion for a typical billionaire with the usual perversions, but not any longer.
I was tempted to open one of the bottles to see if it contained blood instead of Napa’s finest.
Behind one of two distressed-oak doors lay narrow enclosed stairs. I assumed they went up to the kitchen.
I had learned all I was ever likely to learn from Chef Shilshom, unless I attached wires to his private parts and teased information out of him with electric shocks. That wasn’t my style. Besides, the thought of getting a glimpse of the chef’s private parts made me want to scream like a little girl who finds a tarantula on her shoulder.
With much to do and perhaps too little time in which to do it, I went to the second door and gingerly opened it. A long basement corridor waited beyond, closed doors on both sides and a door at the farther end.
I listened at the first door on the left before opening it. The large room was full of hulking iron furnaces and massive boilers that appeared to date from the 1920s. They looked as if they had just come out of the factory, but I couldn’t tell if they were actually still in service, for they were quiet.
On the right, the first door opened to a storeroom in which nothing was stored, and when I opened the second door on the left, I found Victoria Mors, the maid who worked at the direction of Mrs. Tameed, doing laundry.
The washers and dryers were newer than the furnaces and boilers, but like the wine cellar, their very ordinariness made them seem out of place in this weird and increasingly grotesque world within the walls of Roseland.
Victoria Mors was sorting clothes and bedding, transferring them from a laundry cart to the washers. None of the machines was yet in operation, which was why I hadn’t heard motor or agitator noise that would have warned me that the room was occupied.
She seemed as startled to see me as I was discomfited to see her. We stood unmoving, staring at each other, our mouths open, as if we were a couple of figures from an animated Swiss clock that had suddenly stopped with the opening of the door.
Like Henry Lolam and Paulie Sempiterno, surely Victoria thought that Noah Wolflaw’s invitation to Annamaria and me was reckless and inexplicable. While I was searching for words, I knew that she was deciding whether to cry out in alarm, because I was welcome only on the ground floor of the house.
Before she could scream, I stepped into the laundry room, smiled my dumb-as-a-spatula fry-cook smile, and raised the pillowcase sack in which I carried the towel-wrapped hacksaw. “I have some delicate laundry, and they told me to bring it down to you.”
Twenty-seven
Slender, five feet two, Victoria Mors wore the black slacks and simple white blouse that served as a uniform for her and Mrs. Tameed. Although she was probably in her late twenties, I thought of her as a girl, not a woman. She was pretty in an elfin sort of way, with large faded-denim eyes. Barrettes held her strawberry-blond hair back; but now — as every time I’d seen her — a couple of strands had escaped the clasps and curled down the sides of her face, which with her rosy cheeks gave her the look of a child fresh from a session of jump rope or hopscotch. Although her body would have suited a ballerina, she sometimes moved with a charming, coltish awkwardness. She tended to look at me sideways or else with her head lowered and from under her lashes, which seemed like girlish shyness but was more likely sour suspicion.
There in the laundry room, she stared at me directly, and her large, pale-blue eyes were open wide with solicitude, as if hovering over my head were a vampire bat of which I was unaware.
She said, “Oh, you didn’t have to bring the laundry yourself, Mr. Odd. I would have come to the guest tower for it.”
“Yes, ma’am, I know, but I hoped to save you the effort. It must be exhausting for you and Mrs. Tameed to take care of this big house. All the dusting and sweeping and polishing and the endless picking up after. Although of course I suppose there must be several other maids I haven’t met.”
“Haven’t you?” she said, by her tone and expression managing to present herself as a dim but winning girl who couldn’t quite follow conversations in which exchanges were longer than six words.
“Have you worked at Roseland for long?”
“I’m ever so glad for the job.”
“Well, who wouldn’t be?”
“We’re like a family here.”
“I feel the warmth.”
“And it’s such a lovely place.”
“It’s magical,” I agreed.
“The beautiful gardens, the wonderful old oaks.”
“I climbed one, spent an entire though very short night in it.”
She blinked. “You did what?”
“I climbed one of the wonderful old oaks. All the way to the wonderful top, where the limbs were almost too small to support me.”
Perhaps because I’d gone well past six words, she was confused. “Why would you do that?”
“Oh,” I said, “I just had to.”
“Climbing trees is dangerous.”
“
“I never do anything dangerous.”
“Some days, just getting out of bed is dangerous.”
She decided not to look directly at me anymore. Returning to the task of sorting laundry from the cart into the two washing machines, she said, “You can just leave your things, and I’ll deal with them, Mr. Odd.”
“My things?” I asked, because I can pretend to be as obtuse as anyone.
“Your delicate laundry items.”
I couldn’t yet decide whether or not I wanted her to starch the hacksaw, so I held on to the pillowcase sack and said, “Mr. Wolflaw must have very high standards. The house is immaculate.”
“It’s a beautiful house. It deserves to be perfectly kept.”
“Is Mr. Wolflaw a tyrant?”
Glancing sideways at me as she continued to feed the washing machines, Victoria seemed to be genuinely hurt on behalf of her boss. “Whyever would you think such a thing?”
“Well, people as rich as he is can sometimes be demanding.”
“He’s a wonderful employer,” she declared, with a note of disapproval aimed at me for doubting the exemplary nature of the master of Roseland. “I never want another.” With the tenderness of an infatuated schoolgirl, she added, “Never ever.”
“That’s what I thought. He seems like a saint.”
She frowned. “Then why did you say ‘tyrant’?”
