Page 111 of The Maid's Secret

“Why didn’t you say something earlier?” Brown asks. “Why let the maid auction it off?”

“The sale price, Bax. We just set its base worth without any provenance. If we lie low for a bit, then produce this bill of sale in a year or so, the price will skyrocket. We’ll be rich beyond our wildest dreams.”

“An artful deception,” says Bax.

“I’m glad you agree,” Beagle replies.

“But how could you?” asks Brown, his tone sharp and accusatory. “For my whole life, I’ve been running from my family’s dirty dealings. I’ve always wanted to be different from them, to earn my way, to keep things clean. And now you do this?”

“No one ever has to know,” says Beagle. “We can buy the villa inFrance. We can get a yacht in Saint-Tropez just like the one your mother had when you were a kid.”

“You’re just like them—my father and my grandfather. You’re a thief.”

“Please, all I want is for us to—”

Just then, Stark enters the tearoom. Angela and I pull away from our listening hole on the stage floor as Stark puts a finger to her lips. She saunters over, places the vacuum cover back on the port.

“You’ll never believe what we just heard,” I whisper.

“Oh, I’ll believe it,” says Stark. “Speedy and I watched what you were doing in here. Brilliant. He got a battery backup mic working in the greenroom. We heard everything, but we couldn’t record it.”

“I’ve got your back,” says Angela as she holds up her phone. “Voice memo.”

“I can’t quite fathom it,” I say. “One good egg, one bad.”

“Two Bees, one sting,” says Angela. “It hurts to hear what Beagle did.”

“It really does,” says Stark.

“What now?” I ask.

“Well,” says Stark, “would either of you be interested in watching a detective make a celebrity arrest?”

—

Chapter 34

Dear Molly,

The end is near. My time is nigh.

I have spent these last few weeks writing to you whenever I’ve felt well enough to do so, but it gets more difficult with each passing day. In the morning, you feed me my medicine with breakfast, and by the time you head to work, the pain abates enough for me to continue writing. But I know the truth: my time is running out. The pain overtakes me sooner every day, and I cannot keep my hand or my mind steady enough to write. Forgive me, Molly, if my penmanship isn’t polished to perfection, and forgive me, too, for drawing this tale to a close so soon. I want to go on. I wish I could, but alas, few people get to choose their ending.

In my previous entry, I told you about my stroke of good fortune—how after amassing a nest egg from a literal one, I was able to rent a modest apartment on my own and soon after gave birth to the most beautiful baby girl—your mother, Maggie. Oh, Molly, how I loved that child. Everything about her enchanted me—her coal-black eyesand her dark hair, her chiming giggle, and her chubby little toes. The Astors allowed me to bring her with me to work in exchange for free overtime. I carried her from room to room in a laundry basket as I scrubbed, cooked, and cleaned. I spoke to her all day long, my maid-in-training, my little apprentice.

Most often, when I looked at her, I saw John, but sometimes traces of Mama or Papa, too. I thought of them often, half expected my parents to waltz into my apartment and rescue me from what my mother would have called “a hovel.” Or maybe they’d ring the Astors’ front doorbell someday and whisk me back to a glorious new estate and a life of privilege that now felt so remote it was like a dream.

But that never happened. Instead, with each passing day, I realized with more and more certainty that I was on my own, but my solace was that Maggie grew and thrived. Her first steps were taken on the marble floors of the Astors’ parlor. And when she spoke her first word, it wasn’t “Mama” but “spoon.” I’d started my little collection in the curio cabinet—thrift shop finds and hand-me-downs. She loved to play with those old silver spoons, admiring her reflection in the bowls.

Before long, my infant was a toddler, and then a little girl off to school. Time, Molly. It passes too quickly, and one day, you find yourself with so little of it left. Occasionally, life is marked by some unexpected occurrence, as was the case when a mystery guest walked into my life out of the blue, arriving at my apartment door when Maggie was five years old. While my daughter played tea party on the living room floor, I looked through the peephole and almost fainted on the spot.

There he was, the love of my life, the father of my child—John Preston. I was breathless. I didn’t know what to think, what to feel. He was older—time had marked him as it had marked me—but he was the same. I opened the door and just stood there, staring at him.

“Flora,” he said, taking me in; then he noticed the little girl serving tea to her dolls on the floor.

“John,” I replied. “Please, come in.”

As Maggie played, we sat on the sofa and talked. Over five years had gone by and yet my heart raced at the sight of him. He told me how disappointed he had been to arrive at the old oak tree on the day I was supposed to meet him and how he found nothing there except what the fairies had left in the knothole. I apologized, explained that I couldn’t let him ruin his life, “not for me, not for anyone—not even for her,” I said, gesturing to our beautiful little girl babbling to herself on the floor.

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